Four Years In Iraq, Still No Progress

The White House's latest report on Iraq bodes poorly for the chances of a positive outcome for President Bush's surge. Not to hear the president tell it, of course. To the president a few token procedural advances with no tangible benefits represents progress and reason to continue pissing away U.S. soldiers' lives, even though pretty much every important issue on his report indicated that Iraq has regressed over the last four years and is still regressing. Hell, Bush still thinks he's been doing a bang-up job against al-Qaeda, which his own intelligence community seems to think isn't the case.

The truth of the matter is that none of the important benchmarks in the White House report were met or seem likely to be met:

- De-Ba'athification laws still create a legal blockade to keep Sunnis from being represented in the new government. Those same laws are often used to remove Sunni military and police commanders who target Shi'a militias (those would be the same Shi'a militias that run death squads that target Sunni civilians). So the Sunnis still have pretty much zero reasons to attempt reconciliation with the new government and the fighting between Shi'a and Sunni will likely continue.

- The Kurds, Shi'a and Sunni still can't agree on sharing oil revenues, which is Iraq's only real source of funding these days, so reconstruction and services for the people will remain stalled. The Iraqi security forces are still incapable of fielding fully operational and manned units, four years into the occupation, so we'll still have to do the fighting for them.

- And except for results in al-Anbar province, where the U.S. commanders finally caved in and started arming the native Sunni so they could defend themselves against al-Qaeda insurgents and the Shi'a militias, the surge has produced no appreciable decrease in violence across Iraq...mainly because we still don't have enough troops to control the country, secure the borders and deny operating room to insurgents.

Simply put, after four years Iraq has made no significant progress (and in fact have regressed in several key areas, including oil production), they don't appear to be capable of making further progress, and we don't have the resources in Iraq to do more to move them along.

Iraq is a lost cause, and if the Republicans in Congress want to salvage any credibility and save themselves for the 2008 elections, they'll vote with the Democrats to pull Bush's funding for Iraq at the soonest available opportunity. Judging from the recent House vote on the issue of Iraq, however, and John Boehner's comments afterwards, I don't think they've figured it out.

Update: Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice made a public appeal to give the president's Iraq plan more time. Apparently four years of more or less continuous failure isn't enough to dissuade her that her boss has absolutely no idea what he's doing, so let's put this in a historical context. After four years under the Marshall Plan, Germany (much more heavily damaged by hostilities than post-war Iraq) was well on the way to economic recovery. By the six year mark (1951), Germany had progressed enough to enable us to end the plan. This was possible because sufficient Allied troop numbers in the post-war phase created stability in the aftermath of the Nazi government's collapse so that violent upheaval could be kept to a minimum.

When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Eric Shinseki studied that history and proposed that similar troop ratios would be necessary in Iraq (approximately 1 soldier to every 20 locals, requiring a force of 300,000 to 400,000 U.S. soldiers, more than twice the maximum number of troops we've had in Iraq) Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld dismissed his claims...despite Iraq being a non-Western culture that would be far more hostile to the types of democratic reform Bush was envisioning than Germany was. They also dismissed the idea that the U.S. would need to pony up any cash for reconstruction...with Paul Wolfowitz claiming that Iraqi oil revenues would be sufficient to pay for the entire endeavor. And every move the administration has made since then, including the surge, has still been insufficient to change the war on the ground because four years in Bush is still trying to prove that Shinseki and George C. Marshall had no idea what they were talking about and that a war of occupation can be fought on the cheap (both in troops and financial resources).

So if Condolezza Rice, who was a student of European history, wants the public to give her boss more time with his plan, she owes it to the American public to give us solid, specific reasons why Bush's strategy has any credibility...especially considering that every successful U.S. occupation of a foreign country (Germany, Japan, Bosnia) has, by the four-year mark, yielded some tangible measure of progress. Frankly, I doubt any reasons will be forthcoming. It's much easier for her to stick her head in the sand and pretend that there's a happy outcome down the road in Iraq than admit that the ultimate reason for the failure of post-war Iraq is because it's being run by the most incompetent Commander-in-Chief ever to sit in the White House. It's rare for someone that high up to admit they've chosen to ride the coattails of a colossal idiot who turns everything he touches to shit, and I don't expect that Rice would be one of the exceptions to that general rule.

Turks Invade "Kurdistan"

Guess the Turks got tired of waiting for Dubya to quit dropping the ball in Iraq. If the Turkish military gets the larger incursion approved things are going to get very interesting very quickly.

And apparently retired LTG Ricardo Sanchez (who ran the Iraq War for awhile) doesn't think too much of Bush's competence either.

