Curveball

The Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball" by the CIA and who was a main source of "intel" used to make the case for invading Iraq -- especially Colin Powell's now infamous UN presenation -- now admits everything he said was a lie.

Even before the invasion, there was strong evidence that Mr. Janabi was an unreliable source, evidence which critics now say the Bush White House and the C.I.A.’s top leadership ignored.

Mr. Janabi, who defected to Germany in the 1990s, met repeatedly with German intelligence officials beginning in 2000. They refused to allow C.I.A. officials to meet directly with him, instead providing the Americans only with reports of what he had said.

Eventually, though, the Germans grew doubtful of their informer and passed on their suspicions to American intelligence officials.

Mr. Janabi said in his interview with The Guardian that he still believed that it was right for him to lie, because it was the only way to rid Iraq of Mr. Hussein.

In an interview conducted in German and translated by The Guardian, he said: “Believe me, there was no other way to bring about freedom to Iraq. There were no other possibilities.”

I think it is telling that, despite all of this "freedom" brought to Iraq, Mr. Janabi still lives in Germany.

Shifting reactions to torture...and shoes

Eric Martin has two important posts at Obsidian Wings. In the first, he gathers the response to the bipartisan report on torture, the Bush administration's frequent lies about it, and the unsurprising shift in attitudes by the Right.

In the second, he ridicules the Right side of the -osphere again, this time for their reactions to the shoe-throwing incident in which they take ungrateful Iraqis to task for not showing enough love for the man who has left Iraq with hundreds of thousands dead, tortured, or turned to refugees.

Both are too important and insightful to reduce to pull quotes, but one thing did strike me:

Whether or not the flypaper theory was part of the calculus before the invasion, or just a convenient ex post facto rationalization, war supporters from the President and Vice President down have repeated the argument that by virtue of the invasion, and maintenance of troops in Iraq, we can attract al-Qaeda and other extremists to Iraq and "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here." Just today Bush reiterated this point:

Bush: There have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11. One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take ...

Raddatz: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

Bush: Yeah, that's right. So what?

So what? Really? I imagine some Iraqis might, you know, care that their country was turned into bait to lure combatants.

I imagine so, too; it's why the shoe thrower is now a national hero in Iraq. But what especially struck me is that as the Bush administration begins its slow fade, we're hearing more and more from them and their dead-enders a common theme: that al Qaeda hasn't attacked us on our soil since 9/11 (forgetting the guy who tried to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow-torch, but for sake of argument, let's agree that what they say is true).

So, okay, al Qaeda hasn't attacked us on our soil since 9/11. In the words of Bush, "So what?" More precisely, why would they? Bin Liden didn't, as Bush and the Right claim, "Hate us for our freedoms." As I've long understood it, he hated America primarily for a few very specific reasons, most especially because American troops were stationed in the land of Mecca and Medina, a grave humiliation in B.L.'s eyes. Those troops are gone, removed in response to the attack of 9/11. In other words, Bin Laden's grievances at the time were answered.

Fresh reasons to hate us have surely replaced that one, and new ones are always right around the corner, no doubt. For instance, American troops are now stationed in Iraq, a place with its own sites holy to Sunni Muslims. For now, though, it seems al Qaeda is content to attack the fly paper, such as it is.

Jarring

Seeing the photograph of a dead U.S. soldier in Iraq that appeared in the Times this morning was indeed a sobering experience. I've certainly seen plenty of combat photographs of past conflicts, but the fighting in Iraq and the 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers and uncountable Iraqi dead that lay in its wake have been kept so distant from our eyes back here that it's wrenching to see it now. We speak of our dead as "fallen heroes" and those who (until very recently) would have us stay indefinitely talk of honoring their sacrifice by "winning." By not seeing these victims, we do not see the horror and sordidness that death in war entails.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

And while publishing photos of American dead is not barred under the “embed” rules in which journalists travel with military units, the Miller case underscores what is apparently one reality of the Iraq war: that doing so, even under the rules, can result in expulsion from covering the war with the military.

