So I'm in the press filing center waiting to eat our free meal. I'm surrounded by the "liberal media" if you listen to the goofball behind me. An anti-Hillary guy is running around here trying to push the Central America-CIA-cocaine connection... Anyway.

This debate is crucial. The polls predict an Obama win Saturday but you have to remember New Hampshire. The most recent polls have Obama at around 45%, Hillary in the 30s and Edwards in the teens. Grain of salt. I'd be interested in a poll of people in SC that are undecided going into this debate and the primary.

I personally am hoping Obama does well. I saw him first as an intern at the Center for America Progress and was impressed. since then he grew on me. The fact that he did not vote for the authorization to use force on/in Iraq all but wins him my vote. But the idea of another Clinton presidency scares me. I'm tired of Bush and Clintons running our country. We had the end of Reagan which was basically a H. W. Bush administration due to Reagan's age. Then H. W. Bush. Then Clinton. Then W. Bush (less than a year left in that disaster. Thank you very much Supreme Court). So you see, this can't continue... imho.

Not much to say now. It's still cold. Tonight, instead of trying to cover this debate as a live blog (plenty are doing that), I'm going to try to capture the essence of what the press go through especially the spin room. I've got a camera but a slow laptop computer, so I'll try to put video up tonight but might wait till tomorrow so I can use a quicker desktop (render times are a bitch!). Not to mention I'll be doing my 9 to 5 as well and that, of course, takes priority.

More later, enjoy the debate.

Labels: Barack Obama, Bush, Clinton, debate, Democrat, Democratic debate, South Carolina

Malcolm Nance, an adviser on terrorism to the Department of Homeland Security, Special Operations and Intelligence, was a witness and supervisor to "hundreds" of waterboarding training exercises at the US Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. The practice of waterboarding, he concludes, "is a torture technique – period" noting that the practice does not simulate drowning but actually introduces water into the lungs.

The practice involves strapping the person being interrogated on to a board as pints of water are forced into his lungs through a cloth covering his face while the victim's mouth is forced open. Its effect, according to Mr Nance, is a process of slow-motion suffocation.

The practice Bush administration officials refuse to take responsibility for, despite praising its effects in the field, is thought of by Nance as "controlled death."

Labels: Bush, conservative, DHS, foreign policy, politics, torture, US

Blake Hounshell provides the narative:

Over the audio system here at U.N. headquarters, I just heard U.S. President George W. Bush greeting Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the U.N. This brief encounter, I have to say, confirmed all of my preconceived notions of how Bush interacts with other world leaders. Secretary Ban thanked Bush for attending last night's dinner, to which Bush responded brusquely, "My pleasure." U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad were a little more gracious, warmly thanking Ban for his hospitality. Perhaps realizing his goof, Bush chimed in with his own word of thanks, then blurted out, "The red snapper was delicious." He then went on to explain why he didn't stay for the whole event, citing an important meeting he had with his daughter, Jenna, who is getting married soon.

January 2009, this all changes....

Labels: Bush, UN

In front of the VFW, our President bush said:

one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

We'll we've seen the killing fields of Fallujah, Baghdad and Kurdistan.

We've seen 21^st century version of boat people in the 2 million displaced Iraqis.

And now we have our very own re-education camps:

The U.S. military has introduced "religious enlightenment" and other education programs for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, said yesterday.

Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."

Hearts and minds, stay the course, victory, return on progress, religious enlightenment .....

You people are fucking retarded.

Labels: Bush, Conservatives, Iraq, Republicans

In George Bush's prime time address to the nation Thursday night he laid out the basic premise of of his escalation strategy in Iraq.

The premise of our strategy is that securing the Iraqi population is the foundation for all other progress. For Iraqis to bridge sectarian divides, they need to feel safe in their homes and neighborhoods. For lasting reconciliation to take root, Iraqis must feel confident that they do not need sectarian gangs for security. The goal of the surge is to provide that security and to help prepare Iraqi forces to maintain it.

