Jefferson Corner

Mr. Robert Fisk, is perhaps the best journalist any where. Lots of smarts, lots of guts, lots of courage and lots of vision. Perhaps congressional staff members, espcially Democrats, should make Mr. Fisk a required reading for their bosses. Both can learn a great deal and have a better insight into what is going on around the world. A whole lots of smart that Weekly Standard could never match.
Sami Jadallah

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2144057.ece

Robert Fisk: Bush’s new strategy - the march of folly
So into the graveyard of Iraq, George Bush, commander-in-chief, is to send another 21,000 of his soldiers. The march of folly is to continue…
Published: 11 January 2007
There will be timetables, deadlines, benchmarks, goals for both America and its Iraqi satraps. But the war against terror can still be won. We shall prevail. Victory or death. And it shall be death.

President Bush’s announcement early this morning tolled every bell. A billion dollars of extra aid for Iraq, a diary of future success as the Shia powers of Iraq ­ still to be referred to as the “democratically elected government” ­ march in lockstep with America’s best men and women to restore order and strike fear into the hearts of al-Qa’ida. It will take time ­ oh, yes, it will take years, at least three in the words of Washington’s top commander in the field, General Raymond Odierno this week ­ but the mission will be accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Wasn’t that the refrain almost four years ago, on that lonely aircraft carrier off California, Bush striding the deck in his flying suit? And only a few months later, the President had a message for Osama bin Laden and the insurgents of Iraq. “Bring ‘em on!” he shouted. And on they came. Few paid attention late last year when the Islamist leadership of this most ferocious of Arab rebellions proclaimed Bush a war criminal but asked him not to withdraw his troops. “We haven’t yet killed enough of them,” their videotaped statement announced.

Well, they will have their chance now. How ironic that it was the ghastly Saddam, dignified amid his lynch mob, who dared on the scaffold to tell the truth which Bush and Blair would not utter: that Iraq has become “hell” .

It is de rigueur, these days, to recall Vietnam, the false victories, the body counts, the torture and the murders ­ but history is littered with powerful men who thought they could batter their way to victory against the odds. Napoleon comes to mind; not the emperor who retreated from Moscow, but the man who believed the wild guerrilleros of French-occupied Spain could be liquidated. He tortured them, he executed them, he propped up a local Spanish administration of what we would now call Quislings, al-Malikis to a man. He rightly accused his enemies ­ Moore and Wellington ­ of supporting the insurgents. And when faced with defeat, Napoleon took the personal decision “to relaunch the machine” and advanced to recapture Madrid, just as Bush intends to recapture Baghdad. Of course, it ended in disaster. And George Bush is no Napoleon Bonaparte.

No, I would turn to another, less flamboyant, far more modern politician for prophecy, an American who understood, just before the 2003 launch of Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, what would happen to the arrogance of power. For their relevance this morning, the words of the conservative politician Pat Buchanan deserve to be written in marble:

“We will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the ‘On to Berlin’ bravado with which French poilus and British tommies marched in August 1914. But this invasion will not be the cakewalk neoconservatives predict … For a militant Islam that holds in thrall scores of millions of true believers will never accept George Bush dictating the destiny of the Islamic world …

“The one endeavour at which Islamic peoples excel is expelling imperial powers by terror and guerrilla war. They drove the Brits out of Palestine and Aden, the French out of Algeria, the Russians out of Afghanistan, the Americans out of Somalia and Beirut, the Israelis out of Lebanon… We have started up the road to empire and over the next hill we will meet those who went before.”

But George Bush dare not see these armies of the past, their ghosts as palpable as the phantoms of the 3,000 Americans ­ let us forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis ­ already done to death in this obscene war, and those future spirits of the dead still living amid the 20,000 men and women whom Bush is now sending to Iraq. In Baghdad, they will move into both Sunni and Shia “insurgent strongholds” ­ as opposed to just the Sunni variety which they vainly invested in the autumn ­ because this time, and again I quote General Odierno, it is crucial the security plan be ” evenhanded”. This time, he said, “we have to have a believable approach, of going after Sunni and Shia extremists”.

But a “believable approach” is what Bush does not have. The days of even-handed oppression disappeared in the aftermath of invasion.

“Democracy” should have been introduced at the start ­ not delayed until the Shias threatened to join the insurgency if Paul Bremer, America’s second proconsul, did not hold elections ­ just as the American military should have prevented the anarchy of April 2003. The killing of 14 Sunni civilians by US paratroopers at Fallujah that spring set the seal on the insurgency. Yes, Syria and Iran could help George Bush. But Tehran was part of his toytown “Axis of Evil”, Damascus a mere satellite. They were to be future prey, once Project Iraq proved successful. Then there came the shame of our torture, our murders, the mass ethnic cleansing in the land we said we had liberated.

