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| 5/23 |
| 2007/7/30-8/3 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:47469 Activity:moderate |
7/30 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html A War We Just Might Win Never expected that title on the nytimes op-ed page. \_ Are you high? The NyTimes has been shilling for this clusterfuck since before it started (c.f. Judith Miller onwards). See Glenn Greenwald for a good response to this shite: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/30/brookings \_ The constant leaking of secret memos underminig the war is what has led me to that opinion, not anything that might make me high. -op \_ What's different here is that Kenneth M. Pollack is not usually a hawk or a fan of current policy in Iraq. Cf. his article on Securing the Gulf in Foreign Affairs magazine. (Easily Googleable.) That said, this op-ed remains at odds with most of what you read from my man, Juan Cole. -!pp \_ One of the main responsibilities of The Press in a democracy is to keep the people informed about what their government is doing, Bush Administration claims to be able to classify everything under the sun notwithstanding. \_ It is one thing to say we have secret prisons, it is another to announce which countries they're in causing diplomatic problems and yet another to print the tail numbers of the planes which puts lives at risk for no reason. There are degrees to things. Mindlessly printing everything just because you can is irresponsible. The story can get out without details that can get people killed. \_ Announcing which countries they were in was precisely the correct thing to do. The govt. that sanctioned the prisons was not about to abandon the project or admit wrongdoing; political pressure from other govts. is a a fine and measured response. Printing the tail numbers of the planes bespeaks a greater problem than merely negligence of journalistic integrity: it says we do not have people in the intel business who know how to carry out illicit operations. I don't know about you, but that level of incompetence scares the hell out of me. Best not to be conducting black ops in foreign countries, I suppose, but at least have the decency not to get caught. \_ So you think all the journalists who were aware of various activities over the last umtpeen decades should have published everything they discovered just as a 'lesson' to our intel agencies? Wacky. \_ You are responding to someone different than the pp, btw. I personally think everything except the tail numbers was fine, because when first confronted with the accusations, the WH response was to deny and stonewall, remember? Publishing the countries added veracity to the charges. Putting CIA agents life at risk was stepping over the line, imho, but not illegal. over the line, imho, but not illegal. Good job changing the topic from the NYTs constant pre-war cheerleading to the Freeper talking points though, I congratulate you on your verbal judo. \_ WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! DUBYA EMM DEEEES!!!! \_ I'm ok with publishing about foreign prisons. I'm not entirely ok with naming foreign countries as that can create a bigger mess than the prisons themselves and I don't think the media has the brains required to figure out when publishing can do more damage than the thing they're reporting on. I'm entirely not ok with tail numbers. There is absolutely no reason for that. It isn't news. I didn't comment either way on whether it is legal or not. I think it is stupid whether or not it is legal and it is not newsworthy or fit to print, as they say. BTW, I came into this a few posts after we left the NYT pre-war reporting behind so I can't take credit for the direction of the thread to where we are now. \_ The government should have admitted what they were doing. When the government denies denies denies you have to step up the level of proof. If the people in charge had actually stepped up and said, yes, we are doing this, then you wouldn't have seen as much details in the papers. \_ So anything a reporter finds out and publishes, the government should just go ahead and spill the whole story even if it puts American and allied lives at risk. Whatever. \_ Setting aside the plane numbers, explain to me how exposing the illegal kidnapping program put American and allied lives at risk. \_ In general, the government is accountable to The People, yes. I know for some reason the GOP has lost sight of this fundamental principle, but I still hold out hope that the "small government" types will regain control of their party. \_ Uh, no. The whole point of the R party is to preach COMMUNITY and SELF RELIANCE. Localized interest for greater good. You liburals just don't get it. \_ No, the R party is based on large national debts. \_ I would say we are 95%+ in agreement. \_ Compare Pollock's parroting of the official line with statements from the general who is actually training the Iraqi troops: http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0727/p01s01-wome.html |
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| www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/opinion/30pollack.html Enlarge This Image Keith Negley VIEWED from Iraq, where we just spent eight days meeting with American and Iraqi military and civilian personnel, the political debate in Washington is surreal. The Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility. Yet now the administrations critics, in part as a result, seem unaware of the significant changes taking place. Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administrations miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily victory but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with. After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference. Everywhere, Army and Marine units were focused on securing the Iraqi population, working with Iraqi security units, creating new political and economic arrangements at the local level and providing basic services electricity, fuel, clean water and sanitation to the people. Yet in each place, operations had been appropriately tailored to the specific needs of the community. As a result, civilian fatality rates are down roughly a third since the surge began though they remain very high, underscoring how much more still needs to be done. In Ramadi, for example, we talked with an outstanding Marine captain whose company was living in harmony in a complex with a (largely Sunni) Iraqi police company and a (largely Shiite) Iraqi Army unit. He and his men had built an Arab-style living room, where he met with the local Sunni sheiks all formerly allies of Al Qaeda and other jihadist groups who were now competing to secure his friendship. In Baghdads Ghazaliya neighborhood, which has seen some of the worst sectarian combat, we