A Turning Point For A Panel - 4 Harrowing Days In Iraq

By Philip Shenon
New York Times
December 8, 2006

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — For some members of the Iraq Study Group, the turning point came during four days in Baghdad in September. They found the trip so harrowing, they said, that they wondered if they could afford to wait to speak out about the disaster in Iraq.

Like other visitors, they arrived on a C-130 transport plane that performed a plunging corkscrew maneuver to avoid insurgent fire while landing at Baghdad’s airport. Then they were bundled into flak jackets and helmets and rushed onto attack helicopters for the five-minute flight to the Green Zone, the military-controlled neighborhood that is sealed off from the city.

There, they were placed in fleet of armored Humvees, each with a medic seated in the back to offer first aid in the event of a rocket attack. The roar of the Humvees’ engines could not mask the sound of explosions from car bombs outside the Green Zone. The security measures had been routine for most of the American occupation, but they were still jarring to these first-time visitors to the war zone.

“You understand this is real — this is a state of siege,” said Edward P. Djerejian, the former American ambassador to Israel and Syria who helped draft the Iraq Study Group’s report, released Wednesday, which called for an overhaul of American policy in Iraq. “The trip to Baghdad really solidified that perception for all of us.”

Whatever their early differences over the American venture in Iraq, some of those serving on the 10-member bipartisan panel and its staff say the trip to Baghdad brought them to a common understanding of the catastrophic situation in Iraq and how much had gone wrong in American planning for the occupation.

They said the situation in Baghdad was so bleak — and in many ways, so much worse than they expected — that the four Democrats and three Republicans on the trip debated releasing an interim report as soon as they returned home. They worried that a final report released after the November elections, as planned, would be too late to have any hope of salvaging the situation.

One Democrat on the trip, Leon E. Panetta, White House chief of staff under the former president Bill Clinton, said the idea of an interim report was scrapped out of a concern that “if we put out something before the election, we’d be chewed up” in a political fight.

But he said the group’s anxiety about waiting too long was justified — and bipartisan — and helped explain why surprisingly few issues divided the members when it came to writing a final report.

Members of the study group said the most significant showdown between the panel’s Democrats and Republicans took place during final negotiations late last month and involved an explicit timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But they said that even that dispute never seriously threatened to derail the report, with the members so unified on most of the big issues.

The Democratic case for a timetable for troop withdrawal was pressed most aggressively by William J. Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton administration, who said that almost all combat troops should be out of Iraq by the first quarter of 2008. Republicans felt the recommendation would box in President Bush, who has rejected calls for a deadline for withdrawal.

Mr. Perry said in an interview Wednesday on National Public Radio that the issue was resolved in two hours of private talks between him and James A. Baker III, the study group’s Republican co-chairman and a former secretary of state. The compromise language replaced a recommendation that the United States “would” withdraw troops from Iraq under a timetable with a finding that the United States “could” withdraw the troops by early 2008. “I was willing to give up the language but not the substance,” Mr. Perry said.

The study group was created by Congress at the urging of Representative Frank R. Wolf, a Virginia Republican active in foreign-policy issues who grew alarmed by what he saw in Iraq during a visit last year.

He pressed Congressional leaders to approve $1 million for the project through the Washington-based United States Institute of Peace, which oversaw logistical and scholarly support for the project and helped recruit Mr. Baker and his Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House International Relations Committee. Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton selected the commission’s other members — four Republicans and four Democrats, all of them retired or close to it. The average age of the panel members: 74.

“These were not people looking for their next big job,” said Daniel P. Serwer, the study group’s executive director and a vice president of the Institute of Peace. “They called this group bipartisan. But really, they were nonpartisan. You couldn’t tell who was a Democrat and who was a Republican. All of these people believed that if there were vital U.S. interests at stake, then there shouldn’t be any real problem in getting Democrats and Republicans to agree.”

Mr. Djerejian, founding director of the James Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston, signed on at Mr. Baker’s request to help organize the inquiry. He said that Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton agreed early on that the study group’s final report had to be unanimous — or that there should be no report at all. Anything other than a unanimous report “would have been counterproductive, because that would just show that the debate over Iraq is unresolvable,” he said.

He said he was struck by how quickly the study group agreed on what might have seemed a contentious recommendation: its call for the Bush administration to reverse course and engage in direct talks with Iran and Syria about the future of neighboring Iraq.

