The Grand Ayatollah Behind the Curtain

By Colbert I. King
The Washington Post
October 28, 2006

The question directed this week to the National Security Council press office was straightforward: "Has the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani met with any American official, either military or civilian, since the U.S. invasion in 2003?" The answer reveals the extent to which the Bush administration is now, and always has been, out of its depth in Iraq.

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is Iraq's most powerful figure. Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, Sistani was forced to keep a low profile, since he was part of the Shiite majority that Hussein's ruling Baath Party controlled with a heavy hand. Sistani was on the receiving end of assassination attempts by Hussein's thugs. But all that changed in the spring of 2003, when the United States toppled the Iraqi regime.

Today, Sistani's Shiites are the major political force in Iraq. They are leaders in the new government; they run the key Interior Ministry; and one of their own, Nouri al-Maliki, serves as prime minister. Were it not for Iraq's liberation from Hussein's tyranny by U.S. troops, Sistani and his followers would still be under the thumb of Sunnis.

The average Iraqi may not be happy to see the country occupied by foreigners. But if any Iraqi should feel even a tad kindly toward his American liberators, it ought to be the grand ayatollah. After all, he is the chief beneficiary of Hussein's defeat. It's not too much to think that if the president of the United States visits Iraq, Sistani would at least meet him face to face to say thank you. Think again.

Back to the question that started this column: Has Sistani met with any American official in the past 3 1/2 years? Frederick Jones, the NSC's communications director, said yesterday that no American official has ever met Sistani.

But how, you might ask, can that be? After all, since Hussein's statue was pulled down in 2003, Iraq has been visited twice by President Bush. Vice President Cheney has been there, too. Two different secretaries of state -- Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice -- have dropped in. So have Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, countless high-ranking Pentagon brass and enough U.S. senators and members of the House of Representatives to warrant a congressional annex in the Green Zone.

How is it possible that leaders of the world's most powerful nation -- a country that has generously sent 140,000 of its finest sons and daughters to fight, suffer and die to free Iraq from the Baathist grip -- have not met the Iraqi leader with the most to gain from Hussein's defeat?

It's because the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has designated himself off-limits to Americans. He will not let Bush, Cheney, Rice and company in to see him because they are non-Muslims and thus he considers them to be kafir, or infidels. Sistani regards himself as too good to meet with those who freed him.

What's weird is to hear folks in Washington speak about Sistani's views as if they just got off the phone with him. "Sistani doesn't want clerics to have a role in government," one Washington foreign policy expert told me. "Sistani believes Islam should be the national religion," said another. "Sistani is a pragmatist," said a third. All this is asserted with confidence, when in reality these people know only what they have heard from someone else -- a Muslim go-between or a Sistani envoy.

Bush and his high command have never set eyes on the man. Yet Sistani controls them as if they were puppets on a string. It's like something out of "The Wizard of Oz."

Consider what happened in 2004: Barricaded in a Najaf slum miles from Baghdad, the unseen Sistani was able single-handedly to block the United States from staging a handover of power without elections. He did so by issuing a fatwa that sent thousands into the streets. The Bush people were forced to give ground. A law was drafted that led to elections in 2005.

Sistani's chief competition is not the United States but an anti-American Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and his Badr Organization, which has infiltrated Iraqi military and police units. The Iraqi parliament, truth be told, responds to the calls of the firebrand cleric.

What have we come to? In addition to al-Sadr, today's Iraq is under the influence of a Muslim cleric, Sistani, who, according to Newsweek, forbids music for entertainment, dancing and playing chess, and forbids women from shaking the hands of any men other than their fathers, brothers or husbands. His whole purpose is to promote Shiite theology and keep Iraq as a democratic, but decidedly Islamic, state.

Billions spent, thousands of Americans dead or maimed, U.S. armed forces exhausted, stretched thin and working around the clock -- for that? Is this what George W. Bush had in mind?

George Bush Talks About 'The Next Attack On America'

By Daniel Henninger
Wall Street Journal
October 27, 2006

Somewhere it is written in the Book of Politics that when the race gets tight, the leaders call in the Scribes. It is for this reason that I found myself at LaGuardia Airport Wednesday enroute to an afternoon meeting in the Oval Office with President Bush. That would be followed by lunch the next day with the vice president. The airport deserves mention because the very small group of writers who sat with the president was in fact exponentially larger than the number of travelers there who stopped to watch his 10:30 a.m. news conference on the TV monitors.

Two weeks from an election, perhaps their minds are made up. The president's certainly is. "This war is different than the other wars we've been in," Mr. Bush said a few hours after his news conference while sitting beneath a portrait of George Washington. "If we leave, they will follow us here."