walked a street slowly coming back to life with stores and shoppers. The Sunni residents were unhappy with the nearby police checkpoint, where Shiite officers reportedly abused them, but they seemed genuinely happy with the American soldiers and a mostly Kurdish Iraqi Army company patrolling the street. The local Sunni militia even had agreed to confine itself to its compound once the Americans and Iraqi units arrived. We traveled to the northern cities of Tal Afar and Mosul. This is an ethnically rich area, with large numbers of Sunni Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens. American troop levels in both cities now number only in the hundreds because the Iraqis have stepped up to the plate. Reliable police officers man the checkpoints in the cities, while Iraqi Army troops cover the countryside. A local mayor told us his greatest fear was an overly rapid American departure from Iraq. All across the country, the dependability of Iraqi security forces over the long term remains a major question mark. American advisers told us that many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the force have been removed. The American high command assesses that more than three-quarters of the Iraqi Army battalion commanders in Baghdad are now reliable partners (at least for as long as American forces remain in Iraq). In addition, far more Iraqi units are well integrated in terms of ethnicity and religion. The Iraqi Armys highly effective Third Infantry Division started out as overwhelmingly Kurdish in 2005. Today, it is 45 percent Shiite, 28 percent Kurdish, and 27 percent Sunni Arab. Next Page Michael E OHanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Kenneth M Pollack is the director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. Next Article in Opinion (7 of 11) Tips To find reference information about the words used in this article, double-click on any word, phrase or name. A new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry. |
| www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/30/brookings -> www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/30/brookings/ Update VI) What is the most vivid and compelling evidence of how broken our political system is? It is that the exact same people who urged us into the war in Iraq, were wrong in everything they said, and issued one false assurance after the next as the war failed, continue to be the same people held up as our Serious Iraq Experts. this one in the NYT from "liberal" Brookings Institution "scholars" Ken Pollack and Mike O'Hanlon. They accuse war critics of being "unaware of the significant changes taking place," proclaim that "we are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms," and the piece is entitled "A War we Might Just Win." To lavish themselves with credibility -- as though they are war skeptics whom you can trust -- they identify themselves at the beginning "as two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq." In reality, they were not only among the biggest cheerleaders for the war, but repeatedly praised the Pentagon's strategy in Iraq and continuously assured Americans things were going well. They are among the primary authors and principal deceivers responsible for this disaster. Worse, they announce that "the Bush administration has over four years lost essentially all credibility," as though they have not. But let us look at Michael O'Hanlon, and review just a fraction of the endless string of false and misleading statements he made about Iraq and ask why anyone would possibly listen to him about anything, let alone consider him an "expert" of any kind: First, this is not the first time O'Hanlon took a trip to Iraq (for what Sen. NPR Interview, September 28, 2003: LIANE HANSEN: Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. He just returned from a Pentagon-sponsored visit to Iraq and he's in the studio. It's a little better, however, than I thought for a couple of reasons. One is I think the counterinsurgency effort is going fairly well. Now obviously, you mention the number of attacks per day that continue; The assassination of the Governing Council member was tragic, but overall, the counterinsurgency mission seems to be going well in that we are taking out a lot more people than we're losing and I believe we're using force fairly selectively and carefully on balance. Also, security is pretty good in most of the country despite the fact that it's not good everywhere and that we certainly hear the reports of violence on a daily basis. O'HANLON: I would say that the main surprise for me was probably that one could travel around the country, even flying over contested areas, with relatively confident sense of security. There wasn't as much need to avoid certain areas as I might have expected. There was violence in some of the regions that we visited on the days we were there. But you're talking about specific, isolated acts just like you would get in an American city. I'm not trying to say that this is a country at peace, but overall, we really do run most of the country together with our Iraqi partners and the resistance forces are very small pockets who operate only at a given moment here or there. HANSEN: The Defense Department this past week announced the mobilization of 10,000 soldiers from the Army National Guard. The Bush administration has been trying to get countries--actually, mainly trying to get countries to sign up for peacekeeping responsibilities. Is the contingent, do you think, of the 160,000 American and British troops in and around Iraq sufficient? But the bigger problem is just sustaining that number is going to be very hard, and that's the reason we have to call up more National Guardsmen. And, just incidentally, despite heralding his Recent Trip to Iraq, as though that demonstrates he really knows what is going on "on the ground," this is what it consists of: HANSEN: Final question. Are you concerned that you perhaps were given a rather narrow view of the country by your hosts? However, we could be quite prying and we could really push them. We didn't meet a lot of Iraqis who could tell us how things were going, but on balance, I think we had some access. field trip to Iraq and decreed: But the Iraqis we met were nonetheless grateful for the defeat of Saddam and passionate about their country's future. Their enthusiasm, and their desire to work together with US and other coalition forces, warmed the heart of this former Peace Corps volunteer. Maybe that is why, on balance, I couldn't help but leave the country with a real, if guarded and cautious, feeling of optimism. progress report which revealed all the happy news in Iraq: How can we really determine if the Iraq mission is going well? To convince a skeptical public about progress in Iraq, the Bush administration would do well to provide