So that's it, the Iraqis need to feel safe. And he's right. But he misses the point that the escalation has not made people feel safer. A recent poll points this out, Marc Lynch summarizes the findings:

...The BBC/ABC/NHK survey, conducted in all 19 provinces during August, finds that 70% of Iraqis believe that security has deteriorated in the areas covered by the US "surge", and 11% say it has had no effect. Only 11% say that security in the country as a whole has improved in the last six months.
...
95% of Sunnis say that the presence of US troops makes security worse.
...
56% described the "security situation" in the neighborhood in which they live as bad, up slightly from 53% in February, while only 24% say that the security situation in this neighborhood has improved in the past six months. 79% of Sunnis say that security in their neighborhood is bad - despite all those American walking tours of happy, safe markets. Only 7% of Sunnis say that security in their neighborhood has improved in the last 6 months, and only 6% feel safe in their neighborhood.
...
Don't get too excited that 43% say that the neighborhood in which they currently live is relatively safe, because it's probably because this is where they fled to escape from ethnic cleansing: 74% describe their "freedom of movement - the ability to go where you wish safely" as bad, and 77% say that "freedom to live where you wish without persecution" is bad. An astonishing 98% say that the separation of people along sectarian lines is a bad thing.
...
65% say that the current national government is doing a bad job...

The Iraqis don't feel safe in the neighborhoods. The Iraqis haven't answered, in this poll, whether or not they want/need sectarian gangs for security. But, our plan in Anbar is facilitating just that. Meanwhile the Iraqi security forces are rife with Shiite sectarianism. All-in-all, by Bush's "premise" the 'surge' has failed. Furthermore, hope that this will change much in the next 6 to 12 months when the surge is forced to end do to the stress it has put on our military is just hope. And a slim hope at that. By this time next year we'll be back at the troop level we started at, with no end in sight.

Labels: Address, Bush, Iraq, surge

On Sunday President Bush's homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend claimed that Osama bin Laden was "virtually impotent," on the run and in a cave. Similar conclusions have been made by Ann Coulter and president Bush.

Despite these assertions, highly placed government officials reaffirmed Monday that "Osama bin Laden remained the most dangerous terrorist threat to the United States." Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told a Senate committee that eliminating the threat of bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders as well as their sanctuary on the Afghan-Pakistan border the United States "number one priority."

Furthermore, the US focus on Iraq and the inability of Pakistan to confront al Qaeda and its allies has given bin Laden several advantages. According to U.S., Afghan and Pakistani officials and experts, bin Laden has been able "to secure safe harbor in the tribal area of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan, rebuild al Qaida's inner circle, train a new generation of jihadis and expand ties to Middle Eastern and North African terrorist groups." This space has allowed the propaganda wing of al Qaeda, the as-Sahab Media Institute, to increase its production output from 16 videos in 2005, to 74 so far in 2007. This rate has doubled from 1 video every 6 days in 2006 to "an average rate of one every three days or so" in 2007.

Baselessly discounting bin Laden's importance to the 'War on Terror' ignores the sober assessments of our top intelligence officials, provides leeway for an "impotent" terrorist leader and his organization to talk to the world and marks down the significance of the man who killed so many 6 years ago today.

Labels: al Qaeda, Bush, Osama bin Laden, terrorism

We've seen so many goals promoted in regards to the occupation of Iraq. The mission has changed constantly from when it first entered the public conscience to today as we watch the Republicans reset there Iraqi agenda to fit their domestic agenda once again. We know now that president Bush's sole goal is to maneuver into "a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence" so that we "stay longer" in Iraq. He doesn't care about the public will or the soldiers sacrifice. As long as we don't make changes to his failed policies, well that's good enough for him.

