June 2003

June 29, 2003

By Any Other Name

A Washington Post story detailing the "coalition"'s difficulties in "pacifying" Iraq lets the cat out of the bag in a few different places.

First, a former CentCom big-wig laments that, "If we don't get this operation moving soon, the opposition will continue to grow, and we will have a much larger problem." Does this sound like somebody who believes that the resistance is comprised only of "members of the old regime" on one hand, and "disgruntled Iraqis, upset about house searches or whatever" on the other?

Second, we learn that:

Because the war was so narrowly focused on Hussein's government in Baghdad, a large part of the Iraqi population does not feel as if it was defeated, said retired Army Col. Scott R. Feil. "As I heard one Iraqi say, the Americans defeated Saddam, but not the Iraqi people, so the psychology of the loser is not present," he said.

Ah, so, the goal of the war was not to "liberate" the Iraqi population, but to defeat it. Well, that clears that up.

Meanwhile, the lovable Senator Lugar the other day thundered that, "The idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more -- we've got to get over that rhetoric. It is rubbish! We're going to be there a long time." Oooookay. That's pretty explicit. Not to be outdone, a "senior military official in Washington" opines that, "You have to go in and tell them: 'We're gonna do what we did in Germany and Japan. We're gonna write your constitution. We're gonna install your government. We're gonna write your laws. We're gonna watch your every move for a decade, and then maybe you'll get a chance to do it yourself.'"

Any other pre- and post-war pretexts yet to be officially disabused? WMD? Check. Al Qaeda link? Check. Welcomed with open arms? Check. Making America safer and/or dismantling worldwide terrorist networks? Check and check. It's nothing to do with oil? Check. And now we can once and for all put the liberation of the brave people of Iraq angle to bed as well.

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

June 25, 2003

Judith Miller - MET Alpha Commander

Howard Kurtz blows open Miller Watch with a devastating piece in today's Post. Go read it.

Rummy's World

In response to yesterday's killing of six British MPs, Donald Rumsfeld said:

Just as they were unable to stop the coalition advance in Baghdad, the death squads will not stop our commitment to create stability and security in postwar Iraq.

Rummy likes using the term "death squads." But the British were killed by angry townspeople who "fetched weapons from their homes, converged on the police station and attacked British soldiers."

June 24, 2003

Sttttttrike Three

Turns out the latest installment of Operation Bomb Saddam wasn't what is was cracked up to be. That convoy the U.S. obliterated "could have been a smuggling pipeline" for all the Pentagon knows. They do know, apparently, that they shot up some Syrians, which can happen when an army is conducting operations "a kilometer or so" inside the fucking Syrian border. An act of war, anyone?

Meanwhile, at a small village near the border that was caught up in the raid, The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid tallied the carnage:

• Two sheep smugglers
• 13 sheep
• A 20-year-old woman and her 1-year-old daughter
• Four houses
• Two storage shacks
• Three pickups
• Three tractors
• One truck

And not a single Saddam Hussein.

June 22, 2003

Chutzpah

You've got to hand it to the Bush Administration. Even while they're digging up anthrax in Maryland, while Los Alamos can't account for all of its plutonium stocks and North Carolina teeters on the brink, while Congress has given the go-ahead for "mini-nukes" and production of nuclear triggers is set to resume, while at least a few people are speaking out about the poisoning of Iraq and Afghanistan for time immemorial, and, yes, while not a whiff of a banned weapons programme has yet been uncovered in Iraq; the Administration is not resting on its laurels.

Iran is, as we know, coming under much scrutiny for its nuclear weapons programme, a blockade of North Korea is under consideration and Richard Perle "can't rule out" a "surgical strike", Syria's back in the gun sights, and now Libya is being warned over its "pursuit of WMD". (Meanwhile, al-Qaeda may have pinched a 727 and, "As many as 30 suspected terrorists may still be in the United States because of continuing flaws in the county's visa program and poor communication between federal agencies." But, you know, boys will be boys.)

Assuming (for the sake of argument) that the Bush Administration isn't "agressively pursuing" nuclear armageddon, one must conclude that it's probably bluffing. (How else explain the confluence of the bluster with new warnings lamenting Dubya's "imperial over-stretch" -- specifically that "our policy in Afghanistan is definitely on track to fail," and that Iraq's reconstruction is "in chaos"? ) Or more likely that it figures that the world will put up a few contrary bleats, then capitulate just as fully as it did over the slaughter of Iraq.

Shall we prove the Administration wrong?

June 17, 2003

Poll: We're Doomed as a Society

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll, and 22 percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons.

[...]

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of them were from Saudi Arabia. None were Iraqis.

[...]

(Survey director) Kull said the poll's data showed the mistaken belief that weapons of mass destruction were found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war."

Read the whole article.

June 12, 2003

Reunited

Yesterday the CIA announced it has hired former chief UN nuclear weapons inspector David Kay to tag along with the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group to "refine" the search for those darn missing WMD.

A staunch hawk on Iraq, Mr. Kay was one of MSNBC's talking heads during the war. Weeks before the CIA report on the trailers of mass destruction that probably aren't, Mr. Kay got some time on Brokaw's show, announcing with forcefulness that the trailers absolutely were mobile weapons labs ... even though his expertise is nuclear weapons, and he hadn't performed an inspection in over ten years.

Mr. Kay is perhaps less well known for his role in corrupting and de-legitimizing the UNSCOM inspection teams, by sprinkling his with spies, which was later exposed.

