The Basiji

Matthias Kuntzel is a political scientist in Hamburg, Germany, and author of
“Ahmadinejad's Demons” an essay published in The New Republic on 4-24-06 . It is one of the scariest things I have ever read. The BBC also recently covered some of the same issues. If you want to know something about what fanatics believe and what motivates them, read the below excerpts. The tragedy created by the Bush Administration is that we have wasted our resources and lives in Iraq and are now unable to deal with Iran from a position of strength.

During the Iran-Iraq War after Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate for their disadvantage, Khomeini sent Iranian children, some as young as twelve years old, to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies.

These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started in order to supplement his beleaguered army. The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a source not of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite "special units" have been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. And, last year, they formed the potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--a man who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War--to the presidency.

In 1982, during the retaking of the city of Khorramshahr, 10,000 Iranians died. Following "Operation Kheiber," in February 1984, the corpses of some 20,000 fallen Iranians were left on the battlefield. The "Karbala Four" offensive in 1986 cost the lives of more than 10,000 Iranians. All told, some 100,000 men and boys are said to have been killed during Basiji operations. Why did the Basiji volunteer for such duty?

At the beginning of the war, Iran's ruling mullahs did not send human beings into the minefields, but rather animals: donkeys, horses, and dogs. But the tactic proved useless: "After a few donkeys had been blown up, the rest ran off in terror," Mostafa Arki reports in his book Eight Years of War in the Middle East. The donkeys reacted normally--fear of death is natural. The Basiji, on the other hand, marched fearlessly and without complaint to their deaths. The curious slogans that they chanted while entering the battlefields are of note: "Against the Yazid of our time!"; "Hussein's caravan is moving on!"; "A new Karbala awaits us!"

Yazid, Hussein, Karbala--these are all references to the founding myth of Shia Islam. In the late seventh century, Islam was split between those loyal to the Caliph Yazid--the predecessors of Sunni Islam--and the founders of Shia Islam, who thought that the Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, should govern the Muslims. In 680, Hussein led an uprising against the "illegitimate" caliph, but he was betrayed. On the plain of Karbala, on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, Yazid's forces attacked Hussein and his entourage and killed them. Hussein's corpse bore the marks of 33 lance punctures and 34 blows of the sword. His head was cut off and his body was trampled by horses.

Ever since, the martyrdom of Hussein has formed the core of Shia theology, and the Ashura Festival that commemorates his death is Shiism's holiest day. On that day, men beat themselves with their fists or flagellate themselves with iron chains to approximate Hussein's sufferings. At times throughout the centuries, the ritual has grown obscenely violent.

Khomeini appropriated the essence of the ritual as a symbolic act and politicized it. He took the inward-directed fervor and channeled it toward the external enemy. He transformed the passive lamentation into active protest. He made the Battle of Karbala the prototype of any fight against tyranny.

The power of this story was further reinforced by a theological twist that Khomeini gave it. According to Khomeini, life is worthless and death is the beginning of genuine existence. "The natural world," he explained in October 1980, "is the lowest element, the scum of creation. "What is decisive is the beyond: The "divine world, that is eternal." This latter world is accessible to martyrs. Their death is no death, but merely the transition from this world to the world beyond, where they will live on eternally and in splendor. Whether the warrior wins the battle or loses it and dies a Martyr--in both cases, his victory is assured: either a mundane or a spiritual one.

This attitude had a fatal implication for the Basiji: Whether they survived or not was irrelevant. Not even the tactical utility of their sacrifice mattered. Military victories are secondary, Khomeini explained in September 1980.The Basiji must "understand that he is a 'soldier of God' for whom it is not so much the outcome of the conflict as the mere participation in it that provides fulfillment and gratification."

According to Shia tradition, legitimate Islamic rule can only be established following the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam. Until that time, the Shia have only to wait, to keep their peace with illegitimate rule, and to remember the Prophet's grandson, Hussein, in sorrow. Khomeini, however, had no intention of waiting. He vested the myth with an entirely new sense: The Twelfth Imam will only emerge when the believers have vanquished evil. To speed up the Mahdi's return, Muslims had to shake off their torpor and fight.