And so more US troops must die, sacrificed for those who have already died. We cannot betray those who have been killed. It is a lie, of course. Every desperate man keeps gambling, preferably with other men’s lives.

But the Bushes and Blairs have experienced war through television and Hollywood; this is both their illusion and their shield.

Historians will one day ask if the West did not plunge into its Middle East catastrophe so blithely because not one member of any Western government ­ except Colin Powell, and he has shuffled off stage ­ ever fought in a war. The Churchills have gone, used as a wardrobe for a prime minister who lied to his people and a president who, given the chance to fight for his country, felt his Vietnam mission was to defend the skies over Texas.

But still he talks of victory, as ignorant of the past as he is of the future.

Pat Buchanan ended his prophecy with imperishable words: “The only lesson we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.”

The Bush plan, and the question of withdrawal

What Bush says

20,000 troops increase

Mistake of not sending sufficient troops must be rectified. Troops stabilise Baghdad and reinforce Anbar province, on condition that Iraqis take on Shia militias

$1bn reconstruction aid

Fresh funds will help create jobs and stimulate economy to show Iraqis there can be a peace dividend, and friendly Middle East states should help out too

Pullout

US commitment to Iraq is not open-ended but no timetable for troop withdrawal, even though US troops are expected to hand control to Iraqis by November

What Congress says

20,000 troops increase

Troop build-up is a mistake. House expected to vote on increase, Senate legislation forces Bush to seek congressional approval but neither move could block troop deployment

$1bn reconstruction aid

Don’t throw good money after bad. US has squandered billions since the invasion and Democrats plan investigation. Millions of dollars ‘overpaid’ by Pentagon to Iraq contractors

Pullout

Bush has not learnt the lesson of November’s mid-term elections which gave Democrats control of the House and Senate on the platform of a phased withdrawal from Iraq

What Baker says

20,000 troops increase

Up to 20,000 military trainers and troops embedded into and supporting Iraqi army, while combat troops drawn down to avoid increase in total numbers

$1bn reconstruction aid

US economic assistance should be boosted to $5bn per year. US should take anti-corruption measures by posting oil contracts on the internet for outside scrutiny

Pullout

All US combat troops not needed for force protection should be out of Iraq by the first quarter of 2008

Likely outcome

20,000 troops increase

Escalation of conflict

Money will be wasted, with official corruption in Iraq said to drain $7bn a year

Pullout

Troop surge could disguise ‘cut and run’ depending on the circumstances in both Iraq and America

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The neocons got Mr. Bush and got America into this big mess called Iraq, through lies, fraud and misrepresentations, costing the lives of thousands of Americans and Iraqis. Instead of reaching out to the best and brightest in the nation to help him and us get out of this big mess, Mr. Bush decides again, and wrongly reach out to the neocons who made a mess of this nation and of our foreign policy. The neocons are taking the country and its resouces down the drain. The Democrats better come up with a bold answer to Mr. Bush. Let us not repeat Vietnam all over again.
Sami Jadallah

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_011107J.shtml
The Architect of Mr. Bush’s Plan
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t Report

Thursday 11 January 2007

One of the key architects of President Bush’s disastrous Iraq war policy was responsible for writing the president’s new plan calling for an increase in US troops in the region.

By relying on the recommendations of neoconservative scholar Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on what steps the White House should take to address the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, President Bush has once again ignored the advice of career military officials and even some Republican lawmakers - many of whom in recent weeks have urged Bush to resist implementing a policy that would result in escalating the war - and instead has chosen to rely on the proposals drafted by hawkish, think-tank intellectuals that could very well backfire and end up embroiling the United States in an even bloodier conflict.

Perhaps the most alarming element of Bush’s “new” plan for stabilizing Iraq is how much it relies upon the recommendations of individuals who have never set foot on a battlefield. Much of what the president outlined in a prime-time speech Wednesday evening - specifically, sending more than 20,000 additional soldiers into Iraq - was culled from the white paper, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” written by Kagan last month.

Some of the key points of Kagan’s proposal include:

We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the US military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.
We must send more American combat forces into Iraq, and especially into Baghdad, to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.
These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.
After the neighborhoods have been cleared, US soldiers and Marines, again partnered with Iraqis, will remain behind to maintain security.
As security is established, reconstruction aid will help to reestablish normal life and, working through Iraqi officials, will strengthen Iraqi local government.
But these recommendations itself aren’t new. In fact, this “new” plan has actually been collecting dust for two years.

In January 2005, Kagan, who at the time was associated with the controversial Project for the New American Century, signed a letter sent to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate urging lawmakers to deploy an additional 25,000 US troops to Iraq, not so much to quell the violence between Sunni and Shiite factions as to intimidate Iraq’s neighbors in the Middle East by maintaining bases. Kagan, his brother Robert, and PNAC founder and Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol wrote that the Bush administration had ignored its suggestions, and chose to stick with a plan drafted by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said the Iraq war could be won with fewer ground forces and superior air power.

