Incompetence Reigns; The Police Academy Falls

Even Bush supporters are beginning to believe that the post-invasion period following our entry into Iraq is not a shining example of Republican administrative effectiveness. For those diehards who still believe anything done by the President and his staff is perfection personified, here are excerpts from Thursday’s Washington Post article by Amit R. Paley on the long awaited Iraq Police Academy – the centerpiece in the policy to “stand up Iraqi force so that we can stand down”

A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country's security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed "the rain forest."

"This is the most essential civil security project in the country -- and it's a failure," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. "The Baghdad police academy is a disaster."

Federal investigators said the inspector general's findings raise serious questions about whether the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has failed to exercise effective oversight over the Baghdad Police College or reconstruction programs across Iraq, despite charging taxpayers management fees of at least 4.5 percent of total project costs. The Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that it has initiated a wide-ranging investigation of the police academy project.

The report serves as the latest indictment of Parsons Corp., the U.S. construction giant that was awarded about $1 billion for a variety of reconstruction projects across Iraq. After chronicling previous Parsons failures to properly build health clinics, prisons and hospitals, Bowen said he now plans to conduct an audit of every Parsons project. "The truth needs to be told about what we didn't get for our dollar from Parsons," Bowen said.

The most serious problem was substandard plumbing that caused waste from toilets on the second and third floors to cascade throughout the building. A light fixture in one room stopped working because it was filled with urine and fecal matter. The waste threatened the integrity of load-bearing slabs, federal investigators concluded.

Inside the inspector general's office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual. When asked how the problems at the police college compared with other projects they had inspected, the answers came swiftly. "This is significant," said Jon E. Novak, a senior adviser in the office. Bowen said: "It's the worst."

In or Out

Andrew Sullivan in his blog today summarizes the question of whether we should stay in Iraq or get out. His argument is that our present approach is a disaster - we either should leave immediately or commit wholeheartedly to rectifying the conditions besetting Iraq. If the latter, it cannot be done with the current leadership and without greatly increased cost. I don't believe Bush can bring himself to admit mistakes and is only capable of adhering to his present posture, despite all evidence. If the Rove dominated approach succeeds in the coming election, there will be no change over the next two years. If the Democrats capture at least one of the houses of Congress, Bush may be forced to act differently as all he will have left is his legacy. Listening to Bush in yesterday's news conference, truculently blaming the leakers of the NIE for being politically motivated doesn't promise much for the future. He castigated the leaking of the NIE report for the selective nature of the leaks and then in the same breath declassified only a portion of the report. Ironically, the new information was almost as damning as the original leak. NPR today indicated there is a new intelligence report concentrating on Iraq, still labeled draft so it does not have to be released, that apparently is even grimmer in its assessment than the NIE.

The Sullivan blog:

Here's my summary: we've made real progress against the organized professional leadership of al Qaeda. Everywhere else, we've lost ground. One reason we've lost ground - both strategically, ideologically and politically - is because of the bungled war in Iraq, which has produced the worst of all worlds: an ineffective occupation that doesn't bring democracy, has turned the image of the U.S. into Abu Ghraib, and has inspired many more decentralized and dangerous Jihadists across the globe. As a supporter of the war in Iraq, it's clear that over three years later, it has spawned more terrorism, and is now causing more innocent deaths on a daily basis than Saddam's vile regime. Whether this was inevitable or a function of the way it was conducted will be debated for decades. But this much we know: it was conducted dreadfully anyway, on the cheap, and without even minimal strategic intelligence and care. At this point in time, there's no way to spin this except as a fiasco that has obviously made us less safe right now and in the immediate future. The only arguments the Bush administration has left is that in 2050, historians may regard it as a turning point, and that leaving now would be even worse. The first argument is pathetic; the second argument is true but only underscores their unforgivable recklessness.