It was this culture that nurtured Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's worldview. His presidential website says simply that he was "on active service as a Basij volunteer up to the end of the holy defense [the war against Iraq]." After becoming mayor of Tehran in April 2003, Ahmadinejad used his position to build up a strong network of radical Islamic fundamentalists known as Abadgaran-e Iran-e Islami, or Developers of an Islamic Iran. It was in that role that he won his reputation--and popularity--as a hardliner devoted to rolling back the liberal reforms of then-President Muhammad Khatami. Ahmadinejad positioned himself as the leader of a "second revolution" to eradicate corruption and Western influences from Iranian society. And the Basiji, whose numbers had grown dramatically since the end of the Iran-Iraq War, embraced him. Recruited from the more conservative and impoverished parts of the population, the Basiji fall under the direction of--and swear absolute loyalty to--the Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, Khomeini's successor. During Ahmadinejad's run for the presidency in 2005, the millions of Basiji--in every Iranian town, neighborhood, and mosque--became his unofficial campaign workers.

Since Ahmadinejad became president, the influence of the Basiji has grown. In November, the new Iranian president opened the annual "Basiji Week," which commemorates the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq War. According to a report in Kayan, a publication loyal to Khameini, some nine million Basiji--12 percent of the Iranian population--turned out to demonstrate in favor of Ahmadinejad's anti-liberal platform. The article claimed that the demonstrators "form[ed] a human chain some 8,700 kilometers long. In Tehran alone, some 1,250,000 people turned out." Barely noticed by the Western media, this mobilization attests to Ahmadinejad's determination to impose his "second revolution" and to extinguish the few sparks of freedom in Iran.

At the end of July 2005, the Basij movement announced plans to increase its membership from ten million to 15 million by 2010. The elite special units are supposed to comprise some 150,000 people by then. Accordingly, the Basiji have received new powers in their function as an unofficial division of the police.

As Basij ideology and influence enjoy a renaissance under Ahmadinejad, the movement's belief in the virtues of violent self-sacrifice remains intact. There is no "truth commission" in Iran to investigate the state-planned collective suicide that took place from 1980 to 1988. Instead, every Iranian is taught the virtues of martyrdom from childhood. Obviously, many of them reject the Basij teachings.

Since 2004, the mobilization of Iranians for suicide brigades has intensified, with recruits being trained for foreign missions. Thus, a special military unit has been created bearing the name "Commando of Voluntary Martyrs. "According to its own statistics, this force has so far recruited some 52,000 Iranians to the suicidal cause. It aims to form a "martyrdom unit" in every Iranian province.

A politics pursued in alliance with a supernatural force is necessarily unpredictable. Why should an Iranian president engage in pragmatic politics when his assumption is that, in three or four years, the savior will appear? If the messiah is coming, why compromise? That is why, up to now, Ahmadinejad has pursued confrontational policies with evident pleasure.

The history of the Basiji shows that we must expect monstrosities from the current Iranian regime. Already, what began in the early '80s with the clearing of minefields by human detonators has spread throughout the Middle East, as suicide bombing has become the terrorist tactic of choice.

If I Had Only Known

From The Washington Post today:

"Cues of Parental Investment as a Factor in Attractiveness" by Gary L. Brase, Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 2. A University of Missouri psychologist found that women report they would be more likely to have sex with a man shown in a photograph giving a cookie to a baby than with a man shown taking a cookie away from a baby.

Gas Price Rhetoric

With the price of gas exceeding $3 a gallon, panicked Republicans are searching for a political solution. In classic administration style, the President yesterday heralded his approach by making grandiose claims that will have minor if any impact on prices or energy policy.

Bush said he will suspend shipments to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve thereby boosting supply and holding down prices. Two years ago, when Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry suggested suspending purchases for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Bush responded, "We will not play politics with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve," which he emphasized is solely for "major disruptions of energy supplies." According to industry experts and administration officials this action will increase the domestic supply by less than 1 percent. This could save consumers a few cents per gallon at best, energy experts said. Philip K. Verleger, an Aspen, Colo.-based oil consultant, said that Bush's proposals were "more or less like prescribing aspirin to take care of prostate cancer."

The president also said he will temporarily ease environmental regulations that require the use of cleaner-burning fuel additives to cut down on summertime pollution. If at all possible, any action taken by this administration will contain a benefit to industry and a detriment to either consumers or the environment.

