Stealing Surge in Iraq

Move over, Halliburton. Dick Cheney's former company has been replaced as the Texas champion of ripping off American taxpayers in the "rebuilding" of Iraq.

A report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a federal agency, finds that 8 of 11 rebuilding projects by the Parsons Corporation costing $365 million had to be stopped before completion for disastrous waste and ineptness.

The investigation was prompted by the company's $75 million construction of the Baghdad Police College, which ended up with feces and urine pouring from ceilings in student barracks, floors heaving off the ground, and water dripping profusely in a room dubbed "the rain forest."

As the U.S. military makes the country safer from insurgent attacks, American corporations are giving Iraq a taste of democracy in the sluggish, waste-ridden rebuilding of its infrastructure. Audits have found administration and overhead costs running as high as 55 percent on some projects.

In addition to its Texas connections, Parsons is one of the largest contributors to American political campaigns in the construction industry. That makes Middle East baksheesh look like small potatoes.

McCain's Hundred Year War

He is not talking about Iraq on the campaign trail, but John McCain has a good deal to say in today's Wall Street Journal on the first anniversary of the Surge.

So much, in fact, that he needs his Senate colleague, Joe Lieberman, to help him do the heavy lifting in proclaiming, "The Surge Worked," that "conditions in that country have been utterly transformed...al Qaeda has been beaten back, violence across the country has dropped dramatically. The number of car bombings, sectarian murders and suicide attacks has been slashed."

Yesterday, the US military announced, six American soldiers were killed when a house rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad during a new offensive targeting al Qaeda guerrillas, adding to the more than 835 who have died since last February.

The gains in Iraq, McCain tells us, "are thrilling but not yet permanent. Political progress has been slow. And although al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq have been dealt a critical blow, they will strike back at the Iraqi people and us if we give them the chance, as our generals on the ground continue to warn us."

If we wait until President McCain takes office next January, perhaps he will tell us then how many troops we will have to keep there for how long (perhaps less than the 100 years he recently mentioned). Maybe he will reveal his plans to speed up the "slow" political progress in a small country that keeps draining the lives of our most patriotic young people and billions of dollars that could be saving and improving lives back here.

In his Wall Street Journal victory lap, McCain concedes that "mismanagement of the Iraq war from 2003 to 2006 exposed our government's capacity for incompetence." Voters are going to want to know how, sharing Bush's blindness about our interests in the Middle East, McCain is going to do better.

Certainly not by making Joe Lieberman his Secretary of State.

Rash Judgments of 2007

If journalists are historians in a hurry, bloggers are first responders, dashing to each disaster in search of finding some sense, but there are times when smoke gets in our eyes.

For your entertainment and my mental health, herewith a few of the year's least prescient posts, out of more than a thousand, where this witness arrived at the scene and got it wrong:

In January, there was hope the proposed Surge would isolate Bush in his madness, followed by a fantasy that voters might look for authenticity in the next President, perhaps in a series of substantive debates.

Last spring, with all respect to the man's honor and integrity, there were qualms about John McCain's losing it. (Now in Iowa, he is being called the "Comeback Codger.")

Gen. Petraeus was compared to Eisenhower and seen as "the man who could end the war," but he ended up doing more than anyone else to prolong it and gave Congressional Republicans enough cover to keep backing Bush without fear of losing their jobs in next year's elections.

When Karl Rove resigned, the MSM and blogosphere were urged to stop paying attention to the "biggest bottom feeder of our time and look ahead to putting back some semblance of decency into American politics." (He's a columnist for Newsweek now.)

In September, it seemed that Fred Thompson's playing it cool could be a winning strategy, but he turned out to be playing it comatose.

As late as mid-November, Rudy Giuliani looked as bulletproof to scandal as Bill Clinton was in 1992. A few weeks later his poll numbers were diving in a mudslide of revelations.

Blogging is an attempt to share thoughts and feelings, to connect with others, but sometimes the medium delivers a defective message. Sorry, mea culpa and a resolution to try to do better. Happy New Year!