The NIE further concludes that our continued ineffective presence in Iraq is spawning more terrorism, and that our departure would also be a huge morale boost to the Jihadists and foment even more hell. Great. (What the war has done to increase Iran's power and potential danger is not addressed in the sections I've read. But it surely adds to the negatives.) What's clear to me is that we therefore have a gamble ahead of us: do we withdraw from Iraq in some way - either completely or to Kurdish areas - or do we seriously try and get the occupation right? At this point, I'd say the argument is very finely balanced. Obviously, the first step must be to get rid of the people so far responsible for the Iraq disaster. Until Rumsfeld is dismissed, we have no hope for any improvement. General Casey needs to be fired as well, along with several other military leaders who have presided over this mess. For the first time in this administration, we need some accountability. Then we have a decision to make. Do we have the troops necessary to make this work? Or do we not? If we need a draft, do we have the guts to say so and debate it?

My own view is that we should either drastically up the ante in Iraq - by adding tens of thousands of new troops in a serious, concerted attempt to provide order for the first time; or we should withdraw. Anything in between continues the same worst-of-all-worlds nightmare. We knew occupying a Muslim country would be a very high-risk venture. Which is why it had to be done with overwhelming force, meticulous planning, and an equally painstaking political strategy for the aftermath. We know now that Rumsfeld and Cheney just wanted to bomb the crap out of the place to prove they had more testosterone than the Democrats and to scare a few leaders in the Middle East. But the time for their amateurism is over. Either get serious or leave, guys. And make up your mind soon.

Who Do You Believe?

George W. Bush in a major address September 7, 2006 before the Georgia Public Policy Foundation:

America has gone on the offense across the world. And here are some of the results. We've captured or killed many of the most significant al Qaeda members and associates. We've killed al Qaeda's most visible and aggressive leader to emerge after 9/11, the terrorist Zarqawi in Iraq. We've kept the terrorists from achieving their key goal, to overthrow governments across the broader Middle East and to seize control. Instead, the governments they targeted -- such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- have become some of our most valuable allies in the war on terror.

If America pulls out of Iraq before the Iraqis can defend themselves, the terrorists will follow us here, home. The best way to honor the memory of brave Americans … is to complete the mission they began -- so we will stay, we will fight, and we will win in Iraq.

We've learned the lessons of 9/11, and we have addressed the gaps in our defenses exposed by that attack. We've gone on the offense against our enemies, and transformed former adversaries into allies. We have put in place the institutions needed to win this war. Five years after September the 11th, 2001, America is safer -- and America is winning the war on terror. With vigilance, determination, courage, we will defeat the enemies of freedom, and we will leave behind a more peaceful world for our children and our grandchildren.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate, the most authoritative opinion of the combined US intelligence agencies, in a report titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,” completed in April 2006 as reported by The New York Times:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

It asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe. An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology. The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

The estimate concludes that the radical Islamic movement has expanded from a core of Qaeda operatives and affiliated groups to include a new class of “self-generating” cells inspired by Al Qaeda’s leadership but without any direct connection to Osama bin Laden or his top lieutenants.

It also examines how the Internet has helped spread jihadist ideology, and how cyberspace has become a haven for terrorist operatives who no longer have geographical refuges in countries like Afghanistan.

Time to Get Out

NPR’s Weekend Edition this past Saturday had an interview with Lt. General William Odom, U.S Army (Ret.). He is a former head of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan and currently is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

He believes that the US should carefully withdraw from Iraq over the next three to six months because our military presence there diplomatically and strategically paralyzes our actions by tying us down, alienating our friends, and inciting the region. In order to create a stabilized Middle East, we need allies working with us and that will not happen as long as we are in Iraq. He believes this is necessary even in the face of the sectarian violence that will continue and worsen with our departure.

He is more concerned with that violence spreading to the rest of the region than he is with its occurrence in Iraq. We can’t stop the violence without taking sides but doing so would just serve as a further catalyst. Our being there hasn’t stopped the violence, which despite major efforts by the military, keeps growing. Getting out will result in the Iraqis settling their differences and achieving a state where they can then move forward. Avoiding violence while building a model democratic state more and more looks like Bush wishful thinking. Iraq won't be ruled by Iraqis without a brutal fight, whether we are there or not.