Meetings with the president at election time are overtly political, but the remarkable irony here was how little election politics came up in our discussion. Mr. Bush talked expansively about Iraq, the Maliki government, Iran, Syria, North Korea and the broader war on terror. When his own party's infatuation with immigration was raised, Mr. Bush briefly ticked off his own thoughts on immigration policy and swung back to this:

"I'm campaigning like mad, and I'm looking at people in the eye and saying, you better have a government that does everything in its power to protect you from attack. You're right here in the office where I get briefed every morning and I'm telling you it's on my mind, and I can't keep it off my mind. I was affected deeply by the attacks of September the 11th. It became clear to me that day that we were at war. I know we're at war."

The room in which Mr. Bush is briefed every morning on the war, the Oval Office, is a cheerful room, full of light along high lemon-yellow walls. There are fine busts of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, and the Washington painting. These icons of Mr. Bush's political formation no doubt were chosen after his first inauguration. But it is hard not to notice that the room today is occupied full time by three former war presidents and a prime minister of war.

The Oval Office today is a war room, and this is a war presidency. In these most partisan of times, Mr. Bush barely mentions the media and not once utters the word "Democrats." But as in 2004, we are again going to the polls to vote on national security. With Baghdad a cauldron of violence, this is the fight the Democrats say they want, and the one they are going to get Nov. 7. However many Republican candidates are separating themselves from Mr. Bush's war, the president is guaranteeing that the subject goes to the voters.

What struck me Wednesday was how Mr. Bush's public news conference was almost wholly about the Iraqis and their government, and how his private conversation with us was mostly about the stakes for the American people. Over these war years, there should have been more of the latter. Admittedly, it is difficult to convey in public the urgency about the war on terror that Mr. Bush conveys in private. But it is obvious that he regards the threat to the American people as palpable.

"My biggest issue that I think about all the time," Mr. Bush says, "is the next attack on America, because I am fully aware that there are people out there that would like nothing more than to have another spectacular moment by killing American people. And they're coming. And we've got to do everything we can to stop them. That's why we need to be on offense all the time." This, he insists, is the justification for the terrorist wiretaps, the Patriot Act, the interrogations and the Iraq war.

Mr. Bush goes on offense himself in the kind of plain speech that maddens his detractors but may endear him in the heartland: "Maybe it's not nuanced enough for some of the thinkers and all that stuff -- that's fine. But that's exactly what a lot of people like me think."

On the nation's sense of frustration: "You don't have to tell me people are out there looking for something. I'm from Texas. My buddies are saying, 'Are you doing enough?' -- not, 'Are you doing too little?' They want to know, 'Are we winning?' They want to know, this mighty country, are we doing what it takes to win?"

The burden of war, however, has not sapped Mr. Bush physically as it did Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Recalling the deep toll that war and partisanship imposed on their presidencies, I looked closely at Mr. Bush for similar evidence: none. The hair's gone gray, but there is little sign of fatigue in his face or demeanor. I asked how he stays normal: "Prayer and exercise."

He dismisses the notion that Iraq is a mistake or a distraction: "This stuff about how Iraq is causing the enemy . . . whatever excuse they need, they have made up their mind to attack and they grab onto things to justify. If it's not Iraq, it's Israel. If it's not Israel, it's the Crusades. If it's not the Crusades, it is the cartoon."

Still, it's evident that Baghdad's sectarian violence has sent the U.S mood into a trough. The next day in a similar conversation with Vice President Cheney -- ballast to the energy of his president -- I ask if he senses a nation veering again toward the disillusion of the Vietnam War. He says no. "9/11 changes a lot. It's a watershed event and makes it more difficult for someone to argue that if we just bring the troops home we'll be safe and secure behind our oceans. The threat is there and it's real."

No matter the election results, it's obvious this president won't step back. He says, "We will press and press and press to protect ourselves. . . . If this country lets down its guard, it will be a fatal mistake."

Maybe it's too much. Maybe the country, or most of it this fall, doesn't share Mr. Bush's desire to be on offense all the time. Maybe they think he's exaggerating the threat for political effect. Maybe. But with or without a Republican Congress, if the country has a commander in chief who feels this deeply about protecting American soil from another 9/11 for at least another two years, it's fine by me.

Cheney Calls Water-Boarding 'Valuable Tool' In Questioning

The vice president confirmed that an interrogation technique that simulates drowning and has been called 'cruel and inhumane' was used on al Qaeda suspects.
By Jonathan S. Landay
Miami Herald
October 26, 2006

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al Qaeda suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called ''water-boarding,'' which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. ''It's a no-brainer for me,'' Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that is banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture. Some intelligence professionals argue that it often provides false or misleading information because many subjects will tell their interrogators what they think they want to hear to make the water-boarding stop.

GOP Senators fight it

Republican Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said that a law Bush signed last month prohibits water-boarding. The three are the sponsors of the Military Commissions Act, which authorized the administration to continue its interrogations of enemy combatants.