In order to do this some reality--just enough really and selected conveniently--must be injected at opportune times. This is a long-standing trend with this administration. It began as the disarmament of Iraq. Then when they accepted the--once stated by the opposition--fact that there was nothing to disarm, it was expanded to regime change and freedom. Sensing that this wasn't enough to move the American populous towards another invasion, they added in the mythical connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Then, of course the mission was accomplished... but that only lasted a few months. The occupation of Iraq, again, became a mission of freedom as "has been our mission all along" claimed the White House disingenuously. Soon after, it became clear that the 'freedom agenda' was 'hard work' and the goal was shifted to training Iraqis (this is where General Petraeus entered the political realm, conveniently right before the 2004 election. Nothing he wrote then bore fruit.). When that didn't go as planned the Administration shifted again towards promoting democracy. Months later they added that we were there to protect the "homeland" from the terrorists that were being created in Iraq. Nearly a year later the mission shifted again towards security for Iraqis. Early this year the Administrations line became the provision of security for centralized reconciliation while undermining it by embracing former terrorists in the fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq, a plan initiate by the Iraqis long before Bush's escalation. There is no guarantee that this aid wont--in one form or another--be used against US forces or more likely the fledging central government in Baghdad. Most recently, the Administration--sensing lack of real progress on the reconciliation gambit--are now working in the back rooms toward a partition of Iraq.

This plan for partition was once promoted by a group of academics and Senator Joe Biden. It was rejected by the White House and criticized right-wing pundits then, but now it's the 'new way forward.'

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Labels: Biden, Bush, Iraq, Partition, surge

NY Times:

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to "dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures," a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been "to keep the army intact" but that it "didn't happen."

Like anyone believes that any decision this large would have been left merely to an envoy. The only thing that Bush could have said that might save face and appear honest is that Rumsfeld or Cheney kept it from him or were totally in charge at the time. He said neither and tried to shift blame on Bremer. That has now been debunked.

Now for the competency of these "leaders" who so gleefully lead us into the worst foreign policy fiasco since Vietnam if not ever. Buried in the above article comes this quote from Bremer.

“I might add that it was not a controversial decision,” Mr. Bremer said. “The Iraqi Army had disappeared and the only question was whether you were going to recall the army. Recalling the army would have had very practical difficulties, and it would have political consequences. The army had been the main instrument of repression under Saddam Hussein. I would go on to argue that it was the right decision. I’m not second-guessing it.”

Surely a man who became envoy to Iraq would know that there were several armies in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. There was Saddam's army the Republican Guard and a regular army made of conscripts; usually Shiite. A large portion of the overall army was conscripted, but the Republican Guard provided the repression. Not understanding the opportunity that was presented to the US with the regular Iraqi army after May '03 is a mistake that manifests itself in the chaos in Iraq today. The same people who missed this are the ones who say they will lead us to salvation in Iraq.

Don't hold your breath...

Labels: Bremer, Bush, CPA, Iraq, Rumsfeld

President Bush said this earlier today in his super top-secret visit to Iraq (ahhh... progress):

"General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker tell me if the kind of success we are now seeing continues, it is possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer American forces," he said.

What he really means is that he's too cowardly to reassess the situation strategically and will keep the escalation going until it can't physically be sustained without more unprecedented adjustments. So come August '08 we're looking at one of three situations. One, our Congress will gather up the willpower and begin to confront the President. More likely, two, nothing will happen in Congress. The escalation will continue as it has for months now and there will be little to show for it. As are troop levels begin to fall by the weight of their own gravity, the interests in Iraq will go back to their slightly dormant cycles. Finally three, we could reassess the situation noting the fact that we've rid Iraq of a dictator, established that they have no WMD and planted seeds of democracy in the country (perverted as they might be). Then strategically reset our occupation to one of counterterrorism and regional security leaving the Iraqi power centers room to adjust to their new government without the US military being a crutch. Accompany that with a force to protect the Kurds in the north, keep Turkey at bay, control Kurdish irredentist terrorism emanating from Kurdistan, and check Iranian influence in the northern portion of Iraq. One of these paths is logical (#3) so it won't see the light of day. The rest are just plain bad. However one will allow the White House to save face until we elect a new president. That is the road Bush wants. He claims to be loyal, he claims to support the troops. He is doing neither here, both his party and his military will suffer as a result of his intransigence.

He visited al Anbar to highlight the superficial success happening there against al Qaeda in Iraq. The White House is so desperate to stretch this war out, they'll even hijack the success of others as there own:

That assertion is part of Bush's push to sell Anbar as a success story and to hold it up to his congressional critics as a reason why the troop buildup should not be cut short.