“I think everybody in the group, from the right to the left, realized the merits of talking with your adversaries,” Mr. Djerejian said. He recalled how one of the Republicans on the panel, the former attorney general Edwin Meese III, pointed out to the study group that his close friend Ronald Reagan had negotiated arms deals with the Soviet Union even as he described it as an “evil empire.”

The Institute of Peace joined with the Baker Institute and two other research agencies to set up panels of experts, including foreign policy and military analysts, to provide guidance to the study group. Eventually 44 experts were recruited to work for the panel; they produced dozens of research papers.

The task of drafting the final report was largely left to Mr. Djerejian; John B. Williams, a colleague of Mr. Baker’s from his Houston law firm; and two longtime aides to Mr. Hamilton, Christopher A. Kojm and Benjamin J. Rhodes.

Mr. Djerejian said the draft reports were heavily edited by the 10 members of the study group. Sandra Day O’Connor, a former Supreme Court justice, was an exacting editor and insisted that the report be written and organized so that it could be readily understood by people without foreign policy expertise.

“She’d say, ‘We’re writing this for the American people, not for people like you,’ ” Mr. Djerejian said, chuckling. “We are all terrified of her. But she was right. Sometimes we policy wonks get lost in our own verbiage.”

Oil for Sale: Iraq Study Group Recommends Privatization

By Antonia Juhasz
AlterNet
December 7, 2006

In its heavily anticipated report released on Wednesday, the Iraq Study Group made at least four truly radical proposals.

The report calls for the United States to assist in privatizing Iraq's national oil industry, opening Iraq to private foreign oil and energy companies, providing direct technical assistance for the "drafting" of a new national oil law for Iraq, and assuring that all of Iraq's oil revenues accrue to the central government.

President Bush hired an employee from the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq's nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization. The ISG report, however, goes further, stating that "the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise." In addition, the current Constitution of Iraq is ambiguous as to whether control over Iraq's oil should be shared among its regional provinces or held under the central government. The report specifically recommends the latter: "Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population." If these proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq's oil wealth.

The proposals should come as little surprise given that two authors of the report, James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, have each spent much of their political and corporate careers in pursuit of greater access to Iraq's oil and wealth.

"Pragmatist" is the word most often used to describe Iraq Study Group co-chair James A. Baker III. It is equally appropriate for Lawrence Eagleburger. The term applies particularly well to each man's efforts to expand U.S. economic engagement with Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Not only did their efforts enrich Hussein and U.S. corporations, particularly oil companies, it also served the interests of their own private firms.

On April 21,1990, a U.S. delegation was sent to Iraq to placate Saddam Hussein as his anti-American rhetoric and threats of a Kuwaiti invasion intensified. James A. Baker III, then President George H.W. Bush's secretary of state, personally sent a cable to the U.S embassy in Baghdad instructing the U.S. ambassador to meet with Hussein and to make clear that, "as concerned as we are about Iraq's chemical, nuclear, and missile programs, we are not in any sense preparing the way for preemptive military unilateral effort to eliminate these programs."*

Instead, Baker's interest was focused on trade, which he described as the "central factor in the U.S-Iraq relationship." From 1982, when Reagan removed Iraq from the list of countries supporting terrorism, until August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Baker and Eagleburger worked with others in the Reagan and Bush administrations to aggressively and successfully expand this trade.

The efficacy of such a move may best be described in a memo written in 1988 by the Bush transition team arguing that the United States would have "to decide whether to treat Iraq as a distasteful dictatorship to be shunned where possible, or to recognize Iraq's present and potential power in the region and accord it relatively high priority. We strongly urge the latter view." Two reasons offered were Iraq's "vast oil reserves," which promised "a lucrative market for U.S. goods," and the fact that U.S. oil imports from Iraq were skyrocketing. Bush and Baker took the transition team's advice and ran with it.

In fact, from 1983 to 1989, annual trade between the United States and Iraq grew nearly sevenfold and was expected to double in 1990, before Iraq invaded Kuwait. In 1989, Iraq became the United States' second-largest trading partner in the Middle East: Iraq purchased $5.2 billion in U.S. exports, while the U.S. bought $5.5 billion in Iraqi petroleum. From 1987 to July 1990, U.S. imports of Iraqi oil increased from 80,000 to 1.1 million barrels per day.

