February 2004

February 25, 2004

God Bless Those Niggers!

Donald H. Rumsfeld may have sunk to a new low during his visit to Iraq earlier this week.

Complaining that, "Syria and Iran have not been helpful to the people of Iraq. Indeed, they've been unhelpful. They've allowed people to move from their countries to Iraq to engage in terrorist activities against the Iraqi people," because, let's face it, "the powers that be in Syria and Iran are not wishing the free Iraqi people well." Rumsfeld also blamed "terrorist networks, plus the former regime elements, plus some criminals" for the miserable security situation in Free Iraq.

Not all is lost, though, as, according to Donald H., "Instead of responding by acquiescing, we see that volunteers are still in line to join the police. They're still in line to join the army. Instead of retreating, they are leaning forward and taking losses, and God bless them for it."

Now, as this blogger has discussed before now, those pesky Geneva Conventions mandate the occupying power to maintain security in an occupied nation. We've also discussed the reason that volunteers are "leaning forward and taking losses": "Why do you think we work with them? There are no other jobs." It's also been fairly widely reported that the Iraqi resistance is mostly home-grown.

But to gauge the degree of hypocrisy and racism in Rumsfeld's worldview, we could ask ourselves what the expected reaction might be if, noting that extremists abroad were slamming aeroplanes into New York skyscrapers on a weekly basis, official reaction were to decry the unhelpful nature of the countries from which the attacks were staged while praising American people for continuing to show up at their high-rise workplaces to "take losses" in the name of freedom -- but not removing a finger from its collective ass to try to prevent the all-too-predictable next attack.

In other H. Rumsfeld news, twenty years and two months after his December '83 visit to Iraq, the Donald was in Uzbekistan this week re-enacting his infamous handshake with the then-beloved Saddam Hussein. Now, as then, Rumsfeld was despatched to the Asian continent to "discuss the growing military partnership between the United States" and a murderous dictator.

That Uzbek President Islam Karimov submerges his prisoners in boiling water, among various and sundry other grisly misdeeds, underscores "the delicate and difficult nature of U.S. support for Uzbekistan." In other words, it might force McClellan to do a bit of tapdancing at some point -- but the handshake can proceed as planned.

Update: Continuing his World Tour, Rumsfeld next stepped up to the mic while in Kazakhstan. Demonstrating that he's been drinking from the same pixie water that has so bamboozled his Commander in Chief, Rumsfeld allowed that

It's interesting when one thinks about Iraq and their unwillingness to disarm, that Kazakhstan stands as an impressive model of how a country can do it. If Iraq had followed the Kazakhstan model, after 17 U.N. resolutions, and disarmed the way Kazakhstan did, there would not have been a war.

In a "related development", Shell Oil has inked a deal to "develop" a Kazakh oil field. This would be the same Shell Oil which has already wreaked havoc upon indigenous communities in Nigeria, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere.

Yeah, a "military-to-military partnership" and a rapacious multinational are "related" all right. We mustn't forget, however, that if Shell weren't to put down stakes in Kazakhstan, then "the sound and ethical business practices synonymous with Shell, the environmental investment, and the tens of millions of dollars spent on community programs would all be lost."

February 18, 2004

Balz's Brush

An analysis piece headlined 'For Kerry, a Tough Geography Test,' by the Washington Post's Dan Balz, begins: "John F. Kerry faces a daunting challenge as he turns toward a prospective general election campaign against President Bush, a race that will test whether a liberal New Englander and member of the Washington elite can attract support in the more conservative swing states that cost Democrats the White House in 2000."

In the third paragraph Balz writes that "Bush advisers have signaled their determination to paint Kerry as a liberal Washington insider and run against him as someone out of touch with mainstream America."

Or, "the Bush campaign seeks to paint John Kerry exactly as I have done."

February 11, 2004

Looking Forward

The Shrub, early in his Meet The Press interview, reassured the teevee viewing public that

There is going to be ample time for the American people to assess whether or not I made a good calls, whether or not I used good judgment, whether or not I made the right decision in removing Saddam Hussein from power, and I look forward to that debate, and I look forward to talking to the American people about why I made the decisions I made.

That's awfully white of him. But, gee, you don't think the proper time-frame for debating whether or not it would have been the right decision would have been before the war? There was certainly "ample time" then -- and "ample" public willingness to take up the debate. But we'll recall that, at the time, the Dubya had insisted that he couldn't "decide policy based upon a focus group."

Here's an analogy: a serial bank-robber, finally apprehended by the po-lice, agrees to "debate" the merits of his practice with a judge, all the while keeping hold of all his stolen assets, and continuing to plan and execute further robberies.

Who could possibly complain?

In other Meet The Press logical hijinks:

• You remember U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 clearly stated show us your arms and destroy them, or your programs and destroy them. And we said, there are serious consequences if you don't. That was a unanimous verdict. In other words, the worlds of the U.N. Security Council said we're unanimous and you're a danger. So, it wasn't just me and the United States. The world thought he was dangerous and needed to be disarmed.

And, of course, he defied the world once again.

By submitting the required weapons declaration, allowing inspectors into the country, and agreeing to destroy the al Samoud missiles (all in addition to having allowed the destruction of his banned weapons years earlier), he demonstrates "defiance"? Okay, dude.