more systematic information on all of these and other measurable metrics routinely -- even when certain trends do not support the story it wants to sell. The administration should want to do this, because on balance the Iraq mission is going fairly well . As for Baathist remnants of Saddam's regime, they are diminishing with time as coalition forces detain and arrest them. For example, in the region north of Baghdad now run by General Ray Odierno's 4th infantry division, some 600 fighters have been killed and 2,500 arrested over recent months.. Around Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, and other parts of the northern "Sunni triangle," for example, former regime loyalists have been sufficiently weakened that they need reinforcements from other parts of Iraq to continue many of their efforts. Most Baathists from the famous "deck of cards" are now off the street; many second tier loyalists of the former regime are also being arrested or killed on a daily basis. In these counterinsurgency operations, American troops are following much better practices than they did in Vietnam . Coalition forces and other parties were slow at times to anticipate such tactics, resulting in excessive vulnerability to the kinds of truck bombings witnessed in August and the kinds of assassination attempts that just took the life of a member of the Governing Council, Akila al-Hashimi. But these mistakes are being corrected, and future such attacks are unlikely to be as devastating. That sure is a real harsh critic of Bush's war management there. While virtually all of these "liberal hawk" war proponents try to salvage their own reputations by pretending that their Glrious War was ruined by Bush's "terrible mismanagement," that is not what O'Hanlon was saying back then. pdf) before the House Armed Services Committee in October of 2003 and titled his report "A Relatively Promising Counterinsurgency War: Assessing Progress in Iraq." After acknowledging a few "mistakes" -- the Mission Accomplished Speech and Cheney's excessively "rosy" language -- he proclaimed: In my judgment the administration is basically correct that the overall effort in Iraq is succeeding. By the standards of counterinsurgency warfare, most factors, though admittedly not all, appear to be working to our advantage. While one would be mistaken to assume rapid or easy victory, Mr Rumsfeld's leaked memo last week probably had it about right when he described the war as a "long, hard slog" that we are nonetheless quite likely to win. That said, on the prognosis of Iraq's future, the Bush administration is at least partly and perhaps even mostly right. Negative headlines need to be quickly countered with good news, of which there is an abundance. he state of affairs in Iraq and recent trends in that country do not look so disconcerting. Things are getting gradually better even as we progress towards an exit strategy that could further diffuse extremist sentiment. piece for the Brookings Daily War Report entitled "Was the Strategy Brilliant?" Though keeping some distance from it himself, describing it as General Frank's plan rather than his own, he described it as excellent. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went one step further, calling the overall concept "brilliant." Others who had seen it admired its simplicity and its flexibility. Three weeks into the war, with the conflic... |
| www.csmonitor.com/2007/0727/p01s01-wome.html By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the July 27, 2007 edition Page 1 of 2 Baghdad - Iraq is in the throes of its worst political crisis since the fall of Saddam Hussein with the new democratic system, based on national consensus among its ethnic and sectarian groups, appearing dangerously close to collapsing, say several politicians and analysts. This has brought paralysis to governmental institutions and has left parliament unable to make headway on 18 benchmarks Washington is using to measure progress in Iraq, including legislation on oil revenue sharing and reforming security forces. And the disconnect between Baghdad and Washington over the urgency for solutions is growing. The Iraqi parliament is set for an August vacation as the Bush administration faces pressure to show progress in time for a September report to Congress. At the moment, Iraqi politicians are simply trying to keep the government from disintegrating. On Friday, top Iraqi officials were set to convene in the Kurdish north for a crisis summit, in the hopes that talks held outside of Baghdad's politically poisonous atmosphere may bring some resolution to the current political standstill. President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the president of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani, were set to meet at the Salaheddin summer resort at the end of a difficult week. On Wednesday, the Iraqi Accordance Front said it pulled out of Mr Maliki's coalition government, but would return its six cabinet members if the prime minister met a list of demands. The Sunni bloc says it wants, among other things, pardons for detainees not facing specific criminal charges and for all militias to be disbanded. "We are frankly in the midst of the worst crisis," says Fakhri Karim, a close adviser to Messrs. Barzani and Talabani who also publishes the independent Al Mada newspaper. He says he doubts the Friday meeting will find any resolution because of the new political tussle with the Iraqi Accordance Front. "Most of the political blocs have failed to operate within the framework of national consensus. They can't even properly formulate their positions and proposals, let alone realize the very serious dangers that surround everyone." The gravity of the situation was underscored by several officials. Our people expect better performance," said Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. And since Saturday, US Ambassador Ryan Crocker has been shuttling between Iraq's top leaders, but an embassy spokesperson said this was not necessarily indicative of a crisis. "The surge has done well in making a difference in security conditions. there are no quick fixes to years of bitterness and violence," he said. Some US military officers have expressed concern privately that Iraq's leadership has failed to take advantage of some of the breathing room offered by the US-led surge against insurgents and militants. The crisis is also fueling discontent and alienation among Iraqis. they should learn something about unity from our soccer team," said an anonymous caller on a state television program on Wednesday after Iraq's victory over South Korea in the Asian Cup semifinals. Hapless Homer's home run The good news is that, for the most part, the goofball edginess of 'The Simpsons' is transferred intact. Homer may be a movie star now but he's as oblivious as ever. |