Bush said that excessive oil company profits will be investigated by three different federal departments. Sounds good except at the same moment Congress agreed to strike Senate-passed measures that would raise taxes on the major oil companies by nearly $5 billion over five years.

Not mentioned in the speech is that Bush rejected one change that some experts said could reduce oil consumption: tougher federally mandated fuel-economy standards for cars, trucks and SUVs. Doing so of course would hamper the automobile industry from continuing its illogical drive to sell SUVs to the American public

“If the Gloves Come Off?”

The Washington Post today reported on the approval of Donald Rumsfeld’s long awaited plan to fight terrorism.

Details of the plans are secret, but in general they envision a significantly expanded role for the military -- and, in particular, a growing force of elite Special Operations troops -- in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It lays out nine key goals, such as targeting terrorist leaders, safe havens, communications and other logistical support, and countering extremist ideology.

A second detailed plan is focused specifically on al-Qaeda and associated movements, including more than a dozen groups spread across the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Africa. Such groups include the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Ansar al-Islam in the Middle East, Jemaah Islamiya in Indonesia, and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in Saharan Africa.

A third plan sets out how the military can both disrupt and respond to another major terrorist strike on the United States. It includes lengthy annexes that offer a menu of options for the military to retaliate quickly against specific terrorist groups, individuals or state sponsors depending on who is believed to be behind an attack. Another attack could create both a justification and an opportunity that is lacking today to retaliate against some known targets, according to current and former defense officials familiar with the plan.

This plan details "what terrorists or bad guys we would hit if the gloves came off. The gloves are not off," said one official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The gloves are not off! We’ve spent billions of dollars in Iraq, watched as almost 2,400 US soldiers and countless Iraqi citizens have died, but we have not been pursuing an all out war against the people who attacked us on September 11th and who are still committed to further attacks. This is the epitome of incompetence and misguided analysis of what our priorities should be.

The War on Leaks

The CIA has announced the firing of a senior analyst accused of being the source of leaks about secret prisons where terrorist suspects were held. The C.I.A. would not identify the officer, but several government officials said it was Mary O. McCarthy, a veteran intelligence analyst who until 2001 was senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, where she served under President Bill Clinton and into the Bush administration. At the time of her dismissal, Ms. McCarthy was working in the agency's inspector general's office, after a stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an organization in Washington that examines global security issues.

Leaking classified information that harms national security and that makes US citizens less safe, is a crime, (except of course if the Administration does it to further their political aims – see Scooter Libby). But how exactly does the release of this information harm our war on terrorism and make us less safe. The release of the information certainly embarrassed the Bush administration, serving as another example of how they disregard US morals and democratic values. Release of that information makes us look like our new hoped for best friend China – just another big country abusing human rights. But there has been no explanation forthcoming about how knowledge of these prisons has any bearing on how we counter terrorists or how they change their approaches knowing these exist. Does the administration believe that fear of these prisons make terrorists more careful than they would be otherwise?

Firing an experienced intelligence analyst, makes the point that only selected members of the administration can leak classified information and weakens our ability to pursue terrorism. It doesn’t strengthen it at all.

What Reshuffle

The Republicans are glowing about yesterday’s announced White House changes, claiming this is what they have been urging the White House to do in order to shore up the sinking ship. But this just looks like more of the same. Their pattern is to use talking points to hide poor decisions (Iraq is really going well) or to make policy seem to be something other than what it really is (Clean Skies legislation will improve the environment.) As of noon today, George W. Bush is still President, Dick Cheney is still Vice President, Don Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense, Condoleezza Rice is still Secretary of State, and Karl Rove is still in the White House playing a key role. The new Chief of Staff moved all the way across the street from the Executive Office Building to the West Wing. Pardon the French allusion but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or if you prefer – here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.

What Went Wrong In Iraq

David Rieff in the 4-17-06 edition of The New Republic reviews Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq by Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor. His description of the mind set of the Bush administration is frightening. One can only hope that we are so mired in Iraq, that attempting a similar foray into Iran is completely off the table. I’ve reduced a long review and essay to what I think is the essence of Reiff’s argument – namely that optimism blinded our leaders to the reality of the situation they faced.

