Speak out against the war in Iraq - We voted & changed Washington - Keep Ever Vigilant!

2007-04-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

US Officials Exclude Car Bombs in Touting Drop in Iraq Violence

2007-04-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

By Nancy A. Youssef McClatchy Newspapers Thursday 26 April 2007

Washington - U.S. officials who say there has been a dramatic drop in sectarian violence in Iraq since President Bush began sending more American troops into Baghdad aren't counting one of the main killers of Iraqi civilians.

Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn't include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

President Bush explained why in a television interview on Tuesday. "If the standard of success is no car bombings or suicide bombings, we have just handed those who commit suicide bombings a huge victory," he told TV interviewer Charlie Rose.

Others, however, say that not counting bombing victims skews the evidence of how well the Baghdad security plan is protecting the civilian population - one of the surge's main goals.

"Since the administration keeps saying that failure is not an option, they are redefining success in a way that suits them," said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at London-based Chatham House, a foreign policy think tank.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths - the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders - as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

But the number of people killed in explosive attacks is rising, the same statistics show - up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.

Overall, statistics indicate that the number of violent deaths has declined significantly since December, when 1,391 people died in Baghdad, either executed and found dead on the street or killed by bomb blasts. That number was 796 in March and 691 through April 24.

Nearly all of that decline, however, can be attributed to a drop in executions, most of which were blamed on Shiite Muslim militias aligned with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Much of the decline occurred before the security plan began on Feb. 15, and since then radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army militia to stand down.

According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from Iraqi police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and again to 473 in March.

Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

In that same period, the number of bombings has increased, as well. In December, there were 65 explosive attacks. That number was unchanged in January, but it rose to 72 in February, 74 in March and 81 through April 24.

U.S. officials blame the bombings largely on al-Qaida, which they say is hoping to provoke sectarian conflict by targeting Shiite neighborhoods with massive explosions.

Ryan Crocker, who became the U.S. ambassador in Iraq this month, said the bombings are a reaction to the surge of additional U.S. troops into Baghdad.

"The terrorists like al-Qaida would make their own surge," Crocker said this week.

U.S. officials have said that they don't expect the security plan to stop bombings.

"I don't think you're ever going to get rid of all the car bombs," Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said this week. "Iraq is going to have to learn as did, say, Northern Ireland, to live with some degree of sensational attacks."

But some think that approach could backfire, with Iraqis eventually blaming the Americans for failing to stop bombings.

"To win, the insurgents just have to prove they are not losing," said Denselow, of London's Chatham House.

Experts who have studied car bombings say it's no surprise that U.S. officials would want to exclude their victims from any measure of success.

Car bombs are almost impossible to detect and stop, particularly in a traffic-jammed city such as Baghdad. U.S. officials in Baghdad concede that while they've found scores of car bomb factories in Iraq, they've made only a small dent in the manufacturing of these weapons.

Mike Davis, who recently wrote a history of car bombs, said that once car bombs are introduced into a conflict, they're all but impossible to eradicate. A few people with rudimentary skills can assemble one with massive effect.

"They really don't have to be very sophisticated; they just have to be very big," Davis said.

Davis said checkpoints are useful in detecting car bombs "until they blow up the checkpoint," and erecting walls is not practically feasible in communities. When U.S. officials proposed building walls around Baghdad's most troubled neighborhoods to fend off car bomb attacks, residents balked, saying the walls would further divide the city along sectarian lines.

Bombers also have shown that they can adapt quickly. When the U.S. military blocked off markets to vehicular traffic, bombers wearing explosive vests were able to walk into the areas.

Finding a defense against car bombs has fallen to the Joint IED Defeat Organization, a Pentagon task force created in 2003 to find ways to protect U.S. troops from roadside bombs, which remain the No. 1 killer of Americans in Iraq.

But car bombs aren't the primary killer of American service members, said Christine Devries, the task force's spokeswoman. Roadside bombs are.

About Iraqi Civilian Casualties

There are no authoritative statistics on Iraqi civilian casualties. The Iraq Study Group in its report last year found that the Pentagon routinely underreports violence. Other groups have criticized the Iraqi government's statistics as unreliable - a moot point since the government recently stopped releasing comprehensive totals. On Wednesday, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq chastised the Iraqi government for withholding statistics on sectarian violence.

One study, conducted by Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health and Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad, estimated that 78,000 Iraqis were killed by car bombings between March 2003 and June 2006.

Iraq Body Count, which keeps statistics based on news reports, finds that there have been just over 1,050 car bombs that have killed more than one person since August 2003, when a car bomb detonated in front of what was the United Nations headquarters, killing 17.

McClatchy gathers its statistics daily from police contacts, and while they're not comprehensive, they're collected the same way every day.

A roundup of Iraq violence is posted daily on the McClatchy Washington Bureau Web site, http://www.mcclatchydc.com.

Democratic Candidates Gang Up on Bush, War in Iraq

2007-04-27T14:01:00.000-07:00

By Steven Thomma McClatchy Newspapers Friday 27 April 2007

Orangeburg, SC - Candidates for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination eyed each other politely - even warily - Thursday in their first face-to-face debate, a session that offered little likelihood of dramatically shaking up the young campaign.

The eight candidates differed sharply with President Bush, particularly on Iraq, but seldom with one another. The format did not allow them to directly challenge each other - and few did.

Rather, they mostly agreed in their desire to get U.S. troops out of Iraq, to expand health care to the uninsured while controlling costs for those with insurance, to support abortion rights without qualification, and to bar access to guns for the mentally ill like the gunman who killed 32 at Virginia Tech.

Absent direct challenges - or any pronounced gaffes - the debate probably did nothing to fundamentally change the shape of the contest with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina leading in the polls and the rest trailing well behind.

Campaign aides said afterward that they saw little in the debate that would dramatically alter the political landscape - though each predictably said that his or her own candidate did very well.

Mark Penn, senior strategist to the Clinton campaign, said it was too early to expect direct attacks that would turn off voters just getting to know the candidates. "Now is not the time for sharp exchanges," he said.

The debate was the first of a fast-developing campaign in a party desperate to pick a winner who can retake the White House from the Republicans in November 2008 - an eagerness underscored by the thousands who have gathered for unusually early rallies, and the tens of thousands writing checks to finance campaigns.

Sponsored by the South Carolina Democratic Party, the 90-minute debate was moderated by NBC newsman Brian Williams on the campus of South Carolina State University.

Iraq dominated the early questioning, coming just hours after the Senate voted to mandate the withdrawal of U.S. troops starting in October. All four sitting senators running for the nomination voted for the ordered withdrawal.

All candidates said they supported troop removal. Obama stressed that he was proud to have opposed the war from the start when he was a state senator.

Two candidates refused to say whether they agreed with the recent assertion by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate majority leader, that the Iraq war is "lost."

Clinton sidestepped the issue but said she was "proud" of Reid's leadership. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware also refused to comment on Reid's assertion. "This is not a game show," he said.

Despite their opposition to the war, none of the candidates would join fellow candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio in urging impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

On health care, all propose finding ways to cover the nation's 47 million uninsured while controlling costs. They differed on the need to raise taxes to pay for their proposals.

Edwards said he would raise taxes on those making more than $200,000 to finance his proposed coverage of the uninsured. Clinton said she would not add any new spending - presumably meaning she would not add new taxes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico flatly ruled out raising taxes.

Several candidates including Biden, Clinton and Richardson also said they want to curb access to guns by the mentally ill in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre.

But Richardson cautioned against going too far to regulate guns. "I'm a Westerner," he said. "The Second Amendment is precious in the West."

Richardson and four others - Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, former Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska, Biden and Kucinich - raised their hands when asked if they had ever had a gun in their home.

Pressed to explain why he used campaign money to pay for a $400 haircut, Edwards called it a mistake.

Edwards and Clinton both were asked to explain how hedge funds improve the country - Edwards because he worked for one, Clinton because she represents the state where many are based.

Edwards said hedge funds are "an important part" of figuring out how to expand health care or solve poverty, though he didn't explain how. Clinton said the country is better because of its "entrepreneurial economy" but added that government regulation ensures that none has an "unfair advantage."

There were a couple of light spots in the evening.

One came from little-known Gravel when he was asked to explain his presence in the campaign and the debate. "Some of these people frighten me," said Gravel to laughter.

The other moment belonged to Biden. Asked by Williams whether he could control his exceedingly verbose style on the world stage, Biden gave a one-word answer: "Yes."

Army Officer Accuses Generals of "Intellectual and Moral Failures"

2007-04-27T14:00:00.000-07:00

By Thomas E. Ricks The Washington Post Friday 27 April 2007

An active-duty Army officer is publishing a blistering attack on U.S. generals, saying they have botched the war in Iraq and misled Congress about the situation there.

"America's generals have repeated the mistakes of Vietnam in Iraq," charges Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran who is deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. "The intellectual and moral failures . . . constitute a crisis in American generals."

Yingling's comments are especially striking because his unit's performance in securing the northwestern Iraqi city of Tall Afar was cited by President Bush in a March 2006 speech and provided the model for the new security plan underway in Baghdad.

He also holds a high profile for a lieutenant colonel: He attended the Army's elite School for Advanced Military Studies and has written for one of the Army's top professional journals, Military Review.

The article, "General Failure," is to be published today in Armed Forces Journal and is posted at http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/. Its appearance signals the public emergence of a split inside the military between younger, mid-career officers and the top brass.

Many majors and lieutenant colonels have privately expressed anger and frustration with the performance of Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno and other top commanders in the war, calling them slow to grasp the realities of the war and overly optimistic in their assessments.

Some younger officers have stated privately that more generals should have been taken to task for their handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, news of which broke in 2004. The young officers also note that the Army's elaborate "lessons learned" process does not criticize generals and that no generals in Iraq have been replaced for poor battlefield performance, a contrast to other U.S. wars.

Top Army officials are also worried by the number of captains and majors choosing to leave the service. "We do have attrition in those grade slots above our average," acting Army Secretary Pete Geren noted in congressional testimony this week. In order to curtail the number of captains leaving, he said, the Army is planning a $20,000 bonus for those who agree to stay in, plus choices of where to be posted and other incentives.

Until now, charges of incompetent leadership have not been made as publicly by an Army officer as Yingling does in his article.

"After going into Iraq with too few troops and no coherent plan for postwar stabilization, America's general officer corps did not accurately portray the intensity of the insurgency to the American public," he writes. "For reasons that are not yet clear, America's general officer corps underestimated the strength of the enemy, overestimated the capabilities of Iraq's government and security forces and failed to provide Congress with an accurate assessment of security conditions in Iraq."

Yingling said he decided to write the article after attending Purple Heart and deployment ceremonies for Army soldiers. "I find it hard to look them in the eye," he said in an interview. "Our generals are not worthy of their soldiers."

He said he had made his superiors aware of the article but had not sought permission to publish it. He intends to stay in the Army, he said, noting that he is scheduled in two months to take command of a battalion at Fort Hood, Tex.

The article has been read by about 30 of his peers, Yingling added. "At the level of lieutenant colonel and below, it received almost universal approval," he said.
Retired Marine Col. Jerry Durrant, now working in Iraq as a civilian contractor, agrees that discontent is widespread. "Talk to the junior leaders in the services and ask what they think of their senior leadership, and many will tell you how unhappy they are," he said.

Yingling advocates overhauling the way generals are picked and calls for more involvement by Congress. To replace today's "mild-mannered team players," he writes, Congress should create incentives in the promotion system to "reward adaptation and intellectual achievement."

He does not criticize officers by name; instead, the article refers repeatedly to "America's generals." Yingling said he did this intentionally, in order to focus not on the failings of a few people but rather on systemic problems.

He also recommends that Congress review the performance of senior generals as they retire and exercise its power to retire them at a lower rank if it deems their performance inferior. The threat of such high-profile demotions would restore accountability among top officers, he contends. "As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war," he states.

Dying for W

2007-04-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

By Robert Parry Consortium News Thursday 26 April 2007

George W. Bush admits he has no evidence that a withdrawal timetable from Iraq would be harmful. Instead, the President told interviewer Charlie Rose that this core assumption behind his veto threat of a Democratic war appropriation bill is backed by "just logic."

"I mean, you say we start moving troops out," Bush said in the interview on April 24. "Don't you think an enemy is going to wait and adjust based upon an announced timetable for withdrawal?"

It is an argument that Bush has made again and again over the past few years, that with a withdrawal timetable, the "enemy" would just "wait us out." But the answer to Bush's rhetorical question could be, "well, so what if they do?"

If Bush is right and a withdrawal timetable quiets Iraq down for the next year or so - a kind of de facto cease-fire - that could buy time for the Iraqis to begin the difficult process of reconciliation and start removing the irritants that have enflamed the violence.

One of those irritants has been the impression held by many Iraqi nationalists that Bush and his neoconservative advisers want to turn Iraq into a permanent colony while using its territory as a land-based aircraft carrier to pressure or attack other Muslim nations.

The neocons haven't helped by referring to Bush's 2003 conquest as the "USS Iraq" and joking about whether next to force "regime change" in Syria or Iran, with the punch-line, "Real men go to Tehran."

By refusing to set an end date for the U.S. military occupation, Bush has fed this suspicion, prompting many Iraqis - both Sunni and Shiite - to attack American troops. Another negative consequence has been that the drawn-out Iraq War has bought time for foreign al-Qaeda terrorists to put down roots with Sunni insurgents.

Obviously, there is no guarantee that a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal would bring peace to Iraq. The greater likelihood remains that civil strife will continue for some years to come as Iraq's factions nurse their grievances and push for a new national equilibrium.

But the counterpoint to Bush's veto threat against a withdrawal timetable is that his open-ended war is doomed to failure. To attain even the appearance of limited success would require American forces to effectively exterminate all Iraqis who are part of the armed resistance to the U.S. occupation.

After all, the only logical reason for not wanting the "enemy" to lie low is so American troops can capture or kill them.

That has been Bush's strategy for the past four-plus years - longer than it took the United States to win World War II - and the military situation has only grown increasingly dire. Meanwhile, anti-Americanism has swelled around the world, especially among Muslims.

Failed Surge

But a long, bloody stalemate is the likely result from Bush's stubbornness. With little fanfare, the Bush administration has essentially abandoned its earlier "exit strategy" of training a new Iraqi army so as "they stand up, we'll stand down."

Bush's much-touted "surge" - beefing up American forces in Baghdad and other hot spots - is an indirect acknowledgement that the training was a flop. The "surge" is a do-over of the war's original approach of relying on American troops to bring security to the country.

The "surge" also places American troops in lightly defended outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods, rather than concentrating U.S. forces in high-security barracks. The Pentagon acknowledges that this approach will put Americans in greater danger, both from insurgents and from Iraqi police whose loyalties are suspect.

The prediction of higher U.S. casualties is already coming true, as al-Qaeda-connected terrorists and Iraqi insurgents adjust their tactics to kill the vulnerable Americans. On April 23, two suicide truck bombers rammed a U.S. Army outpost near Baqubah, exploding two bombs that killed nine American soldiers and wounded 20 others.

As Iraq's temperatures begin to soar into the 100s, the American troops will have to fight the heat as well as the insurgents. The secure base camps were well equipped with air conditioning, water and other supplies that won't be as accessible in the remote outposts scattered throughout hostile neighborhoods.

Supplying these American troops will be another invitation for ambushes and roadside bombs.

The chances that U.S. troops will kill Iraqi civilians will rise, too, as may have happened earlier this month when an American helicopter gunship killed an Iraqi mother and her two sons in Baghdad Al-Amel neighborhood. [Christian Science Monitor, April 24, 2007]

Bush's insistence on an open-ended U.S. occupation also plays into the hands of foreign al-Qaeda terrorists who are estimated to number only about five percent of the armed opposition.

Captured al-Qaeda documents reveal that the terrorist group has had trouble building alliances with Iraqi insurgents. So, al-Qaeda has pinned its hopes on keeping the U.S. military bogged down in Iraq indefinitely while those bridges are built and a new generation of extremists is recruited, trained and hardened.

In addition, having the U.S. military focused on Iraq protects Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders holed up on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

An announced date for American withdrawal would put non-Iraqi al-Qaeda operatives in a tighter fix. Without the indefinite U.S. occupation, al-Qaeda would find it tougher to recruit young jihadists and would likely face military pressure from Iraqi nationalists fed up with foreign interference of all kinds.

That is why al-Qaeda leaders view Bush's open-ended war in Iraq as crucial to their long-range plans for spreading their radical ideology throughout the Muslim world. As "Atiyah," one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, explained in a Dec. 11, 2005, letter, "prolonging the war is in our interest."

[To read the "prolonging the war" passage from the captured Atiyah letter at the Web site of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center, click here and then scroll down to the bottom of page 16 and the top of page 17.]

"False Hope"

Military and intelligence analysts have told me that the "surge" is already recognized as a failure by U.S. military officers stationed in Iraq. "It's just another layer on top of what they've already been doing," one well-placed U.S. military source said.

In this view, the "surge" is more a political tactic than a military one, a way for Bush to argue for more money without strings, one more time. Presumably, after the "surge" collapses in obvious failure, Bush and his advisers will point to another mirage on the horizon.

Or, as comedian Lewis Black has put it, "Keep false hope alive."

Given what the Iraq Study Group has called the "grave and deteriorating" conditions in Iraq, why not give a timetable for American withdrawal a chance? It potentially could help achieve three goals:

First, it might tamp down the violence from Iraqi nationalists who, if Bush's "logic" is right, would lie low for a while. Second, it might pressure the Iraqi government to get serious about reconciliation during a respite from the violence. Third, it might help isolate al-Qaeda and deny the terrorist group the recruiting advantage from the open-ended U.S. occupation.

There also would be an incentive for the Iraqi nationalists to cooperate in reconciliation, because the United States could reverse its withdrawal plans if Iraq descended into chaos as a failed state or became a haven for al-Qaeda. At minimum, an announced U.S. withdrawal would change the current depressing political and military dynamic in Iraq.

So, a Bush victory in the funding showdown with congressional Democrats might lead to some high-fiving at the White House and mean that President Bush will have saved some political face. But the prospect of an open-ended war will condemn Iraqis and American soldiers alike to nightmarish months ahead and the certainty of many more deaths.

In effect, they will be asked to die for W.

Chairman Murtha to Bush: Sign the Iraq Accountability Act

2007-04-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

Press Release Thursday 26 April 2007

Washington, D.C. - Congressman John P. Murtha, Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, issued the following statement Wednesday on the House passage of the Iraq Accountability Act conference report:

"For over four years, the President has been waging a war without end and a war without accountability and oversight. No longer will this Congress and the American People continue to give the President a blank check in order to continue a failed policy.

"Accountability is desperately needed, and this bill is called the Iraq Accountability Act for a good reason. It requires accountability on the part of the Iraqi Government to solve its own civil war. It calls for the President to be accountable for our military readiness and the welfare of our troops and to begin a responsible redeployment of our forces from Iraq.

"The Iraq Accountability Act provides four billion dollars more than the President requested for the military. This includes additional funding to address training and equipment shortfalls, additional funding for defense health care, and additional funding for PTSD counseling and Traumatic Brain Injury research.

"If the President vetoes the Iraq Accountability Act, he is denying our troops the resources that they need; he is denying our veterans the medical care they deserve; and he is denying the American People a new direction for Iraq. I strongly urge the President, whose own Generals have said that this war cannot be won militarily, to listen to the American People and sign the Iraq Accountability Act."

Senate Passes Iraq War Bill Requiring Pullout

2007-04-26T14:03:00.000-07:00

By Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny The New York Times Thursday 26 April 2007

Washington - The Senate narrowly passed a $124 billion war spending bill early this afternoon after an emotional debate about the best way forward in Iraq. The vote will send the measure to President Bush, who has vowed to veto it because it would require American troops to begin withdrawing by Oct. 1.

The 51-46 vote, far short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to override Mr. Bush's veto, came after a morning-long debate in which supporters of the bill called it a way to make the Iraqis take responsibility for their own security, while opponents called it a blueprint for defeat.

But the outcome was regarded as certain all along, with the White House saying the president might not even comment on it today, given the absence of suspense.

Still, there was plenty of feeling in evidence in the Senate as it debated the bill, which the House of Representatives narrowly approved on Wednesday.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader, called the bill one that "we can and will proudly send to the president," and one that charts a new course in Iraq while honoring America's fighting forces.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the measure is "the only way to make Iraqis take responsibility" for their own destiny. Mr. Kennedy said the president has been wrong all along on Iraq. "Now, he is wrong to threaten to veto this bill," the senator said. "We cannot repeat the mistake of Vietnam."

Another Democratic supporter, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, said the conflict is "a war that never should have started, and on this president's watch may never end" without a timetable for American withdrawal.

But Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, an independent who lost the Democratic nomination last year at least partly because of his support for the war, called the bill "a deadline for defeat" and said it would have "exactly the opposite effect that its supporters expect" because it would discourage the Iraqis.

And Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said it was high time to "look beyond the politics of this thing, and do the right thing" by letting Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, a chance to finish the job.

General Petraeus himself acknowledged this morning that the situation in Iraq is "exceedingly complex and very tough."

"Success will take continued commitment, perseverance and sacrifice, all to make possible an opportunity for the all-important Iraqi political actions that are the key to long-term solutions to Iraq's many problems," the general said at a Pentagon briefing.

At the White House, meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the president, Dana Perino, said that Mr. Bush would veto the measure "very soon," so that "we can take the next step." The next step, presumably, would be more back-and-forth between the White House and the Capitol, since backers of the bill have nowhere near the two-thirds majority required in each chamber to override a veto.

Asked if Mr. Bush planned to comment, Ms. Perino said, "Look, this is a little bit of a foregone conclusion, a little bit anti-climactic," she said.

The veto will be the second of Mr. Bush's presidency, and the first since Democrats gained control of Congress. Last year, Mr. Bush vetoed a stem-cell research bill.

On Wednesday, only hours after General Petraeus told lawmakers he needed more time to gauge the effectiveness of the recent troop buildup there, the House approved the measure by 218 to 208."Last fall, the American people voted for a new direction in Iraq," said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California. "They made it clear that our troops must be given all they need to do their jobs, but that our troops must be brought home responsibly, safely, and soon."

Republicans accused Democrats of establishing a "date certain" for America's defeat in Iraq and capitulating to terrorism.

"This bill is nothing short of a cut and run in the fight against Al Qaeda," said Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky.

On the final vote, 216 Democrats and 2 Republicans supported the bill; 195 Republicans and 13 Democrats opposed it. The legislation provides more than $95 billion for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through Sept. 30, with the money conditioned on the administration's willingness to accept a timetable for withdrawal and new benchmarks to assess the progress of the Iraqi government.

Democratic leaders plan to send the bill to the White House early next week - coinciding with the fourth anniversary of Mr. Bush's May 1, 2003, speech aboard an aircraft carrier, when he declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq, under a banner that said "Mission Accomplished."

With the outcome essentially preordained, advocacy groups on both sides of the issue were readying campaigns to try to shape public opinion as the showdown unfolds.

Groups aligned with the Democrats plan to capitalize on the connection between the veto and the "mission accomplished" anniversary. Americans United for Change has produced a television commercial that replays scenes of Mr. Bush on the carrier and says: "He was wrong then. And he's wrong now. It's the will of one nation versus the stubbornness of one man."

Allies of the president are mobilizing as well. The conservative Web site Townhall.com was organizing an online "no surrender" petition, and urging visitors to the site to tell the Democratic Party's "rogues' gallery that we will not stand for their defeatism," adding, "While they may lack courage, our troops do not and they deserve the resources needed to win this war."

With the vote barely behind them, House Democrats were already considering how to respond legislatively to Mr. Bush's veto. Though there are differing ideas, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Democrat who oversees defense appropriations, said his preference would be to "robustly fund the troops for two months," and include benchmarks but no timetable for withdrawal.

In addition to General Petraeus, lawmakers in the House and Senate heard on Wednesday from Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and Adm. Edmund P. Giambastiani Jr., vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As they walked into the House briefing, the officials were greeted by about a dozen war protesters, some of whom shouted: "War criminal! War criminal!" One woman walked alongside the general, urging him in a softer tone to consider her point of view.

After the briefing, whose substance was classified, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, disputed criticisms that Democrats were trying to end the war before giving the administration's plan a chance to succeed.

"Nobody is saying, 'Get out tomorrow,' " Mr. Hoyer said, noting that the legislation would allow American troops to remain in Iraq to battle terrorist groups.

He and Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, differed on what emerged from the briefing as the most significant cause of violence in Iraq. Mr. Hoyer attributed it to sectarian strife, while Mr. Boehner cited Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, calling the group "the major foe that we face in Iraq today."

Democrats sought to portray their approach as reasonable and called for Mr. Bush to reconsider before sending the bill back to Congress.

"I believe that this legislation, if people were to just take their time and read it, is the exit strategy that the president ought to be pleased to receive," said Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the Democratic whip.

But Republicans called it a dubious attempt at micromanaging the war and said Democrats were also seizing the opportunity to stuff the bill with home-state spending.

The president's allies, aware of public dissatisfaction with the war, acknowledged the difficulties on the ground in Iraq while portraying the Democratic approach as a prescription for defeat.

"It's been ugly, it's been difficult, it has been very painful," said Representative David Dreier, Republican of California. "We all feel the toll that has been taken and are fully aware of the price we are paying, especially in a human sense. But we do not honor those who have sacrificed by abandoning the mission."

The House vote on Wednesday and the preceding debate closely resembled those of one month ago, when the House passed its initial version 218 to 212.

UN: Baghdad Security Operation Has Failed

2007-04-25T14:10:00.000-07:00

The Irish Examiner UK Wednesday 25 April 2007

Sectarian violence continued to claim the lives of a large number of Iraqi civilians in Sunni Arab and Shiite neighbourhoods of Iraq's capital, despite the coalition's new Baghdad security plan, the UN said today.

In its first human rights report since the security plan was launched on February 14 – and began increasing US and Iraqi troops levels in the capital - the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said civilian casualties in the daily violence between January and March remained high, concentrated in and around Baghdad.

American troops are facing increasing danger as they step up their presence in outposts and police stations in Baghdad and areas surrounding the city, as part of the security crackdown to which US President George Bush has committed an extra 30,000 troops.

Thousands of Iraqi soldiers are also being deployed in the streets of the capital in an attempt to pacify it.

"While government officials claimed an initial drop in the number of killings in the latter half of February following the launch of the Baghdad security plan, the number of reported casualties rose again in March," the study said.

But UNAMI also said that for the first time since it began issuing quarterly reports on the human rights situation in Iraq, the new January 1-March 31 one did not contain overall mortality figures from Iraq's Ministry of Health because it refused to release them.

"UNAMI emphasises again the utmost need for the Iraqi government to operate in a transparent manner, and does not accept the government's suggestion that UNAMI used the (previous) mortality figures in an inappropriate fashion," the report said.

The UN agency said that after the publication of its last human rights report about Iraq on January 16, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's office told UNAMI its mortality figures were exaggerated, "although they were in fact official figures compiled and provided by a government ministry".

The new UNAMI report said that on March 1 Iraq's Ministry of Interior announced that 1,646 civilians were killed in Iraq in February, most of them in Baghdad, but that "it is unclear on what basis these figures were compiled."

UNAMI said that even though its current report's evidence could not be numerically substantiated with government figures, it showed continued high levels of violence throughout the reporting period, including large scale indiscriminate killings and assassinations by insurgents, militias and other armed groups.

"In February and March, sectarian violence claimed the lives of large numbers of civilians, including women and children, in both Shia and Sunni neighbourhoods of Baghdad," the report said.

Four Million Displaced as Civil War Deepens Iraqi Refugee Crisis

2007-04-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

By Deniz Yeter t r u t h o u t | Report Wednesday 25 April 2007

The unfolding civil war and inter-sectarian violence in Iraq is deepening a humanitarian crisis of refugees, a Congressional Research Service Report has found. The report, entitled "Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis?" was released in March 2007.

An estimated four million refugees have been displaced, or 13 percent of the Iraqi population. About 1.2 million resulted from the previous Gulf War and a decade of US sanctions. Two million Iraqis are already believed to have fled mainly into neighboring Syria and Jordan, with an additional two million displaced within Iraq.

Since the February 2006 bombing of the Shiite Muslim Al-Askariya shrine in Samarra that marked the beginning of intense, widespread sectarian clashes, an estimated 730,000 more Iraqis are now displaced within Iraq. They are referred to as Internally Displaced Persons or IDPs. Sectarian cleansing is being employed to take control of territory from the opposing factions. That tactic once was commonly used by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose 30-year regime left an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis displaced.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, estimates that 40,000 to 50,000 Iraqis are displaced each month, with the numbers continuously increasing. At this rate, it's believed that an additional 2.3 to 2.7 million refugees will be displaced within Iraq by December. One group of refugees displaced inside Iran, who moved back to Iraq before the March 2003 invasion, are now displaced once again - this time inside Iraq.

Seventy percent of those fleeing are coming from Baghdad. Sunnis have moved from the south to the middle of Iraq and Shiites from the middle to the south. Kurds have moved to the northern areas of Iraq in areas like Kirkuk. When moving in with friends or family isn't an option, many of the displaced wind up squatting in schools, factories or mosques that are typically damaged or abandoned.

There are many groups, such as US or Iraqi government workers, those working with international organizations, and even Palestinians who are particularly vulnerable to reprisal attacks from various factions due to ethnic, religious, or political alignments. There are also many vulnerable groups within the displaced, such as pregnant women, children, the sick and the elderly.

As a part of the surge and Baghdad security plan, US and Iraqi forces are resettling the displaced in their previous homes. The consequences of this resettling plan are yet to be seen. The CRS report suggests a re-examination of resettlement policies and strategies for refugees, especially those displaced within Iraq, and humanitarian relief funds for refugees, including those outside Iraq.

Lack of security has dramatically impacted the standard of living. Kidnappings and assassinations have become a part of everyday life for thousands of Iraqis. Health care, education and social services have all been severely crippled due to the escalating violence, constantly limiting Iraqi society.

Threats of violence have also caused many people to not sleep at their homes or to not stick with routines, to avoid following a pattern known as nighttime and daylight displacement, that could make one a prime candidate for attacks or kidnappings.

The CRS report mentions that the humanitarian crisis is quickly outpacing others in the region, noting it's the largest level of displacement in the Middle East since 1948 with the creation of Israel and the Arab-Israeli War, which has resulted in a continuing 40-year Israeli occupation. That occupation has displaced an estimated 7 million Palestinians, according to UN statistics.

Syria, which has taken in roughly 1 million refugees, including many Iraqi Christians and Shiites, is already feeling a strain on its economy from this open borders policy. Inflation and the cost of housing are rising, and there is a looming threat of water and electrical shortages.

Tensions are high inside the country, with many Syrians complaining about refugees taking jobs that were already scarce before the increase of immigration. Syrian officials worry that the sectarian violence will spill over the border and make its way into the country.

Jordan, which took in an estimated 800,000 refugees, is feeling many of the same constraints, with a population boom of 20 percent due to refugees. While the country's banking and real estate markets are growing with the increased demand for housing, the economy is also suffering from a sharp rise in inflation.

The impact of refugees on the country has increased tensions between Jordanian citizens and the displaced. In response, Jordan established more rigid immigration laws in February 2007 in an attempt to slow the incoming movement.

Iraqi government ministries try to help the displaced, with only a few humanitarian NGOs working in the country who have to operate discreetly in communities for fear of attacks. When these parties fail, sectarian groups such as the Mahdi try to fill the gap by providing assistance and security.

Doubts are being raised about these communities and groups in Iraq and neighboring countries being able to provide for the displaced. Limited resources are creating competition for food, water, fuel, shelter, electricity and other basic items. The problems are compounded by rampant unemployment and a devastated economy.

Bush Blames the Troops

2007-04-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

By Robert Scheer Truthdig Tuesday 24 April 2007

Blame it on the military but make it look like you're supporting the troops. That's been the convenient gambit of failed emperors throughout history as they witnessed their empires decline. Not surprisingly then, it's become the standard rhetorical trick employed by President Bush in shirking responsibility for the Iraq debacle of his making.

Ignoring the fact that we have a system of civilian control over the military, which is why he, the elected president, is designated the commander in chief, Bush hides behind the fiction that the officers in the field are calling the shots when in fact he has put them in an unwinnable situation and refuses to even consider a timetable for getting them out.

He did it again Monday, responding to the prospect that both houses of Congress seem in agreement on setting guidelines for the "progress" that the president continually proclaims is at hand. "I will strongly reject an artificial timetable [for] withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job." This is disingenuous in the extreme, because Bush is the Washington politician who plotted this unnecessary war from the moment the 9/11 attack provided him with an excuse for regime change in a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack.

It was Bush who sent the troops to invade Iraq with the mission of ridding it of weapons of mass destruction, which he should have known Iraq did not have, and to end ties with al-Qaida that, the record shows, he knew never existed. And it was the Bush administration that micro-managed every aspect of the occupation to disastrous consequences ranging from the de-Baathification that isolated the Sunnis to premature elections that put Shiite theocrats in power. The economic reconstruction of Iraq has been a failure for everyone except the U.S. corporations that have ripped off U.S. taxpayers to the tune of many billions of dollars. It is only now, when all of those policies for the economic and political reconstruction of Iraq have come a cropper, that a military surge has been ordered to provide a social order for Iraq that this president's policies have destroyed.

This president has been denied nothing by Congress in the way of financial underwriting for this boondoggle, yet he seeks to cast even the mildest attempt to hold him accountable for the results as unpatriotic. That is all that the Democratic congressional leadership has proposed with its timetable - marks to measure progress on the ground in a war that, as Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye pointed out, has lasted longer than World War II. It is a very limited, nonbinding attempt to hold the president accountable, for it does not ban him from using any portion of the whopping $124 billion in new funds; it requires only that he publicly and specifically defend his claims of progress.