Graham, a military lawyer who serves in the Air Force Reserve, reaffirmed that view in an interview last week with McClatchy Newspapers.

''Water-boarding, in my opinion, would cause extreme physical and psychological pain and suffering, and it very much could run afoul of the War Crimes Act,'' he said, referring to a 1996 law. ``It could very much open people up to prosecution under the War Crimes Act, as well as be a violation of the Detainees Treatment Act.''

A revised U.S. Army Field Manual published last month bans water-boarding as ``cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.''

''There is a disconnect between the president and the vice president and on the other side leading proponents from their own party and leading experts on the laws of war,'' said Neal Sonnett, the chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Enemy Combatants.

Cheney interviewed

The radio interview Tuesday was the first time that a senior Bush administration official has confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding against important al Qaeda suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and turned over to the CIA.

Water-boarding involves holding a person's head under water or pouring water on cloth or cellophane placed over the nose and mouth to simulate drowning until the subject agrees to talk or confess.

Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, denied that Cheney confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding or endorsed the technique.

''What the vice president was referring to was an interrogation program without torture,'' she said. ``The vice president never goes into what may or may not be techniques or methods of questioning.''

'Avaluable tool'

In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told Cheney that listeners had asked him to ``let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives.''

''Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?'' Hennen said.

''I do agree,'' Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the interview released Wednesday. ``And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation.''

Cheney added that Mohammed had provided ``enormously valuable information about how many [al Qaeda members] there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth. We've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that.''

''Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?'' asked Hennen.

'It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president `for torture.' We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in,'' Cheney replied. ``We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.''

CIA spokeswoman Michelle Neff said, ``While we do not discuss specific interrogation methods, the techniques we use have been reviewed by the Department of Justice and are in keeping with our laws and treaty obligations. We neither conduct nor condone torture.''

U.S. Revives Terror Data Mining

Rights advocates fear retread of failed intelligence program
By Shaun Waterman, United Press International
Washington Times
October 26, 2006

The U.S. intelligence czar is developing a computer system capable of mining huge amounts of information about everyday events for patterns that look like terrorist planning -- technology reminiscent of the discontinued Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.

Civil liberties and privacy advocates have criticized the effort, called Tangram, which is being developed by contractors working for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

"They are misdirecting resources towards this kind of fanciful, science-fiction project," said Tim Sparapani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, "while neglecting the basics" of good counterterrorism detective work.

Mr. Negroponte's office declined to comment on the program, but it is described in some detail in a procurement document posted on the Web by the U.S. Air Force, and officials have said it is being tested without using any data about Americans.

The document says the system -- funded for $49 million in research over the next four years -- will build on previous work by U.S. intelligence agencies to develop "methods of ... efficiently searching large data stores for evidence of known [terrorist] behaviors."

An intelligence official who asked for anonymity said the system was being tested using two data sets -- one artificial and the other consisting of intelligence information from the Department of Defense.

"There is nothing in there that does not comply with the regulations on U.S. persons," said the official, referring to rules that govern what information U.S. intelligence agencies can collect, analyze and store about American citizens and legal residents.

Nonetheless, the new system is bound to attract criticism because of its similarity to the TIA program, a project run by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. TIA also aimed to detect patterns of suspected terrorist behavior by data-mining huge stores of information about everyday transactions such as credit-card purchases, telephone calls and travel records.

In response to concerns about the program's privacy and civil liberties implications, Congress in 2003 cut all funding for it, but research continued in different agencies, funded by classified appropriations for Pentagon intelligence agencies.

Most of that continuing research was conducted by the Advanced Research and Development Activity, formerly based at the National Security Agency but now part of Mr. Negroponte's office. The National Journal, which first revealed the existence of Tangram last week, said ARDA would oversee the new program, too.

"The administration has flat-out ignored Congress," Mr. Sparapani said. "They renamed it, retied the bow around and off they went."

National Journal reported that the government last month awarded three contracts for Tangram research and development at a cost of nearly $12 million. Two of the firms receiving awards -- Booz Allen Hamilton and 21st Century Technologies Inc. -- worked on the TIA program. The third, SRI International, worked on one of its predecessors, the so-called Genoa project.

Trying to Contain the Iraq Disaster

Editorial
The New York Times
October 24, 2006

No matter what President Bush says, the question is not whether America can win in Iraq. The only question is whether the United States can extricate itself without leaving behind an unending civil war that will spread more chaos and suffering throughout the Middle East, while spawning terrorism across the globe.

The prospect of what happens after an American pullout haunts the debate on Iraq. The administration, for all its hints about new strategies and timetables, is obviously hoping to slog along for two more years and dump the problem on Mr. Bush’s successor. This fall’s election debates have educated very few voters because neither side is prepared to be honest about the terrible consequences of military withdrawal and the very long odds against success if American troops remain.

