It's April 2007 in Iraq

Meantime, interesting claim of the day. Not surprising per se, there's already been plenty of mutterings that GOP types with a political career to think about after Bush leaves would kindly wish the issue to be put to bed well before the next election.

Max Hastings on the promise and limitations of the troop surge.

For US policy in Iraq to have a chance of working, the indispensable ingredient is time. Yet the storehouse of this precious commodity was almost emptied before Petraeus arrived. Everybody concerned with Iraq - the American and British governments, the precarious regime in Baghdad, the insurgents, the population across the country - is staring at the calendar, looking towards January 2009.

Remember the dead...and remember those whose lives are destroyed.

Blinded and disabled on the 54th day of the war in Iraq, Sam Ross returned home to a rousing parade that outdid anything this small, depressed Appalachian town had ever seen. “Sam’s parade put Dunbar on the map,” his grandfather said.

That was then.

Now Mr. Ross, 24, faces charges of attempted homicide, assault and arson in the burning of a family trailer in February. Nobody in the trailer was hurt, but Mr. Ross fought the assistant fire chief who reported to the scene, and later threatened a state trooper with his prosthetic leg, which was taken away from him, according to the police.

The police locked up Mr. Ross in the Fayette County prison. In his cell, he tried to hang himself with a sheet. After he was cut down, Mr. Ross was committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where, he said in a recent interview there, he is finally getting — and accepting — the help he needs, having spiraled downward in the years since the welcoming fanfare faded.

“I came home a hero, and now I’m a bum,” Mr. Ross, whose full name is Salvatore Ross Jr., said.

Links to text, slides and somecommenton Pentagon IG's report on Doug Feith's pre-war 'intel' on Iraq/al Qaeda.

Tell me again, what prompted the USA and Great Britain to invade Iraq? And what constitutes "victory", and why would this "victory" matter, if we hadn't invade Iraq to begin with?

I am fuzzy on the details.

haven't finished this yet; it's a takedown of Clausewitz who I only know of by reading 'nuff hawk think pieces over the years:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4268401.html

...nor have I done much outside reading on what else David Corn has written. But it's interesting in that, at this late date, articles within the right-wing hawk establishment, in diagnosing the situation, end up using language that cuts right through all the binaries the left has come up with to understand them (neo vs paleo, brass vs RMA, realist vs idealist):

i mean the following two paragraphs are part of the same argument. here he sounds like Mark Steyn:

Besides the fallacy of equating jihadists with Al Qaeda alone, this static conception of the global jihad in terms of finite “stock” ignores the dynamic created by media, i.e., the cyber-mobilization as the new Levee en Masse. On what planet does the good professor live? From the Balkans to Londonistan, Europe has been, for at least a decade now, the closest thing to a “frontline” in the global jihad. In Colin Gray’s Britain today, 6 percent of the Muslim population (i.e., 100,000 individuals) think that the 7/7 London bombings were “fully justified;” 32 percent of British Muslims (half a million people) believe that “Western society is decadent and immoral and that Muslims should seek to bring it to an end;” and 40 percent want to see sharia law adopted in the uk.4

In Colin Gray’s Britain, Muslims are barely 2 million, but politicians are already pandering to the Muslim vote and willing to make all sorts of concessions, including on immigration. Caught in a time warp, Gray looks jihad (al Qaeda) and dawa (Hizb-ut-Tahrir) in the eye, and see nothing more than — a bearded version of the ira. Rather than bury their heads in the Clausewitzian sand, strategists would be better inspired to meditate the truly “remarkable trinity” engineered by Arab governments for more than thirty years: natalist policies, anti-Western mass indoctrination, and mass emigration to the West. Isn’t time at least to add a chapter to On War on “demographic warfare?”