It's a claim of progress that, until now, has not been met with any congressional review, even though it is the obligation of Congress to judge the effectiveness of programs paid for with the funds that Congress alone can appropriate. If the proposed timetable were in place, then it would be more difficult for the president to claim success for his surge, as he did Friday, insisting that "So far, the operation is meeting expectations" and then confusing his audience by conceding that recently "We have seen some of the highest casualty levels of the war."

It's gobbledygook, and the Democratic leaders of Congress have finally decided to call the president on it. "The longer we continue down the president's path, the further we will be from responsibly ending this war," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Not content any longer to take Bush at his word, the leaders in both the House and Senate finally posted some specific benchmarks of progress, accompanied by a nonbinding suggestion of an end to U.S. troop involvement in this quagmire within a year's time if genuine progress is not made. Even that minimum restraint on the president's ambition was accompanied with the caveat that sufficient troops would remain in Iraq to protect U.S. installations, train the Iraqi army and fight terrorists.

The proposal was the softest the Democrats could offer without totally repudiating the will of the voters who brought them to power in the last election. If the president vetoes this authorization bill, then the onus is on him for delaying funding for the troops and showing contempt for the judgment of the voters, who will have another chance in less than two years to hold the president's party responsible. But that will not restore life to the 85 U.S. soldiers killed so far in April alone, or prevent even greater sacrifices to Bush's folly.

The Lost War

2007-04-20T14:13:00.000-07:00

By Serge Truffaut Le Devoir Friday 20 April 2007

The week was not over before it proved to already be one of the bloodiest in Iraq's recent history. In fact, barely had Shiite religious leader Moqtada al-Sadr ordered the resignation of the ministers wearing his colors, than a series of explosions blasted out. Its source? The Sunni.

The chronology of the latest episode in the Iraqi tragedy began when the populist Sadr indicated that he would no longer collaborate in the management of state business. With that blow, he undoubtedly weakened Prime Minister al-Maliki's government, which, moreover, must fear that this empty-chair policy will be followed by another call to action. Which? That Sadr's deputies abstain from voting in the Parliament. Without their support, Maliki's survival will be hanging by a thread.

This withdrawal from current affairs decided by a leader about whom it is unknown whether he is still in Iraq or has fled to Iran follows directly from the military strategy ordered by President Bush at the beginning of the year. Under cover of the negotiations pertaining to the increase in the American contingent based in Iraq, Maliki and the White House had obtained [a pledge] that the members of the Mahdi Army Sadr heads would adopt a low profile. In other words, that they would leave their rifles and other weapons in the cupboards.

The Sunni militias capitalized on that self-restraint by employing methods more violent than ever before. Observing that their Shiite enemies had regrouped, if one may call it that, behind the frail screen constituted by the official army, they increased suicide attacks. And did so with an ardor all the more marked because they - with al-Qaeda at the head of the line - knew that the constitution of official forces as decided by the Pentagon was a gigantic fiasco. Here's why.

According to an analysis signed by Andrew Exum, an American officer, the Pentagon bonzes committed the master mistake of establishing a defense system that more or less reproduced the model set up in the United States. So what? The US system, turned towards the outside, was conceived to respond to foreign threats. But what Iraq needs right now is an infrastructure appropriate to confronting domestic threats.

The absence of perspicacity the Pentagon has displayed has been confirmed by this enormity: all Iraqis engaged in the armed forces have been forbidden to bring their weapons home. With no trust in the soldiers, it was feared that they would supply the different clans that are killing each other off with revolvers and other weapons. That has been noted on several occasions. But what has been observed most is that hundreds of the soldiers, along with their family members, have been massacred ... while they were unarmed.

Result: this large-scale carnage of Iraqis in uniform has had the effect of slowing down the rebuilding of the country's defenses enormously. And that for the reason you will already have guessed: the lines of individuals who decide to sign up have petered out as the rumors about the murders of those already enlisted have been confirmed. On this front, it must be said; American policy has proved to be a disaster.

So we were not surprised to learn that no later than yesterday the Democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, declared: "The war is lost." Sticking obstinately to his policy, President Bush retorted by jeering at these observations, even though many Republicans have begun to share them. After preparing a war on the basis of lies, now President Bush is lying to himself.

Failing the Troops

2007-04-19T09:02:00.000-07:00

April 19, 2007

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday alongside a panel that included both retired generals and academics discussing the current and future state of the military.

“Not since the aftermath of the Vietnam War has the U.S. Army been so depleted,” said Korb in his testimony. “The simple fact is that the United States currently does not have enough troops who are ready and available for potential contingency missions in Iran, North Korea, or anywhere else.”

There was a remarkable unity among the senators and experts over the dangerous predicament our military and country are in. “I’m offended when I hear the Army is in trouble. It’s not the Army. It’s the American people,” said General Barry R. McCaffrey. “We wrecked the Army coming out of Vietnam; it took 10 years to recover. We are not going to get 10 years with this war.”

“Today’s ground operations in Iraq are progressively straining our ground forces in ways that were predictable and predicted,” said Senator Jim Webb (D-VA). Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) concurred, saying, “The Army and Marines are clearly overstretched and we must act promptly to fix these problems.”

Even Joe Lieberman (I-CT), the renowned Iraq war supporter, agreed that the current situation is untenable, saying that we need to “come to the aid of the U.S. Army,” and that the state of the military is an “indictment of the people and policies” of those responsible.

“Congress has been missing-in-action during the past several years while undebated and misguided strategies were implemented by former Secretary Rumsfeld and his team of arrogant and inexperienced civilian associates in the Pentagon,” said McCaffrey in his testimony. “We are failing our troops in that we are stretching them too thin and asking them to do more with much less.”

“We also have a moral responsibility to the young men and women that we take into the service, that before we put them in harm’s way, they are ready,” Korb emphasized. “We should not be taking those risks.”

The panel discussed both the moral and military elements involved in sending so many troops rated “not combat ready” into battle. “Learning to fight by fighting is the most wasteful way to train soldiers,” said Major General Robert H. Scales. “It’s not purely a numbers game. It is a quality game,” agreed Andrew F. Krepinevich, President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

The panel also discussed the detrimental effects of the military only—and barely—reaching its recruitment goals by lowering its standards. Such policies include raising the maximum age of soldiers from 35 to 42 in 2005, doubling the amount of non-high school graduates allowed since last year, raising the number of criminal offenders by 65 percent since 2003, and doubling the number of felons allowed from 2003.

Korb said that such policies have allowed an autistic man to be signed up to be a cavalry scout, as well as Private Steven Green, the soldier arrested for his alleged role in the rape of an Iraqi girl and the murder of her family. Green was allowed to enlist despite having legal, educational, and psychological problems.

“I urge you, do not lower the standards,” Korb said. “People, not hardware, need to be the highest priority if this is going to work.”

“I couldn’t agree with Dr. Korb more. Lowering the standards is the last thing we should do,” McCaffrey said. “Our recruiting is starting to unravel.”

Various senators expressed their concern about the military no longer demanding the best and the brightest. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) warned, “The automatic promotion that is going on right now lends itself to the sort of problems we saw at Walter Reed.” McCaffrey agreed and said, “The skill of the officer corps is in jeopardy.”

“Because of our rotation schedule today, our Army and Marine corps have become simply too busy to learn,” said Scales. “[We need to] reform our human capital. You can’t throw money at this.”

The readiness and personnel crisis is so severe due to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that the committee seriously discussed the prospect of whether a draft would be necessary if another conflict arises. “We must, at all costs, consider the all-volunteer force. I can’t see any measure where we should return to a draft at this time,” Sen. John Warner (R-VA) said.

“If you had a draft right now, you would no longer be in Iraq. The American people would say no,” Korb warned. “If the people are not willing to send their sons and daughters, we have to think very carefully about what we’re doing.”

Greetings from the Red Zone, Dispatches from a Five-Day Trip to Iraq

2007-04-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

By Lawrence J. Korb April 17, 2007

Day 1: April 7, 2007

Greetings from the Red Zone. I was originally supposed to reside in the Green Zone at the Al Rashid Hotel. But the Green Zone is now referred to as the International Zone because of the repeated shellings (called indirect fire), and despite $36 million in repairs, the Al Rashid is a dump. The air conditioning doesn’t work at all, the elevators only sporadically, and the furniture looks like it was purchased at a yard sale (the reconstruction of the Al Rashid is a metaphor for most of the reconstruction projects in Iraq).

Therefore, after one sleepless night at the Al Rashid and on the advice of a State Department official I made the decision to move to a compound outside the Green Zone. (Given the events that transpired during my visit it was a smart move. Also, living in the compound got me out of the Green Zone and into the real Iraq.)

I am over here at the request of the National Academy of Public Administration—a congressionally chartered organization like the National Academy of Sciences, to which I was elected some 20 years ago—to work on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s National Capacity Development Project, known in Arabic as TATWEER.

The purpose of TATWEER is to assist the government of Iraq’s efforts to strengthen public administration in its civilian ministries. There is no doubt that if a democratically elected government of Iraq is unable to function effectively after our departure, it will not last very long. And to function effectively its policies must be carried out by an honest, nonpartisan civil service.

I arrived here on Saturday April 7 (Saddam Hussein’s birthday) on a flight from Amman. Besides myself and one other NAPA member, virtually all of the other non-Iraqis on the flight were contractors from companies like Blackwater, Halliburton, and Dynacorps. The person sitting next to me on the plane was from Blackwater. He looked like Bruce Willis and was about as talkative about the situation in Iraq and what he does there as Sgt. Friday from Dragnet.

The flight took about an hour to get to Baghdad but we circled the airport for another hour. I assume it was for safety reasons, but it seems to me that the best way to avoid being hit by a missile or a rocket-propelled grenade is to go right in. I know the circling had nothing to do with traffic because there was none. I counted seven aircraft on the ground and none of them moved during the hour.

Getting through Iraqi customs was a chore—it was like Moscow in the early 1990s. There were four lines: three for Iraqis and one for “others”. Like the majority of the passengers we went through the “others” line. It took at least an hour for me and my colleague to get through. The Blackwater and Halliburton people, however, went right around the line. One of the other less fortunate contractors remarked that it was not surprising since they are running the country.

The long wait did allow me to speak to some of the contractors about the situation on the ground. When I assured them I was not a member of the press, they were unanimous that the surge was not working. One of them said that members of Muqtada Al-Sadr’s militia have sold their guns and melted back into the population in Sadr City and will buy back their guns at the appropriate time (our own security guard said something similar).

My instructions were to look for my escorts when I got through customs, but for security reasons they would not have any signs with my name on it. Alas, when I got into the terminal there were two South African security guards with a “Welcome Larry Korb” sign. My security guards are veterans of the South African military who are armed with AK-47s and communicate in their walkie-talkies in an Afrikaner dialect that I am sure the insurgents cannot understand (in fact I have trouble understanding them when they speak English).

Before embarking on the road from the airport, I was given an armored vest and a helmet. The vest was infinitely better (and heavier—45 pounds) than the flak jacket I was issued on my last visit in 2003 and the helmets were not required then.

The ride from the airport in our General Motors SUV to the Al Rashid was uneventful. There were some cars on the road and we were part of a two-car convoy. We forced several Iraqi cars onto the side of the road and made several turns over the highway median to get to the Green Zone. (Maybe I am wrong but riding a General Motors car in Iraq would make one more of a target.)

Getting into the Green Zone (now the International Zone) was quite a chore. There were checkpoints manned by private contractors from Peru (employed by Triple Canopy), Georgian soldiers, and U.S. military personnel from the 1st Cavalry Division. (Because of our “Beyond the Call of Duty” report I now know the unit emblems.)

Saturday afternoon we had an Iraqi-style lunch with American and Iraqi officials where we sat on the ground and ate with our fingers. In discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the Iraqi government and political system and the American efforts to date, some intriguing facts emerged. The Iraqi civil service is modeled on that of Turkey; the number of Iraqis working for the government has jumped from 1.3 million in 2003 to about 2 million today (not including the security forces); the government functioned effectively in the 1970s and 1980s; and the decisions that the provinces are making with their allocations from the federal government are not coordinated or controlled from Baghdad. (I must admit that with the flies swarming around and the roar of helicopters and planes overhead it was hard to concentrate).

That evening at dinner, I had an interesting discussion with an Iraqi official who is close to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. He made several intriguing observations. First, in their video conferences, Maliki and Bush do not really communicate. The official also noted that in his discussions with visiting members of Congress there is really not much dialogue, with both sides giving canned presentations. Second, the U.S. military and State Department do not really work well together and General George Casey would complain to Iraqis about the former U.S. Ambassador to iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. Third, the insurgency got started when the Americans failed to take control after the overthrow and the Iraqis realized that the American military was not invincible—that is, its soldiers were human beings who displayed the full range of emotions, including fear. Fourth, do not believe anyone who tells you that the situation is getting better.

Trying to sleep that night at the Al Rashid with the windows open was quite an adventure. Every few minutes it seemed like an F-15 or an Apache or Blackhawk would go roaring by and there would be occasional bursts of gunfire.

Day 2: April 8, 2007
Easter

We spent the entire day in the International Zone, also known as the Green Zone, meeting with members of the Iraqi government including career bureaucrats, members of Parliament, and the Deputy Prime Minister, Barham Saleh, in their offices.

The career people were from the Ministry of Planning and the National Center for Consultancy and Management Development. As far as I can tell (though it is hard to tell) the MOP has responsibility for measuring the performance of Iraq’s 34 current ministries and NCCMD is the group that does the measuring (a poor man’s Office of Management and Budget).

My colleague gave a great PowerPoint presentation on the efforts of American presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush to improve government performance. And while the Iraqis appeared to be interested in how organizations like OMB, the Congressional Budget Office, and the General Accounting Office functioned and how such ideas as reinventing government really worked, the session had an air of unreality about it. With the continuing chaos in Baghdad and the inability of the ministries to spend their investment budgets, it is hard to get too excited about performance measurement. Moreover, there is no doubt that corruption is rampant. In fact the Minister of Planning refers to it the second insurgency.

The session with the Parliamentarians in the convention center (which was attacked on April 12) was much more interesting. While Iraq is not a presidential system, the Iraqi Parliament—unlike most parliaments—sees itself as an independent and co-equal branch of government and is determined to serve as a check on the executive branch, even on members of its own party. And while there is much to applaud in this approach, it appears that currently this it is a recipe for gridlock (witness the failure so far to enact the hydrocarbon law that had been approved by the cabinet).

The meeting with the Deputy Prime Minister in his residence was fascinating. The meeting room resembled the Corcoran Gallery and Saleh, a Kurd who speaks English fluently, is quite articulate and charismatic, just the opposite of Maliki. In fact it dawned on me that he would go over much better with the media than Maliki. From what I was told every foreign government and international organization wants to deal with him.

Saleh said all the right things but after a while it seemed he was telling us what we wanted to hear; that is, his goals are creating a unified Iraq, providing scholarships for younger civil servants regardless of ethnic background, reducing the size of government, and making the legislature strong enough to bring down the government (including him). My impression was confirmed by an American official who told me that you never know what to believe about him—one day he is an ardent Iraqi nationalist, the next day he is a Kurdish separatist.

Day 3: April 9, 2007
The Fourth Anniversary of the Fall of Saddam

To avoid any problems, the government imposed a 24-hour curfew (actually Maliki declared it a government holiday). During the three-mile drive from our compound to the Green Zone and back, I noticed that there were only a handful of cars and trucks on the road and a small number people out of their homes. It is hard to believe that four years after our “victory,” the only way to provide safety is to lock down the capital city.

We spent the morning listening to briefings from consultants advising the individual ministries on the TATWEER project. Most were American and many spoke Arabic. Listening to the briefings, it is easy to see how people making a quick visit to the region with very little understanding of the situation can go away with the impression that things are getting better and that there is “light at the end of the tunnel.” These men and women believe in what they are doing and are close to their clients.

But if one uses the reports of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and pushes the briefers, a different picture emerges. The place is a mess and despite the almost heroic efforts of some Americans and some Iraqis it is not getting better. One of the consultants told me not to believe anyone who says that the situation is getting better.

In the afternoon (it lasted from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.) we had a luncheon meeting with about a dozen leading American and Iraqi officials. The American delegation included the heads of the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office (the successor to the Coalition Provisional Authority), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Office of Economic Reconstruction. The Iraqi delegation included the Iraqi ministers of National Security, Health, and Higher Education and the Deputy Minister of Interior, plus a member of Maliki’s staff and a Parliamentarian. This session also had an air of unreality.

The city was in lockdown, 10 American soldiers had died the day before, and the citizens of Najaf and the Sunni Scholars were calling for an end to the occupation. Yet we had a seven-course meal and the American officials and the Iraqis were exchanging diplomatic pleasantries about the progress they were making.

I had the good fortune to sit next to the Deputy Minister of Interior (the ministry responsible for the national police). He told me that the problem with the police is not training but loyalty and motivation—he cannot get enough officers to come to Baghdad, even though controlling Baghdad is critical to the establishment of a unified Iraq. He also said that Muqtada Al-Sadr still controls six ministries, including his own.

Day 4: April 10, 2007

The day started out normally but was anything but. In the morning we met at the Republican Palace with Ambassador Saleh, the outgoing head of the Iraqi Reconstruction Management Office, the successor to the Coalition Provisional Authority. The first thing that strikes you upon entering the Republican Palace that houses IRMO and most of the American citizens is how much tighter the security has become. In November 2003, we just showed our IDs and went in. Now, there are series of checkpoints and searches that seem to take forever.

There also seems to be 10 times more people walking up and down the corridors of the palace and Ambassador Saloom’s office is much more modest than that of Viceroy Bremer (Paul Bremer, former head of the CPA).

As might be expected, Saloom was upbeat about Iraq’s progress, citing such positive indicators as the number of satellite dishes and the amount of goods in the stores. But the dishes have been there since 2003 (in fact, in my meeting with Bremer in November 2003 he said the same thing), and while the shops may be full, it does not appear that many people are out shopping.

Saloom also dismissed the concerns expressed in the Special Inspector General’s report about the lack of coordination between the U.S. military and civilians and attributed the dust-up between Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates about the small number of State Department civilians being assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Teams as a communication problem. In light of the new White House plan to create a powerful czar to oversee Iraq and Afghanistan, Saloom’s comments seem unreal.

The ambassador did make a good point about the fact that as a result of all the inspections and audits an error-avoidance mentality has permeated the Iraqi bureaucracy and this has had a chilling effect on its ability to take action. There is no doubt that this is one reason none of the Iraqi ministries have yet to spend even 25 percent of their investment budget. If they do not do this by the end of June, the Finance Minister has threatened to take the money back (my suggestion that they use these unspent funds to fund the war until the supplemental passes was not greeted enthusiastically by the American officials).

On our way into the Republican Palace, our security people told us that a helicopter had been brought down by fire, at least three American soldiers had been killed in Baghdad, and the Green Zone was taking indirect fire. Consequentially we could not leave the Green Zone until 1 p.m. and our afternoon meeting on the east side of the Tigris had to be canceled.

While waiting to leave the Green Zone after our IRMO meeting, we visited the military exchange, or PX, and the “pharmacy” (liquor store—the Iraqis call it the Christian pharmacy). I was surprised and saddened that the servicemen and women pay the same prices for goods in Iraq as they do in the states.

Day 5: April 11, 2007

In the morning we had to travel to the east side of the Tigris for a meeting with NCCMD to discuss our proposals for improving the performance of the Iraqi government. A rainstorm had flooded the streets and made a bad traffic situation infinitely worse. Even our normally unflappable security guards were concerned.

To say the least, the 10-mile trip out the Assassin’s Gate and over the al Jumhuriya Bridge and around Tahrir Square was an adventure as our three-car convoy drove over several medians, went the wrong way on a four-lane road and blew their siren constantly to get Iraqis to move aside for our SUVs. While I was glad that these steps enhanced our safety, I wondered what the Iraqis thought of the maneuvers.

The other thing that struck me was the lack of American soldiers patrolling the neighborhoods. In fact, in my whole time here I did not see one American soldier outside the Green Zone.

The meeting with NCCMD was anticlimactic. We and they made some useful suggestions about empowering existing organizations to help improve government performance. What most impressed me was the desire of this group to do the right thing. But they have a small budget and very few people.

Our last event was a debrief for the U.S. Agency for International Development leadership in its very own compound (where they live and work). The people from AID pointed out that while there were some Iraqis trying to do the right thing, the rules have changed so much that nobody is sure about what they are supposed to do and that it is hard to know who or what to believe. An Iraqi working for AID told me we should have allowed the transition government to stay in power much longer.

Conclusion

To say that Iraq in general and Baghdad in particular are much worse than on my last visit would be an understatement. It is hard to believe that after about 3,300 deaths, about 25,000 wounded, an expenditure of $500 billion, and two national elections things could be this bad. (The day I left was the day that the Parliamentarians were killed and the al-Sarafiya bridge was blown up.)

The real issue is if the latest surge will work. The most optimistic projection was “maybe temporarily.” But most people speaking off the record believe that the insurgents will shift to other areas and lay low for a while in Baghdad.

I knew that the Iraqi government was not very effective, but I had no idea it was so bad. The national government already has 34 cabinet-level ministries and is creating about five more. The best civil servants have been de-Baathified and left the country (in fact, I ran into a couple of them at the Baghdad Airport on my way out). The remaining two million civil servants are underpaid, have little motivation, and are hamstrung by a set of rules and regulations that combines the worst elements of Soviet and American bureaucracies.

No one in or out of the American or Iraqi government seemed to have a good answer to my question: “how does it end?” On the back of this visit, I am more and more convinced that we must take control of our own destiny by setting a specific timetable for withdrawal. Currently, our fate is in the hands of an Iraqi government that does not have any real incentive to get its act together and does not even seem to understand the gravity of the situation or the declining level of support in the United States.

While I did not see as many soldiers as on my last visit, the ones I spoke to were clearly dispirited about the repeated deployments and the three-month extension.

Hidden wounds plague GIs / TENS OF THOUSANDS OF IRAQ WAR VETS HAVE SUFFERED BRAIN INJURIES, BUT A DIAGNOSIS CAN TAKE YEARS

2007-04-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

By Erin Emery Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 04/16/2007 06:15:19 AM MDT

Gary Watts, who sustained a traumatic brain injury while serving in Iraq, trains sniffer dogs as part of his rehabilitation. Training a dog requires repetition of commands, and the repetition can help heal Watts' brain. (Post / Kathryn Scott Osler)Colorado Springs - After the 5-ton Army truck stopped tumbling down an embankment in Iraq, Gary Watts found himself standing on his head, upside down in the cab of the truck.

"All I had was a sore neck and a bad, bad headache," Watts said.

He rested for a couple of days after the July 24, 2003, accident, then went back to work. He would listen to his commander's directions but hear only pieces of sentences. Twice, he ended up in the wrong convoy in Iraq, driving a truckload of supplies to the wrong place. His bosses chewed him out, and fellow soldiers made fun of him.

It took nearly three years for doctors to diagnose Watts with what is now known as the signature wound of this war - traumatic brain injury.

"Unfortunately, this may be what we are now creating, a whole population of people who are going to be mildly to moderately brain-injured," said Dr. Sheldon Goldberg, medical director of Porter Adventist's rehabilitation unit. "Just as Christopher Reeve's spinal-cord injury brought spinal- cord injury into the limelight for the public to try and understand, I think very sadly our returning Iraq veterans are going to be bringing traumatic brain injury into the limelight now."

Last week, Fort Carson revealed that 17.8 percent of troops who returned to the mountain post from Iraq in the past two years had a traumatic brain injury, or TBI.

Of 13,400 soldiers screened in the past two years, nearly 2,400 of them had brain injuries. Of those, 13 percent were not fit to return to Iraq. In many cases, those soldiers were medically discharged from the Army.

Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas found that between 10 percent and 20 percent of returning soldiers suffered brain injuries, most from improvised explosive devices, according to Charles Dasey, spokesman for the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command. At Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., 30 percent of soldiers admitted had a brain injury.

"When you consider that 1.5 million people have served in Iraq, that's 150,000 to 300,000 people who have TBI, and that's an enormous, enormous problem that requires immediate action," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a nonprofit advocacy group for vets.

Damage can be cumulative

In high-velocity, concussive-type accidents, the brain is like molded Jell-O tossed around in a wooden box. For soldiers who are exposed to dozens of blasts from improvised explosive devices, the likelihood of more damage increases with each event.

The severity of traumatic brain injuries varies, and it affects each person differently. Many soldiers recover within hours or in one to three months. For some, the brain may never heal.

"What happens to these people is, they don't become stupid. It's not that these people lose their cognitive ability; they just lose the ability to get the messages from one part of the brain to the other as fast as they used to," Goldberg said.

Watts, 35, now receives 100 percent disability from the Department of Veterans Affairs. He lives with his wife, Danelle, 32, and their 10-month-old daughter, McKenna, in the mountain community of Divide.

After his injury, Watts knew something was wrong with his brain. He blew up at other soldiers when he thought they had moved his belongings.

Before he left Iraq and headed home in March 2004, a doctor did a checkup. Watts told him during the exam that he had an accident and memory loss, but at the time, brain injuries were not on the radar of Army doctors.

"They said: 'Well, that's kind of common over here in a war environment. Once you get back home, you should straighten out, so let your doctor know when you get back,' " Watts said.

In recent months, veterans advocacy groups have been critical of the military's medical community because the Pentagon has not released hard numbers on how many troops have suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin, an Army colonel and acting commander of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command, said the difficulty comes from a diagnostic dilemma.

"The question is: 'Who has had a brain injury?' The severe ones, that's easy. ... When you think about football players, how many football players get their bell rung? If you really look, a lot of them do. So getting that exact number of the mild ones can be tough," Jaffin said.

The other challenge is that most traumatic brain injuries heal without medical care. If a soldier shows no symptoms, screening for a TBI does not occur at the nation's Army installations. Veterans organizations want the military to document when a soldier has been exposed to a blast, should symptoms arise in the future.

Last week, a nine-member independent review group selected by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to respond to deficiencies in outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center recommended that the military adopt a policy for recording any exposure to a blast in a patient's medical record, develop a coding system to record TBI, and screen troops before and after deployment to measure functional/cognitive abilities.

Symptoms only got worse

As Watts continued fighting the war in Iraq, his symptoms became worse. He couldn't dismantle and assemble his Army rifle, a task that used to be as simple as tying his shoes. The Army sent Watts - considered a "go-to" guy - to Fort Hood to take a course and a test he needed for promotion. Watts failed the written test twice.

Before he left Fort Hood, two roommates told him they noticed something wasn't right with him.

"I broke down, and I said: 'Hey, I had an accident in Iraq. My head bounced all over the cab, and ever since then my memory has just been useless. I don't even remember your name, and you're my roomie. ... If you don't have it on your shirt, I don't know."'

Back at Fort Carson, doctors diagnosed him with traumatic brain injury, but a medical board wanted more tests. He received a final diagnosis in late April 2006.

Danelle Watts said her husband becomes irritable because he is frustrated that he can't remember what used to be automatic.

"He doesn't remember what day of the week it is, when holidays are," she said.

On a white, dry erase board, she reminds him: "Today is Wednesday, April 4."

Before he was discharged from the Army in July, Watts got lost going to work at Fort Carson. After their daughter was born, Danelle had to quit the Army because her husband was not able to care for the girl himself.

Goldberg, the rehabilitation doctor, said there is no cure for traumatic brain injury. Whether Watts will fully recover is not known, but since he left the Army, he has begun to feel better.

He tries to manage his days and limit the unexpected.

"I'm not lazy, but I try to do as little as possible. If something pops up that I can't control, that I can't predict is going to happen, it throws a wrench in the works and I don't know how to handle it," Watts said.

The key to helping people with brain injuries is providing a safe, supportive environment, Goldberg said.

For the Watts family, that help came from Debra Berthold, a retired Army colonel who works with the Army's Wounded Warrior Program.

Berthold called the family in August, when the Wattses were down to the last $30 in their checking account. Watts was out of the Army, and veterans' benefits hadn't kicked in.

The Wounded Warrior Program is designed "to make sure that we don't do to these soldiers what we've done to our Vietnam soldiers," Berthold said. Anyone who is given a ranking of 30 percent or more disability from the VA is eligible for help. Berthold has a caseload of 60 soldiers, and 80 percent of them have a brain injury.

It's where Watts has received vocational-rehabilitation benefits.

For at least 30 hours a week, he works with Carl Reif, president of Advanced K-9 Training Inc., to learn to train dogs to detect drugs, bombs and cadavers and find lost people.

Training a dog requires repetition, and that repetition - giving the same commands again and again - will help strengthen Watts' brain.

"If the brain is a connection of millions and billions of circuits, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of these circuits are torn or damaged in a very minute way," Reif said, "... what you need to do is to keep sending the same message through on those circuits, to either help heal up those circuits or create new circuits within the brain that go around the injured area."

Watts trains two times a month with Denver-area police officers in the hope that one day he'll be able to have his own dog-training business. Over and over again, he practices.

"There's not a prosthetic brain out there, so no, it's never going to be normal again," Danelle said. "Can he work ways around it? Yes. Are there ways to make it better? Yes. Is it going to take a long time? Sometimes."

Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.

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17.8%
Percentage of 13,400 soldiers at Fort Carson screened in the past two years who had experienced at least a mild traumatic brain injury

30%
Soldiers admitted to Walter Reed Army Medical Center who have suffered traumatic brain injuries

1,977
Troops treated by the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center since the beginning of the war in Iraq

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Q&A
Fort Carson provides the following educational sheet to soldiers to help them understand TBI:

Q: What is a traumatic brain injury?

A: A traumatic brain injury is a blow or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts the function of the brain. Not all blows or jolts to the head result in a TBI. The severity of such an injury may range from "mild," a brief change in mental status or consciousness, to "severe," an extended period of unconsciousness or amnesia after the injury.

Q: What causes TBI?

A: Bomb blasts are the leading cause of TBI, though bullets, fragments, falls, motor vehicle accidents and assaults can cause the injury.

Q: What are the symptoms of TBI?

A: Headaches, dizziness, excessive fatigue, concentration problems, forgetting things, irritability, sleep problems, balance problems, ringing in the ears, vision changes. Symptoms of mild TBI or concussion may resolve within hours or days, or may improve over one to three months.

Q: How to recover from TBI:

A: Get plenty of sleep and don't overexert yourself during the day.

Return to normal activities gradually.

Until you are better, avoid activities that can lead to a second brain injury, such as contact or recreational sports.

Don't drink alcohol; it may slow your brain recovery.

If it's hard to remember things, write them down.

If you find you are losing important items, put them in the same place all the time. Park your car in the same place so you can find it.

If you feel irritable, remove yourself from the situation.

Be patient because brain injuries take time to heal.

Keep your brain active by doing activities that require strategies and fine motor skills, such as crossword puzzles, playing musical instruments, drawing, writing, painting, and playing cards and board games.

Sadr Ministers Quit Iraqi Government Over US Troops

2007-04-16T14:34:00.000-07:00

By Waleed Ibrahim and Ross Colvin Reuters Monday 16 April 2007

Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his ministers to quit Iraq's government on Monday in protest at Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's refusal to set a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal.

Sadr's populist movement, which draws its support mainly from Iraq's Shi'ite poor, holds six ministries and a quarter of the parliamentary seats in Maliki's fractious Shi'ite Alliance, a coalition of Shi'ite Islamist parties.

While Sadr was instrumental in Maliki becoming prime minister last year, the move is unlikely to significantly weaken the government since Sadr's movement does not hold any key cabinet portfolios. It could actually help Maliki by giving him a freer hand to pursue his political policies.

At the same there will be concerns about keeping the anti-American cleric and militia leader engaged in the political process, even though the Sadrists said they would remain in parliament.

Washington has called the Mehdi Army, a Shi'ite militia that claims loyalty to Sadr, the biggest threat to Iraq's security.

The Sadrists accused Maliki of "ignoring the will of the people" over the timetable issue and also failing to improve basic services and effectively deal with deteriorating security. Baghdad's Sadr City slum is the cleric's main powerbase.

"The prime minister has to express the will of the Iraqi people. They went out in a demonstration in their millions asking for a timetable for withdrawal. We noticed the prime minister's response did not express the will of the people, " the head of the Sadrist bloc in parliament, Nassar al-Rubaie told a news conference.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis answered a call by Sadr to rally in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf last week to protest against the presence of more than 140,000 U.S.-led forces in Iraq. Sadr himself did not appear - U.S. officials say he is in hiding in Iran, while his aides say he is still in Iraq.

Maliki said afterwards he saw no need to set a timetable. He said his government was working to build up Iraq's security forces as quickly as possible so U.S.-led forces could leave.

"For the public benefit and lifting the suffering of the patient Iraqi people ... we found it necessary to issue an order to the ministers of the Sadrist bloc to withdraw immediately from the Iraqi government," Rubaie said, reading a statement on behalf of Sadr.

Internal Dissent

One analyst said Sadr could be acting to quell internal dissent over his support for a U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown which has failed to stop car bombings blamed on Sunni Islamist al Qaeda that have targeted Shi'ite neighborhoods in Baghdad.

"Sadr is coming under pressure because of his tacit support of the security plan ... So he has to restore internal discipline, which he does by withdrawing from the political process and going back to the street," said Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group think tank.

Before he entered mainstream politics, Sadr's Mehdi Army fought two uprisings against the Americans in 2004. Since then, the militia has been involved in tit-for-tat attacks against minority Sunni Arabs amid spiraling sectarian violence.

The militia has kept a low profile since the launch of the Baghdad security plan, reportedly on the orders of Sadr.

The Sadrists ended a two-month boycott of parliament in January after pulling out in protest over the timetable issue and a meeting between Maliki and U.S. President George W. Bush. They returned after a deal was brokered.

"Nobody really missed them - their seats were patronage places. Maliki will appoint new ministers and try to bring in people who are more competent," Hiltermann said.

