Iraq Update

     U.S. Troop deaths tied with lowest, July 2003.  The lies thrown out by Bush and McCain concerning Iraq were so numerous, I can only bring up a few now. One huge campaign lie told by the Bush administration (back in 2004) was "that as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down."  Since Bush was sworn in again in January, 2005, the total number of Iraqis "standing up" has increased over 418,000 (125K to 542K).  At least 50,000 of these are now at Operational Readiness Assessment 1.  In January 2005 there were 150,000 U.S. Troops in Iraq, now there are 146,000. 

     The article also says that without an agreement BY DECEMBER, the U.S. has no legal role in Iraq.  If anyone knows what I can do to prevent an agreement from passing, please let me know.  The way out of Iraq has always been them asking us.

     Reagan, on 12/4/1992 said one report said there 160 border disputes in post-Soviet Russia. I should review them all.

Language & Conflict: Status of Forces Disagreement Between U.S. and Iraq

Roads to Iraq says Iraqi PM Allawi says there are translation problems with the agreement.  The NY Times has a story on the general fall apart of the non-agreement.

(Early?) (Draft?) Iraqi SOFA Agreement Leaked

Raed Jarrar has information on how unlikely it is to pass here, which is valid for any official treaty between Iraq and the U.S.  The American Friends Service Committee and Raed did a translation which is available in PDF here.

Biden

Want to know about Biden?  This article, I'm afraid, takes a hard, left look at Biden.

This article gives another way to look at Biden.

Old People and Elections

Most people don't know that the older a person was, the more likely they were to be against the war in Viet Nam.  Sure, the youth were most visible in their opposition, but, as an age cohort, youth were most pro-war.

I hear, also, that in the current war, young people have always been more pro-war than adults (also in the pre-war period).

Two reasons jump to mind.  One, mentioned in the NY Times article above, is that older people know about wars, they know it is the worst possible thing in the world that humans consciously do.  Another is that younger people are usually less aware, and therefore more susceptible to propaganda from their own government.  I remember once seeing (on TV) a classroom of kindergarten kids who almost all thought Britney Spears sang and danced because it was fun to do!

And this is one reason to consider voting for McCain, his marginally greater support among older voters.

Who Wants To Bet Noone Gets Punished For Destroying A Family's Livelihood?

Persephone (UPDATE 1)

UPDATE: Colored Ilam province (in Luri and Bakhtiari) in red, see comments
     A map of the Persephone world.  Dari, I know, is Persian, while Tajik, I think, is very close.  It looks like the colors are very good choices.


Image from Wikipedia, I found it looking up the Pashto Language.

Bush Calls for Halt to All Violence

Apparently "all" does not include Iraq or Afghanistan.  Sorry, distant cousins!

Bush was only talking about Georgia, while Saakashvili has requested in the last hour that Georgia's Parliament declare war on Russia.  It's a war they can't win.  I hear most S. Ossetians like the Russians, more, so it would be like forcing themselves on an unwilling population.  Hmm, maybe that's why George Walker is behind them?  No, seriously, if America had spare military capacity, and it turns out Georgia's claims about how the violence started (very important to me) are true, we could do a little dance.  Now we can do next to nothing.  Realist speaking, Russia still has the 2nd most nukes in the world.  Economy and trade speaking, Russia has industrial workers and a large industrial base, and tons of natural resources.  McCain, though, wants to boot them from the G-8.

Will anyone ever clear up who actually started this incident?

Russia Today Reports Full Mobilization by Georgia

Has 70K troops.  Earlier report says Saakashvili pulling all of 2K troops from Iraq.

Keeping Ya Stupid: CNN tells you about troop deaths

What does the text say at the bottom of the screen while Wolf Blitzer talks to a General in Iraq?

U.S. Troop Deaths at Lowest Ever

That includes when we aren't fighting any wars, I guess.  Ever is a long time, and has to include when we didn't believe in standing armies.

As They Stand Up, We'll Stand Down

Remember that mantra of Bush's?  I'm sure, if you watched the television news, you heard them repeat it, too.  It was, like so many other Bush predictions about Iraq, not what happened.

Do Iraqi troops count?  I know I am supposed to say "Don't Forget Poland," which means Polish troops count, but do Iraqi?  Well, if their standing up lets us stand down then, I guess, they must.  Maybe not 1-to-1, but maybe 100 to 1?  Iraq has added over 400,000 Soldiers, National Guard and Police, but America still has about as many troops as the day we entered Baghdad.  It also makes the October, 2006 call by McCain for 20,000 troops look even more silly.

If we count Iraqi Troops, McCain's proposal amounts to less than one half of one percent of the combined troop totals when he made the proposal, in late October, 2006.  By the way, in the graphs below all the lines are, when pixel length choices are being made, changed in favor of John McCain.