He does not believe withdrawal will be a signal to Al Qaeda that we are weak. Instead he sees it as wisdom on our part that we will no longer allow them to bleed us into weakness in the world. Our Iraq presence has greatly benefited Iran and Al Qaeda. The latter is despised by the Shiites and the Kurds and only tolerated by the Sunnis who hate us more. With the US out, Al Qaeda has no rational reason for being in Iraq and will be expelled.

Our ability to build an Iraqi army and police force, which is Bush’s reason for staying, is untenable because those groups are consumed with factional strife, rather than being a united entity. Until there is an indigenous party in control of the Iraqi government, a unified Iraqi security force is impossible. This will not occur until there is either a civil war that produces a victor who can consolidate the country or the country is divided into three separate parts.

The Chosen Ones

An excerpt from “Imperial Life in the Emerald City," by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, was published in today’s Washington Post. Chandrasekaran was the Post’s bureau chief in Baghdad during much of the Iraq occupation. He describes how the Bush administration staffed the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq's government from April 2003 to June 2004, probably the key time in the post-war period during which any opportunity for creating a unified country was lost by one mistaken decision after another by the Bush administration. One major reason for that result was the quality of personnel as can be seen from Chandrasekaran’s description:

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.
Many of those chosen by O'Beirne's office to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority lacked vital skills and experience.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

Interviews with scores of former CPA personnel over the past two years depict an organization that was dominated -- and ultimately hobbled -- by administration ideologues.

Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq -- training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation -- could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA. But many CPA staff members were more interested in other things: in instituting a flat tax, in selling off government assets, in ending food rations and otherwise fashioning a new nation that looked a lot like the United States. Many of them spent their days cloistered in the Green Zone, a walled-off enclave in central Baghdad with towering palms, posh villas, well-stocked bars and resort-size swimming pools.

To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.
Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000.

One former CPA employee who had an office near O'Beirne's wrote an e-mail to a friend describing the recruitment process: "I watched résumés of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to 'the President's vision for Iraq' (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was 'uncertain.' I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy . . . and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors."

"I'm not here for the Iraqis," one staffer noted to a reporter over lunch. "I'm here for George Bush."

We know from our Vietnam experience that the ‘best and the brightest’ doesn’t guarantee success, but what the Bush Administration did (and surely what they did had nothing to do with lessons learned in Vietnam) was the height of incompetence, bordering on criminality.

Understanding the Enemy

Louise Richardson, a lecturer at Harvard, is the author of a just published book on terrorism and how to tackle it. “What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy. Containing the Threat.” Shockingly it does not reference the Bush explanation of thugs who hate our freedom. Instead it tries to understand what drives terrorists so that effective strategies can be formed to counter their success. Martin Walker, a UPI editor, wrote a review in last Sunday’s NY Times Book Review.

Karl Rove’s observation that virile conservatives march forth to defeat their terrorist enemies while epicene liberals seek to understand them was memorable for its partisan venom. Yet the fact is, without making a thorough effort to comprehend the motives, fears and capabilities of Al Qaeda’s militants, we can hardly hope to defeat them.

Modern terrorists — whether operating in the United States, Europe or the Middle East — have sought to understand us and the vulnerabilities of our open societies. It is high time we sought to understand them.

Richardson suggests that like all terrorist movements, Al Qaeda requires three components: alienated individuals, a complicit society or community, and a legitimizing ideology. Its troops are motivated by some mixture of three key goals: revenge, renown and reaction from the enemy.

Richardson goes on to argue that the policies of the Bush administration have provided Al Qaeda with great renown and monstrous overreaction — precisely the stimulants it needs to prosper. By declaring “war” on terrorism, the White House has defined the struggle against Al Qaeda essentially as a military problem, best managed by the Pentagon. This flies in the face of all available evidence from successful antiterror campaigns. These include the British operations in Malaya in the 1950’s, the penetration of Shining Path by the Peruvian police, the defeats Turkey has inflicted on the Kurdish P.K.K. and, most recently, the co-option of the I.R.A. leadership into electoral politics through the cooperation of the London and Dublin governments.

These successes have a number of features in common. They were led primarily by police intelligence units working in very close coordination with other arms of the state, including the military and the judiciary, as well as local economic development teams. Government officials all came to understand that they were faced with what was fundamentally a political challenge, and that the prime objective was to separate the terrorists from their base in the community. This meant addressing the grievances of that base seriously, and it meant cooperating with moderates in that community who might have shared some of the terrorists’ goals but shrank from their tactics.