Eagleburger and Baker had much to do with that skyrocketing trade. In December 1983, then undersecretary of state Eagleburger wrote the U.S. Export-Import Bank to personally urge it to begin extending loans to Iraq to "signal our belief in the future viability of the Iraqi economy and secure a U.S. foothold in a potentially large export market." He noted that Iraq "has plans well advanced for an additional 50 percent increase in its oil exports by the end of 1984." Ultimately, billions of loans would be made or backed by the U.S. government to the Iraqi dictator, money used by Hussein to purchase U.S. goods.

In 1984, Baker became treasury secretary, Reagan opened full diplomatic relations with Iraq, and Eagleburger became president of Henry Kissinger's corporate consultancy firm, Kissinger Associates.

Kissinger Associates participated in the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum through managing director Alan Stoga. The Forum was a trade association representing some 60 American companies, including Bechtel, Lockheed, Texaco, Exxon, Mobil, and Hunt Oil. The Iraqi ambassador to the United States told a Washington, D.C., audience in 1985, "Our people in Baghdad will give priority -- when there is a competition between two companies -- to the one that is a member of the Forum." Stoga appeared regularly at Forum events and traveled to Iraq on a Forum-sponsored trip in 1989 during which he met directly with Hussein. Many Kissinger clients were also members of the Forum and became recipients of contracts with Hussein.

In 1989, Eagleburger returned to the state department now under Secretary Baker. That same year, President Bush signed National Security Directive 26 stating, "We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy, particularly in the energy area."

The president then began discussions of a $1 billion loan guarantee for Iraq one week before Secretary Baker met with Tariq Aziz at the state department to seal the deal.

But once Hussein invaded Kuwait, all bets were off. Baker made a public plea for support of military action against Hussein, arguing, "The economic lifeline of the industrial world runs from the Gulf and we cannot permit a dictator such as this to sit astride that economic lifeline."

Baker had much to gain from increased access to Iraq's oil. According to author Robert Bryce, Baker and his immediate family's personal investments in the oil industry at the time of the first Gulf War included investments in Amoco, Exxon and Texaco. The family law firm, Baker Botts, has represented Texaco, Exxon, Halliburton and Conoco Phillips, among other companies, in some cases since 1914 and in many cases for decades. (Eagleburger is also connected to Halliburton, having only recently departed the company's board of directors). Baker is a longtime associate and now senior partner of Baker Botts, which this year, for the second year running, was recipient of "The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers Oil & Gas Law Firm of the Year Award," while the Middle East remains a central focus of the firm.

This past July, U.S. Energy Secretary Bodman announced in Baghdad that senior U.S. oil company executives would not enter Iraq without passage of the new law. Petroleum Economist magazine later reported that U.S. oil companies put passage of the oil law before security concerns as the deciding factor over their entry into Iraq. Put simply, the oil companies are trying to get what they were denied before the war or at anytime in modern Iraqi history: access to Iraq's oil under the ground. They are also trying to get the best deal possible out of a war-ravaged and occupied nation. However, waiting for the law's passage and the need to guarantee security of U.S. firms once they get to work, may well be a key factor driving the one proposal by the Iraq Study Group that has received great media attention: extending the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq at least until 2008.

As the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are more thoroughly considered, we should remain ever vigilant and wary of corporate war profiteers in pragmatist's clothing.

*All quotes are referenced in my book, "The Bush Agenda."

Antonia Juhasz is a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, author of "The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time," and a contributing author, with John Perkins and others, of "A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption." www.TheBushAgenda.net.

Welcome Political Cover

Editorial
The New York Times
December 7, 2006

When President Bush insisted that the Iraq Study Group would not provide cover for the White House to chart a “graceful exit” of American troops, he was missing the whole point. The much-anticipated report from the bipartisan panel is precisely about political cover. That is a good thing, if only Mr. Bush has the sense to embrace it.

Iraq is so far gone that nobody expected the panel to come up with a breakthrough solution. As the co-chairmen — former Secretary of State James Baker and former Representative Lee Hamilton — began their letter accompanying yesterday’s report, “there is no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq.” And the study was never going to change the basic facts: there is no victory to be had in Iraq, and however American troops withdraw, they will leave behind a deadly mess.