• Libya, for example, there was an positive effect in Libya where Moammar Khaddafy voluntarily disclosed his weapons programs and agreed to dismantle dismantle them, and the world is a better place as a result of that.

Leaving aside the reality that Libya had been attempting a rapprochement with the West for a good decade, why is Libya the only country to renounce its WMD programmes in the wake of the "disarming" of Saddam? Why not North Korea? Why not Israel? Why not Pakistan? Why not Russia? Why, for god's sake, not the United States? Huhn. Could it be that WMD are a red herring? Could it be that WMD-hoarding dictators on friendly terms with the Bush Administration are free to disregard the "message" sent by the Iraq invasion?

• The fundamental question is: Do you deal with the threat once you see it? What - in the war on terror, how do you deal with threats? I dealt with the threat by taking the case to the world and said, Let's deal with this. We must deal with it now.

An issue this blogger has raised time and time again. The Iraq "threat" was "seen", presumably, no later that the 2002 State Of The Union address, when Iraq was included in the "Axis of Evil" club. Or, at the very latest, on September 24, 2002 -- the date of Tony Blair's infamous "45 minutes" dossier. If the "threat" was of such pressing urgency that it could be "dealt with" not "now", but 14 months after it was first "seen", that's some big-time negligence, by Bush's own logic.

• In complaining that Saddam was not the world's only "madman", Russert's first example is Fidel Castro. Whatever his faults, in 45 years in power, Castro has never invaded another country, never fired off radiological munitions, never overthrown a democratically elected government... If Castro is a "madman", Russert is correct indeed -- there are a fuck of a lot of madmen in the world.

• And the reason why I felt like we needed to use force in Iraq and not in North Korea, because we had run the diplomatic string in Iraq. As a matter of fact, failed diplomacy could embolden Saddam Hussein in the face of this war we were in. In Iraq I mean, in North Korea, excuse me, the diplomacy is just beginning. We are making good progress in North Korea.

Waitasecond. Didn't you just, not fifteen seconds earlier, get done saying that once we "see" a "threat", "We must deal with it now"? What reason is there to suppose that diplomacy would "embolden" Saddam, but will not "embolden" North Korea?

• And the reason I'm not surprised [by the "level and intensity" of the resistance] is because there are people in that part of the world who recognize what a free Iraq will mean in the war on terror. In other words, there are people who desperately want to stop the advance of freedom and democracy because freedom and democracy will be a powerful long term deterrent to terrorist activities.

Uh, wasn't the reason that the 9/11 perpetrators carried out the attacks supposed to be because they despise freedom and democracy? Then, shouldn't an increase in the "level and intensity" of freedom and democracy serve as a powerful catalyst to terrorist activities? In a world ridden with enslavement and autocracy, bin Laden wouldn't have anything to bitch about, so would have to retire from terrorism, yes? Granted, this presents a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. But surely the bin Laden-ites should be able to prioritise their target selections. First, go after the most free and democratic societies -- the Scandinavian countries. Then hit the pseudo-democracies in North America and Europe and/or the semi-democracies in Latin America and East Asia. Then, finally, the "emerging" democracies under U.S. tutelage (Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia, Turkey, et al.).

• I look forward to articulating...

Brother, we all look forward to you articulating something, anything.

February 06, 2004

John Hannah Gets Around

Exclusive: Cheney and the 'Raw' Intelligence

A memo written by a top Washington lobbyist for the controversial Iraqi National Congress raises new questions about the role Vice President Dick Cheney’s office played in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The memo, obtained by NEWSWEEK, suggests that the INC last year was directly feeding intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to terrorism to one of Cheney’s top foreign- policy aides. Cheney staffers later pushed INC info—including defectors’ claims about WMD and terror ties—to bolster the case that Saddam’s government posed a direct threat to America. But the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have strongly questioned the reliability of defectors supplied by the INC.

February 04, 2004

Knees, Corners, and Lights in Tunnels

Three articles today about the Iraq insurgency put the lie to comments by Maj. Gen. Charles "we've turned the corner" Swannack and Maj. Gen. Raymond "brought to their knees" Odierno ... and prove wrong anyone who predicted the capture of Saddam Hussein would put a dent in the low-grade guerrilla war that's killing more than 1.5 Americans per day.

January was the second deadliest month for US troops since the fall of Baghdad.

So who's killing Americans, and separating them from their arms, legs, and eyesight? The mainstream sources linked above and U.S. commanders still chalk up most of the violence to "regime loyalists," either willfully ignorant or oblivious to any notion of Iraqi nationalism playing a role in attempting to remove an occupying army.

February 03, 2004

WMD, the OSP, and the OVP

When David Kay dropped a huge turd in the punch bowl last week, I didn't expect the mainstream media to completely fucking miss the point regarding the bad intel on Iraq, and swallow Kay's line that it's the CIA's fault.

But they did.

So it was left to Knight Ridder's excellent Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and Joseph Galloway to get it right. Or, rather, to state the obvious.

Bush's inquiry into Iraq intelligence must include Cheney, Pentagon

What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S officials said Monday.

[...]

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn’t dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq’s weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.

Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said. “There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence . . . that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon’s now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president,” said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion.

The article is a must read.