I Cogitate

U.S. limits diplomats' travel in Iraq
The embassy bars officials in Baghdad from traveling by land outside the Green Zone.
Ned Parker
Los Angeles Times
September 19, 2007

BAGHDAD — -- The U.S. Embassy on Tuesday banned diplomats and other civilian government employees indefinitely from traveling by land outside the heavily protected Green Zone as American and Iraqi officials debated the legal status of foreign security contractors after a weekend shooting incident here in which eight civilians were reported killed.

The Iraqi government announced Tuesday that its initial investigation had determined that Blackwater USA guards fired without provocation on Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad traffic circle Sunday. The account contradicted statements by the North Carolina-based security company and the U.S. State Department that the guards had come under small-arms fire after a car bomb exploded.

Iraqi authorities said they would move to overhaul the nation's laws to end the immunity of foreign contractors from prosecution in Iraqi courts, a measure established by U.S.-led occupation officials after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The confrontation could prove to be a test of the sovereign powers of the Iraqi government when it clashes with American officials over prickly subjects such as U.S. dependence on private security contractors, whom many Iraqis loathe after repeated reports of wild shooting, reckless driving and abusive behavior.

Iraqi government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said Tuesday that Blackwater guards should be held accountable for Sunday's killings, which took place while the security detail was assigned to protect a State Department motorcade.

Bush's Battlefield Envy
Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
September 17, 2007

President Bush wishes that he could be alongside the troops in Iraq -- except that he's too old.

At least that's what he reportedly told a blogger embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. In the first session of its kind, Bush spent almost an hour on Friday talking with 10 so-called "milbloggers," including two who participated by video conference from a military base outside Baghdad.
 
" N.Z. Bear," one of the eight guests sitting around a table with Bush at the White House, reported: "Responding to one of the bloggers in Iraq he expressed envy that they could be there, and said he'd like to be there but 'One, I'm too old to be out there, and two, they would notice me.'"

Mencken's prophecy
Joseph L. Galloway
McClatchy Newspapers
September 19, 2007

It took just eight decades but H.L. Mencken's astute prediction on the future course of American presidential politics and the electorate's taste in candidates came true:

On July 26th, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe wrote in The Baltimore Sun: "...all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

My late good buddy Leon Daniel, a wire service legend for 40 years at United Press International dredged up that Mencken quote several years ago and found that it was a perfect fit for George W. Bush, The Decider. MSNBC's Keith Olberman highlighted the same quote this week. A tip of the hat to both of them, and to Mencken.

The White House is now so adorned by Mencken's downright moron, and has been for more than six excruciatingly painful years. It wouldn't be so bad if the occupant had at least enough common sense to surround himself with smart, competent and honest advisers and listen to them. But he hasn't.

We inflicted George W. Bush on ourselves — with a little help from Republican spin-meisters, slippery lawyers, hanging chads and some judicial jiggery pokery — and he has stubbornly marched to the beat of his own broken drum year after year, piling up an unparalleled record of failures and disasters without equal in the nation's long history.

He inherited a balanced budget and a manageable national debt, and in just over six years has virtually bankrupted the United States of America and put us in hock to the tune of nine trillion dollars — sum larger than that accumulated by all the 42 other Presidents we had in two and a quarter centuries.

The man from Crawford, Texas, stood Robin Hood on his head almost from Day One, robbing the poor and the middle class so he could give to the rich and Republican. When the bills for those selective tax cuts, and his war of choice in Iraq, began coming due our President simply signed IOU's for a trillion dollars, with those markers now held by our traditional ally Communist China...

...When one raison du jure for the war in Iraq failed — and all have failed — resident Bush and his general-of-the-month could always came up with another to appease the Gods of War and keep the machinery turning...

The Fakery of General Petraeus: What Iraqis Think About the Surge
Patrick Cockburn
Counterpunch
September 11, 2007

At first sight the Petraeus report looks as if it is going to be one of those spurious milestones in the war in Iraq, (like the Iraq Study Group’s report last December), heavily publicized at the time, but not affecting the political and military stalemate in the country.

Unfortunately, the propaganda effort by the White House now underway may have a more malign impact than most propaganda exercises. It claims that victory is possible where failure has already occurred. It manipulates figures and facts to produce a picture of Iraq that is not merely distorted but substantively false.

The ‘surge’, the dispatch of 30,000 American reinforcements, was announced by President Bush on January 10 as a bid to regain control of Baghdad and reduce the level of violence. But the achievements are more apparent than real. The Interior Ministry in Baghdad says that 1,011 people died violently in Iraq in August, but an official at the ministry revealed to the US news agency McClatchy that the true figure for the month is 2,890 killed.

The truest indicator of the level of violence in Iraq is the number of people fleeing their homes because they are terrified that they will be murdered. According to the UN High Commission for Refugees the number of refugees has risen from 50,000 to 60,000 a month and none are returning.

Iraqi society is breaking down. It is no longer possible to get medical treatment for many ailments because 75 per cent of doctors, pharmacists have left their jobs in the hospitals, clinics and universities. The majority of these have fled abroad to join the 2.2 million Iraqis outside the country.

The food rationing system on which five million Iraqis rely to stay alive is also breaking down with two million people no longer being fed because food cannot be distributed in dangerous areas. Rice and beans are of poor quality and flour, tea and baby formula are short. Unemployment is 68 per cent of the workforce, so without a state ration and no jobs, more and more Iraqis are living on the edge of starvation.

No wonder then that what Iraqis believe is happening to them and their country is wholly contrary to the myths pumped out by the White House and the Pentagon. The opinion poll commissioned by ABC news, the BBC and Japanese Television NHK and published yesterday shows that 70 per cent of Iraqis say that their security has got worse during the last six months when the US increased the number of its US troops in Baghdad and surrounding provinces. A solid 57 per cent believe that attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. Some 93 per cent of Sunni approve such attacks and 50 per cent of Shia also back them...

...At the start of yesterday’s Congressional hearings congressmen asked how it was that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was unable to produce a power sharing government. The answer is that he was not elected to do so. He was elected because the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shia parties, won the greatest number of seats in the December, 2005 general election and formed a government in alliance with Kurdish nationalist coalition. Some 54 per cent of Shia Arabs now support the government and 98 per cent of Sunni Arabs disapprove of it.

The Shia know they are 60 per cent of the population and are suspicious that the US is endlessly trying to find ways of robbing them of the power they were denied for centuries under the domination of Sunni Arabs who are only 20 per cent of Iraqis. They are deeply worried that the US is in effect creating a Sunni militia under US control by turning the Anbar Sunni tribes against al Qaida in Iraq.

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