Iraq: Too Dangerous to Cover

The Surge may be making Iraq safer, but not for those reporting it. Eight out of ten journalists say the war is now harder to cover than it was when they started working there.

From an October survey of 111 journalists in 29 news organizations, the Project for Excellence in Journalism concludes: "They believe they have done a better job of covering the American military and the insurgency than they have the lives of ordinary Iraqis. And they do not believe the coverage of Iraq over time has been too negative. If anything, many believe the situation over the course of the war has been worse than the American public has perceived."

Outside of the heavily-fortified Green Zone, local staff do the face-to-face reporting, and they can't carry any equipment, not even notebooks, that might identify them as working for American media out of fear of being killed. Some don't even tell their families.

According to one print journalist, "The dangers can’t be overstated. It’s been an ambush--two staff killed, one wounded--various firefights, and our ‘home’ has been rocked and mortared (by accident, I’m pretty sure).”

A broadcast editor reported: "It's dangerous and frustrating. You want to go out and cover stories, but you can't because of the threat of kidnapping or worse. It's hard to hear commentators back home say, 'The media isn't covering the full story.' Well, there's a reason for that, and it's not bias. When journalists cannot cover a playground being rebuilt because it's too dangerous to travel around the city, then that playground is not the primary story."

Politicians, media critics and journalism students, take note.

The Energizer Bunny of Baghdad Grifters

If you wanted to cram all the Bush Administration's folly, stupidity and inability to learn into the story of one person, it would be Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who milked the U.S. for millions, lied us into the war and now is a key figure in helping Prime Minister al Maliki and Gen. Petraeus put Iraq back together.

His new job is to press the central government to use gains from the Surge to deliver better electricity, health, education and security services to Baghdad neighborhoods.

Never mind that, as late as this summer, he was sabotaging U.S. plans for de-Bathification and spying for Iran, today Chalabi "is an important part of the process," according to Col. Steven Boylan, Petraeus' spokesman. "He has a lot of energy."

During the runup to the war, Chalabi was promoted by Neo-Cons as the “George Washington of Iraq.” A fugitive from Jordan after being convicted of bank fraud, he told the Pentagon all about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda for which we paid $33 million over four years. None of it turned out to be true.

Nonetheless, he stayed on the U.S. payroll until 2004. About that time, we learned Chalabi was selling information to Iran, letting them know that one of our sources of Iranian intelligence was a broken code used by their spy services.

Now he is devoting all that "energy" into helping us put the pieces of Iraq back together. If Petraeus and al Maliki have him over to lunch to discuss his progress, they had better count the silverware before he leaves.

Is This a Great Country or What?

In Washington, our Congress has settled in to business as usual now that the Surge is going so well. Democrats are overjoyed at news of Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, while Republicans are fresh from the triumph of sliming a brain-injured 12-year-old boy to make sure he and others like him don’t rip us off by getting health care insurance.

In Iraq today, other people acting in my name and yours killed six women and nine children during an air and ground attack on senior Al Qaeda leaders. We issued a statement of regret that “civilians are hurt or killed while Coalition forces search to rid Iraq of terrorism."

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, AP reports, “has recently confronted top American commander Gen. David Petraeus about what he sees as overly aggressive U.S. tactics that harm innocent civilians, according to Iraqi officials.”

Last Friday, a pre-dawn U.S. raid on Khalis, a Shiite city north of Baghdad, killed 25 people when troops called in air strikes while hunting suspected smugglers of arms from Iran to Baghdad. Village leaders said the victims included civilians, but the military insisted the 25 killed were militants.

Meanwhile, Shiites and Sunnis are reported to be making no progress toward national reconciliation. But the Surge is working just fine, isn’t it?

We can all go on getting Halloween costumes for the kids and maybe driving somewhere for a little leaf-peeping.

Wesley Clark for V.P. ?