Gene Upshaw Takes A Page From The Real Unions

NFL Player's Association head Gene Upshaw reportedly threatened to break the neck of Hall of Fame guard Joe Demeilleure, a strident critic of Upshaw's management of the NFLPA. The threats were apparently taken seriously by Demeilleure and his family, and aroused the ire of several former players who are unhappy with Upshaw's performance and question the suitability of Upshaw to continue in his job.

Although it's highly unlikely the NFLPA head would actually resort to violence to silence criticism, given the high profile of the NFL and Upshaw, his remarks do add to the questions surrounding the quality of work he is producing. As the association head, Upshaw is supposed to provide support to the player-members of his association, both active and retired. But Upshaw's largely pro-management positions on NFL issues such as concussions, his failure to address the NFL's flawed disability rating system, an apparent disinterest in pursuing issues of relevance to players, his questionable record of success in labor negotiations, as well as remarks he's made in the past indicating an open contempt for the standing of retired players (derisively suggesting that he only has a responsibility to represent people who can vote him out of office), should call into question his ability and commitment to perform his job. Especially since every one of the active players, who now have the ability to vote, will eventually become retired players and be faced by many of the issues that Upshaw refuses to address.

Dubya's Disastrous Approach To Brinksmanship

Now, I'm no bleeding heart, and I'm certainly no fan of Vladimir Putin. In fact, I believe Putin is a world leader we should be casting a very wary eye on...especially considering the recent assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, the suspicious deaths of a number of reporters critical to the Putin regime, and Putin's own alleged ties to Russian organized crime (especially his dealings with the alleged crime boss Vladimir Kumarin and the Tambov crime syndicate). And I don't think a convincing argument can be made to defend Putin against charges that Russia has regressed towards totalitarianism in recent years.

But, that said, rational students of international politics should be hard-pressed to find fault with Putin's paranoia regarding President Bush's latest foreign policy gaffes, the missile defense shield Bush advocates deploying in Eastern European countries and Bush's very public attacks on Putin's domestic policy in regards to democratization.

In order to understand Putin's perspective, you have to view the conflict from Russia's point of view:

1) Russia has long been a nation paranoid about border security. A well-established history of invasions from the Huns, Mongols, French, and Germans (to name just a few) will do tend to do that. So, whenever the Russians see a threat against their sovereign borders from an outside invader (or they see the pre-conditions for a threat start to form), they recognize that the best approach for them historically has been an overly aggressive posture. This is partly why the Russians have recently engaged in aggressive energy blackmail with bordering countries like Belarus and Ukraine. Controlling the border states creates a buffer that protects the integrity of Russian borders and keeps possibly damaging influences (in this case democratization) out.

2) A primary key to border security for the Russians since they gained nuclear weapons has been brinksmanship. In the recent Cold War, that deterrence against what they perceived as U.S. and NATO aggression and encroachment was achieved only by the established principle of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). A catastrophic attack by NATO against the Soviet Union would result in a more or less equally catastrophic attack against the nations of NATO members. This stalemate is only viable as long as MAD exists, and the establishment of anti-missile shields in European countries (which was prohibited by the ABM treaty, until Bush unilaterally scrapped it) clearly acts against the principle of MAD.

3) Bush's open attacks on democratization in Russia, combined with Bush's hyper-aggressive "democratization" agenda in the Middle East, to many Russians can be taken as signs of an impending threat against Russian sovereignty. It's one thing for Ronald Reagan to attack Russia as an "evil empire" when he pursued a more or less benign foreign policy (peace through strength) and supported the concept of stalemate and cooperation in international relations. It's quite another when the U.S. president has a history of invading nations whose leaders he doesn't like (peace through war), based on questionable justifications and utopian ideals, in defiance of widespread international opposition. The Russians were confronted with a similar threat in the 1940s...and their less aggressive approach to dealing with him cost them several million lives. It's unlikely in the nuclear era that Putin, or many Russians for that matter, would be willing to simply bank on the good will of George W. Bush after he condemns the choices that their elected leaders make.

Taken in its entirety, there is every reason for the Russians to be paranoid in their dealings with us, and every reason to believe that President Bush and his foreign policy are leading us towards disaster in Europe. And it's high time the GOP began reining their lame-duck leader in.

"Don't Go Sell It On eBay"

The above quote was a remark that Dubya apparently made to the family of service members killed in Iraq after he gave them a Presidential coin. Yup, that's our President. Class act all the way. Perhaps next he can go to Walter Reed and challenge paraplegics and amputees to a bike race. Or he can tell the spouses of deployed soldiers how lucky they are that he's taken their husbands/wives out of their hair for another five months. Or maybe he can give a speech about how getting a military life insurance or disability payout is like winning the lottery.