Its real mission was to avert the worst scenario, in which a stubborn George W. Bush spends the next two years blindly insisting he will accept nothing short of victory, while Iraq keeps spiraling out of control and the Iraqis get no closer to being able to contain the chaos after the Americans leave.

That is a recipe for years more of savagery, a spillover of terrorism and instability across the Middle East, more sacrifice of American soldiers and more cynicism and division among the American people. Avoiding it is not the same as winning the war, but it is a way to cut one’s losses.

If Mr. Bush has the capacity to seriously reassess his Iraq strategy, he will need exactly the kind of political cover that the Baker-Hamilton group was meant to provide. The central point of the group’s 79 unanimous recommendations is that Washington should focus far more aggressively on training Iraqi forces and prepare for a withdrawal of American troops. The report says all combat brigades could be out by early 2008, but that would still leave tens of thousands of soldiers behind to hold the Iraqi Army together.

That is to be combined with a lot more pressure on the Iraqis to make political compromises and take responsibility for their own security (the report lays out clear milestones and says the United States should reduce its military and economic support if the Iraqis resist) and more aggressive regional diplomacy, including talks with Iran and Syria that Mr. Bush has ruled out.

Make no mistake, the report is a stunning indictment of Mr. Bush’s failure — in Iraq and no less in Washington. But its recommendations are still couched in language vague enough to allow the president to pretend it is the “new way forward” his aides are now talking up, rather than a timetable for withdrawal, which is on Mr. Bush’s no-go list. Predictably, the first reaction of Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, was to insist that “there is nothing in here about pulling back militarily.”

The world has watched as Mr. Bush painted himself into a corner and then insisted it was a strategic decision. Even the Iraqis are trying to provide cover to for him to come tiptoeing back to the real world. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s call for a regional conference on Iraq would allow the administration to get past its refusal to talk to Tehran and Damascus, by saying that ban was never meant to include Iraqi initiatives.

The Iraq report is a deeply diplomatic document, stuffed with “coulds” and “mights.” It is, all in all, exactly the kind of shades-of-gray thinking that Mr. Bush despises, and exactly what he needs to get the country out of the hole he has dug.

Israel rejects US panel report recommendations on Mideast

by David Furst
Agence France Presse
Dec 7, 2006

Israel has rejected the conclusions of a high-level US panel report on Iraq, which urged Washington to step up efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"I see things differently," Olmert told reporters Thursday. "There are many people in the United States who see things differently and it appears to me that the current American administration sees things differently."

The report, presented to President George W. Bush on Wednesday, said resolving the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict was key to achieving Washington's regional goals in Iraq and the Middle East.

But Olmert rejected the link, saying US problems in Iraq "are entirely independent of the controversy between us and the Palestinians."

He also said that restarting peace talks with Syria, as recommended by the report, was unlikely in the near future.

"The fact that Syria attempts to destabilize the government in Lebanon and supports Hamas proves that there is little chance to try and embark on negotiations with this country in the near future," Olmert told reporters.

He declined to say whether he would be willing to return the strategic Golan Heights plateau to Syria in any peace deal.

The US panel said Israel should return the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War, as part of a peace deal with Damascus that would halt Syrian support for radical Palestinian and Lebanese militants and end Syrian meddling in Lebanon.

It made a brief reference to the "right of return" -- Palestinian shorthand for demands that refugees who fled what was to become Israel in 1948 be allowed to return. That was in contrast to previous official terminology, which spoke of the need to address the issue of refugees as part of an overall peace deal.

And it recommended that Washington engage in direct talks with Israel's arch-foe Iran, whose president has repeatedly called for the Jewish state's destruction.

Israeli officials have sought to downplay the report's significance, saying it included only recommendations and that any change of policy would be up to Bush, who has so far not pressed Israel for concessions.

"The report does not reflect the position of the United States but simply one opinion in the US," Olmert said. "I trust President Bush; I trust his judgement."

Olmert said he would be willing to hold talks with Arab countries who support the 2002 Saudi peace initiative.

The plan, adopted by an Arab summit in the same year, offered a full normalization of ties with Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories captured in 1967 borders, the establishment of a Palestinian state and a just solution to the refugee problem.

"I will be happy to have contacts with these countries to reinforce the position of moderate elements who support a negotiated solution to the conflict instead of violent means," Olmert said.