Self-doubt, let alone pessimism, is generally not part of the mentality of people who start wars, and certainly not of those who plan to unleash the most powerful army in the history of the world against a third-rate ill-equipped military force commanded by a man whom one Marine commander described as "dumb as a rock" and his two psychopathic and hopelessly incompetent sons. Three years after our invasion of Iraq, an elective war, we know that the optimism not only of the senior members of the Bush administration, but also of the many liberal hawks who supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, was misplaced. The salient question is whether the disappointments in the Iraq war are owed to the illusions that attend all war planning (we might call it, with apologies to Clausewitz, the fiction of war) or to illusions that were particular to this venture. Why has the war gone so wrong?

Gordon and Trainor establish beyond a doubt the incompetence and the hopelessness of the Iraqi forces, and they evoke with great conviction the dash and the creativity of American officers and enlisted personnel (their criticism is largely reserved for senior generals and civilian officials at the Pentagon). The implausibility of their story is owed, rather, to a fundamental defect in the military plot: our forces were not exactly fighting the Wehrmacht or the Red Army as they advanced toward Baghdad.

In the more sober and analytical parts of their book, Gordon and Trainor emphasize in heretofore unknown detail that the real challenge facing American planners--a challenge that they show the Pentagon largely bungled--was how to secure a lasting victory, or, to use the military term of art, the "desired end state." That end state was not, of course, only a military one. The institutional power play that put responsibility not just for the military campaign itself but also for postwar Iraq in the hands of the Pentagon is well known by now. As Gordon and Trainor put it, Rumsfeld was presenting a vision of a post-Saddam Iraq that would be virtually cost-free to the United States once the shooting had stopped. America could "oust a dictator, usher in a new era in Iraq, shift the balance of power in the Middle East in the United States's favor, all without America's committing itself to the lengthy, costly, and arduous peacekeeping and nation-building, which the Clinton administration had undertaken in Bosnia and Kosovo."

That the Bush administration was convinced that the war in Iraq was going to be cheap is well documented. Whether it was Paul Wolfowitz testifying before Congress that Iraqi oil revenues would almost certainly pay for the country's reconstruction, or Rumsfeld answering with an indignant "Baloney" George Stephanopoulos's query about whether a $300 billion price tag on the war might not be closer to the mark than the $50 or $60 billion the administration was forecasting, examples are legion of the Bush administration's refusal to budge from its most optimistic scenarios for postwar Iraq.

Gordon and Trainor document the same cult of the best-case scenario at the operational level: during the run-up to the war, military planners who thought that more troops would be needed for occupation duties were told no, and that forces from other countries would take care of this, and that American forces would be substantially reduced within a few months of Saddam's fall. The planners were told to make plans for these draw-downs even as planning for the war itself was still going on.

Despite its failure to put together a real coalition to invade Iraq, as President George H.W. Bush had done before the Gulf War of 1991, the Bush administration appears to have launched the war convinced that once Saddam Hussein had been removed, security in a postwar Iraq would be largely guaranteed by existing Iraqi police and military formations denuded of their Baathist senior commanders and buttressed, where necessary, by foreign constabulary forces from Italy, Denmark, Portugal, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. As Gordon and Trainor note, "There was no fallback plan." They describe an administration impervious to the possibility of things going wrong once the initial military mission had been "accomplished," to use George W. Bush's unfortunate word when he addressed the nation from that aircraft carrier on April 26, 2003. "Few of the potential contributors [to this constabulary force]," they write, "had been wholehearted supporters of the war, but the administration assumed they would be willing to help keep peace in a relatively benign Iraq, which controlled some of the world's largest oil reserves and which would be ruled by a new enlightened government."

But when things did not go according to plan, the Bush administration failed to reconsider its postwar strategy. As Gordon and Trainor put it, President Bush and his team "failed to adapt to developments on the ground and remained wedded to their prewar analysis of Iraq even after Iraqis showed their penchant for guerrilla tactics in the first days of the war."

