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Iraq Thread
Insurgents step up sectarian violence in Iraq (FT – front page)
Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground – War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report (Washington Post)
Former Secretary of State James Baker (under Bush I) urges phased exit of U.S. troops from Iraq. (ABC News)
US ‘erodes’ global human rights (BBC)
"We will leave when the job is done"
Iraq New Terror Breeding Ground – War Created Haven, CIA Advisers Report (Washington Post)
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank.
Iraq provides terrorists with "a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills," said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. "There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries."
Insurgents step up sectarian violence in Iraq
A senior aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s top Shia cleric, was assassinated yesterday as insurgents stepped up their violent campaign to disrupt the January 30 elections by provoking sectarian tensions.
Mahmoud al-Madaeni, Mr Sistani’s representative in the mixed Sunni-Shia region of Salman Pak, was attacked on his way home from evening prayers along with his son and two others.
Serious Sunni-Shia violence has been avoided until now, largely due to the Grand Ayatollah’s insistence that Shias refrain from reprisals that could trigger a civil war.
(snip)
* The Iraq war cost $102bn to the end of September 2004, with monthly spending averaging $4.8bn, according to the latest Pentagon figures released yesterday. Experts say the total will be considerably higher once replacement costs for vehicles are added.
Former Secretary of State James Baker (under Bush I) urges phased exit of U.S. troops from Iraq.
A protracted U.S. military presence in Iraq is probably unavoidable since attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces and on Iraqi security forces are likely to continue, Baker said Tuesday in a speech at Rice University in Houston.
"Even under the best of circumstances, the new Iraqi government will remain extremely vulnerable to internal divisions and external meddling," he said.
Still, former President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state said, "any appearance of a permanent occupation will both undermine domestic support here in the United States and play directly into the hands of those in the Middle East who however wrongly suspect us of imperial design."
US ‘erodes’ global human rights
In its annual report, Human Rights Watch says that when a country as dominant as the US openly defies the law, it invites others to do the same.
It says an independent US commission should look into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s US-run Abu Ghraib jail.
According to the New-York based group, abuses committed by the US have significantly weakened the world’s ability to protect human rights.
"The US government is less and less able to push for justice abroad, because it’s unwilling to see justice done at home," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW.
"They should be grateful"
And then there is this (last week) fromAtrios/Digby:
Ben Wikler provides us with a choice excerpt from the Nelson report, a long running insider tipsheet generally considered to be quite reliable:
There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear “bad news.”
Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq…building democracy. “That’s all he wants to hear about,” we have been told. So “in” are the latest totals on school openings, and “out” are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that “it will just get worse.”
Our sources are firm in that they conclude this “good news only” directive comes from Bush himself; that is, it is not a trap or cocoon thrown around the President by National Security Advisor Rice, Vice President Cheney, and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. In any event, whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message.
Digby then notes:
I am not surprised. In fact a couple of weeks ago I wrote:
This is the big story of the second term. Bush himself is now completely in charge. He did what his old man couldn’t do. He has been freed of all constraints, all humility and all sense of proportion. Nobody can run him, not Cheney, not Condi, not Card. He has a sense of his power that he didn’t have before. You can see it. From now on nobody can tell him nothin. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?
They can’t control him.
I’d pretty much go along with this assessment of the brain dead level of denial
currently in the whitehouse. Initially, public denial, is an essential ingredient in an imperial endeavor like Iraq — we can’t very well say we want to destroy your culture and steal all your stuff, no it has to be packaged as an act of benevolence, like “freeing 60 million Iraqis” or “winning the peace”. So, now that (after almost 2 years) the facts on the ground have come to belie any such benevolence, and have created instead a raging resistance that grows like a fire on a block of woodframe buildings, can we expect the former alcoholic in charge to give it up with the addiction, like he did with the drink? I kind of fucking doubt it. First, after all, the public denial so essential to the project in the first place cannot be so easily cast off, thus revealing that nasty underbelly of the true intentions, this would in effect double the failure, by laying all bare. Secondly, it is in some sense, denial itself that has come to embody the man himself. Of course it’s not called “denial” but rather the adjective operatives like steadfast, unwavering, will not wilt, means what he says, bla bla bla. And like Digby notes, the election results have only augmented, like only millions of affirmative drinking buddies could, the illusion of success in delirium. In Iraq, this all means continuing degeneration, through making all the wrong choices, which only hastens the process. Any chance of reasonable(under the circumstances)policy choices, will no doubt be impossible as both the level of denial and chaos accelerate through the political clevage generated by those radicalized in loyality and those that are increasingly alarmed. In this scenario, slothrops notion of partitioning the country, in another short term tactic to hang on, becomes plausable if not actively sought after (by increasing sectarian strife). I would also agree with rememgiap that this would in the end draw in other influences and widen the conflict throught the region. And, all this inability to change course, compromise, or otherwise do anything right, and continually allowing the pressure to ever increase also increases proportionally an end
game blowout — for better or worse.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 16 2005 9:24 utc | 76
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