Category: Iraq

John McCain is riding high in the polls right now. As of right now, he seems to be on the inside track to win the Presidential nomination. He is one of the few candidates who is currently leading Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the general election polls. And yet, it turns out that the McCain Doctrine on Iraq is now unraveling.

John McCain, whose campaign was left for dead last summer, was able to revive in part by portraying himself as a heroic figure who stood up and challenged the Bush administration on Iraq and called out Donald Rumsfeld. He was therefore able to attract Republican critics of the war that might otherwise have gone to Ron Paul; he was able to attract them by showing how the war was allegedly mismanaged. But McCain is now a ticking time bomb who is in danger of imploding. He hitched his wagons to the Petraeus Surge so that when there was more stability in Iraq, he could turn around and say that he was right all along. Already, Mitt Romney is drawing even with McCain in the polls in Florida.

John McCain’s political fortunes in this race rise or fall with the success or failure of the “surge.” And given the stories below, it seems that it has not addressed the ongoing violence in Iraq. People may argue at this point that there is a lot more stability in Iraq than there was several months ago. But the current relative stability in Iraq has nothing to do with the so-called “surge.” But it turns out that the current stability, which could unravel at any time, was a result of deals that were brokered by Northern Ireland and South African negotiators and 16 of the main Iraqi political factions. So, even if there was stability, John McCain cannot justifiably claim credit for it in the first place.

Greyhawk had this posted at ePluribus about the Military breaking ranks with the White House on the propaganda about the Successful Surge with only this one snippet

“Don’t let the quiet fool you,” a senior defense official says. “There’s still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the ‘surge’ has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That’s just ludicrous. There’s increasing quiet in Iraq, but that’s happened because of our shift in strategy – the ‘surge’ had nothing to do with it.”

And just a few sentences, so I followed the link. Here’s abit more to hopefully get you to drop over to the Asia Times online and read the rest.

Joe Johns of CNN asked Hillary Clinton:

Last week, you said the next president will, quote, “have a war to end in Iraq.” In light of the new military and political progress on the ground there in Iraq, are you looking to end this war or win it?

To her credit, Clinton didn’t take the bait, responding well to that inane question:

I’m looking to bring our troops home, starting within 60 days of my becoming president, and here’s why, Joe. I have the greatest admiration for the American military. I serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I’ve been to Iraq three times. I’ve met with the leaders of the various factions. But there is no military solution, and our young men and women should not remain as the referees of their conflict.

Barack Obama and John Edwards also said they want to extract US troops and disengage, to a large degree, from Iraq.  There are nuances, different language, different timelines, but none of the Democrats’ Big Three is espousing “winning” in Iraq. Transcript.

It makes you wonder just what might constitute “victory.”  Someone should have asked Joe Johns.  Or maybe John “100-Years-War” McCain or one of the other rabid Republicans would like to take a crack at it.

If victory means getting out alive, it’s too late for nearly 4,000 US troops, and more than a million Iraqis.

Was regime change the goal?  Would that constitute victory?

If so, US troops should have come home after George Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” stunt.  Saddam has not only been deposed, but captured and brutally executed.  That shouls make us all feel better, even if it turns our that Bin Laden guy was in another country and is still at large, and that Saddam really wasn’t intent on blowing up the world, or at least didn’t have the capability even if he would have liked to.

A stable and successful Iraq will directly improve the national security of our own country,” said Congressman Joe Wilson (SC-02), Co-Chair of the Victory in Iraq Caucus. “Today, we were grateful to be joined by (USAID) Director (Dawn) Liberi and General (John) Kelly, two officials who recognize the tremendous importance of building a civil society in Iraq and are dedicated to successfully completing this mission. Under their leadership, thousands of brave American men and women are working tirelessly to help ensure Iraqis live in a stable, democratic, and prosperous state.” — Link.

“Stable, democratic and prosperous.”  Waiting for that to come true really could mean a Hundred Years War.  Political progress has been and will remain elusive.

Was access to oil our goal, as some critics claim?  We seem to be able to buy all we want, as long as we’re willing to pay in the neighborhood of twice what it cost a year ago. That hardly seems like victory.