Gordon and Trainor argue that American troops on the ground understood that the nature of their enemy was different from the one anticipated in the war plan. But Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, they write, remained unconvinced, and adamantly refused to adjust their plan significantly. Instead they continued to believe that "their victory would be sealed with the seizure of Baghdad, which was identified as Iraq's 'center of gravity.'" They never seem to have understood that "from the first day of the invasion the United States was not fighting a purely conventional war, one that would suddenly be brought to an end when the regime's ministries were seized and its leader toppled." Instead, victory depended on bringing the Sunni regions of Iraq and the population centers of Iraq, above all Baghdad itself, under control. But Gordon and Trainor demonstrate conclusively that, given the administration's pre-existing convictions about what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like, and Rumsfeld's dogmatic insistence that large numbers of American troops would not be needed in Iraq after Baghdad fell, there was never any real thought given to altering the pre-existing strategy. Perhaps the most depressing of all Gordon and Trainor's depressing observations is that "Rumsfeld and his aides viewed the building of a new Iraq as a relatively undemanding pursuit."

Gordon and Trainor seem to have decided not to pursue in depth the question of why this was the case. Instead, they focus on military mistakes and on the disjunction between what they call "the bold and extraordinarily ambitious" political goals of the war and the quality of the actual planning. For Gordon and Trainor, five errors stand out--the failure to understand the question of tribalism in Iraq; the overuse of technology in war fighting; the failure to adapt to changing conditions on the ground; the failure to listen to different (and more pessimistic) military and political perspectives; and the failure to take into account the lessons of nation-building in the Balkans between 1995 and 2002.

We may never know much more about what went wrong in Iraq than what is to be found in the pages of this volume. But the problem is far deeper than loyalty to the president, or careerism, or staying on message. In Washington these days, it is customary to speak of someone who rigidly follows the Bush administration party line as having "swallowed the Kool-Aid." It is not a very accurate way of grasping the realities of presidential policy-making--except with regard to Iraq. Even today, it often seems as if the reality in Iraq has not yet sunk in. There is much talk about how American tactics and patience, so misrepresented by the mainstream media, are finally paying off and the Iraqi army is being "stood up," as they say in the military English in which Bush increasingly tries to take refuge. And administration officials continue to insist that, taken as a whole, the news from Iraq is good. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, recently declared that on balance, and despite some setbacks, things were going "very, very well."

This is either self-deception or the deception of others. Judging from Gordon and Trainor's account, self-deception seems the likelier explanation. Then as now, the belief that we were winning was more theological than empirical. From my own experience, during the period when I was going back and forth to and from Iraq in 2003 and 2004, administration officials still broadly believed that they were winning and felt genuinely aggrieved that, unlike our colleagues from Fox News, upon whom the military and the Coalition Provisional Authority increasingly relied, we in the "mainstream media" could not accept the fact that, on balance, the news from Iraq was more good than bad. It is a view that persists to this day.

The question is why. Gordon and Trainor offer no opinion on the subject, but in my view it is probably unfair to focus exclusively, as they do, on the neo-conservatives, or even on the Bush administration as a whole. Rumsfeld, after all, is about as far from being a believer in democracy-building as it is possible to be--a major reason why he always emphasized to military commanders his preference for strategies that would allow U.S. forces to withdraw quickly. More broadly, the Iraq mess cannot be separated from the problematic question of America's official ideology. I do not mean capitalism or Christianity. I mean optimism.

The problem of optimism lies at the heart of what went wrong both in the planning stages for the war and subsequently on the ground in Iraq. Recently, the U.S. Army journal Military Review published an essay by Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, a British officer who had served in Iraq alongside U.S. forces. His criticism was sharp, and for the most part it concerned strictly military matters. But he, too, came back again and again to this question of what he called "damaging optimism"--the refusal of American commanders to accept the possibility that things might go wrong. And lest this seem simply like the usual British sour grapes about America (Greece to their Rome and all that jazz), the worry about overly optimistic thinking is one of the key recommendations of a recent Department of Defense study cautioning that the tendency of U.S. officers to take their wishes for reality has created huge problems for the American effort in Iraq.

Aylwin-Foster wrote that "self-belief and resilient optimism are recognized necessities for successful command, and all professional forces strive for a strong can-do ethos. However, it is unhelpful if it discourages junior commandeers from reporting unwelcome news up the chain of command. Force commanders and political masters need to know the true state of affairs if they are to reach timely decisions to change plans: arguably, they [the Americans] did not always do so." In a somewhat more discreet echo of Gordon and Trainor's blunt talk about "the dysfunction of American military structures," Aylwin-Foster described the American military establishment in Iraq as seeming to be "weighted down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on." In other words, a military admirably configured to mount a lightning campaign against an inferior foe, but not a military (let alone a political leadership!) prepared to fight a prolonged semi-guerrilla war, particularly in a context of mounting sectarian violence in which the United States can obviously take no side.