US Troop Deaths Up 21 Percent in Iraq

2007-04-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

By Robert H. Reid The Associated Press Saturday 14 April 2007

Civilian deaths down in Baghdad but up elsewhere since start of security operation.
Baghdad - Iraqi civilian deaths have fallen in Baghdad in the two months since the Feb. 14 start of the U.S.-led offensive, according to an Associated Press tally. Outside the capital, civilian deaths are up as Sunni and Shiite extremists shift their operations to avoid the crackdown.

And the sweeps have taken a heavy toll on U.S. forces: Deaths among American soldiers climbed 21 percent in Baghdad compared with the previous two months.

Since the crackdown began Feb. 14, U.S. military officials have spoken of encouraging signs that security is improving in the capital but have cautioned against drawing any firm conclusions until at least the summer.

Figures compiled by the AP from Iraqi police reports show that 1,586 civilians were killed in Baghdad between the start of the offensive and Thursday.

That represents a sharp drop from the 2,871 civilians who died violently in the capital during the two months that preceded the security crackdown.

Outside the capital, 1,504 civilians were killed between Feb. 14 and Thursday, compared with 1,009 deaths during the two previous months, the figures show.

"We know this increased security presence and cooperation from the people is having an impact in Baghdad," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William C. Caldwell said this week. "It is a good beginning, but it is not nearly enough. The violence across the rest of Iraq remains at unacceptable levels." Click Here To Tell Us Your Story. U.S. officials have cautioned that numbers alone cannot provide a complete picture of the security situation.

The Baghdad crackdown was designed to provide the Iraqi government with what U.S. officials call a "secure platform" and to buy time for the country's religious and ethnically based political parties to agree on key reforms.

So far there has been little progress on that front.

Sunni and Shiite militants remain a potent force - regardless of whether they are slaughtering civilians in the capital at the previous rate.

On Thursday, extremists managed to penetrate the most secure part of the capital - the Green Zone - and launch a suicide attack in the building where the Iraqi parliament meets.

Earlier in the day, a suicide truck bomber heavily damaged a major bridge across the Tigris River, collapsing part of the span into the muddy waters.

Such spectacular attacks may not produce a large number of civilian casualties. But they undermine public confidence - which the U.S. military believes is essential for lasting stability.

"It is not going to be possible to see just how well the resulting mix of capabilities will counter the insurgency until the late spring of 2008 at the earliest," wrote former Pentagon analyst Anthony Cordesman. "The various insurgents and hostile groups may be weakened or suppressed early on, but will do their best to react."

It is unclear why deaths outside Baghdad have increased. However, U.S. military officials say both Sunni and Shiite extremists left Baghdad ahead of the crackdown, instead stepping up their operations in a belt of communities around the capital.

The rise in deaths outside Baghdad may also be partly a result of clashes in Anbar province between al-Qaida extremists and Sunni tribes that have broken with the extremist movement.

For example, at least 52 people were killed Feb. 24 when a suicide truck bomber struck worshippers leaving a Sunni mosque in Anbar after the mosque's preacher spoke out against al-Qaida.

Also, hundreds of Shiites died last month in a spate of bombings and shootings during a religious holiday - including 120 Shiite pilgrims killed by a pair of suicide bombers in Hillah.

One key finding of the figures: Although civilians deaths are down in the capital, a careful analysis of the figures shows that sectarian tensions remain high.

Of the 1,586 civilians killed in Baghdad since the start of the crackdown, more than half - or 832 - appear to have been the victims of sectarian death squads. Their bodies were found scattered around the city. That number represents a significant drop from the 1,754 bodies found in the capital during the two months before the crackdown, according to AP figures. Still, the figure shows that the security crackdown has been unable to stop death squads entirely.

Furthermore, the number of civilians killed by suicide bombers has risen in Baghdad - 352 during the crackdown compared with 279 in the two months before.

Suicide bombings are considered the signature attack of Sunni religious extremists, including al-Qaida in Iraq. And most of the suicide attacks occurred in largely Shiite areas of the capital, indicating attacks on Shiites by Sunnis.

The AP count includes civilians as well as government officials and police and security forces, and is considered a minimum based on AP reporting.

The United Nations had been releasing monthly civilian casualty figures compiled from information received from the Iraqi Health Ministry, hospitals across the country and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad.

However, the U.N. office in Baghdad has not released a casualty report since late January. U.N. officials in Baghdad have been saying for weeks that new figures would be released soon and have offered no explanation for the delay.

Iraqi officials had complained that the U.N. figures were too high.

Pentagon lengthens Army tours / All active-duty troops in Iraq and Afghanistan must stay 90 more days. Move aids buildup but adds to strain on forces

2007-04-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon ordered 90-day extensions Wednesday for all active-duty Army troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretching their overseas tours from 12 to 15 months in a move that will exert new strain on a struggling military but allow the Bush administration to continue its troop buildup in Baghdad well into next year.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates' announcement came amid expectations that the Pentagon was about to order longer tours for some units, but the new policy is a far more sweeping and drastic step, stretching deployments for more than 100,000 members of the Army.

"I realize this decision will ask a lot of our Army troops and their families," Gates said, adding that it would ensure that the administration would not be forced to withdraw forces before it was ready. "This approach also upholds our commitment to decide when to begin any drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq solely based on conditions on the ground."

The extension order also came at a crucial time in the war and the political debate surrounding it as congressional Democrats push for troop withdrawals.

It marked the second time in four months that the administration has responded to pressure for withdrawals by taking a dramatic step to expand U.S. involvement in Iraq. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group in December recommended troop withdrawals, just weeks before President Bush announced the current buildup.

Gates said the extensions were not a signal that he had decided to stretch out the troop buildup.

But military experts said that by extending all of the active-duty brigades, the administration would be able to continue the increase into 2008.

"It was always envisioned that the only way you could do it [the troop increase] was to extend tours of duty; that was known right from the outset," said Jack Keane, a retired Army general and one of the architects of the current strategy, who recommended across-the-board extensions in December.

The announcement also demonstrated how the partnership between Gates and the new top commander in Iraq, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, differed from the team that preceded it.

Under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, known for his preference for small numbers of ground forces, commanders were reluctant to demand more troops. But Petraeus has made it plain that he will ask for more troops if needed. So far, Gates has granted those requests.

"The good news here is we have a commander in Iraq who is saying what he needs," said William Nash, a retired Army major general now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gates addressed a hastily convened news conference at the Pentagon as details of the extensions were given to unit commanders. Normally, units would be told of new orders 48 hours before any public announcement, but Gates moved up the announcement after news leaks revealed the likelihood of extensions.

Gates, angered by the leaks, said they caused "hardship not only for our service men and women, but their families, by letting them read about something like this in the newspapers."

Gates' decision will immediately affect about 79,000 soldiers in Iraq, 18,000 in Afghanistan and 7,000 in Kuwait, according to Army officials. The first combat units to be affected in Iraq will be those that were due to come home this summer.

The extensions do not affect the Marine Corps, whose members currently serve for seven months in Iraq before returning home for six months, or the National Guard.

The Minnesota National Guard's yearlong tour was extended in January, when Bush announced the troop increase. But Pentagon officials since have promised they would mobilize Guard troops for only one year at a time, including training, which means their Iraq tours will probably be about 10 months.

Nash is among experts who see a likely connection between the extensions and the flexibility to continue the troop buildup.

"The fact is we are going to keep doing what we are doing," Nash said. "Absolutely, it will go into next year. That is why they went to 15 months."

He added: "To sustain the surge, they have to keep folks longer so you build up higher troop levels. This is a 'plus up' of the surge, in my view."

The extensions also may signal that the administration believes that the initial buildup of forces is having a positive effect in Baghdad and in Al Anbar province, said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a former Army major and an expert on counterinsurgency strategy who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

"We are reinforcing success; some things are breaking right for us," he said. "Maybe Secretary Gates wants to generate real success so Congress will get off his back."

But Krepinevich also added that the performance of Iraqi units continued to disappoint American military leaders. The extensions make it clear that the extra U.S. forces will need to take more of a leading role in operations for some months, he said.

The extensions allow the Army to continue the flow of forces into Iraq to sustain the troop increase without decreasing the training period at home — what the military calls dwell time — between deployments. Military experts have expressed concern over shrinking training time, saying it increased the risk of units being unprepared for complicated counterinsurgency combat.

While difficult for families of soldiers, the extensions are likely to mean that a more experienced group of soldiers is working the streets.

"The longer you spend with the people, the relationships you have with them, it all adds to the potential success of the operations. The more change you have, the tougher it is to build continuity," Keane said.

But Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said there is little evidence that the lack of progress is due to short tours.

"Put yourself in the boots of those troops," Rieckhoff said. "Fifteen months is a long time to be away from your spouse and children. This decision is undoubtedly going to have a negative impact on retention … and the Army's already strained recruiting."

Toni Johnson, 24, thought she was prepared for life as a military wife when she married her high school sweetheart, Jeff, an Army mechanic based at Ft. Hood, Texas. But an extended war, and now news of a 15-month deployment, are testing her patience, she said.

"That's three extra months without my husband, three extra months of our kids missing their father," said Johnson, a Republican who voted for Bush. "It will definitely be a hardship."

The couple have three children, ages 3, 4 and 9. "It's hardest on the younger ones because they don't understand why Daddy is gone," Johnson said. "I underestimated how hard it is to be a military wife."

Krepinevich, who once was extended for a month while serving in Korea, said there was no denying the deep effect the extensions would have on soldiers.

"The months start to seem like years after a while," Krepinevich said. "On the other hand, this is what war is about. It is about ever-changing circumstances, it is about military leaders making tough choices, it's about taking calculated risks. And that is what is going on here."

As the Pentagon was announcing the extensions Wednesday, the White House said it was weighing the appointment of a new "high-profile" official to coordinate the assignment of personnel from the national security agencies to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"One of the considerations is to place someone of … a slightly higher profile that can help cut through bureaucracy and make sure that these policies are being implemented to their best possible ability," said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

She said no one had been offered the job so far.

A former senior defense official confirmed a report Wednesday in the Washington Post that Keane, retired Marine Gen. John J. Sheehan and retired Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston had been approached about the job.

The former official said the White House proposal was not intended to usurp the authority of the Defense Department to run the war.

The extension order seemed likely to sharpen tensions between war critics in Congress and the Bush administration.

The two are headed toward a showdown over the next war-funding bill as Democrats in the House and Senate push for a timetable for troop withdrawals and Bush demands a measure with no strings attached.

Sen. John Kyl (R-Ariz.), a member of the Senate Republican leadership team, sought to cast the troop extension as a warning to congressional Democrats who are battling with the president over the war supplemental funding bill.

Critics of the war said the announcement outlined the problems with the administration's current strategy. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said the extensions were an "unacceptable price" for troops to have to pay.

"Today's announcement just underscores the fact that the burden of the war in Iraq has fallen upon our troops and their families," Pelosi said in a statement. "The Bush administration has failed to create a plan to fully equip and train our troops, bring them home safely and soon, and provide our veterans with the quality care they deserve."

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee, said the mass extensions were the inevitable consequences of the Bush administration's missteps in Iraq.

"Once again, the failures of this administration are being underwritten by our troops," Levin said. "The cost of this will fall on the backs of the brave men and women already serving in harm's way, and their families."

*

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Times Staff Writers Paul Richter and Noam Levey in Washington and Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.

julian.barnes@latimes.com

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Begin text of infobox

Iraq duty

Many U.S. troops have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon announced that Army tours would be extended from one year to 15 months. How tours compare by service, including how long units are home between deployments:

Army

15 months deployed

12 months home

(Goal: two years home)

Marines

7 months deployed

6 months home

(Goal: one year home)

National Guard/Reserve

10 months deployed

(12 months mobilized)

Average 30 months home

(Goal: Five years home)

Congressional Report: Gross Mismanagement of Iraq Funds

2007-04-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t | Report Wednesday 11 April 2007

A damning report issued last month by the nonpartisan research arm of Congress says the Department of Defense continues to overstate its financial needs, by tens of billions of dollars, to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The agency also casts serious doubt on President Bush's statements that money to fund the war will dry up by the end of the month if his budgetary demands are not immediately met.

The 45-page report, "The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11," prepared for Congress by the Congressional Research Service, warned lawmakers that before they release additional funds to the Pentagon for the Iraq war, they should first demand that Defense Department officials provide an accurate accounting of how the money is being spent.

Since 2001, the Pentagon has grossly mismanaged the $510 billion spent thus far on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; has used money earmarked for equipment upgrades to finance fighting on the battlefield, and has refused to provide Congress with a transparent accounting of the money it has spent and intends to spend, according to the CRS report.

"Congressional leaders have promised more scrutiny of the administration's requests for a [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental and [fiscal year] 2008 war costs. The [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental requests an additional $93.4 billion for war costs, which would bring DOD's annual war cost to $163.4 billion, the highest to date and 40 percent more than in 2006. If enacted, cumulative war costs would reach $607 billion," the report says. "Thus far, Congress is receiving fairly detailed quarterly reporting on various metrics for success in Iraq ... but cost is not one of those metrics."

Exacerbating the issue is the fact that the Department of Defense "has periodically revised the figures shown for each operation in previous years, suggesting questions about the validity of its figures," the report says, adding that some of the department's supplemental requests for 2007 include "$2 billion from some unknown source."

Last July, David Walker, comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, testified before the Congressional Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Affairs. He told lawmakers that a lack of actual costs, supporting documentation and routine reporting problems by the Pentagon with regard to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "make it difficult to reliably know what the war is costing, to determine how appropriated funds are being spent, and to use historical data to predict future trends."

But the Defense Department "has not been willing to provide Congress" with the data it uses to predict its operating costs on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. As such, Congressional researchers have recommended in their report that Congress ask the Department of Defense Inspector General to audit the Pentagon in order to resolve these various gaps and discrepancies in cost data related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Until now, President Bush has enjoyed the luxury of having a Republican majority in Congress issue the Defense Department a blank check to use as the administration saw fit in Iraq without needed oversight from lawmakers, the report said.

Now, with a Democratic majority presiding over both Houses, Congressional researchers have advised lawmakers that they should be cautious not to give in to urgent budgetary demands from the administration that may very well be based on financial chicanery, the report added.

The report recommends that Congress should consider taking drastic measures to rein in the administration's out-of-control spending and draw on history for guidance.

"While only a handful of provisions have been enacted, Congressional consideration of these various limiting provisions placed pressure on the administration and thus influenced the course of events," the report says. "For example, one provision that prohibited the introduction of US ground troops into Cambodia was enacted in 1970 after US forces had invaded and then been withdrawn from Cambodia; that provision was intended to prevent the re-introduction of troops. Although President Nixon did not reintroduce US troops, the United States continued to bomb Cambodia for the next three years.

"Two well-known proposals - the McGovern-Hatfield amendment and the Cooper-Church amendments - were also part of this jockeying between the administration and Congress. The first prohibited expenditure of previously appropriated funds after a specified date "in or over Indochina," except for the purpose of withdrawing troops or for protection of US troops during the withdrawal, while the second prohibited the expenditure of any funds after July 1, 1970 to retain troops in Cambodia "unless specifically authorized by law hereafter. Overall, funding restrictions have generally proven more effective than the War Powers Act, which has been challenged by the executive branch on constitutional grounds," the report says.

Furthermore, before agreeing to provide the Pentagon with additional funds for Iraq, lawmakers should insist that the Defense Department provide a detailed financial report on the reasons its costs for funding the war have more than doubled from last year.

"Although DOD has testified frequently and submitted various reports on Iraq and the global war on terror, information and explanations of changes in the cost of OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] and OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] have been limited, incomplete, and sometimes inconsistent," the CRS report dated March 15 says. "Until the [fiscal year] 2007 supplemental and [fiscal year] 2008 war costs request, DOD has submitted very little information to buttress its requests. Both the Iraq Study Group and [the Congressional Budget Office] have criticized DOD's presentation of cost data for Iraq and the global war on terror." The Iraq Study Group called the administration's requests "confusing, making it difficult for both the general public and members of Congress to know something that 'should be a simple question,' such as the amount requested for Iraq operations."

Documents turned over to Congress by the Defense Department to justify its financial needs in Iraq and the so-called global war on terror "have been sparse," and government agencies, including the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office, "have all found various discrepancies in DOD figures - including understating budget authority and obligations, mismatches between [budget authority] and obligations data, double-counting of some obligations, questionable figures, and a lack of information about basic factors that affect costs such as troop strength ..."

"For example, DOD provided five pages to justify $33 billion in operation and maintenance spending, about half of the [fiscal year] 2006 supplemental request. Because few details are included, [the Congressional Budget Office] notes the difficulty in determining the basis of DOD requests and estimating alternatives," the report states. "And because appropriations for war are mixed with DOD's baseline budget, information about 'what has actually been spent,' or outlays, is not available. That information is important for estimating the cost of alternate future scenarios and also for showing the effect of war costs on the federal deficit."

The Pentagon claims the skyrocketing costs for funding the war are due to investments in "force protection" and "situational awareness, which amounts to radios, sensors, multi-purpose vehicles, as well as equipment for new Marine and Army units sent into battle, extensive upgrading of equipment, and the building of more extensive infrastructure to support troops and equipment in and around Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the Congressional Research Service report says "these reasons are not sufficient, however, to explain the scope of increases thus far or to sort out whether the new requests are legitimately war-related emergencies, rather than being part of ongoing modernization or transformation programs."

The Department of Defense "has provided little rationale or explanation for its requirements or change in requirements for replacing war-worn equipment or extensive upgrades. In some cases, requirements do not appear to be strictly related to war needs," the report says.

Congressional researchers have warned Congress that the Defense Department's $1.9 billion supplemental request for "military construction" in its 2007 budget is twice as much as what it received in 2005 and may be controversial if approved by lawmakers, because it would indicate an "intent to set up permanent bases in Iraq and ... not clearly an emergency. "

Finally, the report says that despite the rhetoric disseminated by the White House, the Pentagon has enough money to continue to fund the war until June or July, while Congress and President Bush try and come to an agreement about legislation lawmakers passed last month in which money to fund the Iraq war going forward is contingent upon a clear-cut exit date from the region. Bush has said he will veto the measure, and has stated publicly that additional funding for the war has now reached the point of urgency, a claim Congressional researchers say is untrue.

"The Army is currently claiming that the supplemental needs to be enacted by the end of April to avoid such problems. In this year's bridge fund, however, Congress provided $28.4 billion to meet the Army's operational needs, some $7 billion higher than last year's bridge fund. The additional funds could reduce the pressure to pass the supplemental quickly. Using DOD data, CRS estimates that the Army could cover its operational costs till about June or July 2007 by using war funds in the bridge, temporarily transferring procurement funds to operations, and tapping monies in its baseline budget that would not be needed until the end of the year," the report says.

Huge Protest in Iraq Demands US Withdraw

2007-04-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

By Edward Wong The New York Times Tuesday 10 April 2007

Baghdad - Tens of thousands of protesters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric, took to the streets of the holy city of Najaf on Monday in an extraordinarily disciplined rally to demand an end to the American military presence in Iraq, burning American flags and chanting "Death to America!"

Residents said that the angry, boisterous demonstration was the largest in Najaf, the heart of Shiite religious power, since the American-led invasion in 2003. It took place on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, and it was an obvious effort by Mr. Sadr to show the extent of his influence here in Iraq, even though he did not appear at the rally. Mr. Sadr went underground after the American military began a new security push in Baghdad on Feb. 14, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Mr. Sadr used the protest to try to reassert his image as a nationalist rebel who appeals to both anti-American Shiites and Sunni Arabs. He established that reputation in 2004, when he publicly supported Sunni insurgents in Falluja who were battling United States marines, and quickly gained popularity among Sunnis across Iraq and the region. But his nationalist credentials have been tarnished in the last year, as Sunni Arabs have accused Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, of torturing and killing Sunnis.

Iraqi policemen and soldiers lined the path taken by the protesters, and there were no reports of violence during the day. The American military handed security oversight of the city and province of Najaf to the Iraqi government in December, and the calm atmosphere showed that the Iraqi security forces could maintain control, keeping suicide bombers away from an obvious target. In March, when millions of Shiite pilgrims flocked to the holy cities of the south, Iraqi security forces in provinces adjoining Najaf failed to stop bombers from killing scores of them.

Vehicles were not allowed near Monday's march, and Baghdad had a daylong ban on traffic to prevent outbreaks of violence.

During the protest in Najaf, Sadr followers draped themselves in Iraqi flags and waved them to symbolize national unity, and a small number of conservative Sunni Arabs took part in the march.

"We have 30 people who came," said Ayad Abdul Wahab, an agriculture professor in Basra and an official in the Iraqi Islamic Party, a leading fundamentalist Sunni Arab group. "We support Moktada in this demonstration, and we stress our rejection of foreign occupation."

He and his friends together carried a 30-foot-long Iraqi flag.

In the four years of war, the only other person who has been able to call for protests of this scale has been Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, who, like Mr. Sadr, has a home in Najaf.

The protest was in some ways another challenge to the Shiite clerical hierarchy, showing that in the new Iraq, a violent young upstart like Mr. Sadr can command the masses right in the backyard of venerable clerics like Ayatollah Sistani. Mr. Sadr has increasingly tapped into a powerful desire among Shiites to stand up forcefully to both the American presence and militant Sunnis, and to ignore calls for moderation from older clerics.

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, an American military spokesman in Baghdad, said that American officers had helped officials in Najaf plan security for the event, but that the Iraqis had taken the lead.

Colonel Garver and other American officials tried to put the best possible light on the event, despite the fiery words. "We say that we're here to support democracy," he said. "We say that free speech and freedom of assembly are part of that. While we don't necessarily agree with the message, we agree with their right to say it."

The protest unfolded as heavy fighting continued in parts of Diwaniya, a southern city where American and Iraqi forces have been battling cells of the Mahdi Army since Friday. Mr. Sadr issued a statement on Sunday calling for the Mahdi militiamen and the Iraqi forces there to stop fighting each other, but those words went unheeded. Gun battles broke out on Monday, and an American officer said at a news conference that at least one American soldier had been killed and one wounded in four days of clashes.

That fighting and the protest in Najaf, as well as Mr. Sadr's mysterious absence, raise questions about how much control he actually maintains over his militia. Mr. Sadr is obviously still able to order huge numbers of people into the streets, but there has been talk that branches of his militia have split off and now operate independently. In Baghdad, some Mahdi Army cells have refrained in the last two months from attacking Americans and carrying out killings of Sunni Arabs, supposedly on orders from Mr. Sadr, but bodies of Sunnis have begun reappearing in some neighborhoods in recent weeks.

The protest in Najaf was made up mostly of young men, many of whom drove down from the sprawling Sadr City section of Baghdad, some 100 miles north, the previous night. They gathered Monday morning in the town of Kufa, where Mr. Sadr has his main mosque, and walked a few miles to Sadrain Square in Najaf. Protesters stomped on American flags and burned them. "No, no America; leave, leave occupier," they chanted. At Sadrain Square, the protesters listened to a statement read over loudspeakers that was attributed to Mr. Sadr.

"Oh Iraqi people, you are aware, as 48 months have passed, that we live in a state of oppression, unjust repression and occupation," the statement read. "Forty-eight hard months - that make four years - in which we have gotten nothing but more killing, destruction and degradation. Tens of people are being killed every day. Tens are disabled every day."

Mr. Sadr added: "America made efforts to stoke sectarian strife, and here I would like to tell you, the sons of the two rivers, that you have proved your ability to surpass difficulties and sacrifice yourselves, despite the conspiracies of the evil powers against you."

An Interior Ministry employee in a flowing tan robe, Haider Abdul Rahim Mustafa, 23, said that he had come from Basra "to demand the withdrawal of the occupier."

"The occupier supported Saddam and helped him to become stronger, then removed him because his cards were burned," he said, using an Arabic expression to note that Saddam Hussein was no longer useful to the United States. "The fall of Saddam means nothing to us as long as the alternative is the American occupation."

Estimates of the crowd's size varied wildly. A police commander in Najaf, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim al-Mayahi, said there were at least half a million people. Colonel Garver said that military reports had estimates of 5,000 to 7,000. Residents and other Iraqi officials said there were tens of thousands, and television images of the rally seemed to support their estimates.

The colonel declined to give any information on the whereabouts of Mr. Sadr, though American military officials said weeks ago that they believed he is in Iran. Mr. Sadr's aides declined to say where he is, but previously they have said he remained in Iraq.

In Diwaniya, hospital officials said their wards were overwhelmed by casualties. There was a shortage of food and oxygen, and ambulances were being blocked from the scene of combat, said Dr. Hamid Jaati, the city's health director. The main hospital received 13 dead Iraqis and 41 injured ones over the weekend, he added.

The fighting started Friday after the provincial council and governor called for the Iraqi Army and American forces to take on the Sadr militiamen. The governor and 28 of 40 council members belong to a powerful Shiite party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is the main rival to the Sadr organization. Sadr officials have accused the party of using the military to carry out a political grudge, but the governor, Khalil Jalil Hamza, denied that on Monday.

In Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, a suicide car bomb killed three civilians and wounded four others on Sunday night, police officials said Monday. Also in Diyala, a local politician was fatally shot on Monday in Hibhib, and three bodies were found in Khalis.

Patterns of War Shift Amid US Force Buildup

2007-04-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

By Alissa J. Rubin and Edward Wong The New York Times Monday 09 April 2007

Baghdad - Nearly two months into the new security push in Baghdad, there has been some success in reducing the number of death squad victims found crumpled in the streets each day.

And while the overall death rates for all of Iraq have not dropped significantly, largely because of devastating suicide bombings, a few parts of the capital have become calmer as some death squads have decided to lie low.

But there is little sign that the Baghdad push is accomplishing its main purpose: to create an island of stability in which Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds can try to figure out how to run the country together. There has been no visible move toward compromise on the main dividing issues, like regional autonomy and more power sharing between Shiites and Sunnis.

For American troops, Baghdad has become a deadlier battleground as they have poured into the capital to confront Sunni and Shiite militias on their home streets. The rate of American deaths in the city over the first seven weeks of the security plan has nearly doubled from the previous period, though it has stayed roughly the same over all, decreasing in other parts of the country as troops have focused on the capital.

American commanders say it will be months before they can draw conclusions about the campaign to secure Baghdad, and just more than half of the so-called surge of nearly 30,000 additional troops into the country have arrived. But at the same time, political pressure in the United States for quick results and a firm troop pullout date has become more intense than ever.

This snapshot of the early weeks of the operation, which officially began on Feb. 14, is drawn from American and Iraqi casualty data and interviews with military commanders and government officials.

Already in that time, the military and political reality has shifted from what American planners faced when they prepared the Baghdad operation, continuing a pattern of rapid change that has become painfully familiar since the 2003 invasion.

In the northern and western provinces where they hold sway, and even in parts of Baghdad, Sunni Arab insurgents have sharpened their tactics, using more suicide car and vest bombs and carrying out successive chlorine gas attacks.

Even as officials have sought to dampen the insurgency by trying to deal with Sunni Arab factions, those groups have become increasingly fractured. There are now at least a dozen major Sunni insurgent groups - many fighting other Sunnis as well as the Americans and the Shiite-led government. A deal made with any one or two would be unlikely to be acceptable to the others.

While Shiite militias appear to have quieted in Baghdad so far, elements of them have been fighting pitched battles outside the city, sometimes against one another, sometimes against Sunni Arabs. They are pushing Sunnis out of their homes and attacking their mosques.

And in a new tactic, both Shiite and Sunni militants have been burning down homes and shops in the provinces in recent months.

One American private in the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, who was working the overnight shift at a new garrison in western Baghdad, described the Americans' fight this way: "The insurgents, they see what we're doing and we see what they're doing. Then we get ahead, then they figure out what we've done and they get ahead.

"It's like a game of cat and mouse. It's just a really, really smart mouse."

A Shift in Deaths

The incoming five brigades as part of the new security plan will bring the total number of American troops in Iraq to about 173,000 when it is complete, more than at any time since the war began.

Many of the new troops are joining long-term garrisons along with Iraqi forces in particularly violent neighborhoods of Baghdad, keeping up frequent patrols and trying to strengthen relations with Iraqis by meeting with local leaders and residents.

That has put the Americans in the middle of sectarian battlegrounds, and their death rate in the city has nearly doubled. The number of Americans killed in combat or other violence rose to 53 in Baghdad in the first seven weeks of the push, from Feb. 14 to April 2. That is up from 29 in the seven weeks before then.

Diyala Province, just northeast of Baghdad, has also been a trouble spot, bitterly contested by Sunni and Shiite militants. The United States military added a battalion in the province, and the fighting has been fierce, with 15 Americans killed there in the seven weeks starting on Feb. 14. The total from the seven weeks before then was 10.

At the same time, though, the rate of American deaths throughout the country has stayed about the same, with 116 killed in hostile incidents, up from 113 in the prior seven weeks.

As the focus has intensified on Baghdad, deaths have fallen in some outlying areas - even in Anbar Province, the heart of the Sunni rebellion where American marines have long faced intense violence. In the seven weeks after the start of the Baghdad operation, 31 Americans were killed in Anbar, down from 46 in the seven weeks beforehand.

While it is difficult to point to any one reason, in recent months Anbar has been at the center of a fissure in the insurgency between tribes who support the terrorist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and tribes who reject it because it is seen as inviting foreign fighters.

Roadside bombs were by far the most common means of killing Americans. Deaths in Baghdad and Diyala from such explosions more than doubled. In Baghdad, 83 percent of troop deaths since the plan began have been caused by roadside bombs. In Diyala, all but one of the 15 soldiers who died in the seven-week period were killed by roadside bombs. Just four were killed by the bombs in the preceding seven weeks there.

Violence Against Civilians

The Iraqi government and the American military refuse to release overall civilian casualty numbers; both give numbers only for a few categories of deaths, making it difficult to get an overall picture. One of the last official reports on civilian casualties came in January from the United Nations, which, citing morgue and hospital statistics, said at least 34,452 Iraqis were killed last year, or an average of nearly 100 per day.

Over the past seven weeks, American commanders say that the security push has had some success so far in cutting down the number of sectarian execution-style killings - tracked by counting the number of bodies found with gunshot or knife wounds. Military officials say that such killings have dropped 26 percent nationwide and even more in Baghdad.

But other kinds of attacks, like car bombings, have kept the overall civilian death rate high, and in recent days there are anecdotal reports that sectarian executions may be on the rise again.

"We've not seen the overall same significant amount of decline in the overall number of casualties" as in execution killings, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, spokesman for the American military command, said in a news conference last week.

The American military believes that much of the drop in executions has come because of decreased activity by Shiite militias and death squads, especially the powerful Mahdi Army militia that claims allegiance to the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

Many militia leaders have been detained in raids by the American military, according to the Iraqi government, and despite some major car bomb attacks on Shiite areas, the militias appear to have decided to refrain from carrying out revenge killings.

"The cycle of violence is not as predictable," a senior American military official said. "Iraqi people are showing restraint, and the ability of death squads to retaliate is being circumscribed."

However, it appears that not all Shiite cells, Mahdi Army or otherwise, are so patient. American soldiers in sections of western Baghdad, as well as Sunni Arabs living there and in Sunni enclaves south of Baghdad in Babil Province, are reporting that sectarian killings and threats against Sunni Arab families have begun to rise again, after a brief hiatus at the start of the security plan.

"There's been spray paint on walls: 'Get out or you'll pay with your blood,' " said Capt. Benjamin Morales, 28, commander of a company of the 82nd Airborne that oversees a Shiite-dominated section of western Baghdad. There were eight Sunni households in the area at the start of March; three had left by its end.

The Iraqi government has been encouraging displaced families to return to their abandoned homes and offering $200 as an incentive. The government said that 2,000 families had returned by mid-March, but there is no way to verify the numbers.

In Fadhil, a Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods, residents say Shiite militias have been attacking with mortar shells and sniper fire. They accuse the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces of taking part, which Iraqi military officials deny.

"The situation was quiet when the militias left the country, but when they came back, the tension returned," said Wamid Salah Hameed, a community leader in Fadhil. "The military is attacking us and firing at the neighborhood randomly. There is a sectarian feeling among the soldiers in the army."

Meanwhile, Shiite militias have burned shops in a Sunni enclave of Babil Province, and Sunni militias burned Sunni and Shiite homes in Diyala last month.

Sunni militias have been active in Baghdad, too. The number of bodies of their presumed victims that turn up, tortured and shot, appears to have declined, but not halted, in recent weeks. In the past three weeks in some mostly Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad, Shiites bringing supplies to displaced families - even displaced Sunni families - have been kidnapped and killed, their bodies left in corner lots.

"We used to see sometimes eight bodies a day," said Sgt. Michael Brosch, of the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry. "Sometimes they were all beheaded. Then right at the beginning of the security plan, we didn't see any. Now we're seeing them again."

At the same time, deaths and injuries nationwide from vehicle bombs, which are typically associated with Sunni insurgents, particularly Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, have continued at a rapid pace.

January and February were particularly bad months for car bombing deaths; nearly 1,100 were killed in February alone. That number dropped to 783 in March, still high compared with months earlier in the war, according to an American military official. But the overall number of bombings actually increased: there were 108 car bombs that either detonated or were disarmed in March, a record for the war.

Outside of Baghdad, several huge bombings have been responsible for many of the deaths. The worst, last month in Tal Afar, killed 152.

In Anbar, at least six bombings involved a terrifying new weapon: truck bombs that spread chlorine gas, burning victims' lungs and skin. The deadliest of those attacks, in Ramadi on Friday, killed at least 30 people.

A Fractured Government

Most American and Iraqi officials say that the key to Iraq's security is a political agreement that gives Sunni Arabs more power in the government. But the near-term prognosis for that looks grim, as the calm necessary to negotiate such a deal remains elusive.