This page opposed a needlessly hurried and unilateral invasion, even before it became apparent that the Bush administration was unprepared to do the job properly. But after it happened, we believed that America should stay and try to clean up the mess it had made — as long as there was any conceivable road to success.

That road is vanishing. Today we want to describe a strategy for containing the disaster as much as humanly possible. It is hardly a recipe for triumph. Americans can only look back in wonder on the days when the Bush administration believed that success would turn Iraq into a stable, wealthy democracy — a model to strike fear into the region’s autocrats while inspiring a new generation of democrats. Even last fall, the White House was dividing its strategy into a series of victorious outcomes, with the short-term goal of an Iraq “making steady progress in fighting terrorists.” The medium term had Iraq taking the lead in “providing its own security” and “on its way to achieving its economic potential,” with the ultimate outcome being a “peaceful, united, stable and secure” nation.

If an American military occupation could ever have achieved those goals, that opportunity is gone. It is very clear that even with the best American effort, Iraq will remain at war with itself for years to come, its government weak and deeply divided, and its economy battered and still dependent on outside aid. The most the United States can do now is to try to build up Iraq’s security forces so they can contain the fighting — so it neither devours Iraqi society nor spills over to Iraq’s neighbors — and give Iraq’s leaders a start toward the political framework they would need if they chose to try to keep their country whole.

The tragedy is that even this marginal sort of outcome seems nearly unachievable now. But if America is to make one last push, there are steps that might lessen the chance of all-out chaos after the troops withdraw:

Start at Home

For all the talk of timetables for Iraq, there has been little discussion of the timetable that must be handed to George W. Bush. The president cannot leave office with American troops still dying in an Iraq that staggers along just short of civil war, on behalf of no concrete objective other than “get the job done,” which is now Mr. Bush’s rhetorical substitute for “stay the course.” The administration’s current vague talk about behind-the-scenes agreements with Iraqi politicians is next to meaningless. Americans, Iraqis and the rest of the world need clear, public signs of progress.

Mr. Bush can make the first one by firing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There is no chance of switching strategy as long as he is in control of the Pentagon. The administration’s plans have gone woefully wrong, and while the president is unlikely to admit that, he can send a message by removing Mr. Rumsfeld. It would also be a signal to the military commanders in the field that the administration now wants to hear the truth about what they need, what can be salvaged out of this mess, and what cannot.

The president should also make it clear, once and for all, that the United States will not keep permanent bases in Iraq. The people in Iraq and across the Middle East need a strong sign that the troops are not there to further any American imperial agenda.

Demand Reconciliation Talks

Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has indefinitely postponed reconciliation talks among the nation’s top politicians. He must receive an immediate deadline to start the process. Tomorrow would not be too soon; the end of the year would be too late.

Whatever decisions Iraqi leaders reached over the past few years were achieved by pushing aside all the critical questions that were hardest to address. The Bush administration must demand not only that new talks start, but that they continue until some agreement is reached on protecting minority rights, dividing up Iraq’s oil revenues, the role of religion in the state, providing an amnesty for insurgents willing to put down their weapons, and demobilizing and disarming the militias.

More outside aid could increase their incentive to talk. Even then, the threat of an American withdrawal may be the only way to extract real concessions. In parallel with the reconciliation talks, the United States should begin its own negotiations with the Iraqi leadership about a timetable for withdrawing American troops — making clear that America’s willingness to stay longer will depend on the Iraqis’ willingness to make real compromises. Iraqi politicians have to know that they have even more to lose if their country plunges into complete civil war.

We are skeptical of calls to divide the country into three ethnically controlled regions, using the model that finally ended the Bosnian war. Most Iraqis, except for the Kurds, show little enthusiasm for the idea. Clear ethnic boundaries could not be drawn without driving many people from their homes — though an intolerable level of ethnic cleansing is already pushing things in that direction. Any effort at reconciliation will almost certainly require a transfer of power and resources to provincial and local governments. But it must be up to the Iraqis to decide the ultimate shape of their country.

Stabilize Baghdad

Most Iraqis have forgotten what security is — or if they remember, it is an idealized vision of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Since neither the government nor the American occupation is able to provide basic services or safety, it is little wonder that Iraqis have turned to the militias for protection. In such a world, retribution will always take precedence over the uncertainties of political compromise.

American commanders have launched a series of supposedly make-or-break campaigns to take back the streets of Baghdad. The problem is not one of military strategy; their idea of “clearing” out insurgents, “holding” neighborhoods and quickly rebuilding infrastructure is probably the only thing that could work. The problem is that commanders in Baghdad have been given only a fraction of the troops — American and Iraqi — they need.