“It is absolutely censorship,” Mr. Miller said. “I took pictures of something they didn’t like, and they removed me. Deciding what I can and cannot document, I don’t see a clearer definition of censorship.”

The Marine Corps denied it was trying to place limits on the news media and said Mr. Miller broke embed regulations. Security is the issue, officials said.

“Specifically, Mr. Miller provided our enemy with an after-action report on the effectiveness of their attack and on the response procedures of U.S. and Iraqi forces,” said Lt. Col. Chris Hughes, a Marine spokesman.

News organizations say that such restrictions are one factor in declining coverage of the war, along with the danger, the high cost to financially ailing media outlets and diminished interest among Americans in following the war. By a recent count, only half a dozen Western photographers were covering a war in which 150,000 American troops are engaged.

In my lifetime I cannot remember a war that has been so devastating to U.S. troops and interest and so little covered.

More photos from Iraq and previous wars here.

Our sensitivities are spared. The war goes on.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that the Pentagon and the administration believe that Americans lost stomach for the war in Vietnam because of the images from Southeast Asia beamed into living rooms every night. But as the photo essay linked to above shows, the horrors of war were not disinfected before they were shown to the folks back home in WWII. During Vietnam, the images simply underscored the realization of people that they had been lied to in entering the war, lied to during the conduct of the war, and lied to to keep us there. It wasn't the imagery, it was the lies.

We know the lies that fuel our presence in Iraq. What we don't have is the visual record of the meaningless death.

"Too many Kagans"

Wow, Joe. Just wow.

7. On the day that John Yoo's remarkable torture memo is released, this foolishness is a reminder that none of these people--none of the vicious, mendacious, naive, simplistic, unapologetic, neo-colonialist ideologues who promulgated this disaster--should have even the vaguest claim on the time or tolerance of fair-minded people. Fred Kagan's certainty is an obscenity, his claim to expertise a farce.

And as Duncan notes approvingly, no gratuitous mention of the dirty fucking hippies.

UPDATE: Fixed link.

McCain's "free ride"

I think Eugene Robinson could take it quite a bit further and call his colleagues on the free raid they're giving Saint McCain on all issues, but it's a start.

Quite a "defining moment" in Iraq, wasn't it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.

That is indeed what McCain meant, by the way, no matter how his apologists try to spin it. Those who claim that by "a hundred years" McCain was talking about a long-term peacetime deployment like the U.S. military presence in South Korea are being disingenuous or obtuse. In and around Seoul, citizens aren't shooting at American soldiers or trying to blow them up with roadside bombs -- and U.S. combat forces aren't taking sides in bloody internecine battles over power and wealth.

...

If Democrats are going to take several more months to settle on a presidential nominee, they had better find some way to stop giving John McCain a free ride on Iraq. He should have to explain why he wants to keep us on George Bush's long, winding path to nowhere.

The problem is, it's not the Dems who are giving McCain a free ride. It's the press corps. Case in point: what's McCain's reaction to the humiliating defeat of Maliki and Iraqi security forces (and American air cover) this weekend?

Crickets chirping.

But he has a point. Obama should pretty much ignore Clinton at this point and direct all his fire at McCain's position on Iraq and his economic advisers. Better yet, he should continue to mock McCain. Clinton should stop sniping at Obama's inelectibility and start talking about why she's different from McCain on these issues.

UPDATE: From reader "Anonymous:"

Iraqi PM: Basra operation was 'success'"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23898460/

Patience, patience. A "success" like this one requires a bit more time for the "spin meisters" to confabulate.

I feel certain that by the end of the week, it will have proved to be the "mother of all victories."

UPDATE II: According to Somerby, I've been played a rube. The thing is, though, I got Robinson's short hand. Iraq is not Japan. It didn't surrender unconditionally and agree to an occupation. Nor is it South Korea, relying on the U.S. to protect it from a rapacious (and crazy) neighbor (no, Iran is not like North Korea, even if they roost on the same "axis"). That's what Robinson's saying here; he's refusing to take McCain's statement at face value.