“We write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps,” states the January 28, 2005, letter sent to Senators Bill Frist and Harry Reid, Congressman Dennis Hastert, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. “While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality.”

As US casualties piled up, Kagan publicly criticized Rumsfeld’s plan for post-war Iraq and began to peddle his ideas for a substantial increase in US troops.

“The secretary of defense simply chose to prioritize preparing America’s military for future conventional conflict rather than for the current mission,” Kagan wrote in the January 17, 2005, issue of the Weekly Standard. “That position, based on the hope that the current mission would be of short duration and the recognition that the future may arrive at any moment, is understandable. It just turns out to have been wrong.”

The lack of soldiers on the ground has been a hot-button issue since the start of the March 2003 invasion. Career military officials believe that is the reason the war hasn’t been a “cakewalk.” They blame former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld for designing a flawed war plan that has resulted in the deaths of more than 3,000 US soldiers and led to deep divisions between senior military officials and the defense secretary.

In Wednesday’s speech, but without identifying him by name, Bush put the responsibility for the quagmire squarely on Rumsfeld’s shoulders. But the president also lauded Rumsfeld’s war plan. In a televised news conference last year, Bush said there was no need to send additional troops into Iraq.

The Genesis of the Iraq War Plan

In October 2002, Rumsfeld ordered the military’s regional commanders to rewrite all of their war plans to capitalize on precision weapons, better intelligence, and speedier deployment in the event the United States decided to invade Iraq.

The goal was to use fewer ground troops, a move that caused dismay among some in the military who said concern for the troops requires overwhelming numerical superiority to assure victory.

Several longtime military officers said they viewed Rumsfeld’s approach as injecting too much risk into war planning and said it could result in US casualties that might be prevented by amassing larger forces. Those predictions have been borne out over the past 33 months.

Still, Rumsfeld refused to listen to his military commanders, saying that his plan would allow “the military to begin combat operations on less notice and with far fewer troops than thought possible - or thought wise - before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,” the New York Times reported in its October 13, 2002, edition.

“Looking at what was overwhelming force a decade or two decades ago, today you can have overwhelming force, conceivably, with lesser numbers because the lethality is equal to or greater than before,” Rumsfeld told the Times.

Rumsfeld said too many of the military plans on the shelves of the regional war-fighting commanders were freighted with outdated assumptions and military requirements, which have changed with the advent of new weapons and doctrines.

It has been a mistake, he said, to measure the quantity of forces required for a mission and “fail to look at lethality, where you end up with precision-guided munitions, which can give you 10 times the lethality that a dumb weapon might, as an example,” the Times reported.

Through a combination of pre-deployments, faster cargo ships and a larger fleet of transport aircraft, the military would be able to deliver “fewer troops but in a faster time that would allow you to have concentrated power that would have the same effect as waiting longer with what a bigger force might have,” Rumsfeld said.

Critics in the military said there were several reasons to deploy a force of overwhelming numbers before starting any offensive with Iraq. Large numbers illustrate US resolve and can intimidate Iraqi forces into laying down their arms or even turning against Hussein’s government.

According to Defense Department sources, Rumsfeld at first insisted that our vast air superiority and a degraded Iraqi military would enable 75,000 US troops to win the war. General Tommy Franks, the theater commander in chief, convinced Rumsfeld to send 250,000 (augmented by 45,000 British). However, the Army would have preferred a much deeper force.

Kagan Reemerges

Kagan resurfaced in early December with another column in the Weekly Standard, “We Can Put More Forces in Iraq,” which suggested sending more troops to the region and continuing to fight the war for up to two years.

“A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations - characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence - required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants,” Kagan wrote. “Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules of thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both US and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004, Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 US soldiers - a ratio of about 1 to 125.”

Following the publication of Kagan’s column, Vice President Dick Cheney and senior members of Bush’s cabinet began to enter into a dialogue with Kagan to draft an alternative plan for dealing with the violence in Iraq. The move was orchestrated so the White House could avoid adopting the proposals set forth that week by the Iraq Study Group, led by longtime Bush family confidante James A. Baker III, that called for entering into a dialogue with Iran and Syria and redeploying troops in 2008.

Two weeks later, Kagan published “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the AEI white paper that recycled his public statements and columns from 2005 that were highly critical of Rumsfeld’s post-war planning. Like the January 28, 2005, letter he sent to Congress and the Senate, the 47-page report called for sending more troops into the region to combat the violence between Sunnis and Shiites - which ultimately would ensure the war would continue to rage for at least two years.

Ultimately, President Bush agreed with Kagan, and used the key recommendations of his study as the foundation for his new Iraq policy - a policy that even some staunch pro-war Republicans have distanced themselves from.

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