Making money for Halliburton and KBR?  Only the most cynical would suggest that Bush and Cheney started a war to help their old friends and political cronies.  More likely that was just one of the positive side effects, from the Bush-Cheney point of view.  Sort of like collateral damage to the US taxpayers and economy.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that funneling tons of money to Halliburton was the goal. Then this administration really has accomplished its mission, and it’s time to declare victory and bring the troops home.

I don’t think it’s the “I have a dream”  speech, either in its Washington, DC, or earlier Detroit versions.  I think Dr. King’s greatest speech was given on April 4, 1967, to a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City.  It’s “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.”  Exactly, a year later, on April 4, 1968, Dr. King was murdered in Memphis.

Dr. King’s holiday is a day when I hope we can pause for a moment to remember Dr. King, to read this timeless speech of four decades ago, and to recommit ourselves to the struggle for peace and justice.  And most important, I hope we can find ways to re-dedicate ourselves to action for peace and justice.

It’s also important to remember on this holiday not the sanitized, uncontroversial, bland version of Dr. King that the traditional media now commemorate.  The version who gave the “I have a dream speech” and did nothing else of importance.  To the contrary, it’s extremely important to remember the Dr. King who was wiretapped and surveilled by the FBI and state governments, and who was constantly attacked in the media as a Communist and an outside agitator and a revolutionary.  And the Dr. King who was despite his courage in actual physical danger, along with his wife and children, for every waking minute of every one of his days.  And the Dr. King who was threatened quite publicly with lynching and bombing and shooting so regularly by racists, white supremacists and reactionaries of every stripe. And the Dr. King about whom so many Americans expressed their outspoken hatred and contempt even in polite company, at the dinner table, and in their houses of worship.

Join me at the Riverside Church.  

There are no photos of this week’s Iraq Moratorium vigil in downtown Milwaukee.  The battery in the digital camera froze.

About 40 people turned out in the bitter cold, and marched with flags, banners, signs and drums past City Hall, then gathered on four corners of the main downtown intersection.

“I was feeling a little wimpy, like maybe it was too cold to come, but I decided that if 70,000 people could go to the Packers game Sunday, when it will be colder than this, I could come out here for an hour to try to stop the war,” one vigiler said.

The tundra was frozen in Hayward, a city of 2,200 in northwestern Wisconsin which has led the nation in percentage of the population turning out for Iraq Moratorium vigils.  Attendance was down from the high of 83 in December, but, as one of the organizers reports on the scene below:

 

24 determined, (and half crazy!) peace supporters braved 20 below zero windchills to stand for an hour in observance of Iraq Moratorium Day #5. We had mostly encouraging responses from motorists who seemed both delighted, and incredulous, at our presence on the street corner.

At 4:45 p.m. some folks suggested that we knock off early due to the bitterly cold winds, but a couple of hardcore skier/peace types shouted, “No! We came to stand for an hour, and for an hour we’ll stand!” We hunkered down, and at 5 p.m. sharp a great cheer went up as we headed for the warmth of vehicles that had been idling for half an hour in the parking lot. See you in February!!

That’s hard core.

Those are among the reports beginning to trickle in to the Iraq Moratorium website in the wake of Friday’s actions, numbering about 90 across the country.  Typically, many more will be posted during the coming week, many with photos and videos.

In Mountain View, California, where the weather was a bit warmer, the Raging Grannies Action League “welcomed” a new armed forces recruiting station to the neighborhood — and let the recruiters know they were invading the Grannies’ turf.  “Killing and Dying is not a career,” the Grannies said.

Iraq Moratorium #6 falls on February 15, the Third Friday of the month.  Now’s the time to start planning, and share your plans and ideas with others at IraqMoratorium.org

P.S. — Go Pack!

Families gathered at the 5th Marine Regiment Memorial Park at Camp Pendleton, Calif.,(right) to spend their last few moments with loved ones before they left for Iraq. Regimental Combat Team 5 left Camp Pendleton on January 3 for their one year deployment to the Al Anbar province of Iraq.– USMC Photo.

While my old regiment ships out again,I have to ask:

Are we headed, as many in the antiwar movement have feared, into an Iraq-free zone during this election season?  Have the Dems decided to wait until next year to try to do anything?