When the 2004 Presidential candidate announced his support for Hillary Clinton this month, Gen. Wesley Clark seemed destined to become a Cabinet member if she were to win the White House next year. But he is beginning to look more like a potential running mate.

If Rudy Giuliani’s rabid attacks on Clinton and the Democrats as soft on defense against terrorists foreshadow the Republican ’08 strategy, Clark’s military experience and strategic credentials would be an effective counterweight to Gen. Giuliani’s experience as commander of the TV cameras in the wake of 9/11 or Fred Thompson’s laid-back war talk.

On the Daily Show last night, Clark artfully defended Gen. David Petraeus, who served under him when they were both junior officers, on a personal level while noting that the Surge was “too late” to solve our problems in Iraq.

Clark’s experience, not only as Supreme Commander in Europe during the Kosovo war but in the jungles of Washington intrigue with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, would be useful not only as campaign window dressing but in the realities of a new Clinton Administration elected to clean up Bush’s military and diplomatic mess around the world.

As he makes the TV rounds promoting his new book, “A Time to Lead,” and arguing for diplomatic rather than military engagement with Iran, Gen. Clark may be working his way up more than the best-seller list.

Using Generals Like Kleenex

It’s sad to see the piling-on. Beyond the infamous MoveOn ad, there are now stories about Petraeus’ penchant for ass-kissing and his presidential ambitions.

But character assassination won’t change what Bush is doing in Iraq, and impugning Petraeus is not only mean-spirited but unworthy of those who oppose the war on moral and ethical grounds.

The sighting of Colin Powell this week in a GQ interview is a reminder of how this Administration uses Generals like Kleenex to wipe their fingerprints off disastrous policies.

Powell claims he did all he could to warn Bush and Cheney off invading Iraq. Whether he did or not, Petraeus might want to take a good look at what Powell has to say about the Surge:

“Suppose I’m a battalion commander. My troops ask, ‘What do I do today, boss?’ ‘Let’s go fight the Shia militias!’ ‘What do I do tomorrow?’ ‘Let’s go fight the Sunni insurgents!’ ‘What do I do the day after tomorrow?’ ‘Let’s go chase Al Qaeda!” “What do we do the day after that?’ ‘We’re going to guard streets!’ Our kids are fantastic. But this is not sustainable. Our surge can work only with an Iraqi political and military surge.”

Petraeus might want to note that Powell is talking about a political surge there, not here.

Petraeus' Technocratitis

In 2004, as a division commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus was asking a philosophical question to which he clearly had no answer, “Tell me how this ends.”

At his first press conference after taking command this year, he was still focused on the broad picture, saying, “There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq...There needs to be a political aspect.”

In his appearance before Congress today, Gen. Petraeus seems to have put all doubts aside as he gives what amounts to an unqualified testimonial to the “progress” of the Surge and joins the chorus of chaos-sayers if we significantly withdraw our troops in the near future.

Given his intelligence and sincerity, the most obvious diagnosis is that the General has contracted a severe case of technocratitis--so involved in the security mission he is overseeing that he no longer has the perspective of three years ago, of Iraq as an endlessly frustrating enterprise.

It is Congress’ job to see the war in the perspective Petraeus had back then and has clearly lost to the tunnel vision of his assignment now.

Tell us how this ends, General, and when.

Our Hundred Years' War

When the fighting started, did the English have any idea how long it would go on? Did they expect to go through France in a cakewalk?

It’s Year 5 in Iraq, and the forecasts are lengthening. On Meet the Press this morning, retired Marine General James Jones, head of a commission studying the readiness of Iraqis to take over their own security, predicted “it’s probably a three to four year project for them.”

Today’s Washington Post, describing Bush Administration in-fighting over the war, reports one plan that calls for “slashing U.S. combat forces in Iraq by three-quarters by 2010” and Gen. Petraeus “making the case to keep as many troops as long as possible to cement any security progress.”