In truth, the progress in Anbar was initiated by the Iraqis themselves, a point Gates himself made, saying the Sunni tribes decided to fight and retake control from al-Qaida many months before Bush decided to send an extra 4,000 Marines to Anbar as part of his troop buildup.

In any regard, this "success" is the fruit of a plan that works against the initial strategic vision of the escalation and one that borders on hypocrisy.

As last months NIE stated:

Such initiatives, if not fully exploited by the Iraqi government, could over time also shift greater power to the regions, undermine efforts to impose central authority, and reinvigorate armed opposition to the Baghdad government

Labels: Anbar, benchmarks, Bush, CAP, counter terrorism, Iraq, surge

Portions of the much awaited report on Iraqi political progress by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, are beginning to leak out. As is painfully obvious, despite minimal results on the military and security front, the political progress has been a disaster. To remind the reader, President Bush's escalation came with 18 benchmarks in which to measure progress. In July, the White House claimed, in error, that "satisfactory performance" was being achieved in 8 of those 18 benchmarks. I opined in a post earlier this month:

If you think back, the July "Initial Benchmark Assessment Report" that claimed that "satisfactory performance" on nearly half of the proposed benchmarks was so fundamentally flawed that I doubt the White House can flaw it any more this time around. They set a fake bar, way too high, and now they won't be able to reach past it while still seeming realistic. They may have burned themselves...

Back in July, this White House spin was promptly debunked as misleading rhetoric.

As predicted here, the White House spin has fallen flat in the face of pragmatic, apolitical analysis. The GAO's report will conclude that not 8 but only 5 of the benchmarks (or is it only 3?) will be met as a result of the Presidents escalation in Iraq.

Congressional auditors have determined that the Iraqi government has failed to meet the vast majority of political and military goals laid out by lawmakers to assess President Bush's Iraq war strategy, The Associated Press has learned.

The Government Accountability Office, or GAO, will report that at least 13 of the 18 benchmarks to measure the surge of U.S. troops to Iraq are unfulfilled ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline for Bush to give a detailed accounting of the situation eight months after he announced the policy, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

Assuming the surge will continue due to a split Congress, a lack of promising alternatives and a President who has already made up his mind, we'll probably ride this out until the definitive timetable sets in early next year and forces our extraction (the realities surfacing as strain in our military). So instead of strategically assessing and addressing failed policy when we could, the 'stay the course' crowd has set us for withdrawal as a broken force with severely limited resources available for the greater threat: al Qaeda proper and their franchise terrorist outfits that plan and recruit with immunity.

Fortunately, the smart folks at the Center for American Progress have inked a last resort plan for strategically removing our troops from the Iraqi morass. Not immediately and not in 4 years but in a span of about a year and with a residual force remaining to address the questions that will remain in the northern Iraq and to confront al Qaeda and other terrorists. They warn that our leaders need to begin planning for this now because if the escalation fulfills the White House's hopes and dreams or is another failure, we need to have a plan to get out. (We've witnessed how military campaigns conducted without plans end up.)

So far I've read the synopsis linked above and have started to make my way through the whole report (.pdf). So far, so good; although I would allow some flexibility with the year time table. Say, to 15 months or so...

Labels: benchmarks, Bush, CAP, GAO, Iraq, surge

Those interested in the hunt for Usama bin Laden would be well served to read the Newsweek report on the ever-continuing hunt. Consider it a concise version of Woodward's "Bush at War" and Gary Berntsen's "Jawbreaker" with additional contemporary, reporting. Here are some snips.

This part would have made me laugh if it wasn't so serious and disappointing. Instead I just shook my head...

The Iraq War, meanwhile, has proved to be a black hole for the Americans, devouring men and material and absorbing the attention of the brass in Washington. In 2005, the CIA gave President Bush a secret slide show on the hunt for bin Laden. The president was taken aback by the small number of CIA case officers posted to Afghanistan and Pakistan. "Is that all there are?" the president asked, according to a former intelligence official, who declined to be identified discussing White House meetings. The CIA had already embarked on a "surge" of sorts, and doubled the number of officers in the field. But many were inexperienced and raw recruits, and they produced little improvement in "actionable" intelligence.