Heckuva job, Maliki

The defining moment, indeed.

Crappuccino

Roy.

We've reached the point with this war where what ordinary people would regard with horror and revulsion is perceived by its fans as great news. Of course, as ever, they're not nuts, we're nuts. "If peace arrives even in Baghdad," sighs Totten, "...somebody, somewhere, will complain that Iraq has been taken over by the imperial powers of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Starbucks." I say, send Starbucks now: their product tastes like foul water, too, but at least it's been boiled.

And see Kia, in comments.

"A tonal shift"

Dare I say it? Kevin Drum is SHRILL.

Benchmarkery

Shorter Charles the K: Nancy Pelosi's habit of saying exactly what our commanders say is a knife in teh back.

How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks -- mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government -- that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.

I can understand Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, saying that the central government needs to seize the window provided by the surge to achieve political reconciliation. We would all love to have the leaders of the various factions -- Kurd, Shiite and Sunni -- sign nice pieces of paper tying up all the knotty questions of federalism, de-Baathification and oil revenue.

What commander would not want such a silver bullet that would obviate the need for any further ground action? But it is not going to happen for the same reason it has not already happened: The Maliki government is too sectarian and paralyzed to be able to end the war in a stroke of reconciliation.

Excellent.

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?!

Bejebus, nothing kills a blogger's ego quite like this.

But Boylan is not always so high-minded. Sometimes he'll write to a blog simply to make himself heard. In April, Boylan described an anti-American march in Baghdad that was organized by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as "progress," as it proved that Iraqis now enjoyed "the right to assemble." A fellow who calls himself "skank" and blogs at skank.tanglebones.com criticized Boylan's characterization: "Makes you want to scream, doesn't it?" skank wrote. Boylan popped into the comments thread to defend himself: "I guess you would rather have them shooting at us [as opposed to] marching saying that they want us to leave so that they can be united, which is what they were chanting. The sooner they unite and figure this out, the better for everyone."

"Skank?" At "skank.tanglebones.com?"

Col. Steven Boylan has the time and energy to scour the hateamerica, islamolovin' blogosphere and enters the friggin' comments thread at something called skank.tanglebones.com?

Hey, Colonel, what the fuck am I, chopped liver? The Vegacura challenges you to comment...either the real you or whoever is sneaking into the Green Zone, logging on to your laptop, and impersonating you, I don't really care. Just need the traffic.

"Negative events never help"

Karen Hughes, who helped sell a dim-witted reformed alcoholic fundy nut to (a minority of) U.S. voters, found it more difficult to sell his policies to the rest of the world. She's quitting.

Magic carpet bombing

It is uproariously funny that the cover of the latest issue of the New Yorker has a drawing of Ahmadinejad in a mens' room stall with a sandalled foot creeping in from the adjacent stall and, inside the magazine, a the latest Annal of National Security from Seymour Hersh.

Then it gets a lot less funny.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, “The President has made it clear that the United States government remains committed to a diplomatic solution with respect to Iran. The State Department is working diligently along with the international community to address our broad range of concerns.” (The White House declined to comment.)

I was repeatedly cautioned, in interviews, that the President has yet to issue the “execute order” that would be required for a military operation inside Iran, and such an order may never be issued. But there has been a significant increase in the tempo of attack planning. In mid-August, senior officials told reporters that the Administration intended to declare Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. And two former senior officials of the C.I.A. told me that, by late summer, the agency had increased the size and the authority of the Iranian Operations Group. (A spokesman for the agency said, “The C.I.A. does not, as a rule, publicly discuss the relative size of its operational components.”)

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency. He added, “The guys now running the Iranian program have limited direct experience with Iran. In the event of an attack, how will the Iranians react? They will react, and the Administration has not thought it all the way through.”

That theme was echoed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national-security adviser, who said that he had heard discussions of the White House’s more limited bombing plans for Iran. Brzezinski said that Iran would likely react to an American attack “by intensifying the conflict in Iraq and also in Afghanistan, their neighbors, and that could draw in Pakistan. We will be stuck in a regional war for twenty years.”