...and here he sounds like Andrew Sullivan:

For those who naively thought that the current Iraqi predicament could safely be blamed on three dozen “neocon chickenhawks,” Thomas Ricks’s recent book will be a revelation: Failure was not the least preordained, and the military, as much as the civilians, has its share of responsibility. Talking about a military fiasco would be excessive, because it is not the U.S. military that made the two most fateful decisions (disbanding the Iraqi army in 2003; taking four months to form a government in 2006). But the fact remains, “well into 2005, the American military … didn’t imagine or prepare for the possibility that former regime members had their own ‘day-after’ plans to fight on even if they lost the conventional battle. It didn’t imagine that Iraq would become a magnet for international jihadists, so it failed to seal the borders. It didn’t imagine the Sunni tribal militias would react with such violence to the American presence, so it failed to take the pre-emptive economic and political steps to address their grievances. And it failed to understand that there were elements within the Shiite community that would use force to try to establish a theocratic system.”

I'm still sort of processing this thing but it's blown up all over on the right.

Between the top two cited graphs of gibberish and the bottom, which is a statement of the now dumbly obvious, all bases would seem to be covered.

As for invoking Clausewitz, that's like repeating the aphorisms of Sun Tzu. A convenient magic eight-ball to invoke in those instances when you wish to appear smart to those who can't think critically, have no common sense, or are impressed with names they only vaguely recognize.

but the argument is that the american military is too obsessed with clausewitz...?

the military's inability to secure the borders or deal with imported jihadists was preordained by the former SECDEF, who was a neocon chickenhawk to the core, so that's a lot of worthless horseshit.

bitching at the joint chiefs and field generals for not sneaking in a larger troop presence under Rummy's nose is pretty pathetic guys! try harder!

i was gonna post something about how the wolfowitz/perle/rice neocon is way different from the rumsfeld/cheney neocon but at this point the term should probably just be retired.

Remember the dead:

In 2003, when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, a woman named Hamdiyah al-Dulaimi had three handsome sons. They were good men with wives and families, the shining accomplishments of her life.

In hindsight, it was a much better life than she realized at the time. Most certainly better than it is now, four years after the fall of Baghdad.

On April 9, 2003, the people of the city cheered invading U.S. soldiers in the city square. Leaders of the coalition troops promised liberty, freedom and life without tyranny.

But Baghdad still has none of those things. And al-Dulaimi has no sons.

One day last spring, a dozen men in black uniforms knocked down her door. They screamed "Filthy Sunnis!" and handcuffed her sons, Haqqi, 39, Qais, 37, and Ali, 31.

"Why? What did my boys do?" the mother cried as the gunmen dragged their new prisoners across the floor.

Al-Dulaimi dropped to her knees, clinging to the ankles of a kidnapper. She begged, kissing his shoes. "At least leave me one. Take the other two. Leave me one."

They beat her unconscious with their gun stocks and took her sons.

The next day, her sons' corpses were on the sidewalk. Haqqi's body was headless. The bodies of Qais and Ali had been mutilated; some parts were missing.

Like so many others, their grieving mother fled -- to Syria, in her case.

reports of a bomb within the iraq parliament itself going off, maybe in the canteen?

Explosion rocks Iraq parliament
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6548337.stm

a bomb in the green zone? in the parliament?

are they using ninjas now??

I'm not trying to win the jadedness competition, but I'm surprised there haven't been more attacks in the green zone by now.

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the attack did not mean the security operation had failed."

Come again?

Meantime, a little sign things are all starting to come to head via this editorial:

Two of the five new Army brigades that will be involved in the Baghdad surge were so quickly deployed to Iraq that they did not engage in crucial training at Fort Irwin, Calif. "These soldiers, aren't getting the benefit of participating in war games on the wide Mojave Desert, where gun-jamming sand and faux insurgents closely resemble conditions in Iraq," Time magazine reported in a weekend cover story, "Why Our Army Is At the Breaking Point." In an April 7 article, "For the Army: Code Yellow," the National Journal reported: "The high demand for fresh troops has led the Army to reduce basic training from 14 weeks to nine, and drill instructors have lessened the physical demands so that injuries won't disqualify valuable recruits."

As these magazines hit the newsstands, the Pentagon revealed new developments confirming the Army readiness crisis. At least 13,000 troops in four Army National Guard combat brigades, all of which served overseas combat tours in 2004 and 2005, will be involuntarily mobilized and deployed to Iraq before the end of the year, the Pentagon announced over the weekend. Also, another 17,500 soldiers now serving in Iraq will likely have their one-year combat deployments extended by as many as four months.