There have never been enough troops, the result of Mr. Rumsfeld’s negligent decision to use Iraq as a proving ground for his pet military theories, rather than listen to his generals. And since the Army and Marines are already strained to the breaking point, the only hope of restoring even limited sanity to Baghdad would require the transfer of thousands of American troops to the capital from elsewhere in the country. That likely means moving personnel out of the Sunni-dominated west, and more mayhem in a place like Anbar.

But Iraqis need a clear demonstration that security and rebuilding is possible. So long as Baghdad is in chaos they will have no reason to believe in anything but sectarian militias and vigilante justice. Once Washington is making a credible effort to stabilize Baghdad, Iraqi politicians will have more of an incentive to show up for reconciliation talks. No one wants to be a rejectionist if it looks like the tide might be turning.

Convene the Neighbors

America’s closest allies in the region are furious about America’s gross mismanagement of the war. But even Iran and Syria, which are eager to see America bloodied, have a great deal to lose if all-out civil war erupts in Iraq, driving refugees toward their borders. That self-interest could be the start of a discussion about how Iraq’s neighbors might help pressure their clients inside Iraq to step back from the brink. Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich neighbors — whose own stability could be threatened by an Iraqi collapse — need to be pressed into providing major financing to underwrite jobs programs and reconstruction.

Enlightened self-interest is a rarity in the Middle East. The Bush administration will most likely have to go further to elicit real help, showing a serious willingness to expand its dialogue with Damascus and Tehran beyond the issue of Iraq and to be a genuine broker for Middle East peace. That should be the easiest part of the strategy — only this White House regards the willingness to talk to another country as a major concession.

Acknowledge Reality

While the strategy described above seems the best bet to us, the odds are still very much against it working. At this point, all plans to avoid disaster involve the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. In America, almost no one — even the administration’s harshest critics — wants to tell people the bitter truth about how few options remain on the table, and about the mayhem that will almost certainly follow an American withdrawal unless more is done.

Truth will only take us so far, but it is the right way to begin. Americans will probably spend the next generation debating whether the Iraq invasion would have worked under a competent administration. Right now, the best place to express bitterness about what may become the worst foreign policy debacle in American history is at the polls. But anger at a president is not a plan for what happens next.

When it comes to Iraq the choices in the immediate future are scant and ugly. But there are still a few options to pursue, and the alternatives are so horrible that it is worth trying once again — as long as everyone understands that there is little time left and the odds are very long.

Bush's Iraq Strategy Is Unraveling

By Joseph L. Galloway
Arizona Daily Star (Tucson)
October 23, 2006

There he goes again. Vice President Dick Cheney last week delivered his opinion of how the Iraqi government is doing: "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."

This from the sagacious leader who a year ago declared that the Iraqi insurgents were "in the last throes" of their struggle.

Cheney's assessment last week came when the bodies of Iraqis slaughtered in sectarian violence were clogging the morgues of Baghdad and Balad and the Interior Ministry announced that it was firing 3,000 special police on corruption and other charges.

It came as more than 70 Americans had been killed in Iraq in the first three weeks of October. That makes this one of the deadliest months for our soldiers and Marines in the 3 1/2 years of war in Iraq and brings the total to more than 2,770 dead and more than 21,070 wounded.

The Iraqi government stands by silently as private militias with ties to various members of that government, or to Iran, roam the streets killing anyone with the wrong name and taking potshots at the American soldiers trying to restore order.

When the Iraqi premier visited Washington, President Bush, far from turning up the heat on him, declared that he fully supported him and his government, and added that he had no intention of cutting back the commitment of U.S. troops.

Even the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad conceded Thursday that the Iraqi government that Bush supports and Cheney thinks is "doing remarkably well" hasn't succeeded in stemming the sectarian murders that have made Iraq's capital the center of slaughter instead of governance.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told a television audience that the United States should send an additional 100,000 troops to Iraq and ought to obtain that force by increasing strength of the Army and Marines by the same number, 100,000.

The news from Afghanistan is equally grim: The Taliban are operating in the south in battalion-size elements against an understrength Afghan army of only 30,000. Taliban and al-Qaida fighters take shelter in parts of Pakistan that aren't controlled by the central government. NATO has taken over command of the border fight and is already begging member governments for reinforcements.

The president's answer to metastatic terrorism last week was to sign a bill reinstating military tribunals to try suspects vacuumed up in the worldwide war against terror; suspending habeas corpus for defendants being given drumhead courts-martial in Guantanamo; and permitting and excusing so-called "alternative methods" of interrogation.

By confusing and conflating the war in Iraq with the global fight against terrorism, Bush, Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have created with their mistakes and misjudgments an ever-growing jihad against our troops and our interests.

In the wake of 9/11, Bush declared that there was an "axis of evil" — Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

He chose to deal with the weakest and least threatening of the three evils, Iraq, and then got our forces bogged down in the middle of a civil war that threatens to shake that country apart and drown it in blood.