A New York Times blog reports that a poll “which contained an oversample of members of the United States military and their families, found that Americans say the Iraqi government is not doing all it can realistically be expected to do to establish order. Sixty-two percent of those polled said the United States made a mistake getting involved in Iraq.”

This week, the Washington air will be filled talk of “progress” in Iraq, and the questioning of what we are doing there will be branded defeatist by those who are planning to replicate the whole enterprise in Iran before American voters throw them out of power.

At how many points in the Hundred Years’ War did the English and French talk about progress, patience and persistence? And they were fighting for their national existence, not in a far-off hellhole for the misbegotten theories of armchair strategists named Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Libby.

Iraq Death Watch Numbers Game

After the Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee turned down all offers to write his memoirs, saying that to do so would “be trading on the blood of my men.” That delicacy of feeling is long gone.

Now Washington bureaucrats are not at all squeamish about using soldiers’ blood for political profit. Case in point is the claim that American combat deaths have gone down since the Surge started and, as the McClatchy Newspapers reported, “Military officials and observers are wondering whether the lower U.S. casualties are a sign of success...”

A recent post questioning this “sign of success” has drawn a rebuttal of what McClatchy calls “vitriolic criticism...from liberal web sites.”

This “vitriolic” retired journalist has long been an admirer of the reporting by McClatchy, formerly Knight Ridder, particularly in the selling of the Iraq war by the Bush Administration, and the criticism of the numbers story was clearly aimed at the Pentagon source rather than the messenger.

Readers can judge for themselves, but there is a new kind of callous ingenuity in stressing certain kinds of deaths over others, particularly when one source of the numbers--an August helicopter crash that killed 14 U.S. troops--is officially an accident but an Air Force spokesman “could not rule out a strike by a surface to air missile.”

But it’s saddening to be arguing about how our young people are dying rather than why.

Buying Words With Blood

Sen. Carl Levin says the glass in Iraq is more than half-empty, Sen. John Warner says it may be half-full and Fox News sees it brimming over.

“Sens. Warner and Levin Travel to Iraq, Praise Surge Results” is their headline for a story that starts: “Sen. Carl Levin said Monday that the Iraqi Parliament should vote no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki because of its sectarian nature and leadership.

"The Maliki government is non-functional," Levin, D-Mich., said.”

Since President Bush, instead of drawing down troops in Iraq at the beginning of this year as 70 percent of Americans wanted him to do, announced the Surge, more than 700 of our young people have died there and thousands have been wounded.

With all this blood, we have bought words--from the White House, Congress and self-appointed experts across the political spectrum. Next month, we will get words from Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, which will lead to even more words from armchair warriors on all sides.

None of them will stop the dying and, if we want to know what for, here are words from a commander on the ground: “This is not black and white here. It’s all shades of grey, and there’s a mixture of extremist elements and terror elements and criminal activity. It’s all of the above,” according to Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of Multinational Division Center and Task Force Marne, whose words are reported on a Department of Defense web site.

“It’s naive to believe that all sorts of violence inside of Iraq is Sunni vs. Shiia or Shiia vs. Sunni; that’s just not true. And when you find intra-Shiia rivalry, it’s primarily a function of the struggle for power and influence.”

How many words will it take to stop the bleeding?

Petraeus and Crocker: No Slam Dunk

After phony patriotism failed, the last refuge of the Bush Administration in Iraq has been competence, replacing robot generals and servile ambassadors with two men of substance, David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker.

For months, Bush has kept Congress from taking action to start stopping the war by hiding behind Petraeus’ September progress report. Now, worried about what the General and Crocker will say, the Administration is trying to have them testify in private while Condoleeza Rice and Robert Gates do the public cheer-leading.

No dice, the Democrats answer. "Americans deserve an even-handed assessment of conditions in Iraq,“ House Democratic Chairman Rahm Emanuel declared, not “a snapshot from the same people who told us the mission was accomplished and the insurgency was in its last throes."