June 11, 2003

Department of Corrections

Yesterday the count of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since President Bush's May 1 victory speech launched with an initial total of 29, based on a report from AFP. After yesterday's attack in Baghdad that left a paratrooper dead and another critically injured, the Daily Telegraph put the number at 42. Both are apparently incorrect. Fox News is compiling a complete list of "Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the current total, including the victim of yesterday's RPG attack, is 44.

June 09, 2003

About Those Mobile Labs ...

You know the argument that those Iraqi trailers were mobile weapons labs is in trouble when media stooge Judith Miller writes

American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.

... chemical weapons experts, engineers, chemists and military systems experts contacted by The Observer over the past week, say the layout and equipment found on the trailers is entirely inconsistent with the vehicles being mobile labs.

Oh, and the Federation of American Scientists also doubts the claim.

June 06, 2003

Miller Watch

The Nation's Russ Baker is the latest to take a crack at Judith Miller's questionable reporting in his superb 'Scoops' and Truth at the Times.

Miller responded to Baker's query about Ahmad Chalabi being an unnamed source for Miller's WMD articles, as reported recently by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz:

"Chalabi has NEVER been an unnamed source of mine," Miller told The Nation in an e-mail. "He has ALWAYS been named. Every time. This is one of several gross errors in Kurtz's story." Miller did not identify those errors. It's notable that Miller's comments about Chalabi don't jibe with what she told (Times Baghdad bureau chief) John Burns in her e-mail to him. Chalabi is named or quoted in sixteen Miller articles over the past year, mostly on political topics, but in only one of those is he mentioned, even remotely, in connection with WMDs--and then only to note that he and US military investigators might be exchanging intelligence information. If he were the New York Times's key supplier of exclusives on that subject and, as Miller claims, was not used as an unattributed source, his name should appear in those articles.

Here is Miller's original email correspondence with Burns:

I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.

June 05, 2003

As Predicted?

Troubled Iraqi Areas May See More Troops
AP (via Washington Post) - May 29, 2003
Senior leaders and logistics experts in the 3rd Infantry say most of the division is not ready for combat. They complain that they have received almost no spare parts to repair damaged tanks and armored personnel carriers - what the military calls Class IX supplies - since they left Kuwait on March 22.

"He is going to get U.S. soldiers needlessly killed if he expects us to go into battle," a senior noncommissioned officer in the 3rd Infantry said of McKiernan.

U.S. Soldier Killed, Five Wounded in Iraq
AP (via Washington Post) - June 5, 2003
The assault came a day after more than 1,500 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division - which helped fight the war and take Baghdad - moved into Fallujah and surrounding areas in central Iraq. Their mission is to quell increasing attacks on U.S. occupying forces in the region.

June 04, 2003

Rumsfeld -- Wrong Again

Rumsfeld Announces End of Afghan Combat
Washington Post - May 2, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that 8,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan have ended major combat operations and will shift their focus to stabilizing and rebuilding the country.

U.S. Troops Seek Guerillas in Afghanistan
AP (via Guardian) - June 4, 2003
The operation that ended Monday was one of the largest American since Anaconda, the March 2002 battle between U.S. and al-Qaida fighters in the Shah-e-Kot Valley.

June 02, 2003

Say What?

An April 22 Salon article discussing the disappearance of the Iraqi army, concluded with the following paragraph:

Wamid Nathmi, a political scientist who used to be regarded as something as close to an opposition figure as one could get in Iraq, has made a 180-degree turn and now subscribes to paranoid theories about how Baghdad could have fallen. At first, he says, he blamed "traitors," but now he hints that Americans used some new and terrible weapon, "maybe a limited-scale nuclear device," against the soldiers defending the International Airport. "Go to the airport," he urges. "The Americans keep it closed to everybody, and I have heard there are hundreds or thousands of dead Iraqi soldiers there who have been burned all over, not shot. That is how they were able to defeat us."

This is the one and only time (to this blogger's knowledge) that such a claim has been adduced. Yet, two months later, the airport remains closed to civilian traffic. The reason, stated over the "coalition"'s Baghdad radio station on the weekend, is that planes trying to land are coming under fire from "members of the former regime who want to undermine the rebuilding campaign." The "coalition", rather than using the massive military and reconaissance capabilities at its disposal is asking for members of the general public to come forward with any information about the alleged shooting at of planes!

Totally preposterous. Also at odds with other reasons given: the "antiquated electronics": are not up to "international standards", and "U.S. military and business contractors are filling bomb craters on the main runways and bringing the airport up to international standards". Neither does it take into account that the "coalition" is operating a "fortress-style" detention center at the airport.

The suggestion of a "new and terrible weapon" doesn't seem very credible, if only because eyewitness survivors ought to have surfaced before now. But it would seem that something fishy is going on there. Any ideas?

Bullshit Here. Bullshit There. Bullshit Everywhere.

The big news today, as reported by U.S. News and Newsweek, is that Colin Powell was so disturbed about the quality of intelligence on Iraq that he assembled a team to review the information he was given before the big UN speech on February 5th. According to U.S. News, during the speech's rehearsal, "Powell tossed several pages in the air. 'I'm not reading this. This is bullshit.'"

Well, of course. It came from Chalabi. But the make-believe intel didn't go to waste. Several of the tossed pages ended up on the front page of the New York Times, as reported by Judith Miller. (For a complete takedown of Miller, and a call for a Times investigation of her, see Jack Shafer's latest.)

The unfortunate flip-side of the amusing Powell anecdote is that one may conclude the things that made the cut for his Feb. 5th speech were true ... which would be wrong. As Glen Rangwala has pointed out, most of Powell's 44 claims were bullshit, as well.