With our military unable to muster more than two or three brigades — fewer than 10,000 troops — to deal with any other firefights that erupt elsewhere, we have few options to deal with the other two evils. Iran is working hard to build nuclear weapons, and North Korea has begun nuclear-weapon testing.

Faced with all of this, plus various ethics scandals wafting off Capitol Hill, the electorate seems more than a little angry with a Republican Congress that seemingly has delivered nothing that wasn't intended to benefit them or their party.

Nevertheless, Bush and political spinmeister Karl Rove pronounced themselves as confident that Republicans would maintain control of both chambers of Congress as Cheney is that the Iraqi government is doing remarkably well. We can only wonder what sort of exotic cheroots our leaders are smoking.

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of "We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young."

Into The Abyss Of Baghdad

By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
October 23, 2006

BAGHDAD —I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll in graduate school, or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.

In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.

"Drill holes," says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.

He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos that documents the transformation of some mother's son into a slab of meat on a bloody table in a morgue.

"Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush," Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein's wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. "President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!"

I covered Iraq for two years, beginning a few months after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion. For the last year, I have been gone. I wondered how the country had changed.

I found that this ancient byway of Islamic learning and foreign invaders has gone over to the dark side. A year ago, car bombs, ambushes, daily gun battles and chronic lack of electricity and gasoline were sapping the city. But not this: the wanton execution of individuals because of sect — a phenomenon so commonplace it has earned a military shorthand: EJK, for extrajudicial killing.

Every day the corpses pile up in the capital like discarded furniture — at curbside, in lots, in waterways and sewer lines; every day the executioners return. A city in which it was long taboo to ask, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics.

Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds. Residents of one sect or the other must clear out or face the whim of fanatics with power drills.

Gunmen showed up one day on an avenue where fishmongers have long hawked barbecued fillets. They mowed the vendors down. Maybe it was because of the merchants' beliefs — the fish salesmen were Shiites in a mostly Sunni district, Dawoodi. Maybe it was revenge. No one knows with certainty. No one asks. All that remains are the remnants of charcoal fires.

"It's like a ghost city," laments Fatima Omar, a resident of the Amariya district, which once abounded with street life. She is 22, a recent graduate of Baghdad University, an English major — and, like many of her generation, unsure of what future she can expect. "So many of our men are either dead or have gone away," she says. "We may be doomed to spinsterhood."

People are here one day, gone the next. Those who do go out often venture no farther than familiar streets. In the sinister evenings, when death squads roam, people block off their lanes with barbed wire, logs, bricks to ward off the killers.

Many residents remain in their homes — paralyzed, going slowly crazy.

"My children are imprisoned at home," says a cook, Daniel, a Christian whom I knew from better times, now planning to join the exodus from Iraq. "They are nervous and sad all the time. Baghdad is a big prison, and their home is a small one. I forced my son to leave school. It's more important that he be alive than educated."

But homes offer only an illusion of safety. Recently, insurgents rented apartments in mostly Shiite east Baghdad, filled the flats with explosives and blew them up after Friday prayers. Dozens perished.

Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.

A year ago, many still extolled "Shiite restraint," the majority sect's seeming disavowal of tit-for-tat reprisals for massacres of Shiite pilgrims, policemen, clergy and lawmakers, among others. But you don't hear much anymore about Shiite restraint. Its principal proponent, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, now seems a septuagenarian afterthought, his increasingly exasperated words from the southern shrine city of Najaf reduced to near irrelevancy.

U.S. FORCES find themselves in a strangely ambiguous role. Troops still battle mostly Sunni insurgents, especially in the western province of Al Anbar. In Baghdad's Sunni districts, however, where residents once danced alongside burning Humvees, American troops are now tolerated as a bulwark against Shiite militias. But even that acceptance has its limits.

"Some boys came up here and shook our hands the other day," a sergeant recalls to me at a frontline base called Apache in the Adamiya district, the last major Sunni bastion on the east side of the Tigris. He is on his fourth tour: three deployments to Iraq, one to Afghanistan, and has seen little of his own children. "But later I saw that their fathers slapped the boys," the sergeant continues. "I guess they told the kids never to greet us again."

On a recent patrol in Adamiya, one of the capital's oldest sections, U.S. soldiers went door to door speaking with merchants and residents, trying to earn their confidence. Everyone seemed cordial as people spoke of their terror of Shiite militiamen. Then a shot rang out and a soldier fell 10 yards from where I stood with the platoon captain; a sniper, probably Sunni, had taken aim at this 21-year-old private from Florida ostensibly there to protect Sunnis against Shiite depredations. The GI survived.

Coursing through the deserted cityscape in an Army Humvee after curfew empties the streets is an experience laced with foreboding. U.S. vehicles, among the few on the road, offer an inviting target for an unseen enemy. Piles of long-uncollected trash may conceal laser-guided explosives. Russian roulette is the oft-repeated analogy.

