Tag: Iraq

War hits home

I guess there are some Americans who are sacrificing because of the war in Iraq. The sad thing is that they should have to sacrifice in this way.

A shortage of Kansas National Guard equipment will slow recovery efforts in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, state officials say.

Because of the war on terror, Kansas has only 40 percent of its allocated equipment, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the adjutant general’s office.

As a result, she said, the state is rushing to hire contractors to help clear debris.

The situation was no surprise to Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, who has warned for months that the National Guard was ill-prepared for a catastrophe because so much equipment and personnel were in Iraq.

And national experts say the problem is not confined to Kansas.

A congressionally sponsored commission looking into military readiness reported last month that close to 90 percent of Guard units in this country were “not ready,” primarily because of equipment shortages.

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An acceptable level of violence?

The president acutally said this yesterday, during a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America in Washington:

And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

It’s received some press coverage — though not nearly enough. Violence, he is saying, is OK. It will be there. It is a fact of life.
There is violence in East St. Louis and Newark and Trenton — and that’s just the way it is, this president says. “Success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives.”
Comfortable? Acceptable? Humans are remarkably adaptive and will find ways to get along no matter what the circumstances. So the Iraqis live through the violence and find ways to make due — same as those Americans who are stuck in drug-scarred neighborhoods. That doesn’t make it right.
Then, this is pretty standard from a president who has shown little compassion for America’s cities, who pretty much ignored New Orleans in the days immediately after the hurricane hit, who has only visited New York for fundraisers and photo-ops (and a political convention), who rarely ventures outside of his comfort zone.
In many ways, this comment is like Sen. John McCain’s stroll through the Baghdad market — or like Bush I’s attempt to buy socks during the 1992 presidential campaign — another example of how out of touch the president and his administration is.
It also is another example of the president’s shifting rationale for the war and for remaining in Iraq — we’ve moved from weapons of mass destruction to deposing Saddam to imposing democracy to maintaining order to … to what? And that’s the point. What exactly are we hoping to accomplish?
It’s time to get out.
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Bring ’em home

Juan Cole is right: The president’s veto of the withdrawal timeline needs aresponse, but John Edwards’ approach — to send the same bill back to the president until he signs it — is probably the wrong one politically.

It is satisfying to say so, but it probably isn’t good political tactics. When Newt Gingrich played politics with the budget under Clinton and even shut down DC, it was Congress that took the hit in the polls. Just being obstreperous isn’t very attractive.

U.S. Rep. John Murtha appears to have the best idea on this — as Cole points out:

Murtha is suggesting that they don’t fund a whole year, maybe only two months. That sort of conditionality, whatever its mechanism, seems right to me.

The key is to find a way to fund the troops, but begin the process of getting them home. In the meantime, war opponents need to turn up the pressure by expanding their protests. This thing has gone on way too long.

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Accomplishing the right mission

Baltimore Sun — like most of the nation’s major dailies — editorializes on the anniversary of President George W. Bush’s notorious Top Gun moment (photo from CNN), tying it back to the current fight over the war funding bill he plans to veto.

He doesn’t want deadlines for withdrawal because that will tell the enemy what America’s plans are. But if U.S. soldiers aren’t going to leave by 2008, when are they going to get out? The obvious implication here is this: The president expects them to stay in Iraq for a very long time to come. The only way he can see to justify the losses so far is to keep fighting.

In April alone, the war took 100 American lives and cost about $9 billion. Yesterday, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction reported on one little corner of the war effort – but it’s a little corner that seems emblematic of the whole enterprise. His inspectors looked at eight completed construction projects, paid for by the U.S. – not a representative sample, because most projects are in areas that are too dangerous to visit, but just eight projects that could be assessed. They found that seven were structural failures.

This is what Americans are getting for their blood and treasure. Failure, failure, success, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure. In the four years since President Bush put on that Navy flight suit and headed out on his mission before the cameras, his administration has accomplished almost nothing in Iraq, and now argues that that is the very reason U.S. soldiers and Marines must stay there and keep fighting and dying.

The Record of Hackensack makes similar points in its editorial:

The fourth anniversary of the “mission accomplished” speech is a grim reminder of thousands of lives needlessly lost. Unless Bush shifts course, the nation will be mired in Iraq for the fifth anniversary as well.

The mission that needs to be accomplished is to bring the troops home.

Yes. “Bring ‘Em Home,” as The Boss sings on this Pete Seeger tune. Bring ’em home.

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Now he tells us

Former CIA director George Tenet is finally ready to spill the beans on the distorted intelligence that led us into Iraq.

But only because he’s expecting a big payday for doing so — not exactly the most altruistic of motives. Tenet has penned a tell-all book, “At the Center of the Storm,” that is expected to be published Monday by Harper Collins. The New York Times, which bought a prepublication copy, offered a summary of the book:

By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

The book, the Times said, paints President George W. Bush in a positive light while also making it clear that there was little debate over going to war.

Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

He also

largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

The revelations, of course, are late in coming and only reinforce what we already know. It also underscores the failure of the Republican Congress to engage in its oversight responsibilities.

David Corn in his Capital Games blog on The Nation Web site offers this take:

But here’s an out-of-the-box question: don’t the citizens of the United States deserve to know what happened in the run-up to the war (and to 9/11) for free? Tenet may feel–as he claims–damn lousy about the screwed-up National Intelligence Estimate that helped pave the way to war in Iraq. But he did not feel bad enough to resign–or to disclose earlier what had gone wrong. He sat on the story and now is peddling it for personal profit.

Tenet should have long ago been questioned openly by a congressional committee about all this–though no Republican committee chair would have dared–or he should have spilled all to 60 Minutes and other media, as a public service, not as an advertisement for his book. On Friday, Representative Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee, sent Tenet a letter asking him to testify before his committee on May 10 regarding “one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq–the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger–and related issues.” Let’s hope Tenet can take time from the book tour to appear.

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