Administration’s worries are reflected in what the straight-talking Petraeus told reporters yesterday: "We know that the surge has to come to an end. I think everyone understands that, by about a year or so from now, we've got to be a good bit smaller than we are right now.”

Five years ago, Crocker was one of the authors of a State Department memo on the pitfalls of an attack. Based on long experience in Iraq, Crocker warned that an invasion could "unleash long-repressed sectarian and ethnic tensions" and that “the Sunni minority would not easily relinquish power, and that powerful neighbors such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would try to move in to influence events."

If you’re still trying to sell that war, you don’t want Petraeus and Crocker to do the pitching. You need a toady like George Tenet out there to predict a slam dunk.

Drinking Sand in Iraq

I love my country more than I dislike George Bush, so it’s tempting to believe Michael Barone’s contention today that, in Iraq, “instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.”

Tempting but not sustainable--the crumbs we are being fed about local gains by Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon in their New York Times OpEd piece last week and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Meet the Press yesterday are not enough to nourish hope for overall improvement in that shattered nation.

Even in his upbeat assessment, Gates admitted that “the problem when we would go after Al Qaeda and insurgents before is that when we would hit them in one place, they’d squirt to another place. For the first time the commander has enough forces that he can attack all of their basic locations at the same time, so it’s much more difficult for them to squirt out and escape...”

For now. But how long will we have to keep the troops we have there in place and how many more will it take to stop the “squirting” all over Iraq? And how much good will local pacification be if the central government fails, as it has so far, to come together even on the simplest issues?

There is so much Iraq Fatigue in the U.S. that a change in the narrative is like an oasis in the desert, but we can’t let ourselves be sidetracked by another mirage and end up trying to drink the sand.

Lame Duck Surges On

Gen. Peter Pace, who is being replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September, answers a question today that nobody is asking: Should we put more troops into Iraq?

The military must "be prepared for whatever it's going to look like two months from now," Pace said in an interview with two reporters traveling with him to Iraq from Washington.

"That way, if we need to plus up or come down" in numbers of troops, we would be ready, according to an AP “Military Writer.”

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced last month that he would not be re-appointing Pace in order to avoid a “contentious” confirmation process. Is the General giving Congressional Democrats a nose-thumbing salute with today’s statement, or has he really lost it?

"My Country, Right or Wrong"

John Boehner is a living metaphor for the political muddle in Washington over Iraq.

During a meeting of the Republican Congressional caucus yesterday, the House Minority Leader reportedly characterized Senate colleagues as “wimps” for backing away from unquestioning support of the Bush policy.

He was rebuked by Rep. Heather Wilson, a former Air Force officer, who expressed admiration for Sen. Richard Lugar’s speech about rethinking Middle East policy.

Boehner is an emotional man. In May, before debate about the Surge, he wept openly as Rep. Sam Johnson talked of his years as a POW in North Vietnam, describing how his captors would play tapes of antiwar protesters back home over prison loudspeakers.

The Minority Leader was strongly moved by Johnson’s analogy of his experience in hearing that opposition to any expression of Congressional disapproval of the policy in Iraq.

There is no reason to question Boehner’s sincerity or patriotism, but his judgment is another matter. He embodies a classic American debate.

In 1816, after a victory, Naval Commander Stephen Decatur proposed a toast: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”

In 1872, Sen. Carl Schurz, a former General, amended that declaration: “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

George Bush has complicated that difference by re-defining patriotism as support for a mindless, belligerent foreign policy that has alienated our country from almost all of the civilized world.

In Boehner’s heart, it may simply be a question of patriotism, yes or no. But someone should explain to him that Bush’s Neo-Cons have hijacked American patriotism and that some of those in both parties who truly love their country are fighting to get it back.

Madness, Theirs and Ours

At the end of "The Bridge on the River Kwai," after the carnage caused by fanaticism and misplaced loyalties, a dazed British doctor wanders among the bodies, repeating over and over, "Madness, madness."

That image can be the only response to the revelation now that an al Qaeda leader told a British cleric who lives in Iraq that "those who cure you will kill you."

