it's december 2004 in iraq

Do they know it's Christmastime at all?

And from today's NYT:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - The American military presence in Iraq will grow by nearly 12,000 troops by next month, to 150,000, the highest level since the invasion last year, to provide security for the Iraqi elections in January and to quell insurgent attacks around the country, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.

Just through the elections, you see.

Gaps naturally lead to stop gaps. When gaps are small, stop gaps may stopper them effectively. However, hugely gaping gaps eat stop gaps for lunch. D'y'see?

What fun this is all turning out to be! (Ack.)

Don't even get me started on shortfalls.

Okay, sorta catching up all sorts of things:

Bush says Iraqi troops not ready (among the other great bits: "Car bombs... are effective propaganda tools.")

The knives start coming out for Rumsfeld...from the right

Meanwhile, the long term horrors on the health front among the troops are just starting. Great.

yeah, there's been at least two things on NPR about troop healthcare lately.

And then there was SignatureGate -- reported by David Hackworth back in November and forcing dear ol' Rumsfeld to change his approach.

Hackworth's latest, meanwhile, is an interesting read as well on many levels regarding scrounging.

Today's news. *sigh*

Twenty-two people have been killed and at least 50 injured in an attack at a US military base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the US military says.

Unknown assailants fired multiple rocket and mortar rounds, apparently at a dining hall in the base, at around 1200 (0900 GMT).

It is not clear how many US troops were among the casualties.

And there's more details on prisoner abuse that have surfaced. But hey, Blair flew in for a photo op, so clearly everything's great!

19 confirmed US soldiers dead at least, and that's not mentioning the Iraqis also killed. A Washington Post report is not very sanguine:

The adequacy of current troop numbers is one of the questions provoked by yesterday's action, said Charles McComas, a veteran Special Forces soldier who served in Afghanistan before retiring. "Do we have the right forces and enough of them to do the offensive patrolling to reduce the chances of this happening again?" he asked.

A private-sector security expert who recently left Baghdad after more than a year there agreed, noting that the United States originally put an entire division in the Mosul area, the 101st Airborne, but replaced it earlier this year with a force about half that size, only to see insurgent attacks increase. "We have replaced a division with a brigade and think we can offer the same amount of security," he said, insisting on anonymity because his opinions are so at odds with the official U.S. government view.

The attack also indicates that the insurgency is growing more sophisticated with the passage of time. One of the basic principles of waging a counterinsurgency is that it requires patience. "Twenty-one months" -- the length of the occupation so far -- "is not a long time to tame the tribal warfare expected there," said retired Marine Lt. Col. Rick Raftery, an intelligence specialist who operated in northern Iraq in 1991. "My guess is that this will take 10 years."

Another principle, less noted but painfully clear yesterday, is that insurgents also tend to sharpen their tactics as time goes by. Over the past 20 months, enemy fighters have learned a lot about how the U.S. military operates and where its vulnerabilities lie.

"The longer you are anywhere, the more difficult it becomes," said Hess, who served in northern Iraq in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1996. "They have changed their tactics a lot in the year-plus."

Several experts noted that insurgents appear to have acted on accurate intelligence. Kalev Sepp, a former Special Forces counterinsurgency expert who recently returned from Iraq, noted that the attack "was carried out in daylight against the largest facility on the base, at exactly the time when the largest number of soldiers would be present."

"This combination of evidence indicates a good probability that the attack was well-planned and professionally executed," Sepp said.

Meanwhile, more about further abuse details and more twisting in the wind:

The variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon's past insistence -- arising out of the summertime scandal surrounding the mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison -- that the abuse occurred largely during a few months at that prison, and that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.

After the latest revelations, including the disclosures that officials in other federal agencies had objected to these actions by soldiers -- to the point of urging, in some cases, war crimes prosecutions -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded yesterday with a promise that the President Bush expects a full investigation and corrective actions "to make sure that abuse does not occur again."

The details of the abuse appeared to catch some administration officials by surprise, although five different agencies for weeks have been culling releasable records from their files, under an agreement worked out by U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein, who was responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by five independent groups seeking anything pertinent to detainee deaths, abuse and transfers to other countries since Sept. 11, 2001.

McClellan said that he did not know whether the White House was informed about the incidents detailed in the documents released on Monday. These included the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the impersonation of FBI agents by military interrogators -- two of many practices that provoked concern among FBI agents stationed there.

The second page of that story is not necessarily for the squeamish but should be read anyway.

Meantime, while this is arguably more a case of the mysteries of military organization at work than anything else, the fact of the matter is that a soldier who lost an arm in Iraq got discharged with the Army telling him he owed $2000. Thanks guys. Said press report and more helped change that situation but still.

A very moving post from a Mosul-based chaplain. You may disagree with the spiritual conclusions (the final observations actually struck me as creepy), but the details, though often brutal, are both unsettling and moving.

Thanks, Ned, for giving ILE one thread where the Iraq war persists. After the November election it has been all too easy to become discouraged about opposing the war. After all, BushCo has offered ample proof that no amount of reality can penetrate their carapace, so the obvious conclusion would be that resistance is futile. That's a wrong conclusion in my view.

BushCo would appear to be safe now from public opinion, having won another four year term, but it is not nearly as safe as appearances suggest. The majority of Congress must face elections in two years and they know it. Turning public opinion against this war is not just a job for Iraqis.

The Iraq war is a continuing disaster for Iraq, the USA, and the world. It is deeply wrong. It is enormously costly. Iraqis and US soldiers are still being blown to bits every day. In bald terms of suffering and death, shortening this war by even one week would be worthwhile.

At an even more basic level, if BushCo is allowed to bury the truth under its lies, then justice dies and we are all lost. It is imperative to fight against the lies, if only because they are a sickness that will prove fatal to a great many things worth having, like civil rights and their protection through democratic control of the powerful. It looks to me like a matter of bedrock self-interest, not naive idealism.

Thanks again, Ned, for not giving in to despair.

Yer welcome, sir. At base, I feel that there needs to be an accounting. Evidence pointed out along the way will help with that, though it will be a long, long time coming, perhaps.

NPR's Talk of the Nation is covering the prisoner abuse thing today. Right this second, in fact.