Aides of the premier quoted in the Israeli press sought to downplay the significance of the US report.

"There is no cause for worry, even though this is certainly a very bad report from Israel's point of view," one Olmert aide told the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily.

"If Bush adopts the recommendations, it will be like an earthquake in the Middle East, but it is unlikely that this will happen."

But others warned that the Jewish state had to act to counter the findings.

"Israel will have to prepare for a completely different reality," Dore Gold, Israel's former ambassador to the United Nations, told the Ynet news site.

"Israeli diplomacy ... must now make a major effort to resist the attempts to 'Palestinianize' the situation in Iraq, with Israel being asked to pay for it," Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to Washington, wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

When Iraq Went Wrong

By TIM PRITCHARD
Op-Ed Contributor
The New York Times
December 5, 2006

OF the many tasks that faced the Iraq Study Group, which is to release its report tomorrow, perhaps the most vexing was pinpointing the exact moment when everything in Iraq started to go wrong. How did scenes of joyful Iraqis pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue so quickly turn into images of car bombings, grieving mothers and burning helicopters?

Some of those who appeared before the panel argued that it had been a mistake to disband the Iraqi Army after the military victory. Others said there had not been enough troops on the ground to secure and stabilize Iraq. The problem with such analyses is their tendency to treat the invasion and the post-invasion period as separate entities.

That is, the invasion is generally portrayed as well planned and executed, while the post-invasion strategy is characterized as poorly thought out and undermanned. The idea is that hidden somewhere in the weeks and months following the arrival of American forces in Baghdad lies a magic moment when Iraq somehow began to descend into chaos.

In fact, the short fight to get to Baghdad and the long one in which coalition forces have been engaged ever since have much in common. All the information about the nature of the trouble to come was apparent from the very first days of the war. If lessons learned then had been incorporated into military and political thinking, it would have injected a much needed dose of realism at an early stage.

Those lessons were best synthesized in a little-known but bloody battle, fought in an obscure part of Iraq on Day 4 of the war. It was a battle that America nearly lost.

It was dawn on March 23, 2003, when marines from Task Force Tarawa approached the town of Nasiriya, in southern Iraq. They had been given a routine task: taking two key bridges to open up a route to Baghdad. Nasiriya was a predominantly Shiite town that had rebelled against Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war. It was assumed that as soon as the Americans rolled into town, the city’s defenders would lay down their weapons and, as one Marine commander told me, “put flowers in our gun barrels, hold up their babies for us to kiss and give us the keys to the city.”

But when Task Force Tarawa’s lead units reached the outskirts they came across the burnt-out remnants of several vehicles of the Army’s 507th Maintenance Company. A captain in the 507th told wide-eyed Marine commanders how his convoy had taken a wrong turn at night, driven into Nasiriya and been attacked by Iraqi fighters. Several soldiers were still missing in the city, including a young private, Jessica Lynch.

It was the fate of the missing Jessica Lynch that attracted America’s attention in the days following. But it’s what happened to the marines of Task Force Tarawa that is most instructive about the true nature of the Iraq war.

As Marine units moved into the city, they were attacked by large numbers of Iraqi fighters. To their surprise, few of the Iraqi combatants seemed to be wearing military uniforms. Many were dressed in the loose-fitting black clothing worn by Shiite Muslims, and much of the gunfire came from dwellings flying black flags denoting them as Shiite homes. And yet the Shiites were supposed to be on the Americans’ side.

What’s more, as the marines were drawn into a raging battle in the city center, more and more people came out of ordinary homes to take up arms. One group of young American troops, who became separated from the rest of their unit and were forced to commandeer a house in the middle of the city, found themselves under attack for several hours from what appeared to be armed civilians. They had been expecting to fight Iraqi soldiers. Instead they found themselves shooting at old men, women, even children.

Of course, there were fanatical Sunni Saddam Fedayeen troops, as well as some desperate foreign jihadis, who fought that day. But untold hundreds of those who picked up weapons were simply civilians intent on defending homes against foreign invaders. The potent and complex mix of insurgency — Sunni and Shiite militants, foreign fighters and civilians — that causes such chaos in Iraq today was already apparent during the battle of Nasiriya.