Meanwhile, the equipment crisis is so severe that stateside troops routinely train on hardware different from the equipment they will operate in Iraq. "Beyond the lack of weapons for stateside troops," Time reported, "Army stockpiles of equipment around the globe are shrinking as their contents are siphoned to Iraq, reducing the nation's ability to respond to the next crisis." On the op-ed page of this newspaper on Monday, retired Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales, a former commander of the Army War College, wrote: "While the true magnitude of the Army's equipment disaster remains clouded in classification, the anecdotal evidence of impending collapse is anywhere you choose to look. For the first time in nearly half a century ... the 82nd Airborne Division cannot generate enough power to put one of its brigades on strategic alert."

Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War, told the National Journal: "[T]here is a sense of denial of the problem in the Pentagon that I find utterly beyond belief. My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don't expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam. Only this time we won't have 10 years to fix it again. There will be no timeout from the Global War on Terror."

Frankly I would have figured this from The Washington Post -- but not necessarily from The Washington Times...

I met an Iraqi exile recently who still reckons the invasion was a good idea.

Tell me again, what prompted the USA and Great Britain to invade Iraq?

I was always a bit vague on this, and got the impression it was one of those muddled decisions, where you decide to do something and then keep coming up with reasons for your decision retrospectively rather than the other way round. I think the most credible reason was that the US leadership hoped that by crushing Saddam Hussein they could establish total hegemony in the Middle East, and Britain rowed in because the UK long ago abdicated an independent foreign policy.

http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009926

worth reading for the shia/sunni stuff

I met an Iraqi exile recently who still reckons the invasion was a good idea.

i did too. a kurd. i think he could tell i was surprised.

I think most Iraqi exiles who left pre-invasion were in favour of it.

Gotta love that extension of a tour of duty. The soldiers do:

Word of the extension arrived almost by accident here at the rambling villa in the countryside east of Ramadi that the men from Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Division, have turned into an American-Iraqi military base.

Shortly after midnight, First Sgt. Jody Heikkinen spotted an article about it on the Internet, and the company officers were caught off guard. “We’re trying to figure out what it means,” said Capt. Chris Calihan, 31, the company commander.

The soldiers had been scheduled to return home in June, but the announcement appeared to extend their stay until September.

Among those soldiers who were still awake, there were muffled outbursts of anger and frustration laced with dark humor.

“If I get malaria, I get to leave, right?” Specialist Rodney Lawson, 30, said to no one in particular.

The soldiers wondered if their relationships back home could weather an extension and predicted that divorce rates in the military would spike. They muttered about three additional months of forced celibacy and fretted half jokingly about impatient wives and girlfriends. “Now a lot of cheating be going on,” said Sgt. Jonathan Wilson, 29. “I’m serious.”

Specialist Lawson had planned to take a vacation with his former wife, with whom he has two daughters, after he got back to the division’s home base in Schweinfurt, Germany. They were going to give the relationship another try.

“This has totally wrecked everything I had planned,” he said as he slumped on an empty explosives crate.

“Now I’m never going to get together with my ex-wife,” he said. “I’m scared that the longer it takes, more things could happen.”

The soldiers also worried about the extra months of dodging snipers’ bullets and roadside bombs.

“You only going to get so many chances,” said Specialist Lawson, whose Bradley fighting vehicle has been hit three times by rocket-propelled grenades during this rotation.

By midmorning, as the soldiers mobilized for another day of missions, the harsher emotions gave way to resignation and stoicism.

“The way I look at it, you get bent out of shape about stuff you can do something about,” said Sgt. First Class Thomas Nunn, 29, as he led a patrol through the villa’s forecourt, which heavy rainfall and the treads of the Bradleys had turned into a pool of shin-high mud.

shiit, that body count doubled within 20 minutes. this is a bigger one than usual. i have nothing new or useful to say here but FFS.

pret-ty bad

poopty-peupty-pants-s-s

i'm kind of surprised at how many people seem to be in baghdad... i would expect even more to have left.