In a speech at the United Nations last week, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was defiant. He referred to America as an “aggressor” state, and said, “How can the incompetents who cannot even manage and control themselves rule humanity and arrange its affairs? Unfortunately, they have put themselves in the position of God.” (The day before, at Columbia, he suggested that the facts of the Holocaust still needed to be determined.)

“A lot depends on how stupid the Iranians will be,” Brzezinski told me. “Will they cool off Ahmadinejad and tone down their language?” The Bush Administration, by charging that Iran was interfering in Iraq, was aiming “to paint it as ‘We’re responding to what is an intolerable situation,’ ” Brzezinski said. “This time, unlike the attack in Iraq, we’re going to play the victim. The name of our game seems to be to get the Iranians to overplay their hand.”

In addition to the long neocon obsession with destroying the Iranian regime, it looks to me as though Bush/Cheney are actually trying to intensify Iran's military involvement in Iraq. That will serve their dual purpose of then having an excuse for even more intensive bombing in Iran and providing them with a useful exit strategy (exit from the White House, that is, not Iraq) of being able to blame Iran for the chaos and disaster they've initiated in the region. Brilliant. And once again we are hitting the wasp's nest with a stick -- and we don't have a clue what the wasps will do.

Or, to put it another way, Bush is the small child with the broom handle. Iran is the second pinata filled, not with candy and toys, but with explosives, shit, and death.

And if Bush/Cheney "don't give a rat's ass" for the effect this will have on their own party, then there is no political consequence for them whatsoever. Democracy has failed.

And so has sanity.

Many of those who support the President’s policy argue that Iran poses an imminent threat. In a recent essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz depicted President Ahmadinejad as a revolutionary, “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran. . . . [T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force.” Podhoretz concluded, “I pray with all my heart” that President Bush “will find it possible to take the only action that can stop Iran from following through on its evil intentions both toward us and toward Israel.” Podhoretz recently told politico.com that he had met with the President for about forty-five minutes to urge him to take military action against Iran, and believed that “Bush is going to hit” Iran before leaving office. (Podhoretz, one of the founders of neoconservatism, is a strong backer of Rudolph Giuliani’s Presidential campaign, and his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is a senior adviser to President Bush on national security.)

Ahmadinejad, Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, Podhoretz, Abrams...what a fucking crew.

Oh, and then there's the U.S. Navy, chafing as the Air Force gets all the fun in Iraq.

Read the whole thing.

Mission Accomplished

Again!

We hate you, now stay

Une cri de coeur from the New York Times stringers in Iraq?

In interviews four months ago, many Iraqis refused to say how long American troops should stay. Now, however, some say they want them here for a minimum of three years, and maybe even five years. Ms. Zubaidi said she thought five years would be the minimum, adding that the police and army needed to be remade to root out sectarianism.

“They will need five years,” she said. “The first year they need to prepare themselves properly to work with the Iraqi people. Then they need a year or two years to start from the ground building the security services and then. ...” She lowered her voice and looked around as if she was afraid someone might be listening, then continued: “They need one year to prepare a government for Iraq that is built not on a sectarian foundation. It must be a secular government.

“Religion has nothing to do with government,” she said. “Religion is in my heart.”

I wonder if the opinion of friends of New York Times Iraqi reporters for the New York Times is common in the prevailing view within an ethnically cleansed Baghdad, but I have enormous respect for the courage of the reporters and their subjects in this story.

It's not so much a plan....

...as it is another Friedman Unit.

Lunatics and fools

Uh oh, Joe Klein is making sense.

Comfortably numb

From A G.O.P. Senator Charts a Middle Course, September 3, 2007:

As he toured the state recently, [Senator Lamar] Alexander took the opportunity to explain his approach on Iraq, which essentially boils down to gradually shifting United States forces from direct combat operations to more training and equipping of Iraqi forces, with a concentration on stabilizing the country province by province. He said such a strategy could lead to a significant drawdown of troops within a year or slightly longer.