A successful counterterrorist campaign, Richardson explains, seeks to empower and legitimize the nonviolent moderates, thus isolating the terrorists. Success requires governments to hold the moral high ground, convincing the undecided that the state and its agents are the good guys, who enforce democratic principles and civil liberties even among their own troops and police officers. In other words, with an effective antiterrorist policy there would be no Guantánamo, no detention without fair trial, no secret wiretapping programs and no “renditions” of suspects to friendly but foul regimes that practice torture. Intelligence organizations would operate under clear and strict judicial guidelines, with transparent political oversight.

In its determination to display resolve, Richardson says, the Bush administration has so far failed to learn these lessons. She points out that most governments go through an initial phase of draconian measures with full public support, a second phase of polarization, when liberals bleating about human and civic rights are treated as semitraitorous wimps, and a third phase that comes with the understanding that the tough tactics are not working as expected and that (as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems to have realized in Iraq) they are creating new terrorists faster than the old ones can be killed or neutralized.

This third phase leads to a reassessment, and then to a search for ways to divide the enemy and exploit the merest hint of division or ideological argument. Al Qaeda, for its part, has already shown itself quite adept at the tactic of dividing the enemy, exploiting differences between Washington and its European allies. And if senior figures in the Bush administration are even bothering to read bin Laden’s speeches, they should have noticed that he condemns the United States for its rejection of the International Criminal Court and for turning a blind eye to the profiteering of the Halliburton Company. As Richardson points out, this suggests that bin Laden has taken to heart “Lenin’s key contribution to terrorist strategy ... the importance of exploiting every fragment of local alienation for its own ends.”

The Message

In New Jersey, Thomas Kean, Jr. is running for the Senate on the Republican ticket. But he never mentions the word “republican” in his speeches or in his campaign literature. His platform is that he thinks Iraq is a disaster and that he will be an “independent” and “reform” politician. Republicans in close races are all claiming their newly found independence of the administration. If they get away with this approach, the result will be that Hastert, Boehner, and Frist will continue to control Congress, and once the election is over, the odds are great that the rubber stamping of Bush policies will be no different that what has occurred in the past six years.

While asserting their independence from the administration, they continue to parrot the only message that they think will defeat Democrats because it worked in the last three elections. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post characterized this Republican pre-election message in these words: "Vote Democrat and Die."

Nancy Pelosi last week said that capturing Osama bin Laden wouldn't make us safer. President Bush said "he's not the issue" and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "If he were gone tomorrow, the same problem would exist". What is different about these statements? Not much, but to Republicans, Pelosi’s statement bordered on treason.

Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) wondered whether Democrats are "more interested in protecting terrorists than in protecting the American people." Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) stood next to a poster of Pelosi and her words about bin Laden and demanded: "Where do your loyalties lie?" House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said Democrats "are confused about who the enemy actually is."

The Democrats as usual are broadcasting a number of messages, no one of which is clearly resonating with the public. This is self-defeating in the face of an election where they have their best opportunity in six years. What they should be doing is screaming that the past six years of Republican rule have been a disaster for the United States – incompetence in strategic decision making, pursuing the wrong enemy, diminishing our prestige, and spectacularly wasting lives and money.

Some Democrats appear to be realizing what they need to do to counter Republican assertions. John Kerry yesterday spoke about the Bush Administration’s “cut and run” policy in Afghanistan. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a middle of the road Democrat who has supported Bush much more than most Democrats, reacted to the Republican charges with words that ought to become a mantra for every Democrat:

America is not tired of fighting terrorism. America is tired of the wrongheaded and boneheaded leadership of the Republican Party that has sent $6.5 billion a month to Iraq when the front line was Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, that led this country to attack Saddam Hussein when we were attacked by Osama bin Laden. And Americans are most certainly tired of leadership that, despite documented mistake after mistake after mistake . . . never admit that they ever do anything wrong.