Intelligence about the terrain was also sorely lacking. Marine tanks spearheading the maneuver took a route that led to a marsh where they sank, mired uselessly in thick mud, while the battle raged. It’s more than just a metaphor for coalition forces getting bogged down, post-invasion, in towns like Falluja and Samarra. It was the product of a rush to arms without adequate intelligence or planning.

At one stage, in a “friendly fire” incident, Air Force planes fired at marines on the ground, killing up to 10. Radio communications repeatedly failed. Units lost contact with each other. Faced with an increasingly determined enemy, Marine commanders thought they might just lose the battle. This showed another truth, obscured during the march to Baghdad, but that has become strikingly apparent since: there is a limit to what armor and technology can do against a people with faith and who fight because they feel their country has been violated.

There were other incidents in Nasiriya, minor at the time, that foreshadowed events that would become an international embarrassment. At one point, a Marine commander came across a gruesome scene: young marines, standing over a pile of Iraqi corpses, taking photos of each other, thumbs up and grinning inanely to camera. It took only a year for the first photos of American soldiers grinning over the bodies of abused Iraqi prisoners to appear.

BUT what was most striking at Nasiriya in those very early days of the war was the refusal of freedom-deprived Iraqis to come forward and support coalition forces. At best, the civilians stood by and watched the American war machine thunder into town. At worst, they ran to arms stashes, grabbed AK-47s and took to the streets. Four days into the invasion, and already, instead of coming together, Iraqis were falling back into their faiths and tribes and killing coalition forces and each other.

Eighteen marines died in Nasiriya that March day, in what turned out to be the bloodiest phase of the invasion. Four days later the city was finally declared secure. Two weeks after that, American forces triumphantly entered Baghdad and helped topple Saddam Hussein’s statue. Everyone lauded the speed and efficiency with which United States forces had fought their way to Baghdad. The trauma of Nasiriya was forgotten.

And that was a shame. If the details of what happened at Nasiriya had been gathered, recognized and analyzed more soberly early on, instead of trampled on in a rush of triumphalism, coalition forces might have learned useful lessons for the reconstruction of Iraq: the limits of military power, the importance of a proper understanding of the complexity of a place and its people, the perils of underestimating an enemy. Instead, of course, President Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and made his hubristic speech announcing the end of combat operations under a banner announcing “Mission Accomplished.”

The battle of Nasiriya taught that there was, contrary to first appearances, no simple route to Baghdad. It should also serve to remind those in Washington that there will be no simple route out of it.

Tim Pritchard is the author of “Ambush Alley: The Most Extraordinary Battle of the Iraq War.”

Losing the Good War

Editorial
The New York Times
December 5, 2006

Afghanistan was supposed to be the good war — and the war America was winning. But because of the Bush administration’s inattention and mismanagement, even the good war is going wrong.

The latest grim news is that after years of effort — and more than $1 billion spent — Afghanistan’s American-trained police force is unable to perform even routine law enforcement work. According to an article in yesterday’s Times, investigators for the Pentagon and the State Department found that the training program’s managers did not even know how many police officers were serving, while thousands of trucks and other American-purchased police equipment have simply disappeared.

The failure to provide local security — or even a semblance of impartial justice — helps explain why so many Afghans have lost confidence in the pro-Western government of President Hamid Karzai, and why a growing number are again turning to the Taliban for protection. The failure to stand up an effective police force also helps explain why opium cultivation rose by nearly 60 percent this year.

Creating even the most basic government institutions was always going to be difficult in a country as poor as Afghanistan. According to one expert, 70 percent or more of the recruits in the police training program are illiterate — not surprising in a country with a male literacy rate of only 43 percent. But the State Department and Pentagon compounded these problems, handing off the bulk of the police training work to an expensive private contractor and then failing to vigilantly monitor the program. We have seen that time and again in Iraq, where experts say the police training is at least as flawed.

There are many culprits for Afghanistan’s many problems. Mr. Karzai needs to do a lot more to curb the corruption that is rife among his political appointees. President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan needs to do a lot more to stanch the torrent of Taliban fighters crossing his border into Afghanistan. NATO members need to send more troops to Afghanistan — with far fewer restrictions on how they fight.

As for fixing the police training program, there is little hope of that without also reforming the Afghan Ministry of Interior, which oversees the police, and is mired in both incompetence and corruption. Washington has sent some advisers to help clean up the ministry, but the effort is moving far too slowly. And the United States and its allies need to send a lot more police advisers to walk the beat with the newly graduated recruits, who get just a few months of classroom training. That is standard practice for training effective police forces, but it has not been tried in Afghanistan.

