Fortnightly Iraq News Roundup

According to the Bush administration’s logic, the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq is a proactive measure for the US, which helps to secure homeland security and serves to protect the lives of its citizens. This is because there are, in Bush and his Neocon advisors’ crazy logic, there are a finite number of terrorists (usually dishonestly and inaccurately referred to simply as al Qaeda) who hate us for our freedom and will exploit any opportunity to kill our civilians through terrorist attacks. Thus, fighting these al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq helps protect the homeland because if our soldiers are kicking terrorist ass in the Middle East, we don’t have to worry about them making it stateside and blowing up a subway car full of defenseless civilians in Los Angeles New York City.

This is informally referred to in military jargon as the “flypaper theory”:

In military strategy, the flypaper theory is the idea that it is desirable to draw enemies to a single area where it is easier to dispatch them and where they are far from one’s own vulnerabilities. Perhaps the best description of the benefits of the strategy was given by U.S. Army General Ricardo Sanchez, who is commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq: “This is what I would call a terrorist magnet, where America, being present here in Iraq, creates a target of opportunity… But this is exactly where we want to fight them. …This will prevent the American people from having to go through their attacks back in the United States.”

The desirability of the strategy depends upon how many new enemies are created by using it, how many of them are drawn to the “flytrap,” and how easily they are dispatched. Critics of the war in Iraq argue that the war has indeed drawn terrorists to Iraq, but that this merely causes destruction there and does not avert terrorism in the West.

(For more critical analysis of the flypaper theory, see here, here and here)

Unfortunately, the recently declassified parts of the July National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) utterly obliterates this rationale: Bush’s own handpicked Intelligence Community, as it has done in its previous reports, has confirmed what most Americans who read the paper and watch the evening news (I’m not including “Special Report with Brit Hume” here) have long ago concluded: This illegal military occupation that will have cost our economy $550 billion by this October, has killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and maimed and killed thousands of our own troops is increasing the chances al Qaeda will successfully hit us again at home in a terrorist attack, not lessen the risks as Bush’s National Security Advisors promised.

Some of the important findings from the declassified section of the report – which really doesn’t take much time to read – include:

Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.

[A]l-Qa’ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.

Al Qaeda’s association with “al Qaeda in Iraq” (AQI) helps to “energize the broader Sunni extremist community” and “recruit and indoctrinate operatives” and [al Qaeda's] association with AQI helps al-Qa’ida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.

Analyzing the significance of the NIE from his perch at Slate, Fred Kaplan observes:

It’s worth recalling that, back in the spring of 2003, as the war was getting under way, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense (and one of the war’s outspoken architects), told Vanity Fair that one reason to invade Iraq was to allow U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia. The presence of “infidel” soldiers on holy soil had been “a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida,” Wolfowitz said. (Osama Bin Laden had publicly cited their presence as a rationale for the attack on the World Trade Center.) Yet the troops couldn’t safely leave Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq. Hence, Saddam had to be removed first. (Though Wolfowitz didn’t say so, another element of the plan was to relocate the U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to the new, presumably pro-Western Iraq.)

Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less “a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida.” (Some of Wolfowitz’s erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn’t grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.

Again, it’s worth emphasizing that this is not a new development. In fact, last September’s NIE made almost exactly the same points*. It’s troubling because the issue seems to be getting more and more pronounced and serious while at the same time the Bushies and their supporters in the media and the Right Wing think tanks continue to argue the precise opposite; i.e.: the open-ended occupation is making us safer at home.

More commentary on the latest NIE from Richard Clarke in the New York Daily News, focusing specifically on the three somewhat major developments the report strangely failed to discuss:

First, it fails to note that the intelligence community’s judgment has changed significantly since its last report in 2006. Back then, they were saying that Al Qaeda was suffering. Not any more. “[W]e judge that Al Qaeda will intensify its efforts to put operatives here,” says the report.

In other words, Al Qaeda has been recovering on President Bush’s watch, particularly these last two years. The President rushed to point out that while that may be true, Al Qaeda is still not ascapable as it was on 9/11. Is thatall he can say he has accomplished against the organization that attacked us nearly six years ago, the organization he said he would destroy?

Second, the NIE notes that Al Qaeda may use “regional terrorist groups” and cites, as an example, “Al Qaeda in Iraq.” What it does not say, but can be read between the lines: “Al Qaeda in Iraq” is a different organization than the folks in Pakistan and Afghanistan who attacked us. Put another way, the President is wrong when he claims that we are fighting in Iraq the people who attacked New York and Virginia. “Al Qaeda in Iraq” did not even exist until after we invaded Iraq.

Third, the NIE slides quickly over the fact that the reconstituted Al Qaeda is in Pakistan – which is supposedly our ally in the war on terrorism. We have reportedly given the Pakistani government more than $10 billion since 9/11. Yet, while the Pakistanis have cooperated in going after some Al Qaeda leaders who were holed up in their big cities, they also signed a written agreement that effectively created a sanctuary for terrorists in their northwest territory.