I guess most of them have nowhere else to go, and it's their home, they want to live there. The market had just been rebuilt. This week alone there seems to have been about 350 people killed. and it's so difficult to feel anything about this anymore. At least with the people in Virginia you see photos and hear something of their lives and we see them and we feel something. Over in Iraq (not that far away) we just get these terrible numbers, day in day out.

i'm kind of surprised at how many people seem to be in baghdad... i would expect even more to have left.

Where would they go? The borders are mainly closed, getting a passport is nigh on impossible and the countryside and other towns are not significantly safer nor are they going to be particularly welcoming to strangers who might be concealing dangerous elements.

wtf Robert Gates saying the bomb was designed to make it "look like" the security plan was failing.

Surely the biggest bombing since the occupation began indicates that the security plan *is* failing?

Yeah, this is just what they need right now...
US defence chief arrives in Iraq

I bet if we just gave the citizens of Iraq more guns the place would be safer.

So Hitchens now claims Iraq was going to be a mess anyway. Clever.

Paul Krugman writing about the petulant child in chief

There are two ways to describe the confrontation between Congress and the Bush administration over funding for the Iraq surge. You can pretend that it’s a normal political dispute. Or you can see it for what it really is: a hostage situation, in which a beleaguered President Bush, barricaded in the White House, is threatening dire consequences for innocent bystanders — the troops — if his demands aren’t met.

If this were a normal political dispute, Democrats in Congress would clearly hold the upper hand: by a huge margin, Americans say they want a timetable for withdrawal, and by a large margin they also say they trust Congress, not Mr. Bush, to do a better job handling the situation in Iraq.

But this isn’t a normal political dispute. Mr. Bush isn’t really trying to win the argument on the merits. He’s just betting that the people outside the barricade care more than he does about the fate of those innocent bystanders...

Can't find the thread about Pat Tillman, but his brother and another Ranger in the unit were testifying today about orders to lie about how Pat died. Jessica Lynch also testified about the bizarro story they tried to sell about her.

ABC World News actually showed those testimonies tonight. Kudos Mr.Gibson, you might become a real newsman yet.

Jessica Lynch: "I stepped out of the shower, saw myself in the mirror and said, 'Jeez, you look awful.' Letting a few years go by before repeating the obvious about this swill before Congress was so hard, losing weight with NutraSystem was easy."

This is a first. At least for this war:

A senior U.S. Army officer who ran a military police detachment guarding prisoners in Iraq has been charged with nine offenses, including "aiding the enemy" and having a relationship with the daughter of a detainee, according to U.S. military officials in Baghdad.

does anybody else get the impression that the sole reason Democrats are pushing the withdrawal thing in Congress right now is because they're betting that Republicans running in '08 won't want a vote in support of Bush's veto hanging around their necks come election time? It looks like they're basically gambling on Republicans either pressuring Bush to not make them look bad, or getting behind his veto and fucking themselves at the ballot box in '08 for being "pro-war"

I mean I applaud the effort to stop this completely pointless and wrong waste of human life and resources, but it looks like its being made for the most craven political reasons.

Tenet is apparently complaining about having been a scape-goat. He got his pat on the head for doing his master's bidding and seemed fine with it before.

http://www.geocities.com/ifthethunderdontgetya/GeorgeTenetMedal.jpg

fuck him. he's just hawking a book.

Thing about the withdrawal is that we have 17 months and change before the next federal elections, and it's going to take some time to pull of our guys out, even if they voted to end the occupation today. Hell, it'd take time even if our guys said "fuck it" and shot their way out to get to Kuwait. We have ~150K troops over there, ~150K mercenary and contractor-types, and a shitload of infrastructure and gear. We ain't leaving all that sitting around and going to evacuate Echo Base.

Is timing this right political? possibly, but at the same time, pulling out the occupation forces will already take months.

Iraq is very tough.Sez the general, David Petraeus, who always waves his hands when talking to reporters so you know he's serious.

Mr. Shock & Awe Outed by famous escort now in news, in MP3 file on website.

An interesting shift in the wind -- Rick Moran, among other things a regular (until now?) RedState commentator, throws in the towel, with qualifications and some odd assumptions re: Bush's flexibility, but essentially realizing the jig is up. He ain't happy about it but I'll take him over the likes of Riehl. I suspect more will start caving soon.