Some Shiite leaders have publicly said they are prepared to reconcile with the minority Sunnis, who generally prospered under Saddam Hussein's Baathist government. But the Shiites are still loath to give Sunnis any additional power and risk returning to the oppressed status they held for centuries.

Meanwhile, the Kurds in the north are pushing policies that will maximize the powers of their autonomous region, including trying to get control of the ethnically mixed oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

The Sunni Arabs seek several changes in the government's structure. They want Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a conservative Shiite, to make good on his promise to replace ineffective or corrupt ministers. Mr. Maliki promised the shake-up months ago, but the proposal now appears moribund.

The Sunni Arabs also want the Constitution amended to bring power back to Baghdad and reduce the chance that areas in the oil-rich, Shiite-dominated south will follow the model of Kurdistan and create an autonomous state.

In addition, the Sunni Arabs continue to push for a rollback of purges of Sunni Arabs from government that began after the Shiites came to power in national elections.

But to stop the violence, the ruling Shiites must deal with Sunnis outside the government, in the factionalized insurgency, who can offer few guarantees on any promises to stop bombings against Shiites.

"We talk to people who say they represent the insurgents and they all say the same thing: 'We oppose the occupation, but we don't believe in killing civilians, in killing women and children,' " a senior adviser to Mr. Maliki said. "But our people are dying in bombs every day. Who is killing them?"

Retired General: Time to Stabilize Iraq Running Out

2007-03-31T07:29:00.000-07:00

By Jeff Schogol
Stars and Stripes

Saturday 31 March 2007

McCaffrey says Iraqi troops need to be equipped, and US can't sustain "surge."
Arlington, Virginia - The United States should plan on having three years left to conduct major operations in Iraq, said retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

McCaffrey, former commander of U.S. Southern Command, has written a report on the conditions in Iraq and the way forward after his trip in early March to Iraq and Kuwait.

One of the report's conclusions: The United States has little time left to get things right in Iraq.

"It is very unlikely that the U.S. political opposition can constitutionally force the President into retreat," the report says. "However, our next President will only have 12 months or less to get Iraq straight before he/she is forced to pull the plug. Therefore, our planning horizons should assume that there are less than 36 months remaining of substantial U.S. troop presence in Iraq."

In a Thursday phone interview with Stars and Stripes, McCaffrey said President Bush can continue pursuing the war in Iraq for the rest of his term because it is unlikely the Democratic-controlled Congress will stop war funding.

"If they significantly impair the president's ability to command wartime forces, then he will turn around and say, 'Let you be accountable for the outcome,'" McCaffrey said. "Why in their right minds would they want to do that?"

However, McCaffrey said the current U.S. troop presence in Iraq is unsustainable and recommended withdrawing some of the "surge" units. "We can sustain probably seven to 10 brigades in perpetuity in Iraq, but we've got 20," McCaffrey said.

The Army is starting to unravel after having been "starved for resources" and given its current commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. "We have no strategic reserve in the United States to deploy into a new combat requirement," he said. "There is no strategic reserve in the Middle East. We are flat on our ass."

Asked about McCaffrey's report, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman reiterated comments from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the U.S. military has about 2 million troops to call upon.

The recent increase in U.S. forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan reflect the Defense Department's capability to provide extra troops when needed, Whitman said.

"I am confident, as is the chairman, that the United States military will be able to provide trained, equipped and ready forces for any mission that it may receive," he said.

In other matters, McCaffrey stressed the need to give the Iraqi troops and police officers enough weaponry to eventually take over for U.S. and other coalition forces.

Right now, the Iraqis are ill-equipped with only three C-130 transport aircraft, Soviet weapons and no logistics or medical system.

McCaffrey insists the Iraqis need 150 U.S. helicopters, 24 C-130 Hercules aircraft, 5,000 light armored vehicles and precision weapons to suppress mortar and rocket attacks.

Responding to McCaffrey's comments, a senior military official said the Iraqis are already getting more sophisticated weaponry including Cougars and other armored vehicles.

The Iraqi security forces already have more than 2,000 up-armored Humvees, a division of tanks and mechanized vehicles and a brigade of Armored Security Vehicles, the official said in a Friday e-mail to Stripes.

"Having said that, General McCaffrey's right, and there are plans to steadily increase the armament of the ISF ensuring that it is done in a manner that ensures that there is sufficient maintenance, spare parts, training, etc. so that all the new systems don't become 'hangar queens' in short order," the official said.

US Death Toll in March 2007 Is Twice Iraq Forces

2007-03-31T07:27:00.000-07:00

By Steven R. Hurst The Associated Press Saturday 31 March 2007

Baghdad - The U.S. military death toll in March, the first full month of the security crackdown, was nearly twice that of the Iraqi army, which American and Iraqi officials say is taking the leading role in the latest attempt to curb violence in the capital, surrounding cities and Anbar province, according to figures compiled on Saturday.

The Associated Press count of U.S. military deaths for the month was 81, including a soldier who died from non-combat causes Friday. Figures compiled from officials in the Iraqi ministries of Defense, Health and Interior showed the Iraqi military toll was 44. The Iraqi figures showed that 165 Iraqi police were killed in March. Many of the police serve in paramilitary units.

According to the AP count 3,246 U.S. service members have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.

At least 83 American forces died in January and 80 in February, according to the AP tabulation.

The Iraqi figures were gathered from officials who released them on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to give out the numbers.

Additionally, the Iraqi ministry figures listed 1,872 Iraqi civilian deaths for the month, about 300 more than the AP tabulation, which is mainly gathered from daily police reports nationwide.

The civilian death toll for the month was down significantly from 2,172 in December, the highest month casualty figure since the AP began keeping records of civilian deaths in April 2005.

However, the number of civilians killed in March was in the same range as for the first two months of this year; 1,604 in January and 1,552 in February, according to the AP count.

Nearly a third of the Iraqi civilian deaths, more than 500 people, where killed in three big bomb attacks in the last week of the month and revenge killings of Sunni men in Tal Afar the night after a Shiite market was bomb in the northwest Iraqi city.

Congressional Memo: Pentagon War Funds Need Not Urgent

2007-03-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

By Richard Cowan Reuters Friday 30 March 2007

Washington - The U.S. Army has enough money on hand to finance the Iraq War through most of July, according to a congressional study that challenges President George W. Bush's assertions that an infusion of funds is needed more urgently.

According to a Congressional Research Service memo dated March 28 and sent to the Senate Budget Committee, "The Army could finance the O&M (operations and maintenance) of both its baseline and war program ... through most of July 2007" by shifting around money in existing accounts.

The memo said it based its projections "using Army and other data."

That assessment was at odds with Bush and some of his war managers, who have said that Congress could undermine U.S. troops and the war in Iraq if it did not approve approximately $100 billion within weeks.

"The Democrats are distorting and hiding behind a CRS memo on the eve of Congress' spring vacation to distract from their failure to send the President a responsible bill he can sign," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto. "It's time for the Democrats to send the president a bill that funds the troops without forcing retreat, handcuffing our commanders, or adding billions of dollars in pork spending."

Fratto warned that a delay in funding was already affecting troops.

"Yesterday, the Department of Defense notified Congress that in order to meet the force protection needs of the Marine Corps and the Army, we are borrowing funds from other important Marine and Army procurement programs," Fratto said.

Bush requested the emergency funds in early February and Congress is in the process of writing bills providing more money for the war than the president requested.

But Democrats have added conditions to the money, including setting timetables for withdrawing all combat troops from Iraq. Bush wants the money without the conditions and has threatened to veto either bill passed by the Senate or the House of Representatives.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a House panel on Thursday that after April 15, without emergency funding, the Army would have to begin curtailing some troop training, which "could over time delay their ability to go back into combat."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that if the funds were not approved by May 15, the Army might have to extend some soldiers' tours, because other units would not be ready, and reduce equipment repair work, among other things.

Time-Consuming Process

If Congress sends Bush a bill that he vetoes, lawmakers would then have to go through a potentially time-consuming process of rewriting and passing a new war-funding bill.

The administration tried to turn up the pressure on Congress on Friday, when White House spokeswoman Dana Perino criticized lawmakers for taking a spring vacation without making adequate progress on the emergency war funds.

"Every day that the Congress fails to act on this request causes our military hardship and impacts readiness," Perino said.

But according to the memo, "the Army could finance its O&M expenses through the end of May by tapping $52.6 billion in O&M funding already provided by Congress."

Furthermore, with congressional approval, the Pentagon could temporarily transfer money out of other accounts, giving the Army "almost two additional months" to conduct its regular operations and the war.

Since invading Iraq in March 2003 to depose then President Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has refused to include in annual budgets the full estimated cost of the war each year. Instead, it has submitted "emergency" requests that many lawmakers complained have made it difficult to do proper oversight of the war.

More Than 100 Are Killed in Iraq as a Wave of Sectarian Attacks Shows No Sign of Letting Up

2007-03-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

By Kirk Semple The New York Times Friday 30 March 2007

Baghdad - More than 100 people were killed Thursday in a series of attacks around Iraq that included two suicide bombings that struck crowded markets during the week's busiest shopping hours, the authorities said.

The attacks extended an extraordinary surge of sectarian violence in Iraq this week, including a series of bombings and reprisals in the northern city of Tal Afar in which more than 140 people were killed in two days.

On Thursday, officials said 18 police officers in Tal Afar suspected of participating in the massacre of Sunni Arab residents in reprisal for the bombing of a Shiite neighborhood had been freed after being detained for only a few hours.

At a time when the Shiite-dominated central government has been under intense pressure to rein in Shiite militias and death squads, the releases are sure to bring even more outrage from Sunni Arabs.

The deadliest attacks on Thursday were aimed at predominantly Shiite neighborhoods in central Iraq and appeared to be part of a fierce campaign by Sunni Arab insurgents to undermine the latest government security plan for Baghdad.

At least 60 people, mostly women and children, were killed when a man wrapped in an explosive belt walked into a crowded street market in the Shaab neighborhood of eastern Baghdad and detonated the belt, an Interior Ministry official said. At least 25 people were wounded.

The attack appeared to be carefully timed, hitting just after sundown on the eve of the Muslim day of prayer, when markets are packed.

Two hours earlier, a coordinated attack involving three suicide car bombers, including one driving an ambulance, killed at least 28 people, including women and children, and wounded 53 in the predominantly Shiite town of Khalis, about six miles north of Baquba in the violently contested province of Diyala, according to the Iraqi authorities.

The first of those suicide car bombs was detonated at a crowded market, according to a senior Iraqi security official in Baquba. As people rushed to help victims of the first car bombing, a second such bomb went off, killing and wounding rescuers and security forces, the official said.

The third suicide bomber, who was driving a stolen ambulance, apparently had engine problems about 500 yards from the central hospital, his apparent target, the security official said. When several people approached the man to help, the official said, he detonated his explosives.

The attacks came on the heels of a two-day spate of sectarian bloodshed in Tal Afar, during which a double suicide bombing in a Shiite neighborhood was answered by a Shiite massacre of Sunni residents. More than 140 people have been killed there, with at least 210 people wounded, officials said.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki immediately ordered an investigation into the killings. Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani told the government-run television channel Iraqiya on Wednesday that the government would "take legal action" against the 18 police officers who had been arrested and accused of involvement in the massacre, in which at least 70 people were killed.

But on Thursday, officials in Nineveh Province, where the attacks occurred, said the police officers had been held only briefly by the Iraqi Army and released.

Nineveh's governor, Durad Kashmul, said at a news conference that the the army had freed the policemen "to deter strife" after a street demonstration demanding their release, Reuters reported.

Husham al-Hamdani, the head of the provincial security committee, confirmed to The Associated Press that the officers had been freed but gave no reason. Repeated calls to the spokesmen for the Iraqi military command went unanswered, and an envoy from Prime Minister Maliki who visited Tal Afar said he could not confirm or deny the report that the policemen had been released.

In Baghdad, a bomb placed on a popular shopping street in the Baya district killed 10 people and wounded 20, according to officials at the Interior Ministry and Yarmuk Hospital. A car bomb exploded near a hospital in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 20, the ministry official said. And a suicide car bomber detonated himself at an Iraqi Army checkpoint in the Jamiya district of western Baghdad, killing three soldiers and wounding 16.

At least eight more people were killed by gunmen in Baghdad and Mosul, officials said, including a guard employed by the Shiite politician Ahmad Chalabi. At least 25 bodies were discovered around Baghdad.

In the capital, Ryan C. Crocker was sworn in as the new American ambassador to Iraq. At the ceremony, in the international Green Zone, Mr. Crocker said: "Turning the tide from oppression to freedom does not come overnight. It does not come without high costs."

He added: "President Bush's policy is the right one. There has been progress; there is also much more to be done."

Bush War on Terror Draws Fire as Misguided Venture

2007-03-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

By David Morgan Reuters Thursday 29 March 2007

Washington - Five-and-a-half years after the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush's war on terrorism has emerged as a wasteful, misguided exercise that poses its own threat to U.S. national security, experts say.

A growing number of analysts and former U.S. officials say the global war on terrorism has undermined U.S. influence abroad, forced onerous costs in American lives and money in Iraq, and unleashed a huge government spending spree that has often funded projects unrelated to national security.

It has also produced a climate of fear in the United States that helped justify the war in Iraq and the curtailment of civil liberties at home, they said.

"The atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty, and the vagueness of the definition of the enemy, makes the country more fearful and more susceptible to being steered in irrational directions," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was U.S. national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s.

Unlike the muted response to attacks by Britain and Spain, experts say the U.S. has overreacted to the September 11 attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in 2001.

Congress has spent nearly $271.5 billion on homeland security since September 11, with money often going to projects that have nothing to do with security but that are important to politicians and their constituents, according to a survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

At the same time, the number of potential terrorism targets identified by Congress has exploded from 160 in 2003 to 80,000, allowing such unlikely sites as a Midwestern apple festival and a roadside theme park in Florida to bid for funds.

Meanwhile, the private sector - lobbyists, interest groups, industries, the media and even universities - has also used the national security label aggressively to sell its own agendas, experts say.

"What's clear is that there is no focus whatsoever in the way we are fighting terrorism," said Veronique de Rugy, author of the AEI study.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke dismissed the criticism as old and inaccurate, saying the Bush administration had never viewed sites such as small theme parks to be critical national assets deserving of funds. "This has no basis in fact," he said.

Knocke's boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, has also taken issue with the assertion that the U.S. response to September 11 is exaggerated.

"If we begin to heed arguments that somehow our concern about security is overblown ... then I feel we're going to feel consequences in the loss of lives," Chertoff said in a speech outlining his priorities for 2007.

But terrorism experts say the United States has yet to develop a clear understanding of the threat posed by al Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups, despite the war on terrorism and a total of $500 billion spent on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most pernicious effect of the war on terrorism has been the Iraq war, which has claimed the lives of more than 3,200 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and damaged U.S. standing in the Muslim world for generation, experts say.

"Iraq has been vastly worse than anything terrorism's ever done," said Ohio State University political science professor John Mueller, author of a book about the war on terrorism titled, "Overblown."

While both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the shortcomings of U.S. policy in Iraq, experts say politicians have not questioned the war on terrorism mainly because it remains a vote-getter.

"Politicians are acting this way because they think they'll lose votes if they don't. Basically, it's a big pork-barrel, so the pork-barrel leaders are there in five seconds," said Mueller, using American vernacular for the politics of self-enrichment.

Senate OKs Iraq Troop Withdrawal Bill

2007-03-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

By Anne Flaherty The Associated Press Thursday 29 March 2007

Washington - Senate Democrats ignored a veto threat and pushed through a bill Thursday requiring President Bush to start withdrawing troops from "the civil war in Iraq," dealing a rare, sharp rebuke to a wartime commander in chief.

In a mostly party line 51-47 vote, the Senate signed off on a bill providing $122 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also orders Bush to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days of passage while setting a nonbinding goal of ending combat operations by March 31, 2008.

The vote came shortly after Bush, in a move that his aides said was unprecedented, invited all House Republicans to the White House to appear with him in a sort of pep rally to bolster his position in the continuing war policy fight.

"We stand united in saying loud and clear that when we've got a troop in harm's way, we expect that troop to be fully funded," Bush said, surrounded by Republicans on the North Portico, "and we got commanders making tough decisions on the ground, we expect there to be no strings on our commanders."

"We expect the Congress to be wise about how they spend the people's money," he said.

The Senate vote marked its boldest challenge yet to the administration's handling of a war, now in its fifth year, that has cost the lives of more than 3,200 American troops and more than $350 billion. In a show of support for the president, most Republicans opposed the measure, unwilling to back a troop withdrawal schedule.

The House, also run by Democrats, narrowly passed similar legislation last week. Party leaders seem determined that the final bill negotiated between the two chambers will demand some sort of timetable for winding down the war - setting them on course for a veto showdown with the president.

"We've spoken the words the American people wanted us to speak," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "There must be a change of direction in the war in Iraq, the civil war in Iraq."

"The Senate and the House have held together and done what we've done," he told reporters. "It's now in his corner to do what he wants to do."

In a letter to Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reid had said earlier: "This Congress is taking the responsible course and responding to needs that have been ignored by your administration and the prior Congress."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the president respects the role of Congress - and Congress should respect his.

"I think the founders of our nation had great foresight in realizing that it would be better to have one commander in chief managing a war, rather than 535 generals on Capitol Hill trying to do the same thing," she said. "They're mandating failure here."

The legislation represents the Senate's first, bold challenge of Bush's war policies since Democrats took control of Congress in January. With Senate rules allowing the minority party to insist on 60 votes to pass any bill and Democrats holding only a narrow majority, Reid previously had been unable to push through resolutions critical of the war.

This latest proposal was able to get through because Republicans said they didn't want to block an appropriations bill needed for the war.

"I think the sooner we can get this bill ... down to the president for veto, we can get serious about passing a bill that will get money to the troops," said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Democrats acknowledge they do not have enough support in Congress to override Bush's veto, but say they will continue to ratchet up the pressure until he changes course.

The looming showdown was reminiscent of the GOP-led fight with President Clinton over the 1996 budget, which caused a partial government shutdown that lasted 27 days. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., the House speaker at the time, eventually relented but claimed victory because the bill represented a substantial savings over the previous year's spending.

Bush said the money is needed by mid-April or else the troops will begin to run out of money, but some Democrats say the real deadline is probably closer to June.

Experts: Soldiers With Brain Injuries Could Develop Epilepsy

2007-03-29T07:37:00.000-07:00

By Jamie Talan Newsday Thursday 29 March 2007

Epilepsy experts worry that veterans arriving home with traumatic brain injuries are at risk for seizures and these electrical storms could be subtle and develop months to several years following their initial injury.

"Epilepsy is very common following head injury," said Dr. Marc Dichter, professor of neurology and pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania.

He was one of dozens of speakers at an epilepsy meeting held Thursday and continuing Friday at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md. "We are concerned that we will have a growing number of young people with head injuries who may develop epilepsy."

Right now, there are no treatments to prevent epilepsy, a condition that affects 1 to 2 percent of the population. Trauma and brain infection increase the risk for seizures.

"As the brain tries to repair itself, it may take time to ripen into seizures," said Dr. Dennis Spencer, an endowed professor of neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut.

Government reports estimate more than 30,000 troops have been injured in the 4-year-old war in Iraq, and the two major wounds have been limb loss and traumatic brain injury. Veterans groups put the number of injured much higher.

Experts say it is hard to know exactly how many injured troops could later develop epilepsy. U.S. Army and other officials have said better medical care in Iraq has meant that more severely injured soldiers have been saved, only to return home with serious injuries, Dichter said. Severe brain trauma can trigger epilepsy in as many as 30 percent to 50 percent of the brain-injured soldiers, he added.

Early warning signs for epilepsy can include subtle changes in behavior, lapses in memory, strange sensory auras, attention problems and depression.

Most of the meeting was about new research in epilepsy. Researchers reported on a new material that can be laid over the brain that records information from thousands of neurons, which they said would enable them to better understand seizure activity.

John Donohue of Brown University is testing a way to detect seizures by placing into the brains of patients electrodes that can sense a seizure in the making.

Dichter is conducting a pilot study on head injuries, focusing on people who arrive at emergency rooms with gunshot wounds or wounds from accidents. These people are at greater risk of developing epilepsy over the next year or two. Funded by the Department of Defense, scientists also will test the effectiveness of short-term use of anti-seizure medicines to ward off seizures.

It took more than a year for 54-year-old Denise Pease of Corona, assistant comptroller for commercial banking in the Office of the New York City Comptroller, to get the right diagnosis and treatment for epilepsy.

"I went from being a vibrant woman with a bright future to being a candidate for an extended adult care facility," Pease told scientists at the meeting.

Months after a car accident 12 years ago she began losing her way on the street and forgetting familiar things. It wasn't until a relative witnessed a seizure that she received a proper diagnosis.

This week, the American Epilepsy Society also announced new efforts to help wounded soldiers on their return home. Post-traumatic stress disorder, common among soldiers, could also complicate diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy.

Have the Car-Bombers Already Defeated the Surge?

2007-03-27T10:42:00.000-07:00

By Mike Davis TomDispatch.com Tuesday 27 March 2007

The weapon no one can stop.

Despite heroic reassurances from both the White House and the Pentagon that the six-week-old U.S. escalation in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province is proceeding on course, suicide car-bombers continue to devastate Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, often under the noses of reinforced American patrols and checkpoints. Indeed, February was a record month for car bombings, with at least 44 deadly explosions in Baghdad alone, and March promises to duplicate the carnage.

Car bombs, moreover, continue to evolve in horror and lethality. In January and March, the first chemical "dirty bomb" explosions took place using chlorine gas, giving potential new meaning to the President's missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The sectarian guerrillas who claim affiliation with "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" are now striking savagely, and seemingly at will, against dissident Sunni tribes in al-Anbar province as well as Shiite areas of Baghdad and Shiite pilgrims on the highways to the south of the capital. With each massacre, the bombers refute Bush administration claims that the U.S. military can "take back and secure" Baghdad block-by-block or establish its own patrols and new, fortified mini-bases as a realistic substitute for local self-defense militias.

On February 23rd, for instance, shortly after the beginning of the "Surge," a suicide truck-bomber killed 36 Sunnis in Habbaniya, west of Baghdad, after an imam at a local mosque had denounced al-Qaeda. Ten days later, a kamikaze driver ploughed his truck bomb into Baghdad's famed literary bazaar, the crowded corridor of bookstores and coffee houses along Mutanabi Street, incinerating at least 30 people and, perhaps, the last hopes of an Iraqi intellectual renaissance.

On March 10th, another suicide bomber massacred 20 people in Sadr City, just a few hundred yards away from one of the new U.S. bases. The next day, a bomber rammed his car into flatbed truck full of Shiite pilgrims, killing more than 30. A week later, horror exceeded itself when a car bomber evidently used two little children as a decoy to get through a military checkpoint, then exploded the car with the kids still in the back seat.

In a demonstration of a tactic that has proven especially deadly over the past year, a car-bomb attack on March 23rd was coordinated with an assailant in a suicide vest and almost killed Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, whose tribal alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, has accepted funding from the Americans and been denounced by the jihadis.

When it comes to the development of suicide vehicles, however, the most alarming innovation has, without doubt, been the debut in January of truck bombs carrying chlorine gas tanks rigged with explosives. Of course, "dirty bombs," usually of the nuclear variety, have been a longtime obsession of anti-terrorism experts (as well as the producers of TV potboilers), but the sinister glamour of radioactive devices - scattering deadly radiological waste in the City of London or across midtown Manhattan - has tended to overshadow the far greater likelihood that bomb-makers would initially be attracted to the cheapness and ease of combining explosives with any number of ordinary industrial caustics and toxins.

As if to emphasize that poison-gas explosions were now part of their standard arsenal, sectarian bombers - identified, as usual, by the American military as members of "al-Qaeda in Mespotamia" - unleashed three successive chlorine suicide-bomb attacks on March 16th against Sunni towns outside of Falluja. The two largest attacks involved dump trucks loaded with 200-gallon chlorine tanks. Aside from the dozens wounded or killed by the direct explosions, at least another 350 people were stricken by the yellow-green clouds of chlorine.

As in April 1915, with the first uses of chlorine gas on the Western Front in World War I, these explosions sowed widespread panic, underlining - as the bombers no doubt intended - the inability of the Americans to protect potential allies in al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency. (The recent discovery of stocks of chlorine and nitric acid in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad will hardly assuage those fears.)

The shock waves from the March dirty bombs also rattled windows on the Hudson River, where New York Police Department (NYPD) experts warned the media that poor security at local chemical plants raised the danger of copy-cat attacks using stolen ingredients. An anonymous senior official in the department's Counter-Terrorism Bureau told Reuters that "the NYPD expected would-be attackers targeting New York to try to import the tactic." At the same time, New Jersey's two Democratic Senators - Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg - complained that the Bush administration was coddling the chemical industry by blocking New Jersey and other states from implementing tougher safety regulations.

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected U.S. troops into a massive, desperate hunt for the "makeshift car-bomb factories" that Major General William Caldwell, chief spokesman for the Surge, claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and industrial estates that ring Baghdad.

The image of a clandestine car-bomb industry, by the way, is rich with irony. Baghdad's factory belt contains hundreds of state-owned and private factories that once manufactured canned food, tiles, baby clothes, transit buses, fertilizers, commercial glass, and the like. Since the American invasion, however, the plants are idle, if not derelict, and their once integrated Sunni-Shiite workforces are bunkered down, jobless, in increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment in greater Baghdad is variously estimated in the 40-60% range.

It is unlikely that the current raids - using troops who would otherwise be securing streets and "winning hearts and minds" - will uncover more than a tiny fraction of the city's bomb "factories." Indeed, the car bomb - even more than the roadside bombs (IEDs) that are filling the Humvee junkyards - has proven globally to be an almost invincible weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded, as well as the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush administration has totally ignored. None of the American commanders in the field in 2003-2004, much less the imperial daydreamers in neoconservative think-tanks back in Washington, seem to have foreseen the ubiquity of its use.

According to a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Iraqi physicians (organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated 78,000 Iraqis were killed by several thousand vehicle bombings between March 2003 to June 2006. Moreover, as I explain in my newly-published history of the car bomb, Buda's Wagon, there is little hope for any technological fix or scientific miracle that will allow reliable detection of a stolen Mercedes with 500 pounds of C-4 in the trunk or a dump truck laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives idling in one of Baghdad's colossal traffic jams. (Checkpoints? Just a synonym for target of opportunity.)

In the meantime, the bombers are obviously wagering that if they can sustain current levels of carnage, the Shiite militias will be forced back onto the streets to protect their neighborhoods (as the American troops can't), risking a bloody, all-out confrontation with U.S. forces for the ownership of the vast Shiite slum of Sadr City and other Shiite areas in eastern Baghdad. On the other side, Lieutenant General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency expert and mastermind of the Surge, must shut down the car-bombers by the beginning of the summer or face a likely popular revolt in Sadr City. With each explosion, his chances of success diminish.

Congress, End the War

2007-03-23T19:06:00.002-07:00

The Nation 02 April 2007 Issue

"War is over, if you want it," declared John Lennon in the thick of the Vietnam nightmare. To the extent that Lennon's "you" referred to the US Congress, he was right, then and now. The House and Senate have the authority to end the war in Iraq quickly, efficiently and honorably. Claims to the contrary by George W. Bush and his apologists are at odds with every intention of the authors of the Constitution. Which part of "Congress shall have the power to declare war... to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces...to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers" does the White House fail to understand? Unfortunately, it may be the same part that cautious Congressional leaders have trouble comprehending.

Democrats gained control of Congress in November with the charge to bring the occupation to a swift conclusion. Yet, as we mark the fourth anniversary of the war, the story of the 110th Congress still seems to be one of an opposition party struggling to come to grips with its authority to upend a President's misguided policies. Nothing has illustrated the lack of direction so agonizingly as the debates over nonbinding resolutions opposing the troop surge; weeks went into advancing measures that, as their names confirmed, were inconsequential. For a time, it seemed as if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has been so effective on the domestic front, was ceding any real leadership role on foreign policy.

With the announcement of spending legislation that includes benchmarks for progress in Iraq, and a plan to begin withdrawing troops if those benchmarks are unmet, Pelosi has begun to define a Democratic opposition to Bush's policies. But she has not gone nearly far enough. While Democratic leaders are finally arguing for a withdrawal timeline, it is not the right one. Theoretically, the plan would create the potential for withdrawal of some troops in six months. Realistically, because it lacks adequate monitoring mechanisms - Pelosi says determinations about the benchmarks would be a "subjective call" - the best bet is that even if the Democratic plan were to overcome all the hurdles blocking its enactment, there would be no withdrawals for more than a year.

Forcing Americans and Iraqis to die for Bush's delusions for another year while emptying the Treasury at a rate of more than $1 billion a week is unconscionable. That is why House members who have battled hardest to end the war are so frustrated with Pelosi's approach. "This plan would require us to believe whatever the President would tell us about progress that was being made," says Representative Maxine Waters, speaking for the bipartisan Out of Iraq Caucus. Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Lynn Woolsey has been blunter, saying of the legislation, "There's no enforcement mechanism."

Waters and Woolsey are right. While we respect efforts by antiwar Democrats like Jim McDermott and Jerrold Nadler to negotiate with Pelosi in hopes of improving the legislation, conservative Blue Dog Democrats have already signaled that the price of their support will be the removal of any teeth put into the plan by progressives. Worse, they have tampered with the legislation in ways that may even encourage Bush's interventionist tendencies: The Democratic proposal for a timeline originally included a provision that would have required Bush to seek Congressional approval before using military force against Iran. But under pressure from conservative members of her caucus and lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Pelosi removed the language. By first including the provision and then removing it, Pelosi and her aides have given Bush an opening to claim that he does not require Congressional approval for a wider war.

The haggling over compromises points up the flaw in Pelosi's approach: It is too soft, too slow, too open to lobbying mischief and abuse by a President who has done nothing but abuse Congress for six years. America and the world are not crying out for a timeline that might begin extracting troops from Iraq a year from now. Almost 200 American soldiers, and thousands of Iraqis, have died since the Democrats took control of Congress. To accept that the war will go on for another year, at the least, is to accept that the death toll will continue to mount.

Democrats should recognize that the time has come to use the full power accorded Congress in time of war: the power of the purse. As Senator Russ Feingold says, "Some will claim that cutting off funding for the war would endanger our brave troops on the ground. Not true. The safety of our servicemen and -women in Iraq is paramount, and we can and should end funding for the war without putting our troops in further danger."

Instead of negotiating with Bush to give him another year of his war before facing consequences, Democrats should refuse to write another blank check. They should instead support Representative Barbara Lee's proposal to fully fund the withdrawal of US soldiers and military contractors from Iraq. Lee would give military commanders the resources they need to withdraw all troops by the end of the year by mandating that emergency supplemental funding be used only for that purpose.

There may not be enough Democratic and renegade Republican votes to win House passage of Lee's legislation - at least not initially. But tremendous educational and practical progress can be made by just saying no, as loudly as possible, to a President who has not gotten enough resistance from Congress. Setting up a conflict between Bush's desire to keep troops in Iraq through the end of his presidency and a plan to bring them home this year sharpens the debate at a time when the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that a majority of Americans now favor setting a clear deadline. Even as Bush blusters on about staying the course - or whatever the slogan of the moment may be - he is feeling the pressure to end this war. Indeed, he has already split with Vice President Cheney and other Administration hardliners on the issue of engaging diplomatically with Iran and Syria.

No matter what the ultimate exit strategy, engaging in regional diplomacy to help contain the civil war in Iraq and provide more international assistance to the Iraqi people is an essential step in repositioning the United States to be a constructive force in the region, as opposed to serving as a catalyst for a wider sectarian war. The Bush Administration's dawning recognition of this fact will be heightened and extended only if war foes maintain their resolve. If the debate in Congress is about whether to attach a few soft benchmarks to Bush's request for more money to maintain the occupation on his terms, he will feel little sense of urgency. But if the debate is about whether to provide only the money needed to bring the troops home, Bush will understand that time is running out for his strategy - and that he can no longer afford to casually dismiss diplomacy and the logic of withdrawal.

House OKs Timetable for Troops in Iraq

2007-03-23T19:06:00.001-07:00

By Anne Flaherty The Associated Press Friday 23 March 2007

Washington - A sharply divided House voted Friday to order President Bush to bring combat troops home from Iraq next year, a victory for Democrats in an epic war-powers struggle and Congress' boldest challenge yet to the administration's policy.

Ignoring a White House veto threat, lawmakers voted 218-212, mostly along party lines, for a war spending bill requiring that combat operations cease before September 2008, or earlier if the Iraqi government does not meet certain requirements. Democrats said it was time to heed the mandate of their election sweep last November, which gave them control of Congress.

"The American people have lost faith in the president's conduct of this war," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. "The American people see the reality of the war, the president does not."

The vote, echoing clashes between lawmakers and the White House over the Vietnam War four decades ago, pushed the Democratic-led Congress a step closer to a constitutional collision with the wartime commander in chief. Bush has insisted that lawmakers allow more time for his strategy of sending nearly 30,000 additional troops to Iraq to work.

The roll call also marked a triumph for Pelosi., who labored in recent days to bring together a Democratic caucus deeply divided over the war. Some of the party's more liberal members voted against the bill because they said it would not end the war immediately, while more conservative Democrats said they were reluctant to take away flexibility from generals in the field.

Republicans were almost completely unified in their fight against the bill, which they said was tantamount to admitting failure in Iraq.

"The stakes in Iraq are too high and the sacrifices made by our military personnel and their families too great to be content with anything but success," said Republican Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

The bill marks the first time Congress has used its budget power to try to end the war, now in its fifth year, by attaching the withdrawal requirements to a bill providing $124 billion to finance military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of this year.

Excluding the funds in the House-passed bill, Congress has so far provided more than $500 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including about $350 billion for Iraq alone, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. More than 3,200 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since war began in March 2003.