But even today it often seems as if this lesson has not yet sunk in. Though the U.S. military does understand that the solution to the Iraqi quagmire is principally political, neither they nor their civilian leaders have any real idea of what that political solution might look like. Perhaps this is why, increasingly, those who still defend the war do so in default terms, arguing that the United States has to stay in Iraq because otherwise we will have granted a victory to the terrorists. This is eleventh-hour talk, the language of damage limitation. We have to stay because we cannot go.

But those wanting a more vivid and credible sense of what is taking place in Iraq today might heed the blogger Zeyad, a Baghdadi dentist who welcomed the American overthrow of Saddam, and whose blog, Healing Iraq, was once one of the preferred sources for many boosterish conservative bloggers in the United States. Here is how Zeyad describes Baghdad today:

Please don't ask me whether I believe Iraq is on the verge of civil war yet or not. I have never experienced a civil war before, only regular ones. All I see is that both sides are engaged in tit-for-tat lynchings and summary executions. I see governmental forces openly taking sides or stepping aside. I see an occupation force that is clueless about what is going on in the country. I see politicians that distrust each other and continue to flame the situation for their own personal interests. I see Islamic clerics delivering fiery sermons against each other, then smile and hug each other at the end of the day in staged PR stunts. I see the country breaking into pieces. The frontlines between different districts of Baghdad are already clearly demarked and ready for the battle. I was stopped in my own neighborhood yesterday by a watch team and questioned where I live and what I was doing in that area. I see other people curiously staring in each other's faces on the street. I see hundreds of people disappearing in the middle of the night and their corpses surfacing next day with electric drill holes in them. I see people blown up to smithereens because a brainwashed virgin seeker targeted a crowded market or café. I see all that and more. Don't you dare chastise me for what I write about my country.

On the home page of Healing Iraq, there is an epigraph from Swift: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." Gordon and Trainor establish in extraordinary detail that the same could be said about the Bush administration. Throughout military history, from Alcibiades's Sicilian expedition to the "bridge too far" at Arnhem in World War II, nations and individuals have paid a terrible price for the decisions of commanders in whom daring and determination were married to delusion, self-regard, and a fatal disrespect for their adversaries. Whatever the outcome in Iraq, Gordon and Trainor have definitively entered Operation Iraqi Freedom on that sorry roster.

Rumsfeld Rebuked by Generals

In the April 13, 2006 Washington Post, staff writer Thomas Ricks reported that the
retired commander of key forces in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-2005, called yesterday for Donald H. Rumsfeld to step down, joining several other former top military commanders (Generals Zinni, Swannack, Eaton, Riggs and Newbold) who have harshly criticized the defense secretary's authoritarian style for making the military's job more difficult.

Batiste's comments resonate especially within the Army: It is widely known that he was offered a promotion to three-star rank to return to Iraq and be the No. 2 U.S. military officer there but he declined because he no longer wished to serve under Rumsfeld. Also, before going to Iraq, he worked at the highest level of the Pentagon, serving as the senior military assistant to Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense.

Batiste said he believes that the administration's handling of the Iraq war has violated fundamental military principles, such as unity of command and unity of effort. In other interviews, Batiste has said he thinks the violation of another military principle -- ensuring there are enough forces -- helped create the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal by putting too much responsibility on incompetent officers and under trained troops.

Last month, another top officer who served in Iraq, retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he called Rumsfeld "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically." Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi army troops in 2003-2004, said that "Mr. Rumsfeld must step down."

Another retired officer, Army Maj. Gen. John Riggs, said he believes that his peer group is "a pretty closemouthed bunch" but that, even so, his sense is "everyone pretty much thinks Rumsfeld and the bunch around him should be cleared out." He emphatically agrees, Riggs said, explaining that he believes Rumsfeld and his advisers have "made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict."

Administration Response to WMD

The White House reacted stridently to The Washington Post story about bioweapons in mobile trailers by claiming that the President did not know about the report issued by the task force two days before he told a television audience that “we had found the weapons of mass destruction.” They accused the Post of “irresponsible” reporting.