(h/t Democracy Arsenal)

Sidney Blumenthal has an editorial worth reading in July 19th issue of The Guardian. He notes that:

The latest NIE . . . is a strange product. According to highly reliable sources in the intelligence community, no new intelligence at all is reflected in the NIE. Its conclusions, on one level, are a rehash of obvious facts that anyone who reads a daily newspaper could glean, such as the protected status of al-Qaida in frontier regions of Pakistan. Other conclusions lack contextual analysis, partly because of the continuing pressure from the administration to politicise information and cherry-pick intelligence. The NIE, for example, does not explain that al-Qaida in Iraq, while lethal, is a very small part of the Sunni insurgency, and that a number of Sunni insurgent groups are its sworn enemies. Nor did the NIE note how few foreign fighters are in Iraq and what a small percentage of insurgents they constitute. The NIE is utterly devoid of political analysis.

Finally, Spencer Ackerman, writing over at TPM Muckraker analyzes what is missing from the NIE, especially with regard to the security situation in Iraq.

Other developments . . .

• Robert Naiman notes at his blog Just Foreign Policy that according to research from Iraq Body Count, the Iraqi civilian death count is nearing the one million mark – truly a shocking and sickening statistic. He also notes that “A striking fact about this situation is that if Republicans in Congress voted according to voter sentiment in their districts, there would be an overwhelming majority in Congress for a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.”

To buttress his claim, he has created a useful online tool called theWithdrawal Support Calculator. Find out how your congressmen votes compared with the public sentiment on setting a timetable for withdrawal (based on opinion polls) from his constituents.

• Someone should mention to Bush that nearly half of the insurgents in Iraq come from our “close ally” in the War on Terror, Saudi Arabia (not Syria or Iran as the administration keeps claiming)

• UPI reports that “Iraq’s unions [are claiming that] the draft oil law is a threat and [are threatening] ‘mutiny’ if Parliament approves the bill.” Currently, Iraqi PM Maliki’s cabinet is backing the oil law, even though some ministers are threatening to quit if it passed, most Iraqis and outside observers see the proposed legislation as “no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq’s oil wealth.”. (for previous Troubled Times coverage of the draft oil law, see here, here, here and here.

(Update: I didn’t see this before, but apparently even experts in the US Government Accountability Office’s International Affairs and Trade Division are extremely critical of the legislation)

• Citing reporting from Reuters on recently released Pentagon data, Professor and Professor of Middle East History Juan Cole notes that “there were an average of 177.8 attacks on Iraqi military and civilian and US targets per day in June– an all-time record for Iraq.”

• AFP reports that “it will take two more years for Iraqi forces to be ready to replace US troops, a senior US commander said Friday.”

• According to Iraqslogger.com, the Pentagon recently Think Progress notes that Edelman is directly contradicting his boss, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates who has in the past publicly welcomed debate over Iraqi deployment, arguing that it has been “helpful in bringing pressure to bear on the Maliki government.”

Juan Cole provides some background on Edelman’s neoconservative ideological roots and his connection to the 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance.

• Matthew Yglesias, linking to recent posts by Gregory Djerejian (the Belgravia Dispatch) and Atrios (a man who in progressive blogging circles needs no introduction) discussing the downside of a US troop withdrawal from Iraq and argues that the consequences for the US and regional stability might not actually be as dire and catastrophic as the conventional wisdom holds.

It’s worth noting that although some in the Iraqi political class (take, for instance, Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari) are warning of an all-out civil war breaking out in the event of an “early” withdrawal, military planners at the Pentagon are divided over how bad the impact would actually be. Besides, Iraq is acknowledged to already be in the midst of a civil war, with military officials on the ground stating that although the US military can help in the short term, they cannot be expected to provide the ultimate answer to the sectarian violence; the answer has to “come from the Iraqis.”

Military planners stateside might do well to dust off this report from Foreign Policy in Focus on ending the occupation from two and a half years ago. Then again, Bush wouldn’t listen to its findings anyway.

• Writing at his indispensable blog hosted over at Salon Glenn Greenwald asks the rhetorical question: Should General Petraeus’s Iraq updates be taken seriously? This post is Greenwald at his best: Snarky, well-researched and his conclusions are unassailable. Just a few paragraph (to entice you to read the whole thing):

Despite the Mandate Orthodoxy that Gen. Petraeus be treated as the Objective, Unassailably Credible Oracle for how we are doing in Iraq and whether we are winning, his track record of quite dubious claims over the last several years about the war strongly negates that view. It ought to go without saying that no military commander — particularly in the midst of a disastrous four-year war — is entitled to blind faith and to be placed above being questioned. It is not only proper, but critically necessary, to subject happy war claims from the military to great scrutiny.

In general, military commanders do not typically pronounce their own strategies to have failed; quite the opposite. The need for skepticism here is particularly acute given that there are plenty of Generals with equally impressive military pedigrees who disagree vigorously with Petraeus. War supporters — who are attempting now to make criticisms of Petraeus off-limits — long disputed the claims and views of Generals Casey and Abaziad, often quite vigorously, even insultingly. The statements about war from military commanders ought to be subjected to every bit as much scrutiny and skepticism as anyone else’s.