Think Again: Taking Mr. Bush at his Word

2007-03-22T09:06:00.000-07:00

By Eric Alterman March 22, 2007

The fourth anniversary of the Iraq war this week has led many in the media to look for the milestones in the conflict—the casualty figures, both American (3,223 dead, 15,129 wounded) and Iraqi (perhaps as many as 65,160 in media-reported violence and as many as 601,000 in the entire course of the conflict); the changes in personnel and policy; and the swings in public opinion. But one memory worth recalling, since so many in the pro-war punditocracy appear to have caught a rare case of collective amnesia, is the president’s sell to the American people at the outset of this catastrophe four years ago this week.

“My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”

These are the bold words that launched the United States into perhaps its worst foreign policy misadventure in the country’s entire history.

“The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality.”

How many could have predicted that those words would lead to Abu Ghraib, to Hadaitha, and the sex crimes—many of them directed at female soldiers—committed by American
troops; to an increase in the terrorist threat against us; to the destruction of our international reputation; to the disintegration of any kind of personal security for most Iraqis; and the collapse of Iraq’s economic infrastructure, to say nothing of the hundreds of billions—potentially trillions—of dollars thrown away in this never-ending sinkhole. And oh yes, the thousands of American soldiers killed, the tens of thousands wounded, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis similarly maimed and killed.

Bush has even managed to turn the murderous Saddam Hussein into a martyr across the Arab world with a Kangaroo Court murder trial and botched execution of the dictator and his sons and collaborators.

“I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm.”

The casualty figures here speak for themselves, as do the fact that 2 million Iraqis live as refugees outside their country. Even after invading Iraq with questionable motives in the first place, numerous policy choices led to the insurgency and now the civil war that daily threatens Iraqi and American lives, whether failing to prevent looting after the fall of Baghdad, disbanding Hussein’s army and leaving it nowhere to go, or not sending enough troops to maintain order despite repeated warnings force.

“More than 35 countries are giving crucial support—from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units.”

Thank God for Palau. The much-mocked coalition of the willing, which lacked even symbolic support from major European powers and Arab states like in the Gulf War, made the U.S. coalition hollow at best and should have been a sign that international opinion was not with us. And the number of troops contributed was hardly an equal share of the burden; the U.S. deploying at least five times as many troops, if not much more, than any other country. Today, 16 countries have withdrawn from the coalition of the willing.

“The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

It hardly bears repeating that, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bad intelligence, purposely manipulated by the Bush administration, convinced well over half the country that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It also convinced the balance of the Senate and many political opponents who literally could not imagine the degree to which this administration was willing to go to deceive Americans into war.

Of course, the constant demagoging of the non-existent connection between Iraq and 9/11—a notion finally and authoritatively debunked by the 9/11 Commission Report—convinced 55 percent of Americans the relationship existed. But there was no genuine threat to the U.S. from Iraq back then as there is today. Even worse, the unrest in the Middle East has emboldened terrorists and rogue states alike, leaving us in more dangerous security situation than when the war began.

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly—yet, our purpose is sure.”

The administration’s phony scare stories led the vast majority of the country into war with the support of about seventy percent of the country. Thank goodness for the dissenting voices that spoke out in the midst of the campaign of vilification against those who disagreedand the high spirits following the fall of Baghdad. Back then, as The Washington Post reported in a story headlined, “GOP to Hammer Democratic War Critics,” “Bush and GOP congressional leaders [reacted] with vitriol” towards anyone who questioned their wisdom.

In the elite media, The Weekly Standard excoriated war critics in an article headlined, “The Cassandra Chronicles: The Stupidity of the Antiwar Doomsayers.” The New Republic joined in, as did blogger Andrew Sullivan who now shares the views of people he called traitors. But as Paul Krugman noted in a December New York Times article recognizing the accuracy of these pre-war pessimists, the thing to remember about Cassandra is that she was right. If only one could say the same about the Bush cheerleaders who dominated our media—and amazingly, still do.

“[H]elping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment. ... And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory.”

Half measures have characterized the entire campaign, from the lack of body armor and now rest and training for the troops, to the incompetence and political prioritizing of the civilian administration. Military commanders during the first weeks of the war weren’t expecting insurgents, and there was never a plan for the post-war occupation and reconstruction—the famously lacking “Phase IV.”

“We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.”

Iraq today has been sadly ripped apart by sectarian violence. Even worse, The New Yorker reports that the U.S. is doing little to aid the people who did respond to the U.S.’s call for action. Iraqis who worked for the American troops and civilian authorities are being cast aside and often killed by their countrymen for collaboration. Sound familiar?

Bush’s war lacka a military solution and is facing rapidly dwindling chances for a political solution, yet it will continue through the end of his presidency because no one of authority in the administration is capable of admitting a mistake. The saddest part of this entire horrific story is how much of it was predictable from the start. Remember John Kerry’s question about being the last person to “die for a mistake?” How would you like to be the mother, father, son, or daughter to lose your loved one for the same damn mistake a second time?

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress and the author of six books. His popular blog, “Altercation,” has moved from MSNBC.com to Media Matters. The new URL is http://mediamatters.org/altercation/.

Four Years Later... And Counting: Billboarding the Iraqi Disaster

2007-03-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

By Anthony Arnove TomDispatch.com Sunday 18 March 2007

As you read this, we're four years from the moment the Bush administration launched its shock-and-awe assault on Iraq, beginning 48 months of remarkable, non-stop destruction of that country ... and still counting. It's an important moment for taking stock of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Here is a short rundown of some of what George Bush's war and occupation has wrought:

Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up - and they're getting worse by the day - and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Let that sink in for a moment.

Basic foods and necessities, which even Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide, are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's destruction of the already shaky Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the disruption of the oil industry. Prices of vegetables, eggs, tea, cooking and heating oil, gasoline, and electricity have skyrocketed. Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere between 50-70%. One measure of the impact of all this has been a significant rise in child malnutrition, registered by the United Nations and other organizations. Not surprisingly, access to safe water and regular electricity remain well below pre-invasion levels, which were already disastrous after more than a decade of comprehensive sanctions against, and periodic bombing of, a country staggered by a catastrophic war with Iran in the 1980s and the First Gulf War.

In an ongoing crisis, in which hundred of thousands of Iraqis have already died, the last few months have proved some of the bloodiest on record. In October alone, more than six thousand civilians were killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional U.S. troops had been sent in August (in the first official Bush administration "surge") with the claim that they would restore order and stability in the city. In the end, they only fueled more violence. These figures - and they are generally considered undercounts - are more than double the 2005 rate. Other things have more or less doubled in the last years, including, to name just two, the number of daily attacks on U.S. troops and the overall number of U.S. soldiers killed and wounded. United Nations special investigator Manfred Nowak also notes that torture "is totally out of hand" in Iraq. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

Given the disaster that Iraq is today, you could keep listing terrible numbers until your mind was numb. But here's another way of putting the last four years in context. In that same period, there have, in fact, been a large number of deaths in a distant land on the minds of many people in the United States: Darfur. Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."

In those same years, according to the best estimate available, the British medical journal The Lancet's door-to-door study of Iraqi deaths, approximately 655,000 Iraqis had died in war, occupation, and civil strife between March 2003 and June 2006. (The study offers a low-end possible figure on deaths of 392,000 and a high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel coast to coast without seeing the equivalents of the billboards, subway placards, full-page newspaper ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And you certainly won't see, as in the case of Darfur, celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

Why is it that we are counting and thinking about the Sudanese dead as part of a high-profile, celebrity-driven campaign to "Save Darfur," yet Iraqi deaths still go effectively uncounted, and rarely seem to provoke moral outrage, let alone public campaigns to end the killing? And why are the numbers of killed in Darfur cited without any question, while the numbers of Iraqi dead, unless pitifully low-ball figures, are instantly challenged - or dismissed?

In our world, it seems, there are the worthy victims and the unworthy ones. To get at the difference, consider the posture of the United States toward the Sudan and Iraq. According to the Bush administration, Sudan is a "rogue state"; it is on the State Department's list of "state sponsors of terrorism." It stands accused of attacking the United States through its role in the suicide-boat bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. And then, of course - as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in the London Review of Books recently - Darfur fits neatly into a narrative of "Muslim-on-Muslim violence," of a "genocide perpetrated by Arabs," a line of argument that appeals heavily to those who would like to change the subject from what the United States has done - and is doing - in Iraq. Talking about U.S. accountability for the deaths of the Iraqis we supposedly liberated is a far less comfortable matter.

It's okay to discuss U.S. "complicity" in human rights abuses, but only as long as you remain focused on sins of omission, not commission. We are failing the people of Darfur by not militarily intervening. If only we had used our military more aggressively. When, however, we do intervene, and wreak havoc in the process, it's another matter.

If anything, the focus on Darfur serves to legitimize the idea of U.S. intervention, of being more of an empire, not less of one, at the very moment when the carnage that such intervention causes is all too visible and is being widely repudiated around the globe. This has also contributed to a situation in which the violence for which the United States is the most responsible, Iraq, is that for which it is held the least accountable at home.

If anyone erred in Iraq, we now hear establishment critics of the invasion and occupation suggest, the real problem was administration incompetence or George Bush's overly optimistic belief that he could bring democracy to Arab or Muslim people, who, we are told, "have no tradition of democracy," who are from a "sick" and "broken society" - and, in brutalizing one another in a civil war, are now showing their true nature.

There is a general agreement across much of the political spectrum that we can blame Iraqis for the problems they face. In a much-lauded speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Sen. Barack Obama couched his criticism of Bush administration policy in a call for "no more coddling" of the Iraqi government: The United States, he insisted, "is not going to hold together this country indefinitely." Richard Perle, one of the neoconservative architects of the invasion of Iraq, now says he "underestimated the depravity" of the Iraqis. Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democratic frontrunner in the 2008 presidential election, recently asked, "How much are we willing to sacrifice [for the Iraqis]?" As if the Iraqis asked us to invade their country and make their world a living hell and are now letting us down.

This is what happens when the imperial burden gets too heavy. The natives come in for a lashing.

The disaster the United States has wrought in Iraq is worsening by the day and its effects will be long lasting. How long they last, and how far they spread beyond Iraq, will depend on how quickly our government can be forced to end its occupation. It will also depend on how all of us react the next time we hear that we must attack another country to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction, "spread democracy," or undertake a "humanitarian intervention." In the meantime, it's worth thinking about what all those horrific figures will look like next March, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion, and the March after, on the sixth, and the March after that...

Put it on a billboard - in your head, if nowhere else.

US Troop Buildup in Iraq Approaches 30,000

2007-03-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

By David Morgan and Andrew Gray Reuters Saturday 17 March 2007

Washington - The U.S. Army said on Friday it was sending some 2,600 soldiers to Iraq earlier than planned, raising the number of extra U.S. troops being deployed in a new effort to stabilize the country to nearly 30,000.

News of the latest deployment came as Democrats who now control Congress pushed legislation to end a war that is increasingly unpopular in the United States.

The combat aviation brigade from the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division would deploy in early May, some 45 days sooner than previously envisaged, the Army said.

The brigade is the third element to be announced in a package of support units being deployed to assist 21,500 extra combat troops ordered to Iraq under a plan unveiled by President George W. Bush in January.

"The aviation brigade, which is really principally rotary helicopter support for the troops, is the final piece," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters.

There are more than 140,000 U.S. troops already fighting in Iraq, where sectarian violence has thwarted American efforts to bring the four-year-old war to a close.

Gates said he also approved a significant increase in the number of U.S. military personnel training security forces in Afghanistan. Defense officials said the number of extra trainers was around 3,000.

The White House asked the U.S. Congress earlier this month to consider funding more trainers for Afghanistan.

Bush's plan for Iraq aims to quell violence in Baghdad and the western province of Anbar. Under the plan, the extra troops are meant to establish security while Iraqi politicians move ahead with political reconciliation.

The numbers released on Friday show the administration has already approved some 7,200 support troops.

The list includes the Army combat aviation brigade as well as 2,200 military police, requested by commanders to supervise detainees expected to be picked up during the security crackdown, and another 2,400 support personnel.

Gates urged Congress to approve an emergency spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly and without the conditions Democrats want to impose a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

"It starts to be a real problem for us in April if we don't have the money," he told reporters traveling back with him to Washington, D.C. after a change of command ceremony at U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida.

"Legislation that would involve specific deadlines and strict conditions would make it difficult, if not impossible, for our commanders to achieve their mission."

From Shock and Awe to the "Surge" Without End

2007-03-18T11:49:00.000-07:00

By Raymond Whitaker The Independent UK Sunday 18 March 2007

Four years ago this Tuesday, George Bush began his ill-fated Iraq campaign. Today's news that the US is sending an extra battalion to Baghdad will push troop levels to 160,000 - 10,000 more than at the time of the invasion.
US troop levels in Iraq are set to rise higher than at any time since the war began four years ago, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.

This summer, troop levels will top 160,000 - compared with the 150,000 there were at the time of the invasion.

As Britain prepares to pull 1,600 troops out of southern Iraq, the Pentagon has just obtained the agreement of the US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, to deploy an additional combat aviation brigade of 2,600, consisting of ground forces and a full complement of helicopters.

The brigade was due to go to Iraq in the summer as part of a regular rotation of troops, but is being sent in early to support the "surge" of American forces approved by President George Bush in January.

At that point the plan, aimed at bringing the insurgency in Baghdad and neighbouring Anbar province under control, called for an additional 21,500 combat troops to be sent to Iraq. But the figure has since crept up to nearly 30,000, with 2,200 military police being added to handle the higher number of people being detained in security sweeps, plus a further 2,400 combat and service-support personnel. Pentagon figures released on Friday show a total of 7,200 troops have been added to the "surge", taking the overall increase to 28,700.

According to the US military thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, there were 132,000 American ground troops in Iraq at the beginning of this year. When the reinforcements finish arriving by the end of June, the total will rise above 160,000, more than at any point in the past four years. Tuesday is the fourth anniversary of the start of the conflict with the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad.

In 2003, when the American-led coalition smashed its way to Baghdad in three weeks, there were never more than 150,000 US troops in the country. By March 2004, when Saddam Hussein was in custody and Mr Gates's over-confident predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, was anticipating an early exit, the total slipped as low as 117,500. The only months the US deployment approached 160,000 were November and December 2005, when extra forces were in place during the national elections. Their numbers were reduced immediately afterwards, but the formation of a government has done nothing to quell the violence.

Last week the Pentagon admitted for the first time that there was civil war in parts of Iraq. Its assessment of the final quarter of 2006 was its bleakest ever, with record levels of violence. Attacks increased to more than 1,000 a week and average daily casualties rose above 140 - and those figures, the report admitted, are based purely on "violence observed by or reported to the US-led military coalition". The real extent of violence is likely to be much greater.

Describing worsening sectarian divisions, the report said: "Illegally armed groups are engaged in a self-sustaining cycle of politically motivated violence, using tactics that include indiscriminate bombing, murder, and indirect fire to intimidate people and stoke sectarian conflict."

Up to 9,000 civilians are fleeing the country each month as a result, according to the Pentagon. The UNHCR says that if internally displaced people are included, the figure rises to something like 50,000 a month.

This is the background to the "surge" operation, which began a month ago. American and Iraqi forces are attempting to "clear and hold" Baghdad, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

"Once security forces have locked down an area," an official told the IoS, "we are applying a tailored combination of social, governance, economic and political measures. The aim is to take advantage of the temporary absence of insurgents, and render that absence permanent by 'hard-wiring them out' of the environment that they used to dominate.

"Then they may not be able to return, or if they do they will find greatly increased resistance and will stand out better against the background of the population, and it will be harder [for them] to operate."

Commanders claim there have been positive early results, with a decline in sectarian killings in Baghdad, although February saw a record number of bombings. They also admit that to some extent violence has simply been displaced outside the capital - on Friday, in Anbar province, two suicide truck bombers driving tankers filled with chlorine killed at least eight people south of Fallujah. About 350 civilians and six US troops were treated for chlorine gas exposure.

"Moving security forces into an insurgent area to 'shut it down' is like stamping on a puddle - the large pool of water disappears, but little splashes and spots radiate out from it," said the official.

"So if security operations are all you are doing, they will have local and temporary effects. Violence will decrease, but only where you are operating, and when you leave it will come back."

Major General William Caldwell, the most senior US military spokesman in Baghdad, said it would make "an incredible difference ... if the high-profile car bombs can be stopped or brought down to a much lower level". But the official warned that the bombers would remain difficult to stop until the mood of the population changed, and that would come, if at all, at the end of the operation.

While those conducting the operation stress the need for patience, the risk is that US troop losses will rise, strengthening the campaign in Washington for a pullout date to be set. So far this month 44 American soldiers have been killed, on course to match the 80 deaths in February and 83 in January. The belief in Baghdad, said the official, was that the US public would tolerate the losses, as long as there was a perception of progress being made: "What they hate are not lives lost, but lives wasted."

But the political side of the "surge" plan is going badly, according to the Pentagon and others. The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is showing little enthusiasm for American attempts to reverse one of their own worst mistakes: the "de-Baathification" of the old regime, which removed thousands of Sunni military commanders and pushed them into the insurgency.

"In one sentence," the official concluded, "my take on the current situation is: 'Right strategy, great team, possibly too late.'"

A Nation in Ruins

2,000,000 Iraqis now live outside Iraq, according to UNHCR

12,000 doctors have fled Iraq since the war began. Another 2,000 are said to have been killed, and at least 250 kidnapped

50% Average inflation in 2006, according to the World Bank

6.3 hours of electricity daily in Baghdad in December 2006. In May 2003 there were 16-24 hours

32 percentage of people in Iraq with drinkable water

3,700,000 Iraqis now receive food aid from the UN World Food Programme

16% Proportion of Iraqis who said in January that their income meets their basic needs

Four Years After Start of War, Anger Reigns

2007-03-18T11:30:00.000-07:00

by Steve Vogel and Michael Alison Chandler The Washington Post Sunday 18 March 2007

Demonstrators brave cold to carry message to Pentagon, as counter-protesters battle back.

Thousands of demonstrators protesting the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq marched on the Pentagon yesterday, jeered along the way by large numbers of angry counter-protesters.

Demonstrators included many families that brought young children to the march. There were also many high school students and young people.

Organizers billed the antiwar rally as marking the 40th anniversary of the 1967 march on the Pentagon. At times, verbal clashes during the cold and blustery day demonstrated that the bitter divisions of four decades ago sparked by Vietnam are very much alive in the debate over Iraq.

The march, part of a weekend of protests that included smaller demonstrations in other U.S. cities and abroad, comes as the Bush administration sends more troops to Iraq in an attempt to regain control of Baghdad and Congress considers measures to bring U.S. troops home.

Paul Miller, 72, a Korean War-era Marine Corps veteran who flew from California for the march with his brother, was making his first appearance at an antiwar rally. "I was like everybody else. I trusted the people who ran the country, and I'm tired of being lied to," Miller said, standing on a hill overlooking the Pentagon, a beret with a Marine Corps pin on his head. "I feel so bad for the young Marines who are getting their legs blown off and losing their lives."

Organizers said yesterday's march on the Pentagon reflected the public's sense of betrayal over the escalation of the war. As some speakers called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, others denounced Congress in equally bitter terms for not cutting off funding for the war. Yet attendance at yesterday's march was noticeably smaller than one held in Washington in January, police said.

Much of the passion yesterday was supplied by thousands of counter-demonstrators, many of them veterans who mobilized from across the country to gather around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Some said they came in response to appeals on the Internet to protect the Wall against what they feared would be acts of vandalism; no such acts were reported.

Antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan makes a victory sign as she marches toward the pentagon. Sheehans's son, Casey, was a casualty of the war in Iraq.

Others said they were tired of war protesters claiming to speak for the country. "I'm here because I think we need to commit to our troops in the field," said Guy Rocca, 63, a veteran who drove nine hours from Detroit.

Some counter-protesters yelled obscenities and mocked the marchers as traitors. War protesters responded with angry words of their own, and police intervened at times to prevent shouting matches from escalating.

The counter-demonstrators ringed the Lincoln Memorial and continued along portions of Arlington Memorial Bridge. "You've got no pride and no honor," yelled Kenneth Murphy, a Vietnam veteran from North Carolina.

When marchers reached the Virginia side of the bridge, they were greeted by more protesters at the traffic circle in front of Arlington National Cemetery, along with a banner that read in part: "You dishonor our dead on Hallowed ground." The war protesters might have found the warmest reception of the day at the Pentagon, where police had the building blocked off, but no counter-demonstrators were waiting.

"It's strange to say, but welcome to the Pentagon," said protest leader Mara Veheyden-Hilliard, speaking on a stage in the north parking lot as the first streams of marchers began arriving.

A group of protesters who tried to reach the Pentagon by charging toward the south parking lot ended up in a tense standoff with police. Five arrests were made in the incident. But beyond shoving matches, no violence was reported.

After a night of rain, sleet and snow, the day began with bright sunshine but low temperatures. Marchers assembled at first in relatively sparse numbers on a muddy playing field at 23rd Street and Constitution Avenue NW.

Organizers, who had predicted tens of thousands of marchers would demonstrate, gave estimates ranging from 15,000 to 30,000. Police no longer provide official estimates of crowd size but informally put it at 10,000 to 20,000, with a smaller but sizable contingent of counter-protesters.

War protest leaders said a large winter storm that hit the Northeast hurt turnout. More than 60 bus loads of protesters who had been scheduled to come from the region canceled their trips Friday night, according to Brian Becker, national coordinator for the Answer Coalition, the event's main sponsor.

It was quickly apparent that the weather had not prevented counter-demonstrators, many in black leather motorcycle jackets, from showing up in force and surrounding all sides of the Wall.

At one point before the march started, counter-demonstrators formed a gantlet along an asphalt walkway on Constitution Avenue and heaped verbal abuse at protesters who walked through on their way to the assembly area. One Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair yelled obscenities at demonstrators, including some with children.

Some demonstrators supporting the war effort engaged in good-natured banter with war protesters. But others blocked paths and prevented marchers from getting near the Wall, particularly anyone carrying a sign. District resident Eric Anderson, 47, had his sign ripped from his hands and thrown in the mud.

Bob Anders, 60, an Iowa banker who said he served with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam and rode a bus from Iowa to protest the war, had his heart set on seeing the memorial but turned around after seeing the situation. "I've never seen the memorial, and I wanted to see it in a spirit of protest," he said.

After speeches from antiwar activists including Cindy Sheehan, the first marchers took off across the bridge shortly before 1 p.m. The marchers began arriving at the Pentagon about 1:45, some gathering in front of the stage in the north parking lot and others perched on a hill by a Route 27 overpass.

About 2:10, a group of several hundred young people continued past the rally point and marched down Route 27 toward the south parking lot until they confronted a police barricade. Some youths who carried traffic barrels cut in half and painted red and black as shields and wore scarves over their faces pressed forward as Pentagon police, backed by Virginia state troopers in riot gear, stood two layers deep, trying to push them back. When that failed, the police donned gas masks. One of the protesters threw a firecracker, and many people ran off.

About 70 to 80 people sat down and were threatened with arrest. Protesters chanted, "The whole world is watching." Then protesters took a vote and opted to back off.

Yet, many demonstrators showed respect toward police and the military.

Among those marching on a day of cold, whipping wind was Maureen Dooley of Melfa, Va., who first marched on the Pentagon when she was 18; now she is 58. "I came, as I did today, to be quietly counted among the people opposed to this war," she said.

Dooley said she wished she could "apologize for my generation" for the way the antiwar movement treated Vietnam veterans on their return home. "This time, we're with our young men and women," she said.

The Pentagon's windswept north parking lot was cold, and many protesters did not linger long. By 3:30 p.m., only a few hundred marchers remained huddled around the stage. Most had left, with many of the out-of-towners seeking refuge on the floor of the nearby Arlington Cemetery Metro station.

One group that had come by overnight bus from Iowa City huddled on the floor near the station elevators. They had survived the 22-hour bus ride as well as the insults of the counter-protesters, only to be defeated by the bitter cold.

"We just couldn't take it anymore," said Christine Gaunt, 50, a hog farmer from Grinnell, Iowa. Now, with a voice fatigued from chanting litanies against the president and feet tired from marching on the military industrial complex, Gaunt just counted the hours to the group's scheduled bus pickup at 7 p.m.

If she was lucky, she said in a tired voice, she would get home this afternoon, just in time to haul her pigs to the Sunday market.

Staff writers Nelson Hernandez, William Wan and Theola Labb and the Associated Press contributed this report.

Congress, End the War

2007-03-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

Bush Seeks 8,200 More Troops for Wars

2007-03-10T14:43:00.000-08:00

By Deb Riechmann, The Associated Press Saturday 10 March 2007

Montevideo, Uruguay - President Bush asked Congress on Saturday for $3.2 billion to pay for 8,200 more US troops needed in Afghanistan and Iraq on top of the 21,500-troop buildup he announced in January.

Bush wants Congress to fund 3,500 new US troops to expand training of local police and army units in Afghanistan. The money also would pay for the estimated 3,500 existing U.S. troops he already announced would be staying longer in the region to counter an anticipated Taliban offensive in Afghanistan this spring.

In Iraq, most of the additional troops would help with the latest Baghdad security plan, which is getting under way in the capital. The money would pay for 2,400 combat support troops, 2,200 military police forces and 129 troops for reconstruction teams.

The budget revisions come as many lawmakers opposed to the buildup in Iraq are debating funding for the war. But in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bush proposed canceling $3.2 billion in low-priority defense items to offset the extra money needed to support the additional troops.

Cutting the programs, he said, would eliminate the need to increase the overall $93.4 billion in additional defense money he's already requested to finance this year's war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This revised request would better align resources based on the assessment of military commanders to achieve the goal of establishing Iraq and Afghanistan as democratic and secure nations that are free of terrorism," Bush wrote in his letter to lawmakers.

Bush signed the letter on his flight Friday from Brazil to Uruguay, part of his five-nation tour of Latin America that continues on Sunday in Colombia. The White House released the letter Saturday in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, recently hinted of the need to bolster the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.

"Gen. Petraeus expects under the Baghdad security plan as well as other parts of Iraq, that the number of people going into detention will increase and so these military police forces will be for that," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

Pentagon Deploys 2,200 More Troops to Baghdad

2007-03-08T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press Thursday 08 March 2007

Washington - The Pentagon has approved a request by the new US commander in Iraq for an extra 2,200 military police to help deal with an anticipated increase in detainees during the Baghdad security crackdown, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday.

Gates also cited early indications that the Iraqi government is meeting the commitments it made to bolster security, although he cautioned that it was too early to reach any firm conclusions about the outcome.

"We're right at the very beginning," he told a Pentagon news conference. "But I would say that based in terms of whether the Iraqis are meeting the commitments that they've made to us in the security arena, I think that our view would be so far, so good." He was referring to the movement of additional Iraqi troops into the capital.

Gates said that the request for extra MPs is in addition to the 21,500 combat troops that President Bush is sending for the Baghdad security plan, along with 2,400 support troops.

Gordon England, the deputy defense secretary, told Congress this week that the number of required support troops could reach 7,000.

"That's a new requirement by a new commander," Gates said of the request for more MPs by Gen. David Petraeus, who assumed command in Baghdad last month. He added that there were other troop requests still being considered in the Pentagon; he gave no specifics.

The day-to-day commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, has recommended that the higher troop level be maintained until February 2008, The New York Times reported on its Web site Wednesday night. Odierno said the extra troops are needed to support a sustained effort to win over the Iraqi populace.

Odierno made the recommendation to his superior, Gen. David Petraeus, but Petraeus has not yet acted on it, the report said, citing unidentified military officials.

House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, intend to propose legislation requiring the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the fall of 2008, and even earlier if the Iraqi government fails to meet security and other goals, Democratic officials said Wednesday night.

The conditions, described as tentative until presented to the Democratic rank and file, would be added to legislation providing nearly $100 billion the Bush administration has requested for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said, speaking anonymously.

The legislation is expected on the floor of the House later this month, and would mark the most direct challenge to date the new Democratic-controlled Congress has posed to the president's war policies.

Gates said it was not a surprise that Sunni insurgents have launched increased attacks in recent days.

"I think that we expected that there would be in the short term an increase in violence as the surge began to make itself felt," Gates said, adding that there were other "very preliminary positive signs" that the Baghdad security plan is working.

Joining Gates at the news conference, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that in recent days the number of sectarian murders was down slightly and the number of car bombings was up.

"So I think you see potentially the Iraqi people wanting to take advantage of this opportunity and the enemy wanting to keep it going," Pace said.

We'll Have to Talk to Militants, Says US Chief in Iraq

2007-03-08T12:04:00.000-08:00

By Lauren Frayer The Associated Press Thursday 08 March 2007

The new commander of US forces of Iraq, General David Petraeus, said today that insurgents in Iraq have sought to intensify attacks during a Baghdad security crackdown and additional US forces will be sent to areas outside the capital where militant groups are regrouping.

Petraeus said the troop build-ups outside Baghdad will focus on Diyala province north-east of Baghdad, a growing hotbed for suspected Sunni extremists fleeing the US-Iraqi security operation in Baghdad.

But Petraeus stressed that military force alone is "not sufficient" to end the violence in Iraq and political talks must eventually include some militant groups now opposing the US-backed government.

"This is critical," said Petraeus in his first news conference since taking over command last month. He noted that such political negotiations "will determine in the long run the success of this effort. "

Petraeus listed a series of high-profile attacks since US and Iraqi forces began the security sweep three weeks ago, including a suicide blast at a mostly Shiite university and an assassination attempt against one of Iraq's vice presidents.

The Pentagon has pledged 17,500 combat troops to the capital. Petraeus has said the full contingent should not be in place until early June. He declined to say how many US forces will be deployed to Diyala, where the group al-Qaida in Iraq has made one its main staging grounds.

Military officials believe many insurgents have shifted from Baghdad to Diyala to escape the security operation.

"Car bombs have targeted hundreds of Iraqis," Petraeus said. He also denounced the wave of other attacks, including the "thugs with no soul" who have killed more than 150 Shiite pilgrims in the past three days.

"We share the horror" of witnessing the suicide bombings and shootings against the pilgrims, who are heading for a religious commemoration beginning Friday in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, about 50 miles south of Baghdad.

The attacks - mostly blamed on Sunni insurgents - are seen as attempts to provoke a civil war with Shiite militia. But Petraeus said it was " critical" for leaders to halt any drift toward sectarian conflict.

He said US forces are ready to help provide additional security for the pilgrims if asked by Iraqi authorities.

"It is an enormous task to protect all of them and there is a point at which if someone is willing to blow up himself ... the problem becomes very, very difficult indeed," he said

But Petraeus added that he saw no role for the powerful Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army, which had sent out fighters to guard the pilgrimage in the past two years.

He said "extremist elements" in the militia have been engaged in " true excesses" in the past - an apparent reference to suspected gangs carrying out targeted killings against Sunnis.

Blood Diamonds and Blood Oil

2007-03-06T18:50:00.000-08:00

By Retired US Army Reserve Colonel Ann Wright Tuesday 06 March 2007

Child and teen soldiers in Sierra Leone and the US.
We have a myth that we can transform children and kids in their teens into men and women by sending them to war. If they fight young, we give them adulthood. Children and kids who fight eventually do grow into adults - adults with lifetimes ahead of them filled with emotional pain and anger. Is that what we want for our children and for our country?

Last week at Fort Hood, Texas, I attended the court-martial of US Army Specialist Mark Wilkerson. The night before his second deployment to Iraq, he went AWOL for 18 months. You learn a lot about a person's life during court proceedings. I learned that Mark joined Junior ROTC (high school Reserve Officer Training Corps) when he was 15, a sophomore in high school. He said that in grade school he was not inclined toward the military, but his grandmother showed him photo albums of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather in uniform. Joining the military was his family tradition. As a junior in high school, Mark signed up for delayed entry into the military. One month after graduating from high school in May 2002 at age 17, Mark was in basic training in the US Army. In December 2002 he got married and in February 2003 he deployed to Kuwait and on into Iraq. Mark served in Iraq for one year and returned to Fort Hood in March 2004.

Upon his return to the United States, he began having nightmares. He had a full-blown case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the sights, sounds and actions in Iraq. After his one year in Iraq, Mark decided he could not kill others; he submitted an application for Conscientious Objector (CO) status in March 2004. In July 2004 he was told his unit would return to Iraq in January 2005. His CO application was denied in November 2004.

In January 2005, the night before Mark's unit was to depart for Iraq, he and his wife closed their apartment, canceled their cell phone accounts and left Fort Hood. Eighteen months later, in August 2006, after a press conference at Camp Casey in Crawford, Texas, Mark voluntarily returned himself to military control at Fort Hood . During the press conference and before turning himself in, Mark said: "I made the difficult decision to go absent without leave (AWOL) for political, spiritual and personal reasons. I am not willing to kill, or be killed, or do anything I consider morally wrong, for reasons I don't believe in." Mark was tried by a US military general court-martial on February 22, 2007, and was convicted of missing military movement and being absent without leave. He was sentenced to seven months' imprisonment and a bad conduct discharge.

At the same time as I was attending Mark's court-martial, I was reading "A Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beach, a book that describes his experience as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. I also had seen recently the movie "Blood Diamond," a film about rebels in Sierra Leone. The rebels captured young Sierra Leoneans and made them kill family, neighbors and others in bloody initiation rites, then kept them in the rebel family through techniques for developing loyalty to a group whose mission was to kill those designated by their superiors. Thousands of five- to twenty-year-olds were used by the rebels in the war for control of the diamond fields in Sierra Leone.

I was the deputy ambassador at the US Embassy in Freetown, Sierra Leone, when the rebels took over the capital of the country in 1997 and led the evacuation of over 2,500 persons from the violence of Freetown. I returned to Sierra Leone the following year when the embassy reopened. I interviewed many victims of the machete rampages of the child soldiers. I visited the child/kid soldier rehabilitation centers in the Freetown area.