"Everyone's thinking the same thing," a tense sergeant tells me. "IEDs," he adds, using the shorthand for roadside bombs, or improvised explosive devices.

ONE evening, I accompanied a three-Humvee convoy of MPs through largely Shiite east Baghdad. Before leaving the base, the commander performed an unsettling ritual: He anointed the Humvees with clear oil, performing something akin to last rites.

The objective that evening was to patrol with Iraqi police, but the Iraqi lawmen are hesitant to be seen with Americans, whom they regard as IED magnets. The joint patrol never worked out. Still, good fortune was with us: no attacks.

The next night, an armor-piercing bomb hit the same squad, Gator 1-2. A sergeant with whom I had ridden the previous evening lost a leg; the gunner and driver suffered severe shrapnel wounds. "Timing is everything, especially in Iraq," the captain and unit commander wrote in an e-mail informing me of the incident.

The U.S. mission here is now defined largely as training Iraqi police and soldiers. But Sunnis don't trust the mostly Shiite security forces, often with good reason. The question lingers: Are U.S. troops equipping Iraq's sectarian avengers?

At this point, anything seems possible here, a descent of any depth into the abyss. Militiamen and residents are already sealing off neighborhoods by sect. Some have suggested district-to-district ID cards. Word broke recently of a plan to build barriers around this metropolis of 6 million and block the city's entrances with checkpoints. The "terror trench," as some immediately dubbed it, seemed to have a fundamental flaw: The killers already are in Baghdad.

An Iraqi colleague ventured recently to the funeral of two Sunni brothers snatched from their homes near southern Baghdad's Dora district and later found slaughtered. They had disregarded threats to get out. Absent from the ceremony at a relative's home were the traditional mourning tent, the loudspeakers blaring Koranic verses, the elaborate banners honoring the departed.

With grief such a cheap commodity, most folks seem hesitant to call attention to their sorrows. The funeral was behind walls, a hushed affair. Few showed up. The family apologized for the muted ritual. You shouldn't have bothered, the relatives told the few guests, it is too dangerous these days. Visitors sipped sweetened tea, fingered beads, smoked a cigarette or two and moved on.

On Duty At The Alamo

No one in Iraq knows how to stop the sectarian death squads of Sadr City.
By Christian Caryl
Newsweek
October 30, 2006

Officially its name is Forward Operating Base Hope, but the 25 Americans who are stationed there call it something else: "the Alamo." Just south of their fortress is Sadr City, the immense Baghdad slum controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr and his private Mahdi Army. Although the firebrand Shiite cleric has denied any involvement in violence against the Sunnis, his stronghold has become a sanctuary for sectarian death squads. If the neighborhood boils over—as it has twice before, in 2004—millions of furious Iraqis will be standing between the Alamo's residents and the nearest U.S. reinforcements, five miles across town. The base's U.S. commander, Capt. David Baer, says he's not worried. "The militants in Sadr City don't want to fight," he says. "They'd get wiped out."

Even if he's right, how long can the truce last? In an effort to stop the death squads, American units have been struggling to assert control over key Shiite neighborhoods around Baghdad. U.S. casualties have jumped accordingly. In the past few weeks, Americans throughout Iraq have been dying at rates not seen since the battles of Najaf and Fallujah in 2004. Meanwhile the sectarian carnage keeps deepening in and around the capital. "We're obviously very concerned about what we're seeing in the city," Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the senior U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, acknowledged last week. "We're taking a lot of time to go back and look at the whole Baghdad security plan."

The review may prove useless. Even as they create new study groups and ask what has gone wrong, senior officers at the Pentagon say privately that they have already tried every possible strategy. Two years ago, when there were 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and effectively zero Iraqi forces, the expectation was that once the Iraqis were trained up, security would improve. Now there are 140,000 Americans and 130,000 Iraqi troops, and parts of the country—Baghdad among them—are worse off than ever. No one knows what to do about it. "There is no plan B," says one senior Pentagon official, not wanting his name on such a gloomy assessment. U.S. military leaders are increasingly worried that their troops' sacrifices are only enabling Iraq's politicians to duck the tough calls necessary to save Iraq from civil war.

U.S. forces at the Alamo share that frustration. They're supposed to be training a group of 750 Iraqi Army recruits and their officers, but Americans throughout the training system are forced to devote much of their energy and attention to weeding out the bad ones rather than grooming the good ones. About three quarters of the Alamo's Iraqi recruits and officers are natives of Sadr City—meaning they're closely tied, through family and friendship, to the same Shiite militias that are spreading terror and death across much of the capital. A few weeks ago the Americans discovered that someone with a mobile phone had placed a direct call from inside the base to al-Sadr's headquarters. Now the Americans are collecting the Iraqis' phones at the Alamo's gates.