Bush Justifies Iraq

From the President’s speech to the nation last night:

The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power. And now the challenge is to help the Iraqi people build a democracy that fulfills the dreams of the nearly 12 million Iraqis who came out to vote in free elections last December.

Al Qaida and other extremists from across the world have come to Iraq to stop the rise of a free society in the heart of the Middle East. They have joined the remnants of Saddam's regime and other armed groups to foment sectarian violence and drive us out.

Our enemies in Iraq are tough and they are committed, but so are Iraqi and coalition forces. We are adapting to stay ahead of the enemy, and we are carrying out a clear plan to ensure that a democratic Iraq succeeds. We are training Iraqi troops so they can defend their nation. We are helping Iraq's unity government grow in strength and serve its people. We will not leave until this work is done.

Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.

Osama bin Laden calls this fight "The Third World War," and he says that victory for the terrorists in Iraq will mean America's defeat and disgrace forever. If we yield Iraq to men like bin Laden, our enemies will be emboldened. They will gain a new safe haven. They will use Iraq's resources to fuel their extremist movement.

We will not allow this to happen. America will stay in the fight. Iraq will be a free nation and a strong ally in the war on terror. We can be confident that our coalition will succeed because the Iraqi people have been steadfast in the face of unspeakable violence. And we can be confident in victory because of the skill and resolve of America's armed forces.

There is no doubt that Al Qaeda and Islamist extremists want to harm and defeat the United States and other western democracies. The question is whether our being in Iraq has anything to do with the fight against these enemies. Bush desperately has to believe that it does; if not his entire effort since 2003 has been a waste of US lives and money. None of his current justification has anything to do with the original rationale for disposing Saddam – the presence of weapons of mass destruction or the ties to 9/11. He is now creating a false political dichotomy, stating that withdrawal from Iraq means capitulating to Al Qaeda, and hopes this will serve to scare voters away from Democratic candidates.

The counter argument is that our presence in Iraq is hurting our effort to fight our real enemy. By using our resources in Iraq we are not able to focus on the groups in Pakistan (including Osama bin Laden) and the multitudes of loosely connected terrorists throughout the rest of the world. These are the people we need to overcome. Nor are we able to build adequate defenses in the US against potential disaster (see Katrina). Bush’s belief (too much of what he does is based on belief rather than analysis) is that bringing democracy to the Middle East and everywhere else it does not exist is the best way to safeguard the US.

Looking at Iraq today and seeing the sectarian divisions between Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds and imagining a united functioning democracy in the foreseeable future completely ignores the reality on the ground. Victory, defined as a democratic nirvana, looks like a dream of Republican politicians trying to hang on to power. Religious differences, according to today’s Washington Post, have made intermarriage between Sunnis and Shiites impossible, reversing a condition that occurred frequently before our advent. Moqtada Sadr bides his time before unleashing a vicious civil war. The resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is equally depressing. Both countries are filled with people who don’t hate our freedom, but do hate our occupation. The Iraq insurgency certainly has Al Qaeda members but it is more and more evident that the civil war that has begun or is coming has nothing to do with terrorism but is just an old fashioned quest for power between two sects that have hated each other for centuries. The first George Bush understood this and refrained from overthrowing Saddam after liberating Kuwait.

We are now stuck for two plus years with an Administration unable to recognize its mistakes, unable to develop a realistic strategy for addressing our foreign problems, and ready to squander our resources rather than prepare to counter the increasing number of people and countries who see us as the enemy because our actions don’t live up to our ideals. Unfortunately for us thousands of US soldiers, and many thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, are going to pay the ultimate price for this inability to think clearly and act competently.

Incompetence - Continued

While President Bush is off making political speeches, trying to cash in on the fifth anniversary of September 11, and sending Cheney to Meet the Press to deny reality and attack Democrats as appeasers, we are continually besieged with report after report of incompetence by his administration in the war against terrorism The Washington Post reported today that the chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq, Col. Pete Devlin, recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.

Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province's most significant political force. Another person familiar with the report said it describes Anbar as beyond repair; a third said it concludes that the United States has lost in Anbar.

Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago. Not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence.

