McChrystal: More Forces or 'Mission Failure'

Talk about shaping the debate. There should be no debate. The Afghan war should be over. But, just like the surge in Iraq seemed ridiculous when it was first suggested, another surge, even more ridiculous, is now being suggested.

Of course with the appointment of General McChrystal, this recommendation became inevitable. McChrystal is an "expert" in counterinsurgency, a buddy of General Petraeus, and was involved in the Pat Tillman cover up. What else would you expect of him.

So now the media and neo cons will be debating more troops for Afghanistan. The debate will evolve into "how many more". The legitimacy of the war will be pushed into the background. Yes the U.S. has perfected the formula for never ending war. What will Canada do? Peacenik hopes Canada will say "enough is enough", and bring the troops home now.

Top U.S. Commander For Afghan War Calls Next 12 Months Decisive

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 21, 2009

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict "will likely result in failure," according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

Read on...

The myth of the "surge"

punditman says...Oh yeah, Iraq. All is not well. As this article points out, the surge always had that obvious propaganda value attached to it.

With the level of violence rising and the Kurds pressing for a level of autonomy that borders on independence, can we finally dispense with the myth that the 2007 "surge" in Iraq was a success?

The surge had two main goals. The first goal was to bring the level of violence down by increasing U.S. force levels in key areas, forging a tactical alliance with cooperative Sunni groups, and shifting to a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasized population protection. This aspect of the surge succeeded, though it is still hard to know how much of the progress was due to increased force levels and improved tactics and how much was due to other developments, such as the prior "ethnic cleansing" that had separated the contending groups.

The second and equally important goal was to promote political reconciliation among the competing factions in Iraq. This goal was not achieved, and the consequences of that failure are increasingly apparent. What lies ahead is a long-delayed test of strength between the various contending groups, until a new formula for allocating political power emerges. That formula has been missing since before the United States invaded -- that is, Washington never had a plausible plan for reconstructing a workable Iraqi state once it dismantled Saddam's regime -- and it will be up to the Iraqi people to work it out amongst themselves. It won’t be pretty.

Keep Reading...

Forget the Surge -- Violence Is Down in Iraq Because Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective

By Juan Cole
www.juancole.com

Editor's note: John McCain's latest stumble in discussing Iraq -- in which he muddled the timeline of the so-called "surge" -- was treated by most of the press as an unfortunate gaffe, rather than further proof that the aspiring commander in chief does not know what he's talking about when it comes to the war and occupation. (One CNN report actually ran the headline: "McCain Broadens Definition of the Surge.") Meanwhile, the Republican nominee's recent attacks on Barack Obama for failing to admit the success of the "surge" was widely reported by the same members of the media, whose dominant and uncritical narrative has long been that, as McCain and Bush contend, the "surge" has been an unqualified success. "Why can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would?" a USA Today editorial asked last week.

Keep Reading...

Peacenik ponders...Why it is that the media and most polticians have deemed the surge a success? Forget the failed timeline, the unmet performance measures, the violence and the ethnic cleansing. Read Juan Cole's sad overview, above. And try and remember the CNN footage from the days before shock and awe when there was a vibrant city life and street life in Bahgdad. When there was a sophisticated, educated, civil society.....

Iraq: Five Years of War

...and the Media are still M.I.A.

punditman says...

Five years of combat, over 1.2 million Iraqi deaths, almost 4,000 American dead and tens of thousands of US wounded -- and still, the Iraq War's apologists and its media sycophants still don't get it. Or they refuse to. Instead, they remain so blinded by chesty notions of "American exceptionalism" and "good intentions" that they still can't see the desert for the shrubs.

Meanwhile, Iraq drowns in an ocean of suffering.

And whose fault could this be? According to the war's apologists, it lies not only with Jihadists and suicide bombers (who, it should be stressed, were conspicuously missing in pre-invasion Iraq), and other insurgents, who for some reason refuse to lay down their arms -- but also with the incompetents responsible for the "poor planning" behind the occupation and the lack of a "effective counter-insurgency strategy." In other words, blame the bureaucrats for messing up an otherwise "noble project." Missing from this analysis is the vileness of the project itself. Also missing is any hint that those who are directly responsible should be held directly accountable; namely, the Bush administration and others in the "coalition of the willing."

Typical of this mindset are the views expressed in an article by Pulitzer prize winner, John F. Burns, of the New York Times, entitled No end in sight to bleeding in Iraq.

Burns chronicles his and other journalists' boosterism as the first bombs began to fall on Baghdad five years ago:

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a few Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of targets in the Iraqi capital.We were on the 21st-storey roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein's command complex across the Tigris River.

The first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the U.S. occupation, the Green Zone. Then missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam's tyranny. Iraqis yearning for their liberation called it "the air show.''

Among many on the roof, there was a sense that the suffering of millions of Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending. Those missiles and bombs seemed to be retribution for a ruthless dictator and the wretchedness he had visited on Iraq's people.

I get it. So the sentiment went something like this: "Yeah, sure, war is hell and all that, but we're embedded with the good guys...now on with the big event"!

Burns sees the whole Iraq debacle primarily in terms of a series of bureaucratic missteps, from the failure to stop mobs from looting historic sites while US marines stood by and followed their orders to protect only the Oil Ministry, to "the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the absence of a serious plan for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year."

The failure to "find" weapons of mass destruction? Is he suggesting there was something significant to find? Are we to believe he never listened to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter?, who, in the lead up to the ill-fated Iraq invasion, argued that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction?

The lack of an "effective" American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year? Ah, yes the "surge is working" -- that is if you consider ethnic cleansing and a bloody stalemate to be signs of "success."