American Media Has Internalized Lie About Surge (UPDATE 3)

UPDATE 1: Rewrote first paragraph, added facts about when McCain made his proposal
UPDATE 2: New Combined Chart!
UPDATE 3: Updated Anbar Awakening timeline

Back in October, 2006, John McCain called for increasing the number of troops in Iraq by 20,000.  At that time U.S. troop levels in Iraq were about 144,000, while the maximum had been, a year earlier, 160,000.  The narrative being pushed by the media is as follows: John McCain was wise for supporting the surge, the surge has succeeded, and Obama, who said it wouldn't work, is just plain wrong.

The following chart shows total troop strength, as reported by the Iraq Index of the Brookings Institution (as of July 17th, 2008).  Nothing can change the unalterable fact that there was no increase in troops.  The chart shows that the peak of troops occurred in late 2005.  Why do my numbers jibe so badly with what you think you know about reality?  I'm including British, Australian, and other national troops for this one(Don't Forget Poland!) but the next graph shows basically the same thing only including U.S. troops.  More below the graph!

But, even if we take out the non-U.S. troops from the equation, it is clear that the "surge" only brought maximum troop levels only a tiny fraction above their previous highs in late 2005.  John McCain's proposal was just 2.5% percent more than the previous U.S. troop maximum! More below the graph!

Since only a Big Brother, John McCain and Joe Scarborough can easily declare 2 + 2 = 5, or could possibly argue that the decrease in overall troop levels created the increase in security we have seen, let's briefly examine what did change.  The following factors are in chronological order.

• We are now paying off the Sunni tribes who were trying to kill us a year ago, the so-called "Sunni Awakening" began around August, 2006
• General Casey, the previous top military commander in Iraq, was little more than a mouthpiece of the Bush administration.  On February 10th, 2007 General Petraeus replaced him.  Please recall that none of America's military professionals have the decade+ of war experience of, say, an Iraqi General (eight years Iran, one year Kuwait).
• Moqtada al-Sadr declared a ceasefire on August 29th, 2007

I put those facts in the chart below, which otherwise, like all the data in this post, comes from Brooking's Iraq Index.

How to Get Out of Iraq

     We assert that the current, largely elected government of Iraq is, in fact, the legitimate authority in Iraq.  If that is the case, then if they ask us to go, we must go.  We must ask them to ask our troops to withdraw.  We must then explain, humbly, that the wishes of a democratically elected government of a sovereign nation must be respected when it comes to their own territory.

     Does the day we stop paying troops in Iraq, the defense contractors in Iraq, mean the end of the US commitment to Iraq?  We must defend Iraq from any foreign army for a while, after all, we disbanded their military. 

     We must pay for training the Iraqis wish to receive, overseas, in both public administration and civil policing.  We must pay for lots of stuff in Iraq that we have broken.  Building new ministries, regional legislative, executive and judicial facilities, the foundation of any government, must be brought up to a certain standard, likely resulting in completely new construction in those locations.

Stephen Hadley Gives the Daily Brief

     "We have had resolutions on Darfur." 

1. Congo is worse than Darfur, why does no one give a shit?  What's so special about Sudan?  Oil?  That Arabs rule over Christians?  Both?
2. The US brought resolutions before the Security Council, on two separate occasions(although they pulled back the second time when they realized they didn't have the votes (2nd draft resolution on Iraq)) in an attempt to bring the forces able to mustered by the UN Security Council to bear on Iraq.  No such resolution has been brought by the US re:Sudan.
3. I'm not up on UN rules.  I don't (generally) approve of US action into the internal security matters of foreign countries, as I wouldn't approve of foreign countries meddling inside the United States of America.  The smartest ways around this self-imposed restriction seem obvious to me, and need not even be as overt as funding political groups.

Iraq Conspiracy?  No, Confluence (UPDATE 2)

UPDATE 1: Added Palast link to list
UPDATE 2: Added Perle/Soviet to list

     In the last couple days I've seen a couple posts which attempt to answer the question "Why did we fight in Iraq?" and I realized that although I'd commented this material elsewhere, I'd never blogged it myself.  There were a host of forces at play, all with the same aim, while the anti-war arguments were generally based on hypothesis or law.  I'm not sure which order to describe the factors, so please don't read anything in there.