But Petraeus in particular has demonstrated that his statements merit particularly potent scrutiny. So many of the misleading government claims over the past several years about The Great Victory we are Achieving in Iraq have been based upon optimistic claims from Petraeus that turned out to be highly questionable, to put it generously.

As I said, read the whole thing.

• Over at the New York Review of Books, foreign policy analyst Peter Galbraith has penned a masterful essay entitled “Iraq: The Way to Go” which can and should be read here (it is also reprinted over at Alternet, with comments) His thesis is brutally honest and at this late date utterly impossible to quarrel with: The war (really, the military occupation) in Iraq has been lost. His essay is an extremely comprehensive and searing indictment of the Bushies’ failures in Iraq from A to Z and for that alone the essay should be carefully read. But Galbraith goes further and discusses how despite the fact that the Bush and the war’s neocon intellectual architects are not prepared to admit this, “the specter of defeat nevertheless is shaping their thinking in telling ways.”

Just a couple of his numerous examples:

The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning—a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes— but by the consequences of defeat. As President Bush put it, “The consequences of failure in Iraq would be death and destruction in the Middle East and here in America.”

Tellingly, the Iraq war’s intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat. And they have already picked their target: the American people. In The Weekly Standard, Tom Donnelly, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote, “Those who believe the war is already lost—call it the Clinton-Lugar axis—are mounting a surge of their own. Ground won in Iraq becomes ground lost at home.” Lugar provoked Donnelly’s anger by noting that the American people had lost confidence in Bush’s Iraq strategy as demonstrated by the Democratic takeover of both houses of Congress. (This “blame the American people” approach has, through repetition, almost become the accepted explanation for the outcome in Vietnam, attributing defeat to a loss of public support and not to fifteen years of military failure.)

• In an exclusive report, IraqSlogger.com reports that the city of Fallujah, the site of previous US war crimes, is in the midst of a worsening two month seige and conditions have deteriorated to the point that a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions is imminent. Curiously, this story is not being reported by any of the mainstream media outlets, and I’m currently trying to obtain independent verification of its accuracy.

• The Independent (UK) reports on the horrific violence that continues to claim the lives of hundreds of Iraqi civilians. The culprit on July 16th was a suicide truck bomber in Kirkuk, who killed at least 85 people and wounded a further 183. From the article:

The dispatch of 28,000 extra troops to Iraq starting in January, and the more aggressive deployment of the US army in the country, is not working. At best it is moving violence from one area of Iraq to another. The US is allying itself to local tribes and militias against guerrillas but that is angering the government in Baghdad and deepening the violence.

• The AP reports that despite the overwhelming evidence that the “surge” is a failure, the Pentagon is weighing “new directions” for Iraq, including an even bigger troop buildup if President Bush thinks his “surge” strategy needs a further boost.

• In his editorial published in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash writes that “America is just starting to wake up to the awesome scale of its Iraq disaster.” (h/t War in Context)

• McClatchy’s Washington bureau reports that “[T]he Senate’s freshman Democrats [July 18] called for the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate wartime profiteering in Iraq.” This is definately a story worth following.

• According to an IPS News exclusive report, “Mercenary recruitment agencies that send former soldiers to Iraq have been accused in Chile of human right abuses, illegal association, possession of explosives and unauthorised use of army weaponry, and are the target of a special United Nations mission.” Nice.

• Finally, on a more personal level, journalist Dahr Jamail uses some of his own recent experiences in Iraq to explain what is meant by the “Schizophrenia Of War”. He concludes his dispatch with:

That’s what I’m experiencing — a national schizophrenia that results from our government carrying out an unpopular war. It’s what I continue to experience with never lessening sharpness two years after my last trip to Iraq. The hardest thing, in the California sun with that cool breeze on my face, is to know that two realities in two grimly linked countries coexist, and most people in my own country are barely conscious of this.

In Iraq, of course, there is nothing disparate, no disjuncture, only a constant, relentless grinding and suffering, a pervasive condition of tragic hopelessness and despair with no end in sight.

*Then again, war games conducted by the Pentagon’s CENTCOM under General Anthony Zinni (known at the time as Desert Crossing) as far back as 1999 predicted that a post-war Iraq after a deposed Saddam Hussein regime would be a complete disaster too; another unfortunate irony considering the fact that Bush spuriously claims to rely upon Gen. David Petraeus and his military advisors’ advice on these matters when it is clear he only cherry picks the information he really wants to hear while using these subordinates as convenient scapegoats.

To take one high profile example, Bush’s decision to initiate his “surge” policy is a perfect case-in-point considering the clear historical evidence that while it might help him save face, it was almost certain not to work.

For the most recent Iraq news roundup on Troubled Times, (which, admittedly was more than two weeks ago) see here.

(This post was updated and edited several times)