Noah Feldman, in last Sunday’s NY Times magazine:  

What if the United States were at war during a presidential election – and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there – a probable result of current policy – the war may disappear even more completely in the new year…

… elections demand that candidates differentiate themselves, yet various plausible front-runners’ positions on Iraq are not all that far apart. There are subtle differences regarding the completeness and timing of withdrawal: John Edwards, for instance, says he would remove even the troops who are training the Iraqi Army and police. But basically, the leading doves say they want to leave, but not too fast; while the hawks claim they want to stay, but not too long.

This week’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas highlighted what Feldman said.  Clinton, Obama and Edwards all offered their nuanced positions, including this clarification of an old question about whether they would have all US troops out by 2013:

(Follow below the fold- ek hornbeck)

^{(Iraq Moratorium)}

This morning’s NY Times brought this news:

The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018.

If you were a Democrat running for president to end the war in Iraq, you’d be reacting quickly to that sort of news.

But if there is any sort of blowback — or even concern expressed — by the Democratic candidates, I’ve missed it.  

It’s tempting to say that Afghanistan represents the Bush Administration’s supreme failure. I’ve made that claim, in the past. But that presumes that the Bush Administration was, in the the smallest degree, interested in catching the people who attacked us on September 11, 2001, and in keeping this nation safe. Of course, some have done very well, from Bush’s wars. Meanwhile, the collective wisdom of the more than 100 bipartisan foreign-policy experts consulted by Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress to form The Terrorism Index led to this summary:

The world these experts see today is one that continues to grow more threatening. Fully 91 percent say the world is becoming more dangerous for Americans and the United States, up 10 percentage points since February. Eighty-four percent do not believe the United States is winning the war on terror, an increase of 9 percentage points from six months ago. More than 80 percent expect a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 within a decade, a result that is more or less unchanged from one year ago.

But, of course, if the Bush Administration actually gave a damn about national security, and catching the terrorists who attacked us, they’d have done something about it. Instead, their incompetence allowed Osama bin Laden to get away, when he could have been caught or killed, at the battle of Tora Bora. They disastrously shifted their focus from those who had attacked us to those who never had, and because of that, the Taliban are growing stronger both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while Al Qaeda has also regrouped and grown stronger in both countries. In fact, both countries are having to negotiate with the Taliban, and bin Laden, himself, is even now well-positioned to launch another attack.

If this war actually was about justice and security, rather than profits, it would be correctly seen as the signature failure of the singularly disastrous administration. Bush is destroying the Constitution and violating international law, not to mention the basic laws of humanity and morality, but he has not made America safer, and he has not caught the people who committed the worst ever act of terrorism on American soil. It would be surreal, were it not so damnable.  

As everyone knows, the NIE (“National Intelligence Estimate”) advised that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.  Bush was aware of this as far back as August, 2007, and probably sooner, if the truth be known.

Nonetheless, nothing has stopped him from continuing his rant about how dangerous Iran is to us and the world.  And in December, 2007, and this month, January, 2008, his efforts increased.

His trip to the Middle East of January 8, 2008, supposedly predicated on a wish to help the peace effort between Palestine and Israel, and a meeting with both leaders (for the first time), also included Kuwait to meet with U.S. troops [to prep them?], Amb. Cocker and Gen. Petraeus and [hold onto your seats] to hold round-table discussion on democracy with Kuwaiti women, Bahrain for meeting with King Hamad and visits with U.S. Navy 5th fleet, United Arab Emirates, to meet with Pres. Sheikh Khalifa and deliver a speech in Abu Dhabi, then to Dubai and to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Abdullah, then meetings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and then to Sharm el-sheikh, Egypt, to meet with Pres. Hosni Mubarak and then return to the U.S. on Jan. 16th.

. . . . Bush hopes to spur negotiations among Israeli and Palestinian leaders vowing to make peace and lay the ground work for two independent states by year’s end. . . . .

and this is the best:

. . . . Bush, also touring several Arab nations, will address more than the role they can play in encouraging reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. He also will explain his vision for democracy in Iraq and his concern about the potential security threat posed by Iran. . . .(emphasis mine)

The article goes on at great length about the so-called efforts Bush hopes to make toward the Israeli – Palestinian conflict and peace negotiations.  Doubt as Bush set to visit Mideast — Chances called slim for breakthroughs as final year begins.  

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