Burns continues...

There were also instances when America's intentions were betrayed by its troops, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a teenage girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the U.S. military.

Alright, now I am embarrassed for the guy. America's "intentions" (lilly white of course), were "betrayed" by a few soldiers? What did he expect would happen? I have a sneaky feeling he may have missed a few more "instances," so perhaps he should tune in to Winter Soldier.

Burns can easily be considered an early cheerleader of the Iraq invasion -- one of those journalists who urged it on, a laptop bombardier, if you will. Here is an excerpt from an October 2007 interview with him in The Independent:

In the pages of the New York Times he has argued that, even without WMD, "the stronger case [for military intervention] was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbours."

This is liberal interventionism at its worst. Find a dictator with an appalling human rights record (easy enough), and viola! Causis belli! Invade the country, foist our Western ways on them, toss an election in and install a puppet regime. Aside from myopic idiocy, this sort of media cheerleading supports the doctrine of "preventive war," which stands in direct contravention to, and respect for, international law, treaties and institutions.

What's more, Burns sees his home-side rooting as having had no impact:

Although I was writing for an American newspaper with considerable reach and influence in Washington, DC, I didn't see myself as being a player in that process. I felt that that was something that was quite independent, at least in my mind.

Not a player? Just another "guy with an opinion" who called for the invasion of a country of 27 million people? I guess we are not supposed to notice where he works or the power of that soapbox (oddly enough, he is correct, but in hindsight: why should anyone trust the NY Times anymore, after the unmasking of Judith Miller as an administration mouthpiece in the lead up to war?).

The sycophantic mindset necessitates turning a blind eye to the crime of international aggression while ignoring other possible motives that the US and Britain might have had. Why Iraq? Why not Burma?

So, if there was no legal basis to invade Iraq, what moral imperative gave Bush the right to invade? Wait...it always comes to me...9-11! Media mealy mouths never fail to remind me of this. Never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what occurred on that fateful day. But the sycophants ignored this long established fact, and in many cases, actually parroted this Cheney fiction in the lead up to war.

In an world full of honest reporting, the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq would by now be considered, an historic crime of great magnitude. A crime not just against the Iraqi people, who did not threaten anyone, but a crime against humanity and a crime against the truth. Not so.

You would think that after the release of a study by The Centre for Public Integrity that shows that at least 935 demonstrably false statements were made on 532 separate occasions by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan -- that the media would care to report the truth about stove-piped intelligence. Not so.

What should be headline news is generally ignored or brushed aside and instead, we are supposed to believe that 935 false statements were the result of "faulty intelligence" -- instead of blatant lying and systematic propaganda.

If the mainstream media had viewed the Iraq War as the supreme crime that it is, then impeachment proceedings against Team Bush would have begun by now. And Team Blair and all other team members in the "coalition of the willing" would be facing similar charges. But not so.

Part of the basis for any such legal action would necessarily involve the idea of deliberate deception. Not surprisingly, neo-con apologists have never liked such talk. Back in July, 2003, Norman Specter wrote in the The Globe and Mail that, "The case for war did not rest on whether he (Saddam) had X number of biological weapons laboratories or Y amount of nerve agent. It rested on his record and ambitions."

At the time, Punditman wrote the following:

Well, no actually.

The "case for war", at least according to those who sent soldiers to wage it at their behest, actually rested upon Iraq being an imminent threat to the security of the US, indeed to "the peace of the world," (to pluck just one Orwellian passage from Bush's infinite inventory).

And that "case" was built upon a very specific set of claims, accusations, and assertions concerning Mr. Hussein's apparent possession of "vast quantities" of WMDs and his supposed links to Al Queda. These "facts" we were told, left the United States and Britain no choice but to attack ASAP. The cruelty of Saddam's regime and his previous aggressions and miscalculations notwithstanding were simply ad-on pretexts for regime change, once it became clear that the world wasn't buying the Bush-Blair "case for war."

Finally, you would think--you would hope, by now--that establishment media would at least view the Iraqi catastrophe through the lens of the victims while pointing out the underlying cause of the tragedy. Not so.

In June 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees published a study that estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighbouring countries, another 2 million were displaced internally and 40% of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled the country.

Meanwhile, in the seven months preceding the end of May, 2007, a mere 69 Iraqis were given refugee status in the United States. Good luck to the Iraqi refugee trying to flee to America! And yet his or her plight is the direct result of the violence and chaos brought about by this horrific war--a war initiated by the United States, a war that was unnecessary, unprovoked, and illegal -- and a war that has made conditions much worse in the region and, in many ways, much worse for America itself.

Then again, average Iraqis, and I dare say average Americans, were never the main concern of those who have so callously plotted their destinies, their deaths and their sufferings.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to do their job of masquerading as a functioning "fourth estate" -- as they kiss the king's behind.

The Iraq War: Going, Going...

Retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan explained to the Washington Post his reasons for rejecting the “war czar” job: “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going. … So rather than go over there [to the White House], develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.’”

If he can delay a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq until after a new President takes office in January 2009, Bush can insist that someone else was to blame for the defeat.

Bush will have built a moat around his political legacy with the blood of American soldiers and the Iraqi people.

punditan says:
It was apparent to anyone with a brain that the so-called "surge" wouldn't work. Now it should be obvious to even the dimmest bulb in the neo-con/redneck camp, that it isn't working, won't work, and quite possibly has nothing to do with succeeding at all and more to do with Bush remaining engaged in Iraq until the end of his term--an unconscionable waste of lives.