One view of the report offered by some Marine officers is that it is a cry for help from an area where fighting remains intense, yet which recently has been neglected by top commanders and Bush administration officials as they focus on bringing a sense of security to Baghdad. An Army unit of Stryker light armored vehicles that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent to reinforce operations in Baghdad, leaving commanders in the west scrambling to move around other troops to fill the gap.

Of course this is just the Sunni dominated portion of Iraq’s Western desert. So lets look at the Shiite area in the south where Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army are becoming increasingly powerful. Sadr poses a significant dilemma for the Bush administration and Iraq's fragile government. Though Sadr and his followers hold more seats in Iraq's parliament than any other faction, their attitude toward the U.S.-led occupation remains belligerent. They participate in government, but they remain outsiders, keenly aware that their authority is derived from their independence and their opposition to the occupation.

The ongoing evolution of Sadr from populist cleric to guerrilla leader to political kingmaker is emerging as a core challenge to U.S. visions of stability in Iraq. He's a question mark that many analysts say needs to be dealt with immediately and delicately.

"Sadr is a work in progress," said Phebe Marr, a leading expert on Iraqi politics. "He is volatile, an opportunist and dangerous. But he is also popular and has grass-roots support among an important slice of the population. He and his movement need to be dealt with carefully and skillfully before he can take permanent root. "He is too powerful now to take him on frontally."

Senior U.S. military officials are starting to share this view. Once dismissed by Bush administration officials and U.S. generals as irrelevant to Iraq's future, Sadr is increasingly seen as a man who has the power to either implode Iraq or keep it together, even as his militia continues to defy the authority of the Iraqi government and its U.S. backers. As sectarian violence ravages Baghdad and other parts of the country, Sunni Muslims accuse Sadr's Mahdi Army of operating death squads under the mantle of Islam.

Today, Sadr controls 30 seats in the Iraqi parliament and four ministries. All of Sadr's portfolios revolve around providing key services, such as health and transportation. They give him the ability to funnel resources to supportive constituents and boost his popular base. During the protracted negotiations over who would become prime minister after elections in January, Sadr reluctantly supported Nouri al-Maliki, also a Shiite, to head the government.

Many observers argue that at a time when the Bush administration and Sadr aren't talking, one political option is to try and wean poor and lower-middle-class men such as these from the streets.

"The best way to do it is to give them jobs, not in the security system, but where they could be active in the economy," said Ali al-Dabbagh, the Maliki government spokesman, referring to the Mahdi Army militiamen. "Once they get an income, I don't think they will follow an ideology or become fundamentalist and extremist."

Other observers say the Iraqi government and its U.S. benefactors need to undercut Sadr's social services network by providing health, education and other services, as well as establishing the rule of law.

Somehow this doesn’t seem to be high on our list of priorities. Bush’s basic approach to diplomacy is to never talk to our enemies; never attempt to understand their motivation other than to repeat platitudes about how they hate our freedom. Addressing the futility and sense of humiliation felt by millions of third world people is not something we try to counter, with the exception of the laughable Karen Hughes. She is just a higher-ranking politico just like the young inexperienced Republican staffers we sent to Iraq in the days following the invasion.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan is showing increasing sign of exploding. The Bush Administration’s decision to attack Afghanistan and dispose the Taliban, who were harboring Al Qaeda, was a decision the US had to make. It was supported by a great majority of US citizens and received strong support from most of the world. But it has the same faults as the Iraq disaster. Instead of concentrating on the resurrection of Afghanistan, where our actions were supported by most of the population, Bush decided to use the terrorism ploy as an excuse to attack Iraq. This resulted in shifting our resources away from Afghanistan. Events today show how weak the Afghan government is despite billions in aid, and how unable it is to create a functioning and democratic country. Introducing democracy to countries where it did not exist is no easy task, but it is one that the Bush Administration was ignorant of or grossly underestimated. This inability to plan beyond military adventure has crippled Iraq and as is now becoming apparent doing the same in Afghanistan.

A massive car bomb recently killed 16 people in Kabul. In the southern provinces that spawned the Taliban movement, open warfare has resumed after four years of relative quiet. Insurgents are battling NATO troops and employing suicide bombs. Thousands of villagers have fled their homes, to escape both insurgent violence and NATO air strikes. Schools have shut down, and development projects have stopped.