Mr. Bush’s decision to rush off to invade Iraq meant that Afghanistan would be shortchanged when it came to resources and to policy makers’ priority lists. The cost of that inattention can be seen in the failing Afghan police force. It can also be seen in the Taliban’s growing strength, the mounting death toll of Afghan civilians and NATO troops, and the unraveling of the Karzai government. So much for winning the good war.

It ain't all tragic: weird, wild and wonderful events of 2006

Agence France Presse
Sun Dec 3, 2006

A selection of zany events from the year just ending:

- In a new twist on the influx of Polish workers to Britain, an ad appeared in newspapers serving Muslim communities in the east European nation asking for Polish halal butchers to work in Britain.

- An 82-year-old Australian cartoonist who was expert at doing high-speed sketches of sports participants was able to do a quick drawing of a man who robbed his home. Police used it to arrest the burglar.

- The authorities in a Czech town on the border with Austria ordered an Austrian hotel to trim its roof, which was protruding a few centimetres (inches) across the boundary.

- Ziggy Stardust, an indiscreet parrot in England, blew the cover on its mistress's love affair by repeating her amorous exchanges in front of her companion. The latter, named Chris, realised something was up when the bird started squawking "Gary, I love you."

- A woman's handbag containing jewellery and cash worth some 110,000 US dollars was returned intact to its owner in Melbourne, Australia, after she absent-mindedly left it hanging on a shopping trolley. The extremely honest finder wished to remain anonymous.

- Police thought they were onto a terrible crime when a woman's skeleton turned up in the sea off western France with a gash in the skull. Carbon dating later revealed that it was in fact over 500 years old.

- A pair of 17th-century cannon left outside a workshop where they were being restored on the Greek island of Crete narrowly escaped being melted down when a firm of scrap merchants hauled them off by mistake.

- A Frenchman who had braved lawsuits to deep freeze his dead parents' bodies gave up when his freezer system broke down. He had hoped to one day bring them back to life thanks to medical progress.

- Drivers venturing to use their satellite navigation system in an English village called Crackpot found themselves being erroneously directed to the top of a steep cliff.

- A talentless street musician in the Dutch town of Leiden got local people so upset by his awful saxophone playing that they got police to confiscate his instrument.

- New Yorkers were gripped by the story of a cat called Molly which got stuck between the double walls of an old building in Greenwich Village. It took 40 firefighters and two weeks of work to get her out, safe and sound.

- Drinkers had to be evacuated from a Welsh pub when somebody realised that a tubular object that the landlord's wife had long used as a rolling-pin was in fact a World War II shell.

- Policewomen in the Netherlands were furious when they were issued with new uniforms including blouses which turned out to be transparent.

- A British taxi driver who showed up at BBC headquarters in London to pick up a fare was mistaken for a computer expert, and bustled into a studio and given a microphone to be interviewed.

- A Christian missionary group in the United States toured pornography conventions to hand out literature affirming that "Jesus loves porn stars."

- Vietnamese police broke up a network that was helping students to cheat in exams via mobile phones hidden under long wigs.

- A canny Canadian internet user showed the potential of online trading systems by gradually bartering a paperclip into a three-bedroomed house. The clip was first exchanged for a wooden pen, which was traded for a ceramic doorknob, and the process continued right up to the house.

- In a real-life version of a scene from countless cartoons, a 45-year-old woman fell over a precipice in the French Alps but was caught on a tree root which snagged her foot. She was rescued, shocked but unhurt, two and a half hours later.

- Small fish rained down on a village in southern India. A scientist said they were probably picked up by a waterspout or mini-tornado out at sea.

- The US fast food giant McDonald's agreed to change the shape of the cups used for one of its desserts after English animal lovers complained that hedgehogs -- a threatened species -- were getting their snouts stuck in them and dying.

- A 68-year-old man in northern Nigeria told reporters that after having married a total of 201 women in 48 years, he had resolved to make do with the four wives he still had. His main complaint: older wives had an unfortunate tendency to turn the younger ones against him.