Well let's just think about this. We had just invaded Iraq and teams were unsuccessfully scouring the country looking for the weapons the Administration had repeatedly claimed were there and, at that time, were the sole justification for going to war. When two trailers were found in April, a combined CIA/DIA team was put together to go to Iraq and examine them. This was going to be the first hard evidence in support of the claims. It is easy to visualize senior administration officials lining up to hear the results. Unfortunately, the report did not support the Administration position; in fact it completely contradicted it. It is difficult to believe that the results were not known immediately, and if so we have another disturbing lie from the White House.

But if the President really didn’t know about the report, that fact hardly exonerates the administration. Why wasn’t he informed? One more example of incompetence in running the country? Or did senior DOD officials not forward this information in order to keep the news from getting out. What they did do was to classify it to keep it from view. Yet in June and September 2003 and February 2004, Powell, Cheney, and Tenet continued to ignore the report while stating that the mobile trailers were bioweapons labs. How could this be anything other than deliberate subterfuge?

Military Propaganda

The April 10, 2006 Washington Post reported that the US Military has been magnifying the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.

Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer. "The long-term threat is not Zarqawi or religious extremists, but these former regime types and their friends," said Harvey.

Besides the dishonest attempt to mislead the American public, you wonder how our strategy is effected by these efforts. Do we ignore the real threat while concentrating on the one that furthers the Administration’s need for justification of its actions? The entire administration of the Iraq war has been promulgated on the use of erroneous information and driven by the desire to see what it erroneously believed rather than by what is real.

Administration Propaganda

The Washington Post today published a time line exposing the Administration’s callous disregard for the truth. If they weren’t lying to the American Public then this is as a clear an example of incompetence as can be found.

February 5, 2003 Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the UN during the lead up to the Iraq invasion and shows diagrams of alleged mobile bioweapon labs.

April 2003 Trailers found near Mosul

May 25, 2003 Pentagon team begins analysis of trailers.

May 27, 2003 Team files a report stating labs were not used for bioweapons and were not designed for such activity. Three weeks later report is classified.

May 28, 2003 CIA and DIA publish a report saying the opposite.

May 29, 2003 President Bush refers to the trailers by saying in a TV interview, “We have found the Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

June 27, 2003 Colin Powell says the intelligence community is increasingly confident that the trailers were used to make bioweapons.

Summer 2003 News reports begin casting suspicion on bioweapons in trailers.

September 14, 2003 Cheney on Meet the Press calls the trailers mobile biological facilities that could produce anthrax or smallpox.

October 2, 2003 David Kay, the head of the Iraqi Survey Group, says they cannot verify that trailers were used for bioweapons.

February 5, 2004 George Tenet says that the mobile lab theory is possible although there is no consensus.

September 30, 2004 Charles Duelfer, who replaced Kay, says the trailers were almost certainly intended to produce hydrogen, not biological weapons.

GOP Trending Down

The Washington Post/ABC News poll released Monday,found that 38% of the public approve of the job Bush is doing as President, while 60% disapprove. The statistics about Congreess are equally bleak for Republicans. When asked which party they trusted more to do a better job handling a series of current issues the response, with the Democratic percentage first was:


Health - 61% to 29%
Elderly Drug Benefits - 59% to 31%
Corruption in Washington - 52% to 27%
Immigration - 50% to 38%
Iraq - 49% to 42%
Economy - 49% to 43%
Terrorism - 46% to 45%

This is a great opportunity for the Democrats to regain power in 2006 and further on, as yearned for by a bumper sticker I saw yesterday – Is it 2008 Yet? But can they articulate a coherent alternative or at least illuminate the long succession of incompetence and lies?

Junket to Niger

Beyond using classified information to counter growing criticism of their Iraq claims and despite their public condemnation of leakers who they considered almost as depraved as Saddam, the information being leaked by Bush, Cheney, and Libby was known by official Washington to be wrong, and therefore also known to the leakers. According to today’s Washington Post:

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

One striking feature of that decision -- unremarked until now, in part because Fitzgerald did not mention it -- is that the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error.

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

At Cheney's instruction, Libby testified, he told Miller that the uranium story was a "key judgment" of the intelligence estimate, a term of art indicating there was consensus on a question of central importance. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments, which were identified by a headline and bold type and set out in bullet form in the first five pages of the 96-page document.