Unauthorized calls are the least of it. Two weeks ago U.S. and Iraqi troops detained one of the Alamo trainees' senior Iraqi officers for an apparent case of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad's upscale Mansour district. The officer had allegedly "borrowed" two Humvees and seven U.S.-trained Iraqi troops for the task, which he claimed had been ordered by a senior government official. "Everything we've worked for to give people freedoms is being rolled back by the militias," says Lt. Zeroy Lawson, the Alamo's intelligence officer.

The Americans' problems would be bad enough if the militias' tentacles stopped there. Last week U.S. troops captured Sheik Mazen al-Saedi, a senior member of al-Sadr's political organization, on suspicion of fomenting sectarian killings. They freed him the next day on the direct orders of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Al-Sadr and his organization are among the pillars of Maliki's government—the government U.S. troops are trying to protect. "We're operating as guests in this country," General Caldwell explained. "Any kind of ... limits that the prime minister wants to impose upon us, we need to abide by. I mean, this is his nation, after all. It's not ours."

Another core U.S. mission—winning Iraqi hearts and minds—is imperiled by a new threat: snipers. Some of the deadliest of the bunch are operating in the Shiite-dominated areas east of the Tigris River, where the Mahdi Army has been broadening its control. Since late August, American forces have repeatedly found themselves under sudden attack from unseen gunmen armed with high-powered Russian-made sniper rifles. The shooters fire a single shot at long range and melt away into the cityscape before they can be caught. In at least one incident, the sniper used a silencer. "Now it's on everyone's mind," says Capt. Jason Meisel, an intel officer with a unit patrolling directly adjacent to Sadr City. "It's on my mind when I leave the wire. Snipers create fear. That's the whole point of snipers. It's about stopping us from talking to the people."

The tactic is showing results. U.S. units in Baghdad have begun patrolling in heavily armored Bradley fighting vehicles instead of Humvees, and soldiers have learned to jog, not walk, in open areas, constantly scanning the rooftops. It's no way to inspire confidence among the locals, who are desperate for protection. If the Americans can't promise them security, the militias are glad to step in. Iraq's security forces are just as fearful. "My cousins, my neighbors, they're in the militia," says an Iraqi soldier at FOB Hope, declining to be named. "If they find out I'm working here, they'll kill me." If this is hope, God save us from despair.

Israel admits phosphor bomb use in recent war

Cabinet official: Army dropped ordnance on Hezbollah guerrilla positions
The Associated Press
Oct 22, 2006

JERUSALEM - The Israeli army dropped phosphorous bombs on Hezbollah guerrilla targets during their war in Lebanon this summer, an Israeli Cabinet minister said Sunday, confirming Lebanese allegations for the first time.

Until now, Israel had said it only used the weapons — which cause severe chemical burns — to mark targets or territory, according to Israeli media reports.

But Cabinet Minister Yaakov Edri said Israel used the weapons before an Aug. 14 cease-fire went into effect, ending its 34-day war against Hezbollah. Edri said he was speaking on behalf of Defense Minister Amir Peretz, according to his spokeswoman, Orly Yehezkel.

“The Israeli army holds phosphorous munitions in different forms,” Edri said. “The Israeli army made use of phosphorous shells during the war against Hezbollah in attacks against military targets in open ground.”

The Lebanese government accused Israel of dropping phosphorous bombs during the war. Edri did not specify where or against what types of targets the bombs were used.

White phosphorous is a translucent wax-like substance with a pungent smell that, once ignited, creates intense heat and smoke. The Geneva Conventions ban using white phosphorous against civilians or civilian areas.

The United States acknowledged last year that U.S. troops used white phosphorous as a weapon against insurgent strongholds during the battle of Fallujah in November 2004, but said it had never been used against civilian targets.

Israel is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli military said in July its use of weapons “conforms with international law” and it investigates claims of violations based on the information provided.

Overall, more than 1,200 civilians were killed on both sides during the conflict, which started with Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in July.

U.N. accuses both sides

Both Israel and Hezbollah have been accused by the United Nations and human rights groups of violating humanitarian law during the conflict.

Israel has been accused of firing as many as 4 million cluster bombs into Lebanon during the war, especially in the last hours before the cease-fire. U.N. demining experts say up to 1 million cluster bombs failed to explode immediately and continue to threaten civilians.

On Sunday, a cluster bomb exploded in a southern Lebanese village, killing a 12-year-old boy and wounding his younger brother, security officials said. At least 21 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded by cluster bombs since the end of the war, the U.N. Mine Action Center said.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has been criticized for failing to distinguish between Israeli civilian and military targets. Human Rights Watch also said the militant group fired cluster bombs into civilian areas of northern Israel during the fighting.