• PNAC and neo-conservatism always favored using US force to destroy particular enemies of the US establishment, not that Cheney didn't do business with official US enemies.  Emerging out of 70s hawkish leftism (e.g. Scoop Jackson) and the classrooms of the disciples of Leo Strauss, these disturbing elements of the US power structure argue from the axiom that the US is the world Leviathan, a position which is false.
• War is good for the media's ratings.
• Colin Powell, even before Bush took office, was known to favor war against Iraq and North Korea, both of whom he considered Cold War aggressor nations which had not paid for their aggression.  It's hard for me to see how Kim Jong Il can be blamed for the war of his father, Kim Il Song, but that didn't stop General Powell.
• Soldiers want action and medals.
• The foreign policies of certain US allies, namely, Israel.  Israel wanted Saddam gone.  No one can argue that the Saudis really loved Saddam, either.
• In 2000, Iraq became the first major oil producing country to replace the dollar with the Euro.  Many trillions of Middle Eastern "Petrodollars" have long been converted into US dollars before being spent.  This is a great deal for the United States, and changing it would weaken the US economy.
• Defense contractors want sales.
• Oil security.  I think the major US focus on oil as a national security measure dates back to WWII.  Tanks and planes don't run without oil.  Battles in WWII were won and lost based on fuel supplies.  Britian invaded Iraq during WWII because Iraq wanted to sell oil to Germany (a fact notably absent from this CIA timeline).  Having Iraq's oil in friendlier hands would help this aging national security issue, and continue to bolster the US economy.
• Saddam had been, in fact, a murderous tyrant (although everyone glosses over the fact that his last few years had been his best, kills-per-year wise).
• Saddam allegedly tried to kill Bush's father.  Taking the nation to war for personal reasons is treason.
• Because they could.  Some people were tasked with things like "Find any dirt on Iraq that you can, and make a big stink about it."  They were given a job by the President, and they did it well (enough).  William Luti and Doug Feith figure prominently as neo-cons who can assert "I was just doing my job."
• The last reason I can think of is Bush's religion.  He doesn't see things as events in the grand scheme of history, they are Signs From God, and God got him elected, and therefore, God's will must be done.  Israel is not a country, but the Holy Land, and Saddam was certainly an enemy of Israel.
• If Greg Palast's report is correct, it had a lot more to do with greed than I have suggested.  Pure, unadulterated profit motive.
• According to Richard Perle biographer Alan Weisman, Perle himself really wanted to live/relive the feeling people had when the Soviet Union toppled.  Kinda confusing, though, since we didn't shoot at Gorbachev, or try a "decapitation" attack, to do it.

     The arguments against the war?  The maintenance of the Westphalian system, international law, anti-pre-emption, and the "bound to be a quagmire" thesis are all based on high concepts or speculation. 

• It might be obvious to sane people, but no one could prove it would be a quagmire.  No one knew, in advance, that Bu$hCo would choose oil-men and terrorists to run the new Iraq.  As unlikely as it was, war planners made comparisons to post-WWII Japan or Germany. 
• It's doubtful Bush considered Saddam's Iraq as worthy of the rights of a Sovereign, as he doesn't consider Arabs to be worthy of the rights in the Constitution. 
• And international law?  Why, I saw the Bush administration international law expert on C-SPAN.  It was pathetic.  He brought up the Caroline incident and the Cuba blockade/missile crisis as examples of US pre-emption.  The Caroline incident was a British action, while the Cuba blockade was used as an example, five years later, by Egypt, in their blocking the straits of Tiran (an important part of the run-up to the 67 war).

     So to will this action of Bush's be used in the future to start wars.  Like the Supreme Court decision that brought this mindnumbingly incompetent tool to power (Bush V Gore is the first case in USSC history that declares it is inadmissible as precedent), the Bush administration ignores the precedent setting nature of their war.  Considering, for example, past Bush maladministration efforts, wouldn't Iran be in their right minds to attack America now?

     The War in Iraq must be repudiated.

Thou Shalt Not Undermine...

     Reuters is entitling this peice of comic diplomacy "Powell Attacks European NATO Allies on Iraq."...
"When it comes time to perform a mission, it seems to us to be quite awkward for suddenly members of that international staff to say 'I am unable to go,'"
Awkward for whom, he didn't actually say, although "an expert" thinks it was probably dead Iraqis.
"You[] are hurting the credibility and cohesion [of such an] international staff organization,"
by not following along with our lying, rape, murder and plunder, and without credibility, what do you really have?

Don Rumsfeld, fuckwad

No one more than Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz should be blamed for the Iraq War. They were directing D Feith and W Luti, who were also cognizant of their role. The Defense Intelligence Agency, controlled by the Secretary of Defense, and not the Director of Central Intelligence (Head of the CIA), is 80-85% of the total US intelligence budget. DCI Tenet probably made some complaints, but apparently not enough. Secretary of State C Powell wanted to fight again in al-Iraq, according to someone I heard before the Bush administration took office. It's in the last couple minutes of the 40th anniversary of Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex speech, which, since our elections are regularly timed, was a week before Bush took office. It was hosted by the Nation magazine.