But the White House Iraq Group, formed in August 2002 to foster "public education" about Iraq's "grave and gathering danger" to the United States, repeatedly pitched the uranium story. The alleged procurement was a minor issue for most U.S. analysts -- the hard part for Iraq would be enriching uranium, not obtaining the ore, and Niger's controlled market made it an unlikely seller -- but the Niger story proved irresistible to speechwriters. Most nuclear arguments were highly technical, but the public could easily grasp the link between uranium and a bomb.

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, the hunt for weapons of mass destruction was producing no results, and as the bad news converged on the White House -- weeks after a banner behind Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln -- Wilson emerged as a key critic. He focused his ire on Cheney, who had made the administration's earliest and strongest claims about Iraq's alleged nuclear program.
Fitzgerald wrote that Cheney and his aides saw Wilson as a threat to "the credibility of the Vice President (and the President) on a matter of signal importance: the rationale for the war in Iraq." They decided to respond by implying that Wilson got his CIA assignment by "nepotism."

Libby was still defending the uranium claim as the administration's internal battle burst into the open. White House officials tried to blame Tenet for the debacle, but Tenet made public his intervention to keep uranium out of Bush's speech a few months earlier.

In a speech two days later, at the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney defended the war by saying that no responsible leader could ignore the evidence in the NIE. Before a roomful of conservative policymakers, Cheney listed four of the "key judgments" on Iraq's alleged weapons capabilities but made no mention of Niger or uranium.

Cheney’s attempt to accuse Wilson’s wife of nepotism and to claim that the trip was a junket was the essence of his attempt to discredit the messenger. The criticism studiously avoided any debate on the issue. Who but Dick Cheney would imagine a trip to Niger, one of the poorest countries in the world – mostly a desert except during the rainy season – would be the likely site of a junket?

Religion in the News

It has been a bad week for religious conservatives.

First they found out that praying for people they don’t know, even if the recipients know someone is praying for them, has no bearing on whether the prayees recover from illness without complications.

Then a scientist, who previously had identified wind blowing on the Red Sea and dropping the sea level as the reason the Israelites were able to cross and not drown, has now concluded that ice had formed in the Sea of Galilee, and therefore, Jesus had walked on ice rather than water.

Next the long sought ‘missing link’ has been found. Scientists discovered a fossil that was a fish, but with a head that moved separately from its body, that could drag itself on land. It is approximately 375 million years old (sorry creationists, not less than 6,000 years old) and is evidence of evolutionary thinking that life started in the oceans and moved to land.

Finally the Judas Gospel has been translated and reveals that instead of being the heinous betrayer known to mankind, he actually was doing what Jesus asked him to do and is to be considered a hero, although in the process casting into doubt the previous inviolable Bible story.

Public Speaking

In a eulogy for Caper Weinberger, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld spoke with admiration of a sign that Weinberger kept in his office. It was a famous quotation from Winston Churchill.

Never give in -- never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in.

Tellingly, Rumsfeld left out the concluding part of the quotation "except to convictions of honor and good sense." If anything is missing from the Bush administration it is honor and good sense. No matter what mistake is made, they will not admit errors in judgment or learn from the result of most of their actions. Even Condoleezza Rice’s reference to thousands of tactical errors in Iraq is smothered by assertions that strategically no error was made.

During Rice’s trip to Iraq, with Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, Straw explained that the US and Britain had a right to participate in the decision-making process for the establishment of the new government. His rationale, about which Condi had no public disagreement, was that we had this right because over 2,000 of our soldiers had died in Iraq, 140,000 soldiers were in Iraq, and we have expended heavy financial resources.

Given the unilateral nature of the decision to invade Iraq this is as logical an argument as the one that says the best way to ‘support the troops’ is to keep them in harms way regardless of whether the decision to be there was right or not, or whether it is now.

Meanwhile on the President’s words contradict reality front, today’s Washington Post reports that we are cutting back funding in support of Iraqi democracy including projects that teach Iraqis how to create and sustain political parties, think tanks, human rights groups, independent media outlets, trade unions and other elements of democratic society. This follows the ratcheting back of ambitions for reconstructing the country's battered infrastructure.