Using the youth of one's country to fight old men's wars is the history of most countries. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone helped rebel forces to wreak havoc in villages, creating instability that enabled the rebels to gain control of diamond fields. Teen soldiers in the United States are recruited and put in uniform at age 15 (JROTC) to fight at age 17 for oil in Iraq. Some child soldiers in Sierra Leone escaped their rebel "family" and the violence in overrun villages by running far into the jungle and eventually finding refuge from the violence. Some teen soldiers in the United States escaped their military "family" and the violence in Iraq by going AWOL in the United States or in Canada. Those from both countries who stayed with their "families" remained because of "family ties and bonds" formed by either rebel or national indoctrination and by steel - either machetes or guns.

I would argue that the result is much the same. Young men and women in Sierra Leone and in the United States are filled with lifetimes of nightmares from actions they have committed or from sights they have seen in war. Killing by machete or killing by guns results in the same emotional issues for those who have committed the acts. In Sierra Leone, child soldiers eventually were helped in internationally operated rehabilitation centers. In the United States, teen soldiers have gone to US military or Veterans Administration hospitals for assistance. Child soldiers from Sierra Leone are learning to deal with why they burned huts, and why they chopped off arms and legs. Teen soldiers from the United States are dealing with why one busted down doors and terrorized families, and why they sent blistering streams of lead into buildings and homes.

Having been in the US military for 29 years, I understand the need for a professional military. However, Junior ROTC should end in our high schools and the recruitment of high school students in the schools must stop. The United States should not relegate its youth to a future of nightmares and emotional damage from wars. We do not need child/teen soldiers in the United States.

Children and teens should not have to fight for diamonds or for oil.

A Suggestion for Probing Our Shameful Treatment of Fallen Troops

2007-03-06T18:45:00.000-08:00

By Joseph L. Galloway McClatchy Newspapers Friday 02 March 2007

Let's get this straight once and for all: With great power comes great responsibility.

The president and the Congress have the power to send America's fighting men and women to war. They also bear the responsibility for caring for those troops and their families.

It's their duty to make certain that the families of those who fall in battle don't fall through the cracks. They also have a sacred obligation to see that those who are wounded or injured in service receive the finest medical care that a rich nation can provide.

And while we're restating what should be clear and obvious, the politicians also have a responsibility to make certain that the Veterans Administration takes good care of the veterans of the wars gone by - World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf War.

This is our nation's contract with those who bear the burden of protecting and defending the rest of us. If the politicians can't be trusted to get that right all the time, what can we trust them with?

It's the responsibility of all the rest of us to ensure that the politicians and the generals do their duty - and if they don't, then to ensure that their heads roll swiftly.

Those who fail in that honorable mission should be rooted out, called before Congress to deliver whatever lame excuses they can muster, and then sacked. They don't deserve respect or high office or rank, let alone fat pensions.

Only about three-quarters of 1 percent of all Americans wear the uniform. They're volunteers who take on great hardship and deadly risk with selflessness, and for the most part they're proud to do the job.

They're not mercenaries, as some would have us believe. They're not, as former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld put it: fungible. They're not interchangeable faceless parts of a machine that eats money and spits out death and destruction.

They're our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our grandsons and granddaughters. They're the best of their generation, and many thousands of them have been sent into the cauldrons of Iraq and Afghanistan two or three or four times during the last six years.

Every time they go, they leave behind spouses and children who must make do without dad or mom for a year at a time. They leave behind families who have to live with the terrible fear that a military sedan could pull into their driveway any day, carrying a chaplain and an officer and news that will break their hearts and destroy their lives.

This week is replete with even more evidence of gross failure and neglect on the part of those who are charged with carrying out our obligations to them.

The Army, in an effort to save money, has been giving soldiers maimed in combat the lowest possible disability ratings. In years when 50,000 troops have been wounded or injured, it's reduced the number of people judged 100 percent disabled to a third of the number who were granted that rating - and the pensions that go with it - in the year before we went to war.

In the wake of the latest revelations that wounded and recovering soldiers were being warehoused in miserable barracks at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the Army leaders' first reaction was to punish the "platoon sergeants" in charge of those outpatients. Never mind that those platoon sergeants are recovering from war wounds themselves and have had the responsibility for 40 or 50 or 60 other wounded soldiers pawned off on them.

When that only generated more outrage, the Army fired the commander of Walter Reed, Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who'd held the job for only six months.

Then came the news that the grotesque problems with housing and treatment of those outpatient soldiers - who must wait at Walter Reed for as long as 12 months while the paper pushers process their medical discharges or their return to duty - have gone on for years. They were first reported two years ago by the online magazine Salon, and hospital commanders and congressmen and even Rumsfeld's wife had known about them for years.

Those who complained about the appalling treatment of our wounded soldiers, however, were blown off by those who were responsible for fixing the problems.

If all this went on at the Army's premier hospital, in the shadow of the White House and Capitol Hill, what's the situation at less illustrious military medical installations? What must things be like in the hospitals that care for veterans, old and new alike, that are administered by the VA?

One reader e-mailed me this week to suggest that if we really want to get to the bottom of this scandal, we should appoint an investigative commission made up of 10 mothers of wounded soldiers instead of the usual suspects who sit on blue-ribbon commissions and find no one responsible for problems.

The mothers, the reader wrote, would sort out who was to blame in short order and find the problems that need fixing even faster. I second her motion.

Until we get this right and get back to living up to our responsibilities, we don't deserve the sacrifices that our soldiers, sailors, Marines and Air Force personnel make for us every day.

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Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young. Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box 399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@cs.com.

Can Congress End the War?

2007-03-04T18:54:00.000-08:00

By David Swanson TomDispatch.com Sunday 04 March 2007

Democratic leaders may prefer to claim they tried but failed.

The shortest route to ending the Iraq war (and preventing additional wars) is almost certainly through Congress. Influencing the White House directly is unimaginable, and stopping the war through the courts unlikely. Clearly, Congress is the way to go. But what specifically can Congress do?

How We Got Here

The peace movement lobbied a Republican Congress without success for four years. Then, on November 7, 2006, the American public elected a Democratic Congress in a clear mandate delivered at the polls. Not a single new Republican was elected, and 30 new Democrats were ushered in, with voters overwhelmingly telling pollsters that they were voting against the war; and by "against the war," they meant "against the war," not "against the escalation." Remember, the President's "surge" into Baghdad had not yet been announced.

Voters also appeared to be voting for accountability and possibly for the launching of impeachment hearings as well. Polls prior to the election found that a majority of Americans believed a Democratic Congress would impeach. Candidates who campaigned on the theme of accountability, including Keith Ellison (Dem., Minnesota) who promised impeachment, did well. Polls show that a majority of Americans favor impeachment or wish Bush's presidency were over. Voters in November even booted out a couple of Republicans who had turned against the war, saying that they were voting for a Democratic majority so that the Democrats could investigate the war as well as end it - something a majority of Americans continue to say they want.

Prior to the election, Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi had already ordered the Democrats in the House to oppose impeachment, but she had not ordered them to support the war. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), chaired by Congressman Rahm Emanuel, however, directed most of its financial support to candidates who did not call for ending the war. Of the 22 candidates funded by the DCCC, only 8 won. The rest of the victorious Democratic challengers, many of them strongly opposed to the war, got themselves elected without Emanuel's help.

Halfway Steps in the House

Of course, now that the election is over and the Democratic leadership has heard the people speak so clearly, now that, on January 27th, half a million Americans encircled the Capitol in opposition to the war, now that the new Congress has in its hands the power that the Republicans had a year ago, surely ending the war is at the top of its agenda.

Well, not according to Emanuel's way of thinking, as reported in the Washington Post:

"For the rest of the year, Emanuel says, the leadership hopes to stress energy independence (with fuel-saving efficiency standards for appliances and cars) and a move toward better health care for children. And here's what Emanuel doesn't want to do: fall into the political trap of chasing overambitious or potentially unpopular measures. Ask about universal health care, and he shakes his head... Reform of Social Security and other entitlements? Too big, too woolly, too risky... The country is angry, and it will only get more so as the problems in Iraq deepen. Don't look to Emanuel's Democrats for solutions on Iraq. It's Bush's war, and as it splinters the structure of GOP power, the Democrats are waiting to pick up the pieces."
So, clearly the question before us is not just what Congress can do to end the war, but also how the American public can persuade a Democratic Congress to want to end the war. Most Republican members of Congress still follow White House orders like sheep, and leading House Democrat Emanuel is openly telling the media that he'd just as soon have the war still going on in 2008. The war has cost an estimated 655,000 Iraqi lives and over 3,000 American ones in its first 4 years, with the death rate increasing over time, so by a safe estimate Emanuel has just written off perhaps another few hundred thousand lives for the sake of an electoral strategy.

Prior to the recent Congressional recess, Congressman Jack Murtha proposed that he draft a new bill, agreeing to throw $93 billion or so at the war in the form of another "emergency supplemental" outside the regular federal budget. That may not sound like an anti-war proposal, but it certainly passed for one in Washington, D.C. In fact, Murtha was pilloried by Republicans and much of the media because he proposed including requirements that troops be properly rested, trained, and equipped before being sent to Iraq. Murtha argued that these requirements would force Bush to end his "surge."

In a climate in which opposition to the "surge" had become confused with opposition to the war, Murtha's plan was, amazingly enough, treated as the near equivalent of pacifism. And no strong defense of it emerged from the Democratic leadership. Instead the plan evolved into a proposal to require the President to inform Congress when he was deploying troops lacking adequate rest, training, or equipment. But it is unclear how this would even curtail the present escalation, much less end the war, and there has been no indication of what Congress would do if Bush failed to obey this reporting requirement.

Bizarrely, this whole discussion has taken place without any reference to the fact that, in November 2003, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, which placed limits on the number of days that a member of the Armed Forces could be deployed. Bush signed that bill into law, but added a signing statement announcing his intention to disregard that section. The U.S. Constitution gives the President the power to sign bills into law and enforce them, or to veto them. There is no constitutional middle course. Yet Bush has routinely used signing statements to announce his plans to disregard portions of bills he signs into law. This abuse might be addressed by impeachment proceedings, something the Democrats are not currently considering. But short of addressing this abuse, Congress Members could at least behave as though they were aware of it.

Wholehearted House Actions

Numerous peace and justice organizations seeking to end the war are urging Congress Members to vote "no" on the $93 billion supplemental bill. At the same time, they are watching closely for possible amendments to the bill that could require the money be spent on a rapid withdrawal. Such amendments might be introduced and voted on in the House Appropriations Committee, on which Congresswoman Barbara Lee (Dem., California) serves, along with Murtha, or they might be introduced and voted on in the full House.

If a bill provided billions of dollars for the war but required that it all be spent on the withdrawal of troops, and if such a bill passed both houses of Congress, the President would be unable to veto it without denying himself a source of funding he badly wants. And there is at least a chance that Congress would take umbrage and pay attention if he cancelled the end of the war with another of his signing statements.

Other possibilities for ending the war in the House include not passing a supplemental bill at all, or passing one of the four bills that have been introduced (by Representatives Lynn Woolsey, Jim McGovern, Jerrold Nadler, and Dennis Kucinich) that would use the power of the purse to try to bring the war to an end. There are also several bills that would instruct the President to end the war while continuing to fund it, an approach that seems more likely to pass both houses of Congress, but far less likely to achieve anything close to their stated goal.

Senator Russ Feingold held to hearings in January on the constitutional power of the Congress to end a war. One point on which there seems to be consensus: Congress has the Constitutional power to control what money is spent on (even if that power has hardly been touched in any meaningful way in recent years). If Congress says no more money can be spent on the war, then that is the law of the land - although the history of the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret beginning of the current Iraq War, and operations now underway in Iran remind us that the law of the land and the acts of the White House can sometimes be two separate matters.

Congressman Kucinich's bill is brand new. The other three House bills have been in play for some weeks. While Congressman Nadler's bill does not have the support among his colleagues that Woolsey's and McGovern's do (thanks to both friendships and political alliances), Nadler has perhaps done the best job of crafting a bill in which Congress could make use of its undisputed power to end the war. While the other two bills first instruct Bush to end the war in a specific period of time, and only afterward forbid the use of additional funds for the war that is now theoretically over, Nadler's bill immediately restricts the use of any money appropriated by Congress to withdrawing the troops from Iraq.

Actually, Nadler's bill restricts the use of funds to protecting the troops and withdrawing them. He admits that the "protecting the troops" part is a bit of nonsense, since the only way to protect them is to withdraw them. But all of these bills have been written with a keen eye to repelling the commonplace criticism that bringing our troops safely home somehow constitutes a failure to "support the troops."

Senate Shortcomings and Opportunities

A new sideways approach to ending the war without saying you're ending it is only now emerging in the Senate. This one involves "reauthorizing" the war. This war was, of course, never declared but pre-authorized to be launched at the President's discretion for the purpose of eliminating Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction and combating those falsely alleged to have been behind the attacks of 9-11. The facts have already repealed that authorization, but it would be useful for Congress to do so as well.

Actually reauthorizing the war, on the other hand, would undoubtedly be less useful, as it might appear to the public to be support for the war; while any aspects of the reauthorization aimed at slowly ending the war will surely be viciously attacked by the administration and its supporters. In fact, that's already begun. The White House is denouncing any attempts to restrict the war as "micromanagement" and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has announced that Bush will probably disregard restrictions placed on the war by Congress. Rice was asked in a broadcast interview whether the President would feel bound by legislation seeking to withdraw combat troops within 120 days. "The president is going to, as commander in chief, need to do what the country needs done," she replied. This brazenly unconstitutional stance is another one of those "details" - like Bush's past signing statements - that Congress might do well to bear in mind and cease trying to ignore.

There are a couple of possible ways the Senate might get around this. One would simply be not to pass the Pentagon's supplemental spending bill - something that 41 Senators could accomplish through a filibuster. The other would be to pass Senator Russ Feingold's bill to stop funding the war, which would obviously require a far higher voting hurdle than that filibuster. Passing a bill would involve gathering a majority - and overriding a veto to maintain it, a two-thirds vote in both houses. The filibuster, however, presents another kind of hurdle in that it requires some Senator or group of Senators to find the decency and courage to begin it, uncertain of success.

Legislating a Unitary Executive

What is lost in all of these strategy discussions, of course, is the question of whether any sort of Congressional cut-off of funds would actually truncate either the surge or the war. Remember, the President and Vice President began the preparations for the invasion of Iraq secretly with at least $2.5 billion illegally taken from other areas. They have promised never to end the war. They have asserted the power of a "unitary executive." They have launched pre-war operations in Iran without any authorization or funding from Congress. They have built permanent bases in Iraq without any approval from Congress, and continued that construction work in violation of a bill passed by Congress forbidding the use of any funding for it.

So, the question is not just whether Congress can cut off the money, but whether the Bush administration can find enough money in other places illegally to continue a war that has never in any sense been legal. The amount of money we're talking about is enormous, but it is a fraction of the Pentagon's budget, and it seems clear that - given the kinds of "black budget" moneys floating around in that world - the war could be continued for some time (long enough at least to gin up a new enemy to scare Congress with); that is, unless the military sides with Congress in this dispute and refuses to pursue the war with misappropriated funds.

If any of these strategies to end the war come to fruition in Congress, a more likely outcome than an actual end to the war would be a full-scale confrontation with the "commander-in-chief" presidency of George Bush (and the vice-presidency of Dick Cheney), leading to possible impeachment proceedings.

Here's the reality, however: None of these strategies are likely to advance very far very soon. A movement for impeachment now might strengthen the hand of those in Congress who want to move on ending the war. During the Vietnam War, the peace and impeachment efforts aided each other. And the Democrats then won the next elections, something they failed to do after choosing not to pursue impeachment proceedings against Ronald Reagan for the Iran-Contra scandal.

What Could Change

Two events on the horizon might change this outlook. One is an attack on Iran. Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers have said they favor launching the impeachment process if the Bush administration attacks Iran. Needless to say, it would be better to begin proceedings to impeach in order to prevent an attack on Iran, but that is unlikely in the present political atmosphere.

The other event that could take us all surprising places is the completion of the trial of I. Lewis Scooter Libby. The evidence made public by that trial points to an urgent need for impeachment proceedings against Vice President Cheney. The evidence suggests that Cheney was the driving force behind the campaign of retribution against ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, including the outing of his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame. Journalist Murray Waas has indicated some of the points that cry out for investigation. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has urged Cheney to "come clean," offer an explanation for his actions, or resign. A blogger with the handle emptywheel has drafted a mock indictment of Cheney, and Wil S. Hylton has recently published possible articles of impeachment against the Vice President in the men's fashion magazine GQ.

It seems everyone's getting into the act, except Congress. But Congress could do so. The evidence uncovered by the Libby trial did not exist when Pelosi ordered impeachment "off the table" a year ago. Among the public, there is a lot of fear that impeaching Bush (and removing him from office) would give us a President Cheney. By impeaching the incredibly unpopular Cheney first, Congress would allay these fears. Impeaching Cheney might actually unite the mood of the public with that of Congress more easily than the impeachment of George W. Bush - under the motto: Business Before Pleasure - Impeach Cheney First!

In the meantime, the Democrats' strategy of letting the war continue, not thoroughly investigating the fraud that launched it, and not holding the war-makers accountable may prove not to be the electoral winner that Party figures like Emanuel expect. It might even prove a political equalizer and so a loser in 2008 or beyond. Every day that the Democrats don't move to end the war in Iraq is another day in which that war, stretching ever on, can become the Democrats' war. Only if they come to believe that the war's unpopularity will work against them in the voting booths in 2008 or thereafter will they be strongly motivated to take the sorts of actions that might actually bring it to an end.

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David Swanson is the Washington Director of Democrats.com and co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, and of the Backbone Campaign. He serves on a working group of United for Peace and Justice. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including Press Secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign. His website is davidswanson.org.

Note: For those who want to know more about bringing citizen pressure on Washington and/or promoting and lobbying for the launching of impeachment proceedings against George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney, check out David Swanson's previous Tomdispatch piece, "The Impeachment Moment," and then visit ImpeachO7.org.

Halliburton Could Lose $400 million

2007-03-02T18:57:00.000-08:00

By Jay Price The News & Observer Friday 02 March 2007

Military contracting giant KBR Inc. could be docked up to $400 million for improperly using private security companies in Iraq, the company disclosed this week.

The Army has already said it withheld about $20 million in payments to KBR's parent company, Halliburton, because the company's subcontractors used private security contractors, including North Carolina-based Blackwater USA. Army officials have said that private security companies were not allowed under Halliburton's main contract in Iraq and that the military was to provide security.

The Army began looking into the use of private security firms by KBR's subcontractors after a congressional investigation sparked by a series of stories in The News & Observer. KBR has won billions in contracts to provide troops in Iraq with basic needs.

In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, KBR said the Army was continuing to review its contract and that it would begin withholding more payments unless the company "can provide timely information sufficient to show that such action is not necessary to protect the government's interests." If KBR fails, it could lose $400 million in Army payments, although the actual losses could be lower, according to the report.

KBR contends that its Army contract does not prohibit subcontractors from hiring private security services. It's unclear how many security companies might have worked under the KBR contract, but it's certain that Blackwater was not the only one.

In 2004, The N&O investigated Blackwater's work in Iraq and the deaths and public mutilation of four of its workers in Fallujah. Prompted in part by the articles, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California who now heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, started an investigation into how layers of subcontracts in Iraq add to the Pentagon's costs and limit its ability to oversee the work.

It was during a hearing of Waxman's committee last month that a top Army contracting official revealed that the Army had decided to withhold $19.6 million in payments to KBR. Waxman released a statement Thursday saying that the Army's decision showed why Congress must keep an eye on Pentagon contracts.

"Our investigation might mean a savings of hundreds of millions of dollars for taxpayers," Waxman said. "It would have been better if the money had never been wasted in the first place, but there's at least a chance now to fix this expensive mistake."

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House Panel Subpoenas Fired US Attorneys

2007-03-02T13:16:00.000-08:00

By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane The Washington Post Friday 02 March 2007

Democrats issued their first major subpoenas yesterday since taking control of Congress, as a House subcommittee voted to compel testimony from four former U.S. attorneys who were part of a wave of firings by the Justice Department.

The Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law approved the subpoenas for former prosecutors in Arkansas, New Mexico, Seattle and San Diego - all of whom will be required to appear for testimony at a hearing Tuesday. The Senate Judiciary Committee announced plans for a similar hearing on the same day.

The moves mark the latest escalation in the battle between congressional Democrats and the Justice Department over the controversial dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys, at least five of whom were presiding over public corruption probes when they were fired.

"Are these people being removed for doing their job and for it doing it too well?" asked Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the panel, who called the subpoenas "a last resort."

The controversy, which has been simmering for two months, boiled over this week after departing prosecutor David C. Iglesias of New Mexico alleged that two unnamed lawmakers had pressured him to speed up the prosecution of Democrats before the November elections. Iglesias said he believed that complaints from the lawmakers may have led to his dismissal, an allegation the Justice Department has disputed.

The state's top two Democrats, Rep. Tom Udall and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, and Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) have denied calling Iglesias. Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.) and Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) have not responded to requests for comment over the past two days and deflected questions from the Associated Press about the allegations.

"I don't have any comment," Domenici said. "I have no idea what he's talking about."

Wilson referred questions "on that personnel matter" to the Justice Department.

Sanchez said any such contacts by a member of Congress would likely be in violation of House and Senate ethics rules that restrict such "ex parte communications" during ongoing criminal investigations.

Iglesias's office was conducting a probe into allegations involving construction contracts and a prominent Democratic former state senator.

At the time of the alleged phone calls, Wilson, a close ally of Domenici's, was in a tight reelection battle with then-state Attorney General Patricia Madrid. Wilson won by fewer than 2,000 votes.

Iglesias said yesterday that he will identify the lawmakers only if compelled by a subpoena.

"I fear retaliation," said Iglesias, a Republican and former military defense lawyer who served as a model for a character in the movie "A Few Good Men." "This is a small state and there are not too many employment opportunities, and I fear they will blacklist me."

At least four of the other U.S. attorneys were presiding over probes targeting Republican politicians at the time they were notified of their firing.

Although a separate House subcommittee has compelled testimony in a little-noticed drug inquiry, the prosecutors case marks the first major use of subpoena power by the new Democratic majority.

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that the department has been "very forthcoming" with Congress about the dismissals and that any allegations that prosecutors were removed to interfere with investigations are "completely wrong."

Justice officials have said Iglesias and six others were fired for "performance-related" reasons and have denied that any were targeted to disrupt public corruption probes. Officials have acknowledged that an eighth prosecutor, Bud Cummins of Little Rock, was removed to make way for a former aide to presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Cummins and former U.S. attorney John McKay of Seattle said in interviews that they told lawmakers they will not testify unless subpoenas are issued.

"I wanted it clear that I wasn't volunteering to testify and I wasn't trying to affirmatively stir up trouble for everybody," said Cummins, who left in December. "If they would like to hear one of the few facts I have, I'm happy to tell them."

The other former prosecutor scheduled to testify, Carol S. Lam of San Diego, did not return a call seeking comment yesterday.

No Republicans showed up for the unanimous panel vote on issuing the subpoenas. The Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican, Rep. Lamar Smith (Tex.), later called the session "political grandstanding."

Democrats send out first round of subpoenas

2007-03-02T13:14:00.000-08:00

By Susan Crabtree

A House Judiciary subcommittee approved today the first in what is expected to be an avalanche of subpoenas to Bush administration officials. They will likely explore corruption and mismanagement allegations on everything from pre-war Iraq intelligence to the mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina.

The first round of subpoenas concern the recent controversial firings by the Bush administration of seven U.S. attorneys, some of whom were pursuing public corruption cases against Republican members of Congress.

The House Judiciary subcommittee on commercial and administrative law, chaired by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), approved subpoenas requiring four former U.S. attorneys to appear at a subcommittee hearing next Tuesday. The former U.S. attorneys include Carol Lam of California, David Iglesias of New Mexico, H.E. Cummins III of Arkansas, and John McKay of Washington state. The subcommittee approved the subpoenas by voice vote; no Republican lawmakers were present.

Tuesday’s hearing will consider a bill by Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) that would reverse a new Patriot Act provision allowing the attorney general to appoint federal prosecutors without Senate confirmation through the duration of the Bush administration.

Democrats have come to the defense of several dismissed prosecutors, in particular Lam and Cummins of Arkansas. They have noted that Lam was leading the probe of ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.), while Cummins was removed to make room for a former aide to White House senior adviser Karl Rove. Other U.S. attorneys, including those in Nevada and Arizona, were acting on corruption charges against GOP lawmakers before their resignations were requested.

Iglesias, a New Mexico U.S. attorney, asserted at a press conference yesterday that he was fired for purely political reasons. He also charged that prior to the November elections, two federal elected officials asked him to speed up the probes of local politicians.

Democrats, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), have expressed outrage over the firings. She and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) have demanded to see the attorneys’ performance evaluations.

The White House has denied that the attorneys were fired for anything other than performance-related issues. And Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), have argued that Democrats are making up a controversy where none exists.

After the vote on the subpoenas, Sanchez took exception to the White House’s assertions that they can fire the attorneys because they are "at will" employees.

There are several exceptions when an "at-will" employee cannot be fired, Sanchez asserted, such as sex or race discrimination.

"There are several public policy reasons why we don’t fire people," she said. "Are these people being [fired] because they’re doing their jobs and they’re doing them to well? Is this an ideological purge?"

She went on to stress the importance of a judiciary branch that is separate and independent from the executive branch.

"When the executive branch is interfering in the justice system—in other countries we call that corruption," she said. "It’s very troubling to me that there seems to be this undercurrent."

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) also weighed today, with a speech on the House floor.

"So this Administration either originally hired incompetent attorneys in the first place, or hired competent U.S. Attorneys, but incompetently fired them. Which is it?" he asked. "Many Americans believe these U.S. Attorneys are not being fired because they failed to go after public corruption, but because they did and were successful."

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment by press time. It has opposed a Senate bill similar to Berman's. A senior administration official also previously told The Hill that Democrats were trying to create a scandal where there isn't one.

"This sounds to me a little more like Democrats trying to play politics and use the S-word than it does trying to obtain substantive information," the official said.

Breaking the Army ...

2007-03-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

Mother Jones March/April 2007 Issue

Half of American soldiers think we are likely to succeed in Iraq; more than 1/3 say we shouldn't have invaded in the first place. It costs $275,000 to deploy a soldier in Iraq for a year. It costs $5,840 to feed him. Army doctrine recommends deploying 20 soldiers for every 1,000 residents of an area with insurgents in it. Baghdad, a city of 6 million, would require 120,000 troops; 20,000 are there now. Nearly 1/3 of the troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan have served multiple tours. "I don't think they can sustain the rotations the way they are right now without really starting to have severe readiness issues in the Army much more than another year," said retired Brig. General David Grange in December. Some military equipment used in Iraq has experienced the equivalent of 27 years of use in 3 years. It costs $17 billion a year to replace worn and lost equipment.

... and the National Guard and Reserves

The Pentagon has ordered the National Guard to transfer $1.76 billion worth of equipment to the Army. Transferring gear overseas has left domestic Guard units with 1/3 of their essential combat equipment. 7,040 Army National Guard soldiers were deployed to Vietnam; 126 died. More than 100,000 have served in Iraq so far; 392 have died. Deploying reservists in Iraq costs the U.S. economy almost $4 billion in lost productivity annually.

The Home Front

The death rate for soldiers from rural areas is 60% higher than that for soldiers from cities. Between 2003 and 2005, Army divorces increased by 14%. The Miles Foundation reports that calls to its domestic violence hot line for military spouses jumped from 50 to 600 per month after the start of the Iraq War. In 2004, 1 out of 5 military spouses said they had signed up for government assistance to make ends meet. The wife of a New York National Guardsman deployed to Iraq applied for food stamps while raising three kids on $19,000 a year. "His monthly military salary does not cover one monthly mortgage payment."

-------

Aftermath: Long-Term Thinking

2007-03-01T18:12:00.000-08:00

Mother Jones March/April 2007 Issue

Has the war in Iraq increased jihadist terrorism? The Bush administration has offered two responses: First, the moths-to-aflame argument, which says that Iraq draws terrorists who would otherwise "be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders," as President Bush put it in 2005. Second, the hard-to-say position: "Are more terrorists being created in the world?" then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked at a press conference in September 2006. "We don't know. The world doesn't know. There are not good metrics to determine how many people are being trained in a radical madrasa school in some country."

Average Number of Jihadist Terrorism Attacks and Fatalities/Year

In fact, as Rumsfeld knew well, there are plenty of publicly available figures on the incidence and gravity of jihadist attacks. But until now, no one has done a serious statistical analysis of whether an "Iraq effect" does exist. We have undertaken such a study, drawing on data in the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database (terrorismknowledgebase.org), widely considered the best unclassified database on terrorism incidents.

Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of people killed in those attacks, increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, the scene of almost half the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks. But even excluding Iraq and Afghanistan - the other current jihadist hot spot - there has been a 35 percent rise in the number of attacks, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities.

Contrary to Bush's assertion, jihadists have not let the Iraq War distract them from targeting the United States and its allies. The rate of attacks on Western interests and citizens has risen by almost 25 percent, while the yearly fatality rate has increased by 4 percent, a figure that would have been higher had planned attacks, such as the London airline plot, not been prevented.

The globalization of jihad and martyrdom has disquieting implications for American security in the future. Jihadists are already leaving Iraq to operate elsewhere, a "blowback" trend that will greatly increase when the war eventually winds down. Terrorist groups in Iraq, which have learned to raise millions through kidnapping and oil theft, may be in a position to help fund their jihadist brethren elsewhere. Finally, Iraq has increased the popularity of a hardcore takfiri ideology so intolerant that, unlikely as it seems, it makes Osama bin Laden appear relatively moderate.

Though few American civilians have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the past three years, it is naive to assume that this will continue to be the case. We will be living with the consequences of the Iraq debacle for many years.

Iraq's Newest Export: Refugees

1.6 million Iraqis have been displaced within the country. As many as 1.8 million have left Iraq, with 3,000 fleeing daily. Saudi Arabia is building a 560-mile border fence to keep them out. As many as 700,000 Iraqi refugees now live in Jordan. More than 60,000 live in Sweden. Only 202 were admitted to the United States last year.

Iraq: Before and After

In 2006, 30% of Iraqi children went to school. Before the war, attendance was nearly 100%. A 2006 survey of children in Baghdad found that 47% had recently experienced a major traumatic event; 14% had posttraumatic stress disorder. An American psychiatrist says Iraqis are suffering "epidemic levels of PTSD." 40% of Iraqi professionals have fled, including 1/3 of all doctors. 2,000 doctors have been murdered since 2003. The number of Iraqis in jail or prison is up 30% since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The president of the Iraqi National Council of Women does not go out without bodyguards. "I started with 6, then I increased to 12, and then to 20 and then 30." One of the 66 women in the Iraqi Parliament told the UK Observer, "This is the worst time ever in Iraqi women's lives. In the name of religion and sectarian conflict they are being kidnapped and killed and raped."

How the War on Terror Made the World a More Terrifying Place

2007-03-01T17:50:00.000-08:00

By Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn The Independent UK Wednesday 28 February 2007

New figures show dramatic rise in terror attacks worldwide since the invasion of Iraq.
Innocent people across the world are now paying the price of the "Iraq effect", with the loss of hundreds of lives directly linked to the invasion and occupation by American and British forces.

An authoritative US study of terrorist attacks after the invasion in 2003 contradicts the repeated denials of George Bush and Tony Blair that the war is not to blame for an upsurge in fundamentalist violence worldwide. The research is said to be the first to attempt to measure the "Iraq effect" on global terrorism. It found that the number killed in jihadist attacks around the world has risen dramatically since the Iraq war began in March 2003. The study compared the period between 11 September 2001 and the invasion of Iraq with the period since the invasion. The count - excluding the Arab-Israel conflict - shows the number of deaths due to terrorism rose from 729 to 5,420. As well as strikes in Europe, attacks have also increased in Chechnya and Kashmir since the invasion. The research was carried out by the Centre on Law and Security at the NYU Foundation for Mother Jones magazine.

Iraq was the catalyst for a ferocious fundamentalist backlash, according to the study, which says that the number of those killed by Islamists within Iraq rose from seven to 3,122. Afghanistan, invaded by US and British forces in direct response to the September 11 attacks, saw a rise from very few before 2003 to 802 since then. In the Chechen conflict, the toll rose from 234 to 497. In the Kashmir region, as well as India and Pakistan, the total rose from 182 to 489, and in Europe from none to 297.

Two years after declaring "mission accomplished" in Iraq President Bush insisted: "If we were not fighting and destroying the enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people."

Mr Blair has also maintained that the Iraq war has not been responsible for Muslim fundamentalist attacks such as the 7/7 London bombings which killed 52 people. "Iraq, the region and the wider world is a safer place without Saddam [Hussein]," Mr Blair declared in July 2004. Announcing the deployment of 1,400 extra troops to Afghanistan earlier this week - raising the British force level in the country above that in Iraq - the Prime Minister steadfastly denied accusations by MPs that there was any link between the Iraq war an unravelling of security elsewhere.

Last month John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence in Washington, said he was "not certain" that the Iraq war had been a recruiting factor for al-Qa'ida and insisted: "I wouldn't say that there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq, I really wouldn't."

Yet the report points out that the US administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States" - partially declassified last October - stated that "the Iraq war has become the 'cause célèbre' for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

The new study, by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, argues that, on the contrary, "the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of al-Qa'ida ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

"Our study shows that the Iraq war has generated a stunning increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and civilian lives lost. Even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one third."

In trying to gauge the "Iraq effect", the authors had focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two periods - from September 2001 to 30 March 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion) and 21 March 2003 to 30 September 2006. The research has been based on the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database.