Canon Andrew White, who heads Baghdad’s only Anglican parish, met him at a meeting about religious reconciliation held in Amman, the Jordanian capital: “He talked to me about how they were going to destroy British and Americans. He told me that the plans were already made and they would soon be destroying the British. He said the people who cure you would kill you.”

Looking back, the cleric says, "I met the Devil that day."

Canon White is too generous. If he exists, Satan would surely be more devilishly clever and competent than this band of insane thugs. As we face threats from their counterparts, madness is a more accurate diagnosis.

N.B. Six months ago, I used the "River Kwai" image in reaction to President Bush's proposed Surge. It still applies.

The Colin Powelling of Petraeus

Why is the commander in charge of the Surge making headlines about the possibility of U.S. military involvement in Iraq for a decade?

Gen. David Petraeus, willingly or not, is getting the Colin Powell treatment, his impeccable reputation being used to legitimize Bush-Cheney follies.

Everything Petraeus said about Iraq Sunday was carefully qualified but the questioning by Fox News toady Chris Wallace kept goading him toward “comparing it to the situation in South Korea where we have had thousands of troops for decades.”

Pushing Petraeus up front is consistent with the Administration’s practice of using generals like Kleenex to wipe their political fingerprints off disastrous policies.

When Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told Congress before the invasion in 2003 that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify Iraq, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz ridiculed him.

To justify the war, the Administration pushed Gen. Colin Powell, by then Secretary of State, into a UN presentation from which he tried, not altogether successfully, to remove Scooter Libby’s “garbage” supplied by Ahmad Chalabi.

Cheney didn’t even try to hide the fact that he and Bush were using Powell’s credibility to sell the war. Poking him in the chest, the Vice President told Powell, "You've got high poll ratings, you can afford to lose a few points."

Last week, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace faced Senate opposition for being too compliant, the Bushies dropped him with a thud. Loyalty works only one way with them.

Now it’s Petraeus’ turn. Everything in his past suggests that he is an honest, capable man, which of course is why they are using him to front for the Surge. As a good soldier, he may want to look at what happened to Powell, Shinseki, Pace et al when he makes his crucial report to Congress at the end of summer.

He is sworn to serve the American people, not the parody of a Commander-in-Chief.

The Surge: Sunday Talk-Show Smokescreen

As always, the Administration provides distraction for Meet the Press and Fox, while the real news is elsewhere.

Today Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker tell Chris Wallace and Tim Russert that the Surge is working, sort of, but will take longer than planned. They promise to let us know in September.

But on CBS’ Face the Nation, we see what’s really going on when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says, "Most members of my conference believe the critical point to evaluate where we are is in September. Everybody anticipates there will be a new strategy...and I don't think we'll have the same level of troops that we have now."

Translation: Republicans, hearing the voters’ footsteps for ’08, will hold ranks only until fall and then head for the hills by supporting timetables for withdrawal.

Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, did not rub it in, saying only, "What's required here is that the president of the United States tell them we're going to reduce those troops...we're going to begin to leave."

Petraeus and Crocker may be in no hurry, but the endangered species of Congressional Republicans is ready to take wing.

Bush's Behind-My-Back Purge

The President’s unwillingness to face reality has taken a new turn. While he is overseas disporting with his friend Vladimir, command of the war in Iraq is quietly being changed in Washington.

Yesterday members of Congress, at confirmation hearings of the new war “czar,” learned that Stephen Hadley, the White House national security adviser and chief cheerleader for the Surge, would no longer have anything to do with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who testified he would be reporting directly to the President, also told Congress he had expressed doubts about the new policy in January, believing "a military surge would likely have only temporary and localized effects."

Today the Secretary of Defense replaced Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace with Adm. Michael G. Mullen, describing him as “a very smart strategic thinker.”

It is perfectly consistent with Bush’s refusal to admit mistakes to be transferring military power to realists about Iraq by letting it happen behind his back.

We can only hope.