But then again, why should he care? It's not like any members of his family are serving in Iraq. It's easy to be flippant when it's other peoples' kids whose lives you're pissing away.

Update: And, according to a disturbing incident reported on in this Dallas Morning News column, by Georgie Ann Geyer, it's not just Bush's flippancy we should fear and loathe. It's that he has reportedly started demonstrating increasingly erratic behavior around long-time friends, claimed that the war in Iraq is "our country's destiny", and stated, explicitly, that he is attempting to set conditions to make withdrawal from Iraq impossible for his successor. It's enough to make me wonder if I was wrong to believe that Bush wouldn't leave our troops to get slaughtered in a war zone if the funding ran out. Remarks and actions like this are not the behavior of a sane or rational person...they're the actions of someone who is messianically delusional and losing his grip on reality. More on this incident as well as an earlier one with similar overtones.

"I Hope They Forgive Me" = "Please Don't Sue"

Three things occured to me as I read the unfolding saga of The TB Traveler.

First, it's hilariously ironic that Mr. Andrew Speaker turned out to be a personal injury lawyer who decided to put the people on the plane at risk after being ordered by the CDC not to fly back to the States. This is the kind of guy who would sue the airline, the passenger, and the government for letting someone with an infectious disease onto a plane and through border security. The only thing that would have made this story even more hilarious is if the passenger had been John Edwards. Ambulance chasers suck...especially John Edwards.

Second, the government's complete lack of ability (and competence) to stop an identified threat from entering the country. The guy was identified as a health risk before he traveled, and the CDC basically told him their warning was only a formality and it was okay to fly to Europe. The guy was placed on a do-not-fly list while in Europe, told by the CDC not to travel and to turn himself in to Italian authorities, and he was able to get on a plane back to North America. He was recognized by authorities at the Canadian border, and the cops let him walk on through, despite orders to detain him and despite the fact he was using his real name and passport. Basically, the government demonstrated that despite all the scare-mongering about how preserving our liberties undermines and destroys our security, despite the myriad of security regulations that have made air travel one of the most unenjoyable experiences around, and despite the tons of money we pay to enforce those regulations, the government is apparently incapable of stopping one clearly and unquestionably identified threat from entering the country and posing a risk to air travelers. And we're supposed to believe that these same minimum wage government employees are going to do a better job against al-Qaeda and illegal immigrants? HAH!!! The shoe I have to take off at airport security apparently provides a better line of defense than the average TSA employee.

Finally, the apology, "I hope they forgive me." You could almost picture the little tear rolling down Speaker's diseased little cheek. Juries are often swayed by tears like that. For my part, however, it reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Hermes asks his son, who has broken one of his paper route customers' window, what he's supposed to do to make amends.

"Pay for it?".

"O hohoho heavens no. We apologize. With nice cheap words."

Good luck to Mr. Speaker with that strategy...I'm sure his colleagues can already smell the blood in the water.

Yup...best story of the year so far, as far as I'm concerned.

Fred Thompson: Fraud

This pretty much sums up my impression of Fred Thompson...the new flavor of the month in the Republican primary. Lobbyist, lawyer, actor, ladies man, foreign policy illiterate, plus he thinks Bush is doing a bang-up job. In other words, he's a hack who's about as worthless a presidential candidate as you're likely to see. About the only thing that seems to make him appealing is his penchant for playing tough guy roles in the movies, despite the fact that none of his ideas are what you'd call original or deep and despite the fact he's done almost nothing over the course of his real-life career to merit the kind of adulation that Hardball likes to shower him with.

Oh well...it worked for John Wayne, I guess.

Looks like it's not just the Dems who have a jones for superficial and dead-end candidates.

Turkey Sends A Message To The Kurds

The primary beneficiaries of Saddam's downfall, the Kurds, got a warning from the Turkish government as military forces from our NATO ally were moved to the Iraqi border and hints were dropped about potential unsanctioned cross-border operations. Considering that the Turks have been outspoken for quite awhile about their unhappiness with Iraq's (or more precisely, "Kurdistan's") failure to crack down on insurgents infiltrating Turkey, the move comes as little surprise. I can't imagine that they're particularly happy about the autonomy the U.S. has granted the often pro-insurgent Kurdish government either...mainly because the cross-border attacks by the Kurds (who seek secession for oil-rich southern Turkey) have cost the Turks tens of thousands of lives over the years.

Things might get very interesting in northern Iraq if tensions flare up along the border this summer.