The report's assertion that the Iraq invasion has had a far greater impact in radicalising Muslims is widely backed security personnel in the UK. Senior anti-terrorist officials told The Independent that the attack on Iraq, and the now-discredited claims by the US and British governments about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, had led to far more young Muslims engaging in extremist activity than the invasion of Afghanistan two years previously.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of the Secret Service (MI5) said recently: "In Iraq attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded into the internet.

"Chillingly, we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. The threat is serious, is growing and will, I believe, be with us for a generation."

In Afghanistan the most active of the Taliban commanders, Mullah Dadullah, acknowledged how the Iraq war has influenced the struggle in Afghanistan.

"We give and take with the mujahedin in Afghanistan", he said. The most striking example of this has been the dramatic rise in suicide bombings in Afghanistan, a phenomenon not seen through the 10 years of war with the Russians in the 1980s.

The effect of Iraq on various jihadist conflicts has been influenced according to a number of factors, said the report. Countries with troops in Iraq, geographical proximity to the country, the empathy felt for the Iraqis and the exchange of information between Islamist groups. "This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq war than other regions", it said.

Russia, like the US, has used the language of the "war on terror" in its actions in Chechnya, and al-Qa'ida and their associates have entrenched themselves in the border areas of Pakistan from where they have mounted attacks in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

Statistics for the Arab-Israel conflict also show an increase, but the methodology is disputed in the case of Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories and settler attacks on Palestinians.

Civil War: Lost in Transition /

2007-03-01T17:48:00.000-08:00

Mother Jones March/April 2007 Issue

Moving Targets

As Iraq has descended into civil war, it hasn't been easy to measure just how violent it has become. Estimates of civilian casualties vary by a factor of nearly 10, and both the Pentagon and the Iraqi government have been criticized for ignoring or downplaying reports of attacks and deaths. What is beyond doubt is that the bloodshed is mounting and more and more civilians are dying.

Players, Haters: Iraqi Politics at a Glance
Mother Jones March/April 2007 Issue

Shiites

Ayatollah Sistani. A crusty old cleric whose Delphic pronouncements are received as gospel by his followers, Sistani almost never leaves his house and has spurned U.S. officials' pleas for a meeting.

His once-supreme influence is declining in favor of the Shiite militias, but he did help put together the United Iraqi Alliance bloc, by far the biggest of the multiparty coalitions that dominate Iraq's Parliament.

Islamic Dawa. One of the groups in the United Iraqi Alliance, Dawa is the party of current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. It was founded in 1957 by Shiite ayatollahs as a counterforce to the Communist and Baath parties. Dawa later won support from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, formed a terrorist branch, and in 1983 bombed the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. Today, it is led by Islamist scholars.

Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI and its armed wing, the Badr Brigade, were founded as a fundamentalist Shiite party in 1982, under the tutelage of Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guard; they have been supported by Iran ever since.

Party leader Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a cleric and former commander of the Badr Brigade who favors autonomy for the Shiite south, was invited to the White House last year. SCIRI is blamed for torture and assassinations, and its members have infiltrated the Iraqi army and police.

Mahdi Army. A cluster of militias led by the controversial and charismatic (in a grim-faced sort of way) thirtysomething cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, scion of the Sadr family that helped found Dawa. Its tens of thousands of armed men are only loosely under Sadr's control. Like SCIRI, the Mahdi Army has spawned death squads, including a possibly rogue unit in Baghdad led by Abu Deraa, "the Zarqawi of the Shiites." Sadr, who also has ties to Iran, is more of an Iraqi nationalist than other Iran-allied Shiites.

Iraqi National List. Though led by a Shiite - ex-Baathist and former CIA and MI6 asset Ayad Allawi, who was prime minister until early 2005 - the Iraqi National List is a primarily nonsectarian coalition.

It was created as an inclusive alternative to the fundamentalist Shiite parties and includes the party of top Sunni tribal leader (and former Iraqi VP) Ghazi al-Yawer.

Sunnis

Iraq Accord Front. Led by Adnan al-Dulaimi, scion of the largest Sunni tribe in Anbar province, the most religion-oriented of the Sunni coalitions includes the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a secret society founded in Cairo in 1928. Because the Islamic Party participated in various transitional governments, the coalition is now seen by many Sunnis as too close to the United States; in the late 2005 elections, which many Sunnis boycotted, the Iraq Accord Front became Parliament's largest Sunni bloc.

Iraqi National Dialogue Front. Led by Saleh al-Mutlaq, a former Baath party member said to be connected to the insurgency, this bloc has 11 seats in Parliament.

Association of Muslim Scholars. This coalition of clerics straddles the gap between the Sunni establishment and the insurgency.

Its leader, Harith al-Dhari, is more nationalist than Islamist; his son has called the group "the political arm of the resistance fighting to evict American forces from Iraq." The Iraqi government has a warrant out for Dhari's arrest.

The Insurgency. A mostly Sunni "network of networks" linking disparate interests such as former military and intelligence officers, Baath party officials, tribal groups, clergymen, nationalists, and Islamists, the insurgency today has tens of thousands of men under arms. A key underground leader is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a top official under Saddam.

Al Qaeda in Iraq. Founded by the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda makes up a small percentage of the insurgency, but its actions are responsible for a disproportionate number of civilian killings. Its leadership is opaque, and its relationship, if any, to Osama bin Laden is unclear. Its rapport with the rest of the insurgency is strained at best.

Kurds

Kurdistan Democratic Party. The largest and most powerful Kurdish party. Founded in 1946 by a wily warlord, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, the KDP and its pesh merga ("facing death") militia remain a family affair. Its founder's son, Massoud Barzani, is the president of the Kurdish government in northern Iraq, and lots of other Barzanis help run the KDP today.

Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. The KDP's younger sibling was founded by current Iraqi president Jalal Talabani in 1975, after the collapse of a KDP-sponsored uprising supported by the CIA, the Mossad, and the Shah of Iran. The PUK has gotten support from Syria and Iran; in the '90s it was embroiled in a civil war against the KDP. An alliance between the two parties has 53 seats in Parliament; both want independence for the Kurds.

Iraq 101: From Allawi to Zarqawi

2007-03-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

Mother Jones March/April 2007 Issue

Who is this Ali cat? Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds - a primer.

Partly Sunni: Iraq's Neighbors

Iraq is 60 to 65 percent Shiite Arab, 12 to 15 percent Sunni Arab, and 18 to 20 percent Kurd. But it's not a neat breakdown: The big cities, where the majority of Iraqis live, are thoroughly mixed, and many Iraqis live in blended Sunni-Shiite families; some call themselves "Sushi." Sunnis were favored by Saddam Hussein and the Baath party, whose fall gave rise to a Shiite backlash; today, most ordinary Iraqis are horrified by sectarian violence but turn to their own groups for protection.

Shiites

Shiism is a minority branch of Islam followed by about 10 percent of all Muslims, including nearly all of Iran and Bahrain as well as parts of Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan. The schism began after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632, when one group of disciples followed his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and a line of imams after him. "Shia" is short for Shiat Ali, or "followers of Ali." Many Shiites believe that the 12th imam, Muhammad al Mahdi, did not die but went into hiding, and will reappear as a messiah. Sunnis often portray Shiites as heretics - a claim that much of Western scholarship has embraced in describing Shiism as a "sect" - but the two branches' theology differs little, and both read exactly the same Koran. The Shiite branch is more centralized, with a Vatican-like hierarchy of clergymen led by grand ayatollahs. Since the 1979 revolution in Iran, Shiism in the activist mold of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Lebanese movement Hezbollah has developed into a militant force across the Middle East, and that strain is now also evident in Iraq.

Sunnis

Islam's majority branch is dominant in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Rather than following Ali, Sunnis (from sunna, "tradition of the prophet") consider Muhammad's father-in-law, Abu Bakr, to be the prophet's legitimate successor and the first in a line of caliphs ("commanders of the faithful"); Shiites believe Abu Bakr usurped the post. The vast majority of Sunni clerics are apolitical, moderate, and concerned chiefly with religious law and theology; the minority hardline strains are associated chiefly with the back-to-basics fundamentalism of the Salafi movement and the Saudi-based Wahhabi school. The most militant and political Sunni elements emerged in the 20th century in a string of activist movements starting with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and culminating in Al Qaeda.

Kurds

An ancient, mountain-dwelling ethnic group numbering perhaps 30 million in all, with 5 million in Iraq, the Kurds - who are mostly Sunnis, but politically align with whomever will support their goals - have revolted numerous times in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. Ever since U.S. and British warplanes established a no-fly zone in northeast Iraq in the 1990s, Iraqi Kurds have enjoyed de facto autonomy, a privilege enshrined in the new constitution. But many want full independence, and their political leadership has staked a claim to the mixed Kurdish and Arab city of Kirkuk and its massive oil fields. Seizing Kirkuk could spark civil war with Iraq's Arabs and provoke an intervention by Turkey, which fears few things more than an oil-rich Kurdish entity on its border.

5,000 Years of Invasions
c. 2750 B.C. Gilgamesh rules Uruk, namesake of modern Iraq
c. 2300 B.C. Akkadian king Sargon I conquerors Mesopotamia
1792 B.C. Hammurabi takes throne of Babylon
689 B.C. Assyrians destroy Babylon
600 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds Babylon
539 B.C. Persia's Cyrus the Great invades
330 B.C. Alexander the Great invades
53 B.C. Romans attack
638 A.D. Muslim Arabs sweep to power
1258 Mongols besiege and capture Baghdad
1401 Central Asian warlord Tamerlane sacks Baghdad
1410 Black Sheep Turkmen take Baghdad
1466 White Sheep Turkmen take over
1534 Ottomans occupy Baghdad
1915 British attack Ottomans, Iraq becomes a British possession in 1920
1921 Hashemite monarchy installed
1932 Iraq gains independence
1952 Military coup kills King Faisal II
1968 Arab Socialist Baath party takes power
1979 Saddam Hussein becomes president
1980 Iraq invades Iran; eight-year war begins
1991 Gulf War
2003 United States invades

The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide

2007-03-01T17:46:00.000-08:00

By Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank
Mother Jones

March/April 2007 Issue

"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." So said President Bush on November 30, 2005, refining his earlier call to "bring them on." Jihadist terrorists, the administration's argument went, would be drawn to Iraq like moths to a flame, and would perish there rather than wreak havoc elsewhere in the world.

The president's argument conveyed two important assumptions: first, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to U.S. interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists. However, the White House has never cited any evidence for either of these assumptions, and none appears to be publicly available.

The administration's own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States," circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that "the Iraq War has become the 'cause celebre' for jihadists ... and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

Yet administration officials have continued to suggest that there is no evidence any greater jihadist threat exists as a result of the Iraq War. "Are more terrorists being created in the world?" then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rhetorically asked during a press conference in September. "We don't know. The world doesn't know. There are not good metrics to determine how many people are being trained in a radical madrasa school in some country." In January 2007 Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte in congressional testimony stated that he was "not certain" that the Iraq War had been a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and played down the likely impact of the war on jihadists worldwide: "I wouldn't say there has been a widespread growth in Islamic extremism beyond Iraq. I really wouldn't."

Indeed, though what we will call "The Iraq Effect" is a crucial matter for U.S. national security, we have found no statistical documentation of its existence and gravity, at least in the public domain. In this report, we have undertaken what we believe to be the first such study, using information from the world's premier database on global terrorism. The results are being published for the first time by Mother Jones, the news and investigative magazine, as part of a broader "Iraq 101" package in the magazine's March/April 2007 issue.

Our study shows that the Iraq War has generated a stunning sevenfold increase in the yearly rate of fatal jihadist attacks, amounting to literally hundreds of additional terrorist attacks and thousands of civilian lives lost; even when terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is excluded, fatal attacks in the rest of the world have increased by more than one-third.

We are not making the argument that without the Iraq War, jihadist terrorism would not exist, but our study shows that the Iraq conflict has greatly increased the spread of the Al Qaeda ideological virus, as shown by a rising number of terrorist attacks in the past three years from London to Kabul, and from Madrid to the Red Sea.

In our study we focused on the following questions:

Has jihadist terrorism gone up or down around the world since the invasion of Iraq?

What has been the trend if terrorist incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan (the military fronts of the "war on terrorism") are excluded?

Has terrorism explicitly directed at the United States and its allies also increased?
In order to zero in on The Iraq Effect, we focused on the rate of terrorist attacks in two time periods: September 12, 2001, to March 20, 2003 (the day of the Iraq invasion), and March 21, 2003, to September 30, 2006. Extending the data set before 9/11 would risk distorting the results, because the rate of attacks by jihadist groups jumped considerably after 9/11 as jihadist terrorists took inspiration from the events of that terrible day.

We first determined which terrorist organizations should be classified as jihadist. We included in this group Sunni extremist groups affiliated with or sympathetic to the ideology of Al Qaeda. We decided to exclude terrorist attacks by Palestinian groups, as they depend largely on factors particular to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our study draws its data from the MIPT-RAND Terrorism database (available at terrorismknowledgebase.org), which is widely considered to be the best publicly available database on terrorism incidents. RAND defines a terrorist attack as an attack on a civilian entity designed to promote fear or alarm and further a particular political agenda. In our study we only included attacks that caused at least one fatality and were attributed by RAND to a known jihadist group. In some terrorist attacks, and this is especially the case in Iraq, RAND has not been able to attribute a particular attack to a known jihadist group. Therefore our study likely understates the extent of jihadist terrorism in Iraq and around the world.

Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere - a 35 percent increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, from 27.6 to 37 a year, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities from 496 to 554 per year.

Of course, just because jihadist terrorism has risen in the period after the invasion of Iraq, it does not follow that events in Iraq itself caused the change. For example, a rise in attacks in the Kashmir conflict and the Chechen separatist war against Russian forces may have nothing to do with the war in Iraq. But the most direct test of The Iraq Effect - whether the United States and its allies have suffered more jihadist terrorism after the invasion than before - shows that the rate of jihadist attacks on Western interests and citizens around the world (outside of Afghanistan and Iraq) has risen by a quarter, from 7.2 to 9 a year, while the yearly fatality rate in these attacks has increased by 4 percent from 191 to 198.

One of the few positive findings of our study is that only 18 American civilians (not counting civilian contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan) have been killed by jihadist groups since the war in Iraq began. But that number is still significantly higher than the four American civilians who were killed in attacks attributed to jihadist groups in the period between 9/11 and the Iraq War. It was the capture and killing of much of Al Qaeda's leadership after 9/11 and the breakup of its training camp facilities in Afghanistan - not the war in Iraq - that prevented Al Qaeda from successfully launching attacks on American targets on the scale it did in the years before 9/11.

Also undermining the argument that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups are being distracted from plotting against Western targets are the dangerous, anti-American plots that have arisen since the start of the Iraq War. Jihadist terrorists have attacked key American allies since the Iraq conflict began, mounting multiple bombings in London that killed 52 in July 2005, and attacks in Madrid in 2004 that killed 191. Shehzad Tanweer, one of the London bombers, stated in his videotaped suicide "will," "What have you witnessed now is only the beginning of a string of attacks that will continue and become stronger until you pull your forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq." There have been six jihadist attacks on the home soil of the United States' NATO allies (including Turkey) in the period after the invasion of Iraq, whereas there were none in the 18 months following 9/11; and, of course, the plan uncovered in London in August 2006 to smuggle liquid explosives onto U.S. airliners, had it succeeded, would have killed thousands.

Al Qaeda has not let the Iraq War distract it from targeting the United States and her allies. In a January 19, 2006 audiotape, Osama bin Laden himself refuted President Bush's argument that Iraq had distracted and diverted Al Qaeda: "The reality shows that that the war against America and its allies has not remained limited to Iraq, as he claims, but rather, that Iraq has become a source and attraction and recruitment of qualified people.... As for the delay in similar [terrorist] operations in America, [the] operations are being prepared, and you will witness them, in your own land, as soon as preparations are complete."

Ayman al Zawahiri echoed bin Laden's words in a March 4, 2006, videotape broadcast by Al Jazeera calling for jihadists to launch attacks on the home soil of Western countries: "[Muslims have to] inflict losses on the crusader West, especially to its economic infrastructure with strikes that would make it bleed for years. The strikes on New York, Washington, Madrid, and London are the best examples."

One measure of the impact of the Iraq War is the precipitous drop in public support for the United States in Muslim countries. Jordan, a key U.S. ally, saw popular approval for the United States drop from 25 percent in 2002 to 1 percent in 2003. In Lebanon during the same period, favorable views of the United States dropped from 30 percent to 15 percent, and in the world's largest Muslim country, Indonesia, favorable views plummeted from 61 percent to 15 percent. Disliking the United States does not make you a terrorist, but clearly the pool of Muslims who dislike the United States has grown by hundreds of millions since the Iraq War began. The United States' plummeting popularity does not suggest active popular support for jihadist terrorists but it does imply some sympathy with their anti-American posture, which means a significant swath of the Muslim population cannot be relied on as an effective party in counter-terrorism/insurgency measures. And so, popular contempt for U.S. policy has become a force multiplier for Islamist militants.

The Iraq War has also encouraged Muslim youth around the world to join jihadist groups, not necessarily directly tied to Al Qaeda but often motivated by a similar ideology. The Iraq War allowed Al Qaeda, which was on the ropes in 2002 after the United States had captured or killed two-thirds of its leadership, to reinvent itself as a broader movement because Al Qaeda's central message - that the United States is at war with Islam - was judged by significant numbers of Muslims to have been corroborated by the war in Iraq. And compounding this, the wide dissemination of the exploits of jihadist groups in Iraq following the invasion energized potential and actual jihadists across the world.

How exactly has The Iraq Effect played out in different parts of the world? The effect has not been uniform. Europe, the Arab world, and Afghanistan all saw major rises in jihadist terrorism in the period after the invasion of Iraq, while Pakistan and India and the Chechnya/Russia front saw only smaller increases in jihadist terrorism. And in Southeast Asia, attacks and killings by jihadist groups fell by over 60 percent in the period after the Iraq War. The strength or weakness of The Iraq Effect on jihadist terrorism in a particular country seems to be influenced by four factors: (1) if the country itself has troops in Iraq; (2) geographical proximity to Iraq; (3) the degree of identification with Iraq's Arabs felt in the country; and (4) the level of exchanges of ideas or personnel with Iraqi jihadist groups. This may explain why jihadist groups in Europe, Arab countries, and Afghanistan were more affected by the Iraq War than groups in other regions. Europe, unlike Kashmir, Chechnya, and Southeast Asia for example, contains several countries that are part of the coalition in Iraq. It is relatively geographically close to the Arab world and has a large Arab-Muslim diaspora from which jihadists have recruited.

European intelligence services are deeply concerned about the effect of the Iraq War. For example, Dame Eliza Mannigham-Buller, the head of Britain's MI5, stated on November 10, 2006, "In Iraq, attacks are regularly videoed and the footage is downloaded onto the Internet [and] chillingly we see the results here. Young teenagers are being groomed to be suicide bombers. We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and damage our economy ... 30 that we know of. [The] threat is serious, is growing, and, I believe, will be with us for a generation." Startlingly, a recent poll found that a quarter of British Muslims believe that the July 7, 2005, London bombings were justifiable because of British foreign policy, bearing out Dame Eliza's concern about a new generation of radicals in the United Kingdom.

While Islamist militants in Europe are mobilized by a series of grievances such as Palestine, Afghanistan, the Kashmir conflict, and Chechnya, no issue has resonated more in radical circles and on Islamist websites than the war in Iraq. This can be seen in the skyrocketing rate of jihadist terrorist attacks around the Arab world outside of Iraq. There have been 37 attacks in Arab countries outside of Iraq since the invasion, while there were only three in the period between 9/11 and March 2003. The rate of attacks in Arab countries jumped by 445 percent since the Iraq invasion, while the rate of killings rose by 783 percent. The November 9, 2005 bombings of three American hotels in Amman, Jordan, that killed 60, an operation directed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq network, was the most direct manifestation of The Iraq Effect in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has seen an upsurge in jihadist terrorism since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There were no jihadist terrorist attacks between 9/11 and the Iraq War but 12 in the period since. The reason for the surge in terrorism was a decision taken by Al Qaeda's Saudi branch in the spring of 2003 to launch a wave of attacks (primarily at Western targets) to undermine the Saudi royal family. These attacks were initiated on May 12, 2003 with the bombing of Western compounds in Riyadh, killing 34, including 10 Americans. While Saudi authorities believe that planning and training for the operation predated the war in Iraq, the timing of the attack, just weeks after the U.S. invasion is striking.

The fact that the Iraq War radicalized some young Saudis is underlined by studies showing that more Saudis have conducted suicide operations in Iraq than any other nationality. For instance, Mohammed Hafez, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, in a study of the 101 identified suicide attackers in Iraq from March 2003 to February 2006, found that more than 40 percent were Saudi. This jihadist energy was not just transferred over the Saudi border into Iraq. It also contributed to attacks in the Kingdom. The group that beheaded the American contractor Paul Johnson in Riyadh in June 2004 called itself the "Al Fallujah brigade of Al Qaeda" and claimed that it had carried out the killing in part to avenge the actions of "disbelievers" in Iraq. In January 2004 Al Qaeda's Saudi affiliate launched Al Battar, an online training magazine specifically directed at young Saudis interested in fighting their regime. The achievements of jihadists in Iraq figured prominently in its pages. Indeed, a contributor to the first issue of Al Battar argued that the Iraq War had made jihad "a commandment" for Saudi Arabians "[because] the Islamic nation is today in acute conflict with the Crusaders."

The Iraq War had a strong impact in other Arab countries too. Daily images aired by Al Jazeera and other channels of suffering Iraqis enraged the Arab street and strengthened the hands of radicals everywhere. In Egypt, the Iraq War has contributed to a recent wave of attacks by small, self-generated groups. A Sinai-based jihadist group carried out coordinated bombing attacks on Red Sea resorts popular with Western tourists at Taba in October 2004, at Sharm el-Sheikh in July 2005, and at Dahab in April 2006, killing a total of more than 120.

One of the cell's members, Younis Elian Abu Jarir, a taxi driver whose job was to ferry the group around, stated in a confession offered as evidence in court that "they convinced me of the need for holy war against the Jews, Americans, Italians, and other nationalities that participated in the occupation of Iraq." Osama Rushdi, a former spokesman of the Egyptian terrorist group Gamma Islamiyya now living in London, told us that while attacks in the Sinai were partly directed at the Egyptian regime, they appeared to be primarily anti-Western in motivation: "The Iraq War contributed to the negative feelings of the Sinai group. Before the Iraq War, most Egyptians did not have a negative feeling towards American policy. Now almost all are opposed to American policy."

Since the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan has suffered 219 jihadist terrorist attacks that can be attributed to a particular group, resulting in the deaths of 802 civilians. The fact that the Taliban only conducted its first terrorist attacks in September 2003, a few months after the invasion of Iraq, is significant. International forces had already been stationed in the country for two years before the Taliban began to specifically target the U.S.-backed Karzai government and civilians sympathetic to it. This points to a link between events in Iraq and the initiation of the Taliban's terrorist campaign in Afghanistan.

True, local dynamics form part of the explanation for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the use of terrorism, particularly suicide attacks, by the Taliban is an innovation drawn from the Iraqi theater. Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan terrorism researcher, points out that suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until 2005. In 2006, Karzai says, there were 118 such attacks, more than there had been in the entire history of the country. Internet sites have helped spread the tactics of Iraqi jihadists. In 2005 the "Media Committee of the Al Qaeda Mujahideen in Afghanistan" launched an online magazine called Vanguards of Kharasan, which includes articles on what Afghan fighters can learn from Coalition and jihadist strategies in Iraq. Abdul Majid Abdul Majed, a contributor to the April 2006 issue of the magazine, argued for an expansion in suicide operations, citing the effectiveness of jihadist operations in Iraq.

Mullah Dadullah, a key Taliban commander, gave an interview to Al Jazeera in 2006 in which he explained how the Iraq War has influenced the Taliban. Dadullah noted that "we have 'give and take' with the mujahideen in Iraq." Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist who is writing bin Laden's biography, told us that young men traveled from the Afghan province of Khost to "on-the-job training" in Iraq in 2004. "They came back with lots of CDs which were full of military actions against U.S. troops in the Mosul, Fallujah, and Baghdad areas. I think suicide bombing was introduced in Afghanistan and Pakistan after local boys came back after spending some time in Iraq. I met a Taliban commander, Mullah Mannan, last year in Zabul who told me that he was trained in Iraq by Zarqawi along with many Pakistani tribals."

Propaganda circulating in Afghanistan and Pakistan about American "atrocities" and jihadist "heroics" has also energized the Taliban, encouraging a previously somewhat isolated movement to see itself as part of a wider struggle. Our study found a striking correlation in how terrorist campaigns intensified in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rate of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan gathered pace in the summer of 2005, a half year after a similar increase in Iraq, and in 2006 the rate of attacks in both countries rose in tandem to new, unprecedented levels.

While the Iraq War has had a strong effect on the rise in terrorism in Afghanistan, it appears to have played less of a role on jihadists operating in Pakistan and India, though terrorism did rise in those countries following the invasion of Iraq. (Of course, neither Pakistan nor India has foreign troops on its soil, which accounts, in part, for the high terrorism figures in Afghanistan.) The rate of jihadist attacks rose by 21 percent while the fatality rate rose by 19 percent. There were 52 attacks after the Iraq invasion, killing 489 civilians, while there were 19 in the period before, killing 182. The local dynamics of the Kashmir conflict, tensions between India and Pakistan, and the resurfacing of the Taliban in eastern Pakistan likely played a large role here. That said, there is evidence that the Iraq War did energize jihadists in Pakistan. Hamid Mir says, "Iraq not only radicalized the Pakistani tribals [near the Afghan border] but it offered them the opportunity for them to go to Iraq via Iran to get on-the-job training."

There is also evidence that the Iraq War had some impact in other areas of Pakistan. In the summer of 2004, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the head of the Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, told followers in Lahore, "Islam is in grave danger, and the mujahideen are fighting to keep its glory. They are fighting the forces of evil in Iraq in extremely difficult circumstances. We should send mujahideen from Pakistan to help them." And Pakistan, inasmuch as it has become Al Qaeda's new base for training and planning attacks, has become the location where significant numbers of would-be jihadists - including some young British Pakistanis such as the London suicide bombers, radicalized in part by the Iraq War - have traveled to learn bomb-making skills.

In Russia and Chechnya, the Iraq War appears to have had less of an impact than on other jihadist fronts. This is unsurprising given the fact that jihadist groups in the region are preoccupied by a separatist war against the Russian military. Whilst following the invasion of Iraq there was a rise in the number of attacks by Chechen groups that share a similar ideology with Al Qaeda, the total rate of fatalities did not go up. The Iraq War does seem to have diverted some jihadists from the Russian/Chechen front: Arab fighters who might have previously gone to Chechnya now have a cause at their own doorstep, while funds from Arab donors increasingly have gone to the Iraqi jihad.

Southeast Asia has been the one region in the world in which jihadist terrorism has declined significantly in the period since the invasion of Iraq. There was a 67 percent drop in the rate of attacks (from 10.5 to 3.5 attacks per year) in the post-invasion period and a 69 percent drop in the rate of fatalities (from 201 to 62 fatalities per year). And there has been no bombing on the scale of the October 2002 Bali nightclub attack that killed more than 200. However, jihadist terrorism in Southeast Asia has declined in spite, not because of, the Iraq War. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was deeply unpopular in the region, as demonstrated by the poll finding that only 15 percent of Indonesians had a favorable view of the United States in 2003. But the negative impact of the Iraq War on public opinion was mitigated by U.S. efforts to aid the region in the wake of the devastating tsunami of December 2004 - Pew opinion surveys have shown that the number of those with favorable views towards the United States in Indonesia crept above 30 percent in 2005 and 2006.

However, the main reason for the decline of jihadist terrorism in Southeast Asia has been the successful crackdown by local authorities on jihadist groups and their growing unpopularity with the general population. The August 2003 capture of Hambali, Jemaa Islamiya's operational commander, was key to degrading the group's capacity to launch attacks as was the arrest of hundreds of Jemaa Islamiya and Abu Sayyaf operatives in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore in the years after the October 2002 Bali bombings. Those arrested included most of those who planned the Bali attacks, as well as former instructors at Jemaa Islamiya camps and individuals involved in financing attacks. And in November 2005 Indonesian security services killed Jemaa Islamiya master bomber Azhari bin Husin in a shoot-out. The second wave of Bali attacks in 2005 killed mostly Indonesians and created a popular backlash against jihadist groups in Indonesia, degrading their ability to recruit operatives. And Muslim leaders such as Masdar Farid Masudi, the deputy leader of the country's largest Islamic group, condemned the bombings: "If the perpetrators are Muslims, their sentences must be multiplied because they have tarnished the sacredness of their religion and smeared its followers worldwide."

Our survey shows that the Iraq conflict has motivated jihadists around the world to see their particular struggle as part of a wider global jihad fought on behalf of the Islamic ummah, the global community of Muslim believers. The Iraq War had a strong impact in jihadist circles in the Arab world and Europe, but also on the Taliban, which previously had been quite insulated from events elsewhere in the Muslim world. By energizing the jihadist groups, the Iraq conflict acted as a catalyst for the increasing globalization of the jihadist cause, a trend that should be deeply troubling for American policymakers. In the late 1990s, bin Laden pushed a message of a global jihad and attracted recruits from around the Muslim world to train and fight in Afghanistan. The Iraq War has made bin Laden's message of global struggle even more persuasive to militants. Over the past three years, Iraq has attracted thousands of foreign fighters who have been responsible for the majority of suicide attacks in the country. Those attacks have had an enormous strategic impact; for instance, getting the United Nations to pull out of Iraq and sparking the Iraqi civil war.

Emblematic of the problem is Muriel Degauque, a 38-year-old Belgian woman who on November 9, 2005, near the town of Baquba in central Iraq, detonated a bomb as she drove past an American patrol. In the bomb crater, investigators found travel documents that showed that she had arrived in Iraq from Belgium just a few weeks earlier with her Moroccan-Belgian husband Hissam Goris. The couple had been recruited by "Al Qaeda in Iraq." Goris would die the following day, shot by American forces as he prepared to launch a suicide attack near Fallujah.

The story of Muriel Degauque and her husband is part of a trend that Harvard terrorism researcher Assaf Moghadam terms the "globalization of martyrdom." The London suicide bombings in July 2005 revealed the surprising willingness of four British citizens to die to protest the United Kingdom's role in the Coalition in Iraq; Muriel Degauque, for her part, was willing to die for the jihadist cause in a country in which she was a stranger.

This challenges some existing conceptions of the motivations behind suicide attacks. In 2005 University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape published a much-commented-upon study of suicide bombing, "Dying to Win," in which he used a mass of data about previous suicide bombing campaigns to argue that they principally occurred "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." (Of course, terrorism directed against totalitarian regimes rarely occurs because such regimes are police states and are unresponsive to public opinion.) Pape also argued that while religion might aggravate campaigns of suicide terrorism, such campaigns had also been undertaken by secular groups, most notably the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, whose most spectacular success was the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide attacker in 1991.

Pape's findings may explain the actions and motivations of terrorist groups in countries such as Sri Lanka, but his principal claim that campaigns of suicide terrorism are generally nationalist struggles to liberate occupied lands that have little to do with religious belief does not survive contact with the reality of what is going on today in Iraq. The most extensive suicide campaign in history is being conducted in Iraq largely by foreigners animated by the deeply-held religious belief that they must liberate a Muslim land from the "infidel" occupiers.

While Iraqis make up the great bulk of the insurgents, several studies have shown that the suicide attackers in Iraq are generally foreigners, while only a small proportion are Iraqi. (Indeed, the most feared terrorist leader in Iraq until his death earlier this year, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, was a Jordanian.) The Israeli researcher Reuven Paz, using information posted on Al Qaeda-linked websites between October 2004 and March 2005, found that of the 33 suicide attacks listed, 23 were conducted by Saudis, and only 1 by an Iraqi. Similarly, in June 2005 the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute of Washington, D.C. found by tracking both jihadist websites and media reports that of the 199 Sunni extremists who had died in Iraq either in suicide attacks or in action against Coalition or Iraqi forces, 104 were from Saudi Arabia and only 21 from Iraq. The rest were predominantly from countries around the Middle East. And Mohammed Hafez in his previously cited study of the 101 "known" suicide bombers in Iraq found that while 44 were Saudi and 8 were from Italy(!), only 7 were from Iraq.

In congressional testimony this past November, CIA Director General Michael Hayden said that "an overwhelming percentage of the suicide bombers are foreign." A senior U.S. military intelligence official told us that a worrisome recent trend is the rising number of North Africans who have joined the ranks of foreign fighters in Iraq, whose number General Hayden pegged at 1,300 during his November congressional testimony. A Saudi official also confirmed to us the rising number of North Africans who are being drawn into the Iraq War.

The globalization of jihad and martyrdom, accelerated to a significant degree by the Iraq War, has some disquieting implications for American security in the future. First, it has energized jihadist groups generally; second, not all foreign fighters attracted to Iraq will die there. In fact there is evidence that some jihadists are already leaving Iraq to operate elsewhere. Saudi Arabia has made a number of arrests of fighters coming back from Iraq, and Jordanian intelligence sources say that 300 fighters have returned to Jordan from Iraq. As far away as Belgium, authorities have indicated that Younis Lekili, an alleged member of the cell that recruited Muriel Degauque, had previously traveled to fight in Iraq, where he lost his leg. (Lekili is awaiting trial in Belgium.)