Despite the gravity of the issue, Mr. Alexander typically had to raise the subject on his own or respond to news media questions on the subject; he was not pressed on it directly by the public even after a detailed talk on Iraq at a crowded Rotary Club meeting in Jackson or his appearance in Murfreesboro.

Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat who appeared with Mr. Alexander in Nashville, said a certain numbness had set in among Tennesseans when it came to the war. “It is kind of like a low-grade fever,” Mr. Cooper said. “It worries them, but they are so used to the drumbeat of death, destruction and confusion they don’t know how to react.”

And Democrat Focuses on the Financial Toll, September 3, 2007:

In talking to constituents about Iraq during lawmakers’ August break, Mr. Mahoney emphasized his outrage over the financial cost of the war, hoping that the same message of fiscal conservatism that helped elect him would once again resonate with voters and help establish his reputation as a centrist Democrat in a district where President Bush won with more than half the vote in 2000 and in 2004.

“You have got to understand, for the last seven years all the money has been going to Iraq, all the money has been going to homeland security,” Mr. Mahoney said Wednesday at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in the Village of Wellington, Fla.

“The president has been trying to keep it off the balance sheets so you don’t know how bad it is,” he added. “I’m here to tell you it’s bad.”

In Wellington, which is best known for its polo grounds and equestrian centers, Mr. Mahoney did not get a single question about the war, which he attributed to his constituents having made up their minds and being satisfied with where he stands.

Carmen A. Priore, a member of the Wellington Village Council who attended the lunch, had a different explanation. “A lot of people sitting here in the chamber, they are concerned about how am I going to make a mortgage payment,” Mr. Priore said. “Iraq seems so distant.”

Jonathan Schell, writing in The New Yorker on March 13, 1971:

Five years or so ago, when everyone knew that the war was getting larger, the slightest suggestion of an invasion of the north caused as uproar. But now, when the war is supposed to be "winding down," these suggestions pass almost unnoticed, although there is no reason to believe that the consequences of an invasion now would be any different from the what the consequences would have been then. This war has gone to our brain. It has drugged us. Our reflexes have slowed down. Our altertness has been blunted.

I watched in a kind of drugged silence Katie Couric last night, making "Her first trip to Iraq," as she described the great success "the surge" is having in Anbar Province. You knew she was serious because her hair was tied back and she wasn't smiling. Earlier in the day, I'd read Michael Gordon's oh so carefully balanced report on the strategy to support Sunni tribal chiefs, The Former Insurgent Counter-Insurgency ("they may turn against us later, but for now the enemy of my enemy is my friend"), again pointing to Anbar as the model for success. The power of the military in Iraq is similar to the power of the president in the U.S.: they each control the message and the context (coincidently visiting Anbar Province!). We only know what the military tells us, as there is very little independent reporting either in Iraq or in the White House. So expect to hear more about the stunning success of Anbar in the days leading up to the Petraeus/Crocker report, and very little about Basra or about how successes like Anbar could very well be creating the conditions that will worsen political reconciliation, not improve it -- the whole point of "the surge" in the first place.

Cigar-chomping memo taking

Once again it appears that the Pentagon is using a willing John Burns to help control the debate in Washington, but the bullshit meter "surges" up to "high" when you read a passage like this:

General Lynch, a blunt-spoken, cigar-smoking Ohio native who commands the Third Infantry Division, said that all the American troops that began an offensive south of Baghdad in mid-June were part of the five-month-old troop buildup, and that they were making “significant” gains in areas that were previously enemy sanctuaries. Pulling back before the job was completed, he said, would create “an environment where the enemy could come back and fill the void.”

Ok, we got it. General Lynch is a walking cliché . But it would be nice if Burns did some actual reporting to

1. Determine if the "significant" gains being made actually exist.
2. Look a little more closely at how Lynch's fears of an "early withdrawal" compare with what's actually being proposed in Washington. Most of the proposals call for troop levels to start coming down in April, just as Lynch claims that's how much time his troops need. What's the difference?
3. Ask why the enemy could come back and fill the void today, but not on March 31.