- To greet the annual Nobel Prizes, tongue-in-cheek scientists in the United States handed out their own "Ignobel" awards. They included rewards for boffins who had researched into why woodpeckers don't get headaches from all that tapping, and whether dung beetles really enjoy their diet of faeces.

- Kazakhstan reacted first with irritation then with resigned humour to a filmed spoof by the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. The jokes in the film, "Borat", in fact turned out to be mostly at the expense of Americans, who nevertheless lapped it up at the box-office.

- In the real-world Kazakhstan, meanwhile, national mint officials were red-faced when it emerged that they had mis-spelled the word "bank" on their newly issued notes.

- The Marine Corps in the United States said it had finally decided to accept a gift of 4,000 Jesus dolls which recited the scriptures, and were destined to be given to needy children for Christmas. The group which had donated them had complained vocally when officials tried to refuse the gift.

Rumsfeld’s Memo of Options for Iraq War

Following is the text of a classified Nov. 6 memorandum that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sent to the White House suggesting new options in Iraq. The memorandum was sent one day before the midterm Congressional elections and two days before Mr. Rumsfeld resigned.
The New York Times
December 3, 2006


Nov. 6, 2006

SUBJECT: Iraq — Illustrative New Courses of Action

The situation in Iraq has been evolving, and U.S. forces have adjusted, over time, from major combat operations to counterterrorism, to counterinsurgency, to dealing with death squads and sectarian violence. In my view it is time for a major adjustment. Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough. Following is a range of options:

ILLUSTRATIVE OPTIONS

Above the Line: (Many of these options could and, in a number of cases, should be done in combination with others)

* Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made).

* Significantly increase U.S. trainers and embeds, and transfer more U.S. equipment to Iraqi Security forces (ISF), to further accelerate their capabilities by refocusing the assignment of some significant portion of the U.S. troops currently in Iraq.

* Initiate a reverse embeds program, like the Korean Katusas, by putting one or more Iraqi soldiers with every U.S. and possibly Coalition squad, to improve our units’ language capabilities and cultural awareness and to give the Iraqis experience and training with professional U.S. troops.

* Aggressively beef up the Iraqi MOD and MOI, and other Iraqi ministries critical to the success of the ISF — the Iraqi Ministries of Finance, Planning, Health, Criminal Justice, Prisons, etc. — by reaching out to U.S. military retirees and Reserve/National Guard volunteers (i.e., give up on trying to get other USG Departments to do it.)

* Conduct an accelerated draw-down of U.S. bases. We have already reduced from 110 to 55 bases. Plan to get down to 10 to 15 bases by April 2007, and to 5 bases by July 2007.

* Retain high-end SOF capability and necessary support structure to target Al Qaeda, death squads, and Iranians in Iraq, while drawing down all other Coalition forces, except those necessary to provide certain key enablers for the ISF.

* Initiate an approach where U.S. forces provide security only for those provinces or cities that openly request U.S. help and that actively cooperate, with the stipulation being that unless they cooperate fully, U.S. forces would leave their province.

* Stop rewarding bad behavior, as was done in Fallujah when they pushed in reconstruction funds, and start rewarding good behavior. Put our reconstruction efforts in those parts of Iraq that are behaving, and invest and create havens of opportunity to reward them for their good behavior. As the old saying goes, “If you want more of something, reward it; if you want less of something, penalize it.” No more reconstruction assistance in areas where there is violence.

* Position substantial U.S. forces near the Iranian and Syrian borders to reduce infiltration and, importantly, reduce Iranian influence on the Iraqi Government.

* Withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions — cities, patrolling, etc. — and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance.

* Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start “taking our hand off the bicycle seat”), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.

* Provide money to key political and religious leaders (as Saddam Hussein did), to get them to help us get through this difficult period.

* Initiate a massive program for unemployed youth. It would have to be run by U.S. forces, since no other organization could do it.

* Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

* Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist.

Below the Line (less attractive options):

* Continue on the current path.

* Move a large fraction of all U.S. Forces into Baghdad to attempt to control it.

* Increase Brigade Combat Teams and U.S. forces in Iraq substantially.

* Set a firm withdrawal date to leave. Declare that with Saddam gone and Iraq a sovereign nation, the Iraqi people can govern themselves. Tell Iran and Syria to stay out.

* Assist in accelerating an aggressive federalism plan, moving towards three separate states — Sunni, Shia, and Kurd.

* Try a Dayton-like process.