But it is encouraging to hear members of the military brain admitting these truisms

In recent months, says John Arquilla, a Special Ops expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., the U.S. military has achieved a 100-to-1 kill ratio (100 dead guerrillas to every American). But by calling in airstrikes, the Americans also kill a lot of civilians, which breeds more jihadists. And according to Thomas Johnson, also at the Naval Postgraduate School, the military's continued fixation on body counts and kill ratios is irrelevant and even counterproductive. "When you kill a person it's a multiplication factor. It demands that all the male relatives join the fight."

I, of course, have been saying this for years.

Continuing...

Johnson, an Afghan expert, spent last February at Forward Operating Base Salerno near the Pakistan border, briefing commanders on the tribal custom of Pashtunwali. He says only about 5 percent of American troops in Afghanistan ever leave their bases—a statistic, he believes, that explains better than any other why Americans are struggling in the battle for intelligence. He says most soldiers in Afghanistan don't know simple phrases like "stop," "go," or "put your hands up." Americans continually make cultural blunders, like using canine units to search people's homes (dogs are considered unclean in Muslim culture). Meanwhile the Taliban works at winning the trust and confidence of villagers—or intimidating them. "They go into villages and say, 'The Americans have the watches but we have the time. We might not come back in a week or a year, but you bet your britches we'll eventually come back'," says Johnson.

If the White House wants to use historical "comparisons" this one should definitely be first of their list...

During the early days of the cold war, the old boys who ran the CIA began to reason that when it came to fighting against an underhanded foe in a battle for global survival, the rules of fair play they had learned as schoolboys no longer applied. If the communists fight dirty, we must, too, they rationalized—or freedom would perish. This ends-justifying-the-means rationale led to foolish and ultimately unsuccessful assassination plots and other dirty tricks that disgraced and demoralized the CIA when the agency's so-called Crown Jewels were revealed during Watergate. After 9/11, Bush administration officials, particularly Vice President Cheney, vowed to take the gloves off against Al Qaeda.

or maybe this on Bush's reeducation camps in his Vietnam-Iraq misrepresentation from last week

The danger now, says Arquilla, is that the longer the Iraq War goes on, the more skilled the new generations of jihadists will become. "They're getting re-educated," he says. "The first generation of Al Qaeda came through the [Afghan] camps. The second generation are those who've logged on [to Islamist Web sites]. The next generation will be those who have come through the crucible of Iraq. Eventually, their level of skill is going to be greater than the skill of the original generation."

Labels: Afghanistan, Bush, Cheney, counter terrorism, foreign policy, Iraq, Osama bin Laden, terrorism

It's OK if you're a Republican.

Todays speech by the president to legitimize his Iraq policy has roused the ire of those familiar with history. To UCLA historian Robert Dallek, the "distortions" "boggle" his mind.

“We were in Vietnam for 10 years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives, the second-greatest loss of lives in a foreign conflict. And we couldn’t work our will,” he said.

“What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. It’s a distortion,” he continued. “We’ve been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It’s a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out.”

Col. Pat Lang adds in an unrelated post

We keep "screwing up" in places like Vietnam and Iraq because we (as a people) do not accept the relevance of history and cultural difference. We insists on believing people are all pretty much the same and that they will behave as we think we would behave. Nonsense. We and another set of peoples have paid the price for that cultural blindness once again.

and reminds us all that "US forces had been completely out of [Vietnam] for two years when the [North Vietnamese] attacked in violation of the cease-fire and over-ran the country."

While using models are useful in academia, they should be avoided in rhetoric. When models used in rhetoric, they should be held at arms length and scrutinized. One remembers when the Vietnam model was slammed by the Bush Administration and even used to come to conclusions opposite those arrived at today.

The only thing Vietnam has in common with Iraq is that they were wars based on misunderstandings (or lack of understandings), bad policy and that they both became quagmires.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Labels: Bush, Iraq, surge