Saddam Was A Pauper In Comparison

The largest embassy on the planet will be an American one, located on 104 acres in the Green Zone of cheery Baghdad (making it larger than the Vatican and more grandiose than any of Saddam's palaces), and it will be run at a cost of approximately $1.2 billion per year (for U.S. taxpayers). That's assuming, of course, that it ever gets completed or that the next president doesn't realize what a complete and utter disaster our involvement in Iraq has been and decides to pull us out.

The embassy will feature its own electrical grid, water and sewage systems, food imported from America, an Olympic-size pool and a huge security staff to keep all the nasty insurgents at bay. Seeing our forces occupying such exclusive digs will certainly go a long way towards endearing us to the locals...at least whenever they're not too preoccupied dodging explosions, sniper bullets and death squads or living in abject poverty outside the Green Zone because the reconstruction efforts we promised them have stalled. They'll especially love the fact that the labor that builds the embassy will be almost entirely comprised of non-Iraqis and the land that it will be built on was given to the U.S. free of charge by the Iraqi government, so their economy will in fact receive zero benefit from its construction.

Gotta love the Bush administration's grasp of diplomacy, propriety and tact here.

Hillary The Communist

She said this, which really translates to this, which basically means that her economic views are Marxist, she whole-heartedly embraces the idea of big government, and no one with any brains should take anything she has to say seriously. The Democrats are so screwed if she gets the nomination.

Of course if you want a more substantiative analysis of Hillary's true beliefs, this book and this article are as good a place as any to start digging. Unsurprisingly, she's a big fan of true democracy (aka "mob rule")...just as long as she's the one leading the mob, of course.

Why True Democracy Is Evil

For four years now, the United States has been fighting a war in Iraq ostensibly in the interests of "democratizing" (in the short-term) that country and (in the long-term) the Middle East. And for the last four years, as our forces have fought for the right of the Iraqi people to "choose", we've watched the nation of Iraq devolve into a violent, anarchic state exemplified by sectarian rifts, ethnic cleansing (state sponsored and otherwise), and declining productivity. From the Iraqi government that we're supporting it has become evident that there are also emerging strains of violent totalitarianism in their domestic policy. President Bush continually claims that this is the result of insurgents who oppose individual freedom and choice.

What he doesn't get is that democratization is actually succeeding, because what's happening in Iraq is the inevitable outcome of a truly democratic government...the Shi'a (who make up 60% of the Iraqi population) are brutally forcing their will upon the Sunni (who make up 20%). This is the society that the Iraqi people democratically chose, it has no recognition of individual rights, and it's falling apart. So the President accomplished his objective of imposing democracy. He just didn't have a clue as to what the predictable consequences of that would be.

Democracies as an unlimited form of government almost invariably devolve into mob rule, socialism, and/or brutal repression. Democracies don't believe in or protect individual rights, economic freedom and self-determination, unless those freedoms and rights are specifically granted to the people with the explicit understanding that the democracy has no right to infringe upon them. Democracies without specified protections for individuals and property, like any form of government, are basically just a step removed from the most brutal of socialist dictatorships. There's a reason why Hitler arose from a democracy and why countries like East Germany and North Korea use the word "democratic" in their title. It's because democracies are what they are, and dictatorship or destruction are the endpoints of truly democratic nations, which we'll likely see in a few years with Iraq (when it either splits apart or becomes a Shi'a dictatorship).

America, despite what our President might think, is not and never has been a democracy. It was not founded as a democracy, it was never intended to become a democracy, and several of the Founding Fathers explicitly stated their opposition to democracy as a viable form of government...mainly because they recognized that it was short-lived, prone to tyranny, and provided an excellent opportunity to allow people to forcibly steal from each other. We are a constitutional republic, which is why we have such maligned institutions as an electoral college (to protect states' rights when electing the president), a Bill of Rights (to protect our individual freedoms and property rights), and a Constitution that limits the influence the federal government is allowed to exert over the states. We are not a democracy because the Founding Fathers realized that democracies and the practices of unlimited "majority rules" never have and never will create free societies.

This hasn't, however, stopped petty despots like Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, and Woodrow Wilson, and George W. Bush, and innumberable Congressmen from attempting to turn us into a democracy. And unfortunately for us all, they've had (and are still having) a lot of success with it. Because, thanks to our illogical love affair with democracy, instead of having a government that values freedom and liberty we've willing traded it for a government that values financially disastrous handouts, subsidies, and concessions to special interests, forced unequal taxation, acts of theft by the poor and the old, international conquest, de facto institutional racism, hatred of economic freedom, and a palpable contempt for individual rights, due process and free speech.

It's not a trade we should be happy with.