NATO's commanding general, citing the surprising toughness of the insurgents, called last week on member nations to provide as many as 2,500 additional troops for the south. But the proposal faces questions in European capitals about the risks involved. Since taking responsibility for the south from U.S.-led forces at the beginning of August, NATO has lost 35 troops.

Even in the north and west, where the insurgency has hardly reached, many people today express dismay with the government of President Hamid Karzai. They say it remains weak and distant, that public services and protection are grossly inadequate, and that commanders from the war against Soviet troops in the 1980s often hold extortionate sway over daily life.

For the first four years after Karzai came to office in late 2001, such harsh criticism was rare. The influx of foreign support -- more than $3.5 billion in U.S. economic aid alone -- brought a sense of progress. More than 6 million children were enrolled in schools; crews built a new highway between the two major cities, Kabul and Kandahar; and the economy grew at a brisk 15 percent a year.

But the high expectations that democracy would deliver jobs and development has gradually turned to bitter disappointment as reports of corruption spread and the massive doses of foreign aid seemed to produce few tangible benefits for the poor.

The strong initial welcome for U.S. and other foreign troops in the country also began to chill. There were complaints about air strikes on village compounds that killed civilians. As the insurgency erupted this year, with more firefights and bombings in civilian areas, Afghans began blaming the foreign soldiers for exposing them to danger.

Many Afghan Muslims also began to equate modernization with immorality. They mistrusted the emancipation of women enshrined in the new charter and disapproved of Kabul restaurants selling alcohol to foreigners. Earlier this year, an Afghan man was nearly sentenced to death for converting to Christianity.

With the insurgents exploiting government weaknesses and public frustrations, a variety of experts have warned that the achievements of the past five years -- and even the stability of the Afghan government -- could be in serious jeopardy.

Barnett R. Rubin, an American expert on Afghanistan, conducted a broad survey here last month. In a resulting report, "Still Ours to Lose: Afghanistan on the Brink," sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, he wrote that many Afghans had lost faith in the Karzai government and that some felt conditions in the country were "ripe for fundamentalism."

Salvaging the situation, Rubin wrote, will require a major increase and redirection in foreign aid, serious reforms in the justice and police systems, and the shutting down of Taliban support networks in neighboring Pakistan -- none of which seems likely to happen in the near future.

Surprise – We’ve Been Lied To

Today’s news comes courtesy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and reveals that while the President and his accomplices were telling us that Saddam had contacts with Al Qaeda, CIA analysts were stating the opposite. In fact besides not wanting any relationship he was actually trying to capture Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. As reported in The Washington Post:

As recently as Aug. 21 [2006], Bush suggested a link between Hussein and Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed by U.S. forces this summer. But a CIA assessment in October 2005 concluded that Hussein's government "did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates," according to the report.

The report also highlighted the role of Iraqi exiles from the Iraqi National Congress and their disproportionate influence on the Defense Department. The CIA believed as early as 2002 that Iranian intelligence operatives infiltrated the INC and were feeding the Administration false reports. Despite this analysis, the Bush Administration responded by increasing the money we were giving the INC.

The result of all this, in addition to misleading the American public, is that we wound up doing Iran’s bidding by removing Saddam on Iran’s western border and the Taliban on their eastern border. We have spent enormous resources, weakened our position in the world while all the time enhancing a key member in the “Axis of Evil.”

Every American ought to gag whenever President Bush talks about how only he can fight the terrorist organizations arrayed against us. The incompetence of this administration at home and abroad is breath taking. If only the Democrats are smart enough to pound this message home during the next two months before the elections.

For further evidence of gross mismanagement, the Post today quoted the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps, Brig. Gen. Mark E. Scheid, who said that long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq.

Scheid was a colonel with the U.S. Central Command, the unit that oversees military operations in the Middle East, in late 2001 when Rumsfeld "told us to get ready for Iraq."

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us . . . that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4" -- plans that covered post-invasion operations such as security, stability and reconstruction, said Scheid, who is retiring in about three weeks, but "I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that."