German, French, and Dutch intelligence officials have estimated that there are dozens of their citizens returning from the Iraq theater, and some appear to have been determined to carry out attacks on their return to Europe. For example, French police arrested Hamid Bach, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, in June 2005 in Montpellier, several months after he returned from a staging camp for Iraq War recruits in Syria. According to French authorities, Bach's handlers there instructed him to assist with plotting terrorist attacks in Italy. Back in France, Bach is alleged to have bought significant quantities of hydrogen peroxide and to have looked up details on explosives and detonators online. (Bach is awaiting trial in France.)

This "blowback" trend will greatly increase when the war eventually winds down in Iraq. In the short term the countries most at risk are those whose citizens have traveled to fight in Iraq, in particular Arab countries bordering Iraq. Jamal Khashoggi, a leading Saudi expert on jihadist groups, told us that "while Iraq brought new blood into the Al Qaeda organization in Saudi Arabia, this was at a time when the network was being dismantled. Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia could not accommodate these recruits so they sent them to Iraq to train them, motivate them, and prepare them for a future wave of attacks in the Kingdom. It is a deep worry to Saudi authorities that Saudis who have gone to Iraq will come back." That's a scenario for which Khashoggi says Saudi security forces are painstakingly preparing.

Several U.S. citizens have tried to involve themselves in the Iraq jihad. In December an American was arrested in Cairo, Egypt, accused of being part of a cell plotting terrorist attacks in Iraq. And in February 2006 three Americans from Toledo, Ohio, were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill U.S. military personnel in Iraq. According to the FBI, one of these individuals, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, was in contact with an Arab jihadist group sending fighters to Iraq and tried unsuccessfully to cross the border into Iraq. However, to date there is no evidence of Americans actually fighting in Iraq so the number of returnees to the United States is likely to be small. The larger risk is that jihadists will migrate from Iraq to Western countries, a trend that will be accelerated if, as happened following the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, those fighters are not allowed to return to their home countries.

Already terrorist groups in Iraq may be in a position to start sending funds to other jihadist fronts. According to a U.S. government report leaked to the New York Times in November 2006, the fact that insurgent and terrorist groups are raising up to $200 million a year from various illegal activities such as kidnapping and oil theft in Iraq means that they "may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside Iraq." Indeed, a letter from Al Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi in July 2005 contained this revealing request: "Many of the [funding] lines have been cut off. Because of this we need a payment while new lines are being opened. So if you're capable of sending a payment of approximately one hundred thousand we'll be very grateful to you."

The "globalization of martyrdom" prompted by the Iraq War has not only attracted foreign fighters to die in Iraq (we record 148 suicide-terrorist attacks in Iraq credited to an identified jihadist group) but has also encouraged jihadists to conduct many more suicide operations elsewhere. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there has been a 246 percent rise in the rate of suicide attacks (6 before and 47 after) by jihadist groups outside of Iraq and a 24 percent increase in the corresponding fatality rate. Even excluding Afghanistan, there has been a 150 percent rise in the rate of suicide attacks and a 14 percent increase in the rate of fatalities attributable to jihadists worldwide. The reasons for the spread of suicide bombing attacks in other jihadist theaters are complex but the success of these tactics in Iraq, the lionization that Iraqi martyrs receive on jihadist websites, and the increase in feelings of anger and frustration caused by images of the Iraq War have all likely contributed significantly. The spread of suicide bombings should be of great concern to the United States in defending its interests and citizens around the world, because they are virtually impossible to defend against.

The Iraq War has also encouraged the spread of more hardline forms of jihad (the corollary to an increase in suicide bombing). Anger and frustration over Iraq has increased the popularity, especially among young militants, of a hardcore takfiri ideology that is deeply intolerant of divergent interpretations of Islam and highly tolerant of extreme forms of violence. The visceral anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Shiism widely circulated among the Internet circles around ideologues such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada (both Jordanian-Palestinian mentors to Abu Musab al Zarqawi) and Al Qaeda's Syrian hawk, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, are even more extreme, unlikely as it may sound, than the statements of bin Laden himself.

Our study shows just how counterproductive the Iraq War has been to the war on terrorism. The most recent State Department report on global terrorism states that the goal of the United States is to identify, target, and prevent the spread of "jihadist groups focused on attacking the United States or its allies [and those groups that] view governments and leaders in the Muslim world as their primary targets." Yet, since the invasion of Iraq, attacks by such groups have risen more than sevenfold around the world. And though few Americans have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the past three years it is wishful thinking to believe that this will continue to be the case, given the continued determination of militant jihadists to target the country they see as their main enemy. We will be living with the consequences of the Iraq debacle for more than a decade.

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Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.
Special thanks to Mike Torres and Zach Stern at NYU and Kim Cragin and Drew Curiel at RAND.

Sunni Insurgents Remain Biggest Threat to US Troops in Iraq

2007-03-01T17:40:00.000-08:00

By Drew Brown McClatchy Newspapers Wednesday 28 February 2007

Washington - Sunni Muslim insurgents remain by far the biggest threat to American troops in Iraq, despite recent U.S. claims that Iran is providing Shiite Muslim militia groups with a new type of roadside bomb, a review of American casualty reports shows.

While U.S. military officials have held briefings to publicize their concerns about the potent bombs known as explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) or penetrators, casualty reports suggest that such weapons in the hands of Shiite militias are responsible for a relatively small number of American deaths.

U.S. officials have said that attacks with such weapons increased 150 percent in the past year. But a review of bombings by location shows that less than 10 percent of attacks that killed at least two American service members in the past 14 months were in areas where Shiite militias are dominant.

Those reports show that fewer than half the bomb attacks on heavily armored U.S. vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles were in areas where Shiite militias dominate.

While it's difficult to know which armed group planted a bomb, analysts say the casualty numbers show that U.S. officials are exaggerating the importance of EFPs, which military officials say have been used only by Shiites.

"There were relatively few American deaths from explosively formed penetrators until recently, but you can say the same thing about attacks on helicopters or chlorine attacks," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a policy research group in Arlington, Va. "The fact of the matter is that the insurgents, both Sunni and Shiite, are becoming a lot more sophisticated in their tactics. Explosively formed penetrators are only one part of that, and they are not a particularly important part."

Pentagon officials say the issue is important because the Iranian government appears to be involved.

"I think the issue is not whether or not materials and supplies are coming from Iran - they are - but rather how far up the Iranian leadership is involved," said Bryan Whitman, the Pentagon's chief spokesman.

U.S. military officials accuse Iran of supplying Shiite militants with EFPs, which fire a molten slug of metal that can punch through the thickest American armor, including tanks and other vehicles designed to withstand heavy blasts. The officials say the bombs have killed at least 170 U.S. and allied service members and wounded more than 620 since they were first discovered on the battlefield in mid-2004.

Those officials have declined to provide other information about the bombs' use, including when and where the explosions that killed Americans took place. They say that such information would tip off the enemy to its successes.

Roadside bombs have killed at least 1,150 Americans since the war began, according to Coalition Casualty Count, a Web site that tracks coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, 496 died from Dec. 1, 2005, through Jan. 31 of this year.

U.S. military officials point to the discovery of a weapons cache in a Shiite village near Baqouba, about 40 miles from Baghdad, as the latest evidence that Iran is supplying Shiite militants with weapons.

On Monday, the Defense Department posted a video of the discovery on the Web and American officers in Baghdad displayed weapons seized in the raid, including rocket-propelled grenades, 120 mm mortars and 122 mm rockets that they said bore markings that proved the weapons were made in Iran last year.

The find also included artillery rounds, land mines, detonation cord, triggering devices, C-4 explosives and more than 140 metal discs, which U.S. military officers said were components for making EFPs.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the No. 2 commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, said earlier this week that the weapons clearly were linked to Iran.

"The mortar tubes were made in Iran," he said. "We know that the pieces of the explosively formed projectiles, the machine pieces, were made in Iran. So we know they're being developed and brought into Iraq."

Odierno said on CNN this week that he was convinced that the EFP materials were coming from Iran.

"We have tried to see people replicate them here in Iraq, and they have not been able to do it," he said. "The machining required, the materials that are required, we think absolutely are coming from Iran, and you saw the big cache we found just the other day - almost 140 of these could be produced from that cache that we found."

Odierno said Iran's al Quds commando force was involved either in training or supplying Shiite groups, but the full extent of the Iranian government's involvement remains unclear.

Analysts say the evidence is far from clear that Iran could be the only source for the bomb components.

"Explosively formed penetrators are not some exclusive franchise for the Iranians," Thompson said. "They are fairly common around the world."

Explosively formed penetrators are also known as shaped charges. The warheads were developed after World War I to penetrate tanks and other armored vehicles. Rocket-propelled grenades and antitank missiles are conventional examples. Shaped charges also are used in the oil and gas industry.

John Pike, the executive director of GlobalSecurity.org, an online clearinghouse for military, intelligence and homeland-security information, said that while designing a shaped charge would require expertise, fabricating the devices was simpler, requiring only skill in using metal-machining tools.

"These are not factory-produced munitions," he said.

Asked who'd have the expertise to manufacture a shaped charge, Pike cited "people who had worked with explosives in the petroleum industry." In Iraq, he said, "there would be a fair number of those."

Roadside bombs have been the No. 1 killer of U.S. service members in Iraq for years, though the numbers were dropping last year compared with the year before until October, when they shot up sharply, according to the Coalition Casualty Count Web site. December was the deadliest month of the war for roadside bombs, with 67 American deaths, nearly half of which were in Baghdad.

Overall, however, the number of U.S. deaths from IEDs in 2006 was up less than 6 percent from the year before; 419 last year compared with 397 in 2005, according to Coalition Casualty Count.

The spike in the last quarter of the year corresponded with an increased use of explosively formed projectiles during the same period, according to American defense officials. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said on the Senate floor recently that 90 percent of the EFPs detonated in Iraq had been used in Baghdad.

U.S. military officials say EFPs are more dangerous than other types of roadside bombs because they typically produce more casualties.

American casualty reports show that the deadliest roadside-bomb attacks of the war have occurred in predominantly Sunni areas or areas with mixed ethnic and religious populations.

Of the 81 roadside bomb attacks that killed two or more soldiers from December 2005 through January 2007, one-quarter occurred in western Iraq, which is predominantly Sunni, and nearly two-thirds took place in Baghdad and other ethnically and religiously mixed areas, the reports show. Fewer than 10 percent were in predominantly Shiite areas.

Of the 10 fatal bomb attacks on M1 Abrams tanks in the same period, four were in Baghdad and four in Anbar province, a mostly Sunni area. One each occurred in Balad and Taji, which have large Sunni populations and big U.S. bases.

Of the 11 fatal attacks on Bradley Fighting Vehicles during that period, four were in Baghdad. Four were in Taji, and one each occurred in Ramadi, Balad and al Muqdadiyah, all of which have large concentrations of Sunnis.

The three worst attacks on Bradleys were in Taji: Three American soldiers died in a roadside bombing Feb. 22, three in an attack last April 11 and four in a bombing Aug. 27.

US Commanders Admit: We Face a Vietnam-Style Collapse

2007-03-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

By Simon Tisdall Guardian Unlimited UK Thursday 01 March 2007

Elite officers in Iraq fear low morale, lack of troops and loss of political will.

An elite team of officers advising the US commander, General David Petraeus, in Baghdad has concluded that they have six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

The officers - combat veterans who are experts in counter-insurgency - are charged with implementing the "new way forward" strategy announced by George Bush on January 10. The plan includes a controversial "surge" of 21,500 additional American troops to establish security in the Iraqi capital and Anbar province.

But the team, known as the "Baghdad brains trust" and ensconced in the heavily fortified Green Zone, is struggling to overcome a range of entrenched problems in what has become a race against time, according to a former senior administration official familiar with their deliberations.

"They know they are operating under a clock. They know they are going to hear a lot more talk in Washington about 'Plan B' by the autumn - meaning withdrawal. They know the next six-month period is their opportunity. And they say it's getting harder every day," he said.

By improving security, the plan's short-term aim is to create time and space for the Iraqi government to bring rival Shia, Sunni and Kurd factions together in a process of national reconciliation, American officials say. If that works within the stipulated timeframe, longer term schemes for rebuilding Iraq under the so-called "go long" strategy will be set in motion.

But the next six months are make-or-break for the US military and the Iraqi government. The main obstacles confronting Gen Petraeus's team are:

Insufficient troops on the ground

A "disintegrating" international coalition

An anticipated increase in violence in the south as the British leave

Morale problems as casualties rise

A failure of political will in Washington and/or Baghdad.
"The scene is very tense," the former official said. "They are working round the clock. Endless cups of tea with the Iraqis. But they're still trying to figure out what's the plan. The president is expecting progress. But they're thinking, what does he mean? The plan is changing every minute, as all plans do."

The team is an unusual mix of combat experience and academic achievement. It includes Colonel Peter Mansoor, a former armoured division commander with a PhD in the history of infantry; Colonel HR McMaster, author of a well-known critique of Vietnam and a seasoned counter-insurgency operations chief; Lt-Col David Kilcullen, a seconded Australian officer and expert on Islamism; and Colonel Michael Meese, son of the former US attorney-general Edwin Meese, who was a member of the ill-fated Iraq Study Group.

Their biggest headache was insufficient troops on the ground despite the increase ordered by President Bush, the former official said. "We don't have the numbers for the counter-insurgency job even with the surge. The word 'surge' is a misnomer. Strategically, tactically, it's not a surge," an American officer said.

According to the US military's revised counter-insurgency field manual, FM 3-24, written by Gen Petraeus, the optimum "troop-to-task" ratio for Baghdad requires 120,000 US and allied troops in the city alone. Current totals, even including often unreliable Iraqi units, fall short and the deficit is even greater in conflict areas outside Baghdad.

"Additional troops are essential if we are to win," said Lt-Col John Nagel, co-author of the manual, in an address at the US Naval Institute in San Diego last month. One soldier for every 50 civilians in the most intense conflict areas was key to successful counter-insurgency work.Compounding the manpower problems is an apparently insurmountable shortage of civilian volunteers from the Pentagon, state department and treasury. They are needed to staff the additional provincial reconstruction teams and other aid projects promised by Mr Bush.

The cut in British troops in southern Iraq, coupled with the actual or anticipated departure of other allies, has heightened the Petraeus team's worries that the international coalition is "disintegrating" even as the US strives to regain the initiative in Iraq, the former official said.

Increased violence in the south is expected, caused in part by the "displacement" of Shia militias forced out of Baghdad by the US crackdown. American and Iraq forces entered the militant Shia stronghold of Sadr City on Tuesday for the first time since the surge began. No other major operation has yet been attempted there but "we or the Iraqis are going to have to fight them", one US officer said.

According to a British source, plans are in hand for the possible southwards deployment of 6,000 US troops to compensate for Britain's phased withdrawal and any upsurge in unrest.

Morale is another concern in the Green Zone headquarters: American forces are preparing for a rise in casualties as the crackdown gathers pace. In a message to the troops after he assumed overall command last month, Gen Petraeus praised their sacrifices while warning of more "difficult times" to come.

"We serve in Iraq at a critical time ... A decisive moment approaches. Shoulder to shoulder with our Iraqi comrades we will conduct a pivotal campaign to improve security for the Iraqi people. The stakes could not be higher," Gen Petraeus said.

"It's amazing how well morale has held up so far," the former official said. "But the guys know what's being said back home. There is no question morale is gradually being sapped by political debates."

The advisers are also said to be struggling to prevent the "politicisation" of the surge by the Shia-dominated government. The fear is that any security advances may be exploited to further weaken the position of Baghdad's Sunni minority.

Despite progress this week on a new law sharing Iraq's oil wealth, the Petraeus team believes the government is failing to work hard enough to meet other national reconciliation "benchmarks" set by Mr Bush.Yet it is accepted that the US is asking the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do what most politicians in normal circumstances would refuse to contemplate. "What we're doing is asking Maliki to confront his own powerbase," one officer said.

Possibly the biggest longer term concern of Gen Petraeus's team is that political will in Washington may collapse just as the military is on the point of making a counter-insurgency breakthrough. According to a senior administration official, speaking this week, this is precisely what happened in the final year of the Vietnam war. Steven Simon, the national security council's senior director for transnational threats during the Clinton administration, said a final meltdown in political and public backing was likely if the new strategy was not seen to be working quickly.

"The implosion of domestic support for the war will compel the disengagement of US forces. It is now just a matter of time," Mr Simon said in a paper written for the Council on Foreign Relations. "Better to withdraw as a coherent and at least somewhat volitional act than withdraw later in hectic response to public opposition... or to a series of unexpectedly sharp reverses on the ground," he said.

"If it gets really tough in the next few months, it will throw fuel on the fire in Washington," the former official said. "Congress will be emboldened in direct proportion to the trouble in Iraq." If the policy was not judged to be working by Labor Day (the first Monday in September which marks the start of the new political year), Mr Bush could lose control of the policy to Congress and be forced to begin a phased pull-out, he suggested.

A senior Pentagon official said this week that it was too early to gauge the strategy's chances of success - but preliminary reports were encouraging. "There are some promising signs. There is a new overall Iraqi commander in Baghdad. A number of joint operations have just begun. The number of political murders has fallen. Iraqi forces are showing up as promised, admittedly a little bit under strength, and are taking up some of the responsibilities that Maliki said he would,"he said. "We have to be realistic. We're not going to stop the suicide bombers and the roadside explosive devices for some time. And the military alone are certainly not going to solve the problem. Maliki has to meet the benchmarks. A civilian surge is needed, too. The Iraqis have to do it themselves."

US officials say they also have rising hopes of a breakthrough in Sunni-dominated Anbar province where tribal chiefs are increasingly hostile to al-Qaida and foreign fighters - and are looking to build bridges with moderate Shias.

But this week's US decision to join talks on Iraq with Iran and Syria, after previously refusing to do so, is nevertheless seen as an indication of the administration's growing alarm at the possibility of a historic strategic failure.

Soldiers Shift to Baghdad Outposts

2007-03-01T17:30:00.001-08:00

By Joshua Partlow The Washington Post Thursday 01 March 2007

Smaller bases expand troop presence in capital but also pose new risks.

Baghdad - American soldiers are leaving their sprawling fortress-cities and establishing many small outposts in the capital's most violent neighborhoods in a major tactical shift under the two-week-old Baghdad security plan.

Informed by counterinsurgency theory that calls for placing units full-time among the people they want to sway, U.S. troops are using their new bases to work with their Iraqi counterparts, uncover more battlefield intelligence and reinforce, by their sustained presence, the message that they will not allow militants unfettered freedom of movement.

But along with these advantages, American soldiers say these outposts pose new risks to their own safety and require pulling soldiers off patrols to protect their lodgings. The threats became apparent this month when a car bomb exploded at a U.S. outpost in Tarmiyah, north of Baghdad, killing two U.S. soldiers and wounding 29 others.

At a new U.S.-Iraqi base in the Jamiyah neighborhood of western Baghdad, a platoon of American soldiers guards the front gate and watches from the rooftop.

"These little combat outposts, they are more exposed: Your routes in here are very limited, and they're definitely watching us," Staff Sgt. Marcel Weaver, 35, said of the insurgents operating in the neighborhood around the base. A grenade "attack is coming, I can guarantee that."

U.S. soldiers have opened 15 of about 30 planned "joint security stations" in the capital. They have also set up an unspecified number of smaller "combat outposts." U.S. military spokesmen did not respond to requests for information about how many such outposts are operating in Baghdad or how many times they have been attacked.

Early Sunday, the U.S. Army battalion commander for the Jamiyah base gathered his top staff inside the station's control room, in what used to be a wedding hall, and discussed the distressing trend of violence just outside their base. The day before, a few hundred yards from the front gate, insurgents blasted rocket-propelled grenades at an Iraqi-guarded checkpoint, followed the barrage with small-arms fire, then detonated two car bombs when American troops rushed to respond.

"What is it about this checkpoint that makes it such a magnet?" asked Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, the battalion commander, studying a large aerial map of western Baghdad. "Why does it always get attacked?" he asked again, prodding his staff.

His soldiers answered that the recent arrival of Iraqi and U.S. soldiers in the embattled Sunni neighborhood had created an enticing target for insurgents. Kuehl agreed that the ambush may have been designed to draw out the Americans. "Yes, they probably have determined that we are here, and this would have been the route we would have taken to get out," he said.

Later that day, two mortar rounds landed about 50 yards outside another outpost the battalion had set up in a defunct shopping mall in the Adil neighborhood. The blasts struck a Humvee, deflating three tires. At a third new post, in a police station in the al-Khadraa neighborhood, soldiers have faced gunfire and a series of roadside bombs planted amid the trash along the one route to the base.

"I'm sure we're under surveillance, and I'm sure they're looking for our weak points, and that's for every one of these outposts," said Kuehl, who commands the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 1st Infantry Division. "We will never finish building the force protection around this place. It's got to be thought through every day and rehearsed."

The soldiers planned to erect new concrete blast walls on the northern and southern flanks of the two-story headquarters this week. Kuehl has instructed his soldiers to assume the perspective of the enemy and practice, or "red-team," ways to attack the compound. Up on the rooftop, soldiers are stationed at four sandbagged machine-gun turrets every hour of the day.

"I guess it is a little scary," said Pvt. Peter Lahoda, 22, as he gripped an M240 belt-fed machine gun in a turret that has been shot at three times from the street below. Positioned next to him was a life-size mannequin dressed in U.S. military fatigues, its middle fingers extended, that is used as a decoy for gunmen on the street. He said the attacks are often drive-by shootings, fired from a car's back seat or from holes punched in the trunk. "Up here, you're definitely organic to what's going on. You see VBIEDs, you see explosions like 200 meters away," he said, using a military abbreviation for car bombs.

The concern over security at the station imposes limits on one of its central missions: cooperating with Iraqi security forces. Iraqi soldiers at the station are prohibited from entering an operations room where U.S. soldiers discuss classified information. They are not allowed on the roof where Americans watch over the neighborhood. They live on the first floor while Americans inhabit the second. While certain information is shared with the Iraqi army leadership, the lower-ranking soldiers are kept out of briefing sessions, largely because the Americans are suspicious that information will be passed on to insurgents.

"There's a potential for a leak," said Capt. Ramiro Roldan, 25. "We tell them we're going to set up our vehicles at this location to cordon and search an area, there's a potential that we might get a VBEID attack there."

"We just came here, and we can't trust them so much," said Sgt. Freddie Torres.

It has been only a month since the battalion moved into the building, which had been occupied by Iraqi security forces. The Americans cleaned up a horrid tableau of human feces, trash and dead cats littering the premises.

Some American soldiers say the days patrolling the streets and nights drinking tea and playing dominoes with the Iraqis have fashioned a fledgling camaraderie. The Americans also have grown closer to one another while enduring the spartan lodgings - sleeping on cots, living without showers or toilets, burning their waste - that feel far removed from the buffet dinners and air-conditioned gyms on the Camp Liberty base, near the Baghdad airport, they left behind.

"Liberty's like being in Kuwait," Torres said. "If we stayed at Liberty the whole time, then we're not bringing the fight to them. This at least gives us an intimidation factor, knowing we're out here on the grind ready to take it to them."

Kuehl said he believes that over time, operating out of smaller bases will be safer for his soldiers as the neighbors grow to appreciate their backyard policemen and act as an alarm system about impending trouble.

"We're going to get more information, and when we get that information, we can target better, and if we target better, we can get more bad guys off the street and we don't hurt the locals while we do it," he said. "And the other part of getting out here, and I think it's something we've missed in the mission for a while . . . is our purpose to protect the people."

U.S. commanders say they choose the location of the security stations and combat outposts based on where soldiers can most disrupt the insurgency. Kuehl said he moved a platoon into the second floor of the al-Khadraa outpost to stop insurgent weapons traffic through the area.

In the first 10 days since soldiers moved in, drive-by shooters have taken potshots and at least four bombs have exploded on the road outside the entrance, said Lt. Brian Larsen, 23, the platoon leader.

"As far as force protection measures go, this place needs improvement," said Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Chaney.

The soldiers have stacked sandbags in their bedroom windows and draped green netting over their gun positions, and they are making plans to install light fixtures outside and raise the exterior walls by several feet to limit the risk from gunfire.

Sitting on his bunk inside the police station, Sgt. James Simpson, 30, of Atlanta, said grunts like him are prepared for the threats surrounding them.

"It's definitely more exposed, but that's the risk we take," he said. "The safest thing for everybody is to hurry up and beat these guys."

Senate Stalls on Iraq

2007-02-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

By Matt Renner t r u t h o u t | Report Wednesday 28 February 2007

A weekend of confusion among Democratic senators over possible action on Iraq was capped off by an announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada that the Senate would wait on any Iraq-related legislation.

"Iraq is going to be there ... it's just a question of when we get back to it," Reid told the Associated Press, citing action on a national security bill as a higher priority.

Senator Reid is waiting to attempt to begin debate on a bill that would have begun initial troop withdrawals within 120 days of enactment, with the goal of withdrawing almost all combat troops by March 2008.

Sunday, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), declared that he, along with the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden (D-Del.), would pursue a change in the 2002 Congressional Authorization of Force against Iraq.

On NBC's "Meet The Press," Levin outlined a Democratic attempt to force a scale-back of the US military involvement in Iraq. The senator believes that by altering the law that Congress passed to give President Bush authority to invade Iraq, Democrats could change the mission in Iraq and limit President Bush's ability to escalate the war.

"Hopefully, we're going to come up with a resolution which ... would modify that ... earlier resolution to a more limited purpose," Levin Said. The goal would be to limit the US involvement in Iraq to training Iraqi forces and hunting al-Qaeda operatives who infiltrated the country after the invasion. Democrats claim that this could be accomplished by altering the outdated Authorization of Force against Iraq to reflect the current situation.

Levin said that a change in the Authorization of Force could push the Bush administration into a "constitutional battle" with Congress because members of the Bush administration have suggested that attempts to curtail the president's war powers would simply be ignored.

Critics of this tactic describe it as a worthless public relations stunt: a politically guarded maneuver meant to appease the growing antiwar movement without taking any real political risks.

Congress tried a similar tactic to end the war in Vietnam. In 1970, President Nixon ignored the repeal of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution by Congress and continued the war in defiance.

University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle described this Democratic maneuver as an attempt to act and sound like the Senate is taking action, without putting their political futures in jeopardy. "The Senate has two options to end this war: cut funding or impeach Bush and Cheney," Boyle said. Boyle also pointed to the precedent set by Nixon during Vietnam. "Revoking the [Iraq] authorization would do nothing. Senator Biden knows this, he is a lawyer, he was around back then [referring to the Vietnam era]." According to Boyle, the Supreme Court ruled that Nixon's insolence was not a violation of the law.

While questioning the effectiveness of their strategy, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) dared the Democrats to attempt to cut funding for the war. McConnell pointed out the futility of the Democratic effort: "altering the original use of force authorization could best be described as trying to unring a bell." McConnell continued, "The truth of the matter is there's really only ... one way to end the war, if that's what our Democratic friends want to do. That is to cut off the funding for the war."

Over the weekend, Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Levin made statements that effectively assured that they are not going to attempt to cut funding for the war in Iraq, as Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) had proposed earlier. Because the Senate Democrats cling to a razor-thin one vote majority, the threat of Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) switching sides and caucusing with Republicans could hamper any attempt to cut funding. Lieberman told The New Yorker that a move by Democrats to cut funding for the Iraq occupation would be "very hurtful," and that he'd be "deeply affected by it."

One factor in Reid's decision to hold off on a Senate Iraq debate may be the lack of Republican support for binding action on Iraq. He would need at least ten Republicans to cross over and support a debate that might further weaken a president whose war policies they have endorsed since 2002. A Republican filibuster stalled an attempt to consider a nonbinding resolution expressing disapproval of the president's escalation plan on February 17th. Senator Lieberman was the only member of the Democratic caucus to vote for the filibuster.

Baghdad Sees Resurgence of Bomb, Mortar Attack Deaths

2007-02-27T18:10:00.000-08:00

By Richard Mauer McClatchy Newspapers Monday 26 February 2007

Baghdad, Iraq - Nearly two weeks into the newest Baghdad security plan, the daily count of murder victims dumped on the city's streets has declined significantly, a likely sign that Shiite Muslim militia groups aligned with the Iraqi government have reined in their members or sent them out of the capital.

But deaths from bombings and mortar attacks, after an initial decline, have returned to the levels of the previous two months, suggesting that the plan's initial measures have had little impact on the Sunni insurgent groups believed to be responsible for most of that violence.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have released only limited information about what steps they've taken to secure the city since the plan's official kickoff on Feb. 15. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told President Bush last week that the plan, dubbed Operation Enforcing the Law, so far had been a "dazzling success." U.S. officials have been more cautious, saying that it may be months before the plan can be labeled a success or a failure.

Statistics compiled from official daily reports of the Interior Ministry and other Iraqi government sources, as well as interviews in 20 Baghdad neighborhoods about the plan's initial measures, however, show that some early judgments are possible about the plan's effectiveness. With most members of Congress expressing skepticism about the plan's prospects for success, such information could prove useful in the debate over Bush's plan to commit a total of 17,500 additional troops to the plan in the coming months.

From Dec. 1, 2006, through Feb. 14, the number of people killed in public places from violent attacks averaged 14.8 a day. From Feb. 15 through Monday, the number declined, but just barely, to 13.8. Car bombs were up slightly, from an average of 1.2 a day to 1.6, while roadside bombs were identical at 1 per day.

Injuries, on average, rose from 40.4 a day to 52.8 since the start of the plan, while bodies dumped by death squads declined from 22.8 a day to 14.6.

The increase in car bombs is particularly troubling. Members of Shiite militias often have cited Sunni car bombings as the driving force for their activities, which include targeting Sunnis for kidnapping and execution. On Sunday, the government announced new measures to stop car bombs, including prohibitions against parking or standing along major streets.

But American officials say such steps could force insurgents to turn to suicide bombers on foot, as they did on Sunday when a woman detonated herself at the predominately Shiite Mustansiriya University, killing nearly 50 people.

Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the coalition's military spokesman in Baghdad, told reporters last week that 2,700 additional American troops have arrived in the capital and that "elements" of three Iraqi brigades also have been deployed - part of an Iraqi pledge to increase by about 7,700 the number of Iraqi soldiers patrolling Baghdad. The rest of the 17,500 U.S. troops are to be in place by May.

Official have said that 14 joint security stations, with bunks intended to house U.S. and Iraqi troops, have been set up in neighborhoods. As many as 16 more are planned.

But what those troops are doing or how many Iraqi soldiers are on the streets is unknown. U.S. officials blame the failure of earlier security efforts in Baghdad on the inability of Iraqi officials to deliver the number of soldiers and policemen promised. Caldwell has declined to provide specifics on the number of Iraqi troops deployed so far.

In the first week of the plan, the U.S. government reported, U.S. and Iraqi security forces mounted 20,000 patrols, twice the number in the previous week. By the second week, that number had grown to 32,000 patrols, with 63 weapons caches seized and 167 suspected terrorists detained.

But in the neighborhoods, the situation is decidedly mixed. Telephone interviews with more than 25 Baghdad residents in 20 of the city's districts showed that while some saw increased coalition activity, others had yet to see any change in the number of soldiers or police.

"The situation in Ghazaliya is really better since the start of the security plan because the existence of the different security forces - Iraqi and American," said Saif Ahmed, 35, a Sunni, describing a neighborhood in northwest Baghdad that's sharply divided along sectarian lines. "We used to hear shooting and mortars launching or falling, but not any more. There are no more insurgent groups, and no clashes happen. I could see the market restarted, but they still finish their work before sunset."

Zuhair Abdul Rahman, a 36-year-old taxi driver from the mixed Jihad section of southwest Baghdad, also reported hopeful signs.

"I saw today more than two families who came back to the neighborhood. The bakery, which was closed for more than six months, reopened in the last two days," Rahman said.

He said Iraqi police officers had moved into the area after snipers firing across sectarian dividing lines near his home killed two on each side. "I think the place is getting better and better," Rahman said.

But other neighborhoods have seen little change. In Maalef, a formerly mixed neighborhood in southwest Baghdad that's now dominated by Sunnis, a 26-year-old Shiite woman who asked not to be named said her situation remains dire.

"Shiite families can't leave their homes - they might be killed by armed groups," she said. "The armed groups challenge Shiite families to face them and fight, saying, 'Come, bastard Shiite, and fight us if you are brave enough.' There is no security plan in there yet."

Ali Hayder, 67, a retired government worker living in the mixed Dakhiliya section of southeast Baghdad, said security forces are present only at well-established checkpoints.

"Iraqi forces, army or police, hardly ever frequent the area," Hayder said. "Nor has anything changed since the new security plan - no American convoys, nor any strangers."

The U.S. military has described two major operations as the centerpieces of the plan's first 10 days. One, Operation Polar Iron, was targeting primarily Sunni areas of southwest Baghdad. The other, Operation Arrow Strike IV, was at work in the northeast Shiite sections of Shaab and Ur.

On Monday, no car bombs were reported in Baghdad, but presumed Sunni insurgents were able to detonate an improvised explosive device that injured Iraq's Shiite vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi, and killed five workers at the government building where he was attending a meeting. Mahdi's injuries were light, and he returned to work.

The decline in dumped bodies is largely thought to be the result of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's decision to send his Mahdi Army forces underground or out of the city. Sadr hasn't been seen in a month, and American officials have said he's in Iran.

But a Sadr statement released over the weekend openly criticized the plan's inability so far to stop the car bombings, and it raised, at least implicitly, the threat that Shiite militias would become active again to prevent such attacks.

"Here we are watching car bombs continue to explode to harvest thousands of innocent lives from our beloved people in the middle of a security plan controlled by an occupier," news accounts quoted the statements as saying.

Caldwell told reporters last week that he believes the current plan will succeed where others have failed.

"One key difference between (the current plan) and previous iterations of the Baghdad security plan is that this time we intend to build Iraqi institutions and invest in neighborhoods, even as we conduct security operations," he said.

But interviews indicate that that portion of the plan remains vague, with few signs of any concrete steps to deliver services to any of the capital's neighborhoods.