Edgewise

Army recruiters tell students war in Iraq is over

ABC News: Army Recruiters Accused of Misleading Students to Get Them to Enlist:

But if they study hard they won’t get stuck in Iraq.

21st Century Lou

Here’s a swank new version of Walk on the Wild Side, from Lou “Mr.” Reed, with updated lyrics for this modern world. Worth a listen….

Flat Daddies

Warning: This NYT article may flatten your heart.

update: of course, I realize now that not everyone has a NYT account, and with no account, no article. So here’s an excerpt just to get the gist across:

HERMON, Me. — It was the first day of school, and distance not withstanding, 9-year-old Baylee Smith wanted to take a picture with her father, Mark, who is stationed with a National Guard unit in Afghanistan. Real daddy was not available, but Sergeant Smith’s doppelganger was.

Jennifer Smith taking a photo of Derek, left, Baylee, and Alec with a cutout of their father, Master Sgt. Mark Smith, on duty in Afghanistan.

“Where’s Flat Daddy?” an excited Baylee asked as her stepmother, Jennifer Smith, pulled a large cardboard picture of Sergeant Smith, in his uniform, out of her Chevy Blazer and propped him on the bumper. The two, along with Ms. Smith’s young sons, Alec and Derek, posed for a picture with their Flat Daddy, who promptly fell down.

“Stop it Dad, that’s not funny. It’s not a joke,” Baylee said with a laugh.

The Maine National Guard is giving life-size from-the-waist-up pictures of soldiers to the families of deployed guard members. Guard officials and families say the cutouts, known as Flat Daddies or Flat Soldiers, connect families with a relative who is thousands of miles away. The Flat Daddies are toted everywhere from soccer practice to coffee shops to weddings.

What did Bush do about Al Qaeda in his first 8 months?

After the back and forth ‘tween Bill Clinton and Condi Rice this past week re who did what to stop Al Qaeda pre-9/11, Countdown took an interesting look at how the Bush Administration’s spent its first 8 months. The transcript is posted online, as well as a video that’s well worth watching. Note: The meat of the matter kicks off about 4 minutes into the video stream.

Oops!

You almost have to feel sorry for Tony Snow for how unbelievably off-the-charts wrong he was.

Almost.

Flip your WHIG

Over at Hullabaloo, Digby explains how the Plame investigation could conceivably unravel the conspiracy to build a false case for war in Iraq.

Grotian to the max

One of the best ways to follow Saddam Hussein's trial may just be Case School of Law's new Grotian Moment Blog.

(via TalkLeft)

Karl Rove prepared for war

I'm not sure Rove is prepared for the way these liberal soldiers and veterans are pissed at his divisive comments about how different Americans responded to 9/11: Take it to Karl

The press gang redux

I realize the military is hard-up for recruits but I have nothing but respect for the Marines, so I was dismayed to read this article: When Marine recruiters go way beyond the call.

Do we really need to take advantage of the young and unworldy to fill our ranks? If so, we're in more trouble than I thought.

Why I don't give a shit about Laura Bush's jokes

Quoting from Attytood: W.'s "runaway bride" and the 'gotcha' story that wasn't gotten:

Laura Bush telling a scripted joke isn't news anymore than is a troubled woman walking out on a wedding and panicking. There's one striking thing we didn't see on all the First Lady video overkill, and that was any of the guffawing journalists -- that pack of predators -- bolting from their fancy tables to cover a big breaking news story.

Because there was one. Oh, yeah. Didn't you hear? The president lied to the American people. He started a war on false pretenses, and more than 1,500 Americans -- and an untold number of Iraqis -- died.

Well, OK, you sort of knew that already, didn't you? But there wasn't a smoking gun...until now. The Times of London got hold of the secret memo from Tony Blair's pre-war deliberations that show that in the summer of 2002 - months before the Colin Powell charade at the UN - that Bush had decided to invade Iraq ... he just hadn't decided why. The story broke right around the time that Laura Bush was telling a joke about her husband jerking off a horse.

Pardon my French.

No Flawed Policies Here.

"Admiral Church concluded that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan had been the result primarily of a breakdown of discipline, not flawed policies or misguided direction"
NYT

That old "Do your own thing" military!

Got me thinking: Maybe they could have policies and direction that involved beakdowns of discipline, that discouraged them. I remember in Cub Scouts we had Pack Leaders. Maybe they could have something like that.

The made-for-TV war

According to this report (Ex-Marine Says Public Version of Saddam Capture Fiction), the much-vaunted capture of Saddam in his spiderhole was fictitious.

If true, it might be time to add your sense of what's real to the list of collateral damage from the propaganda war.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3

Hit this quote today in Pynchon's amazing Gravity's Rainbow that summed up our current political situation way too perfectly:

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Which leads back to the query my brain just can't shake:

Prince Charles and his flowering love life aside, why the [expletive] doesn't anyone in the media seem to care what the [expletive] happened in the Iraq election?

[expletive]!

update: well, my conspiracy concerns can subside at least for a bit -- the results are in and front page news.

still more update: well the news and initial analysis appears to be relatively positive. Ah, if only our country required a 2/3s vote to pick our leader.

I still think it's peculiar in a disturbing sort of way that the media just went quiet on the Iraq vote for about two weeks there. But here's hoping I was offbase with my recent alarmist rants.

Iran-Iraq: maybe, maybe not

Take 2...

Cecil was wondering whether we have just created "the perfect opening for an oil-rich anti-western Iran-Iraq alliance". I happen to think the two countries will become very tight, and posted a line about the Anschluss of the Mullahs on my blog.

My friend Mark Lew, who knows more about world politics and history than anyone else I know personally, says a full alliance of Iran and Iraq is unlikely. He posted a comment to my "Anschluss" post sketching why, and he has analyzed this in more depth on his own blog; specific post is here.

Can anyone explain to me...

...without diving into conspiracy (already got that covered -- thanks...) why it might be that the election results in Iraq are getting close to zero media attention?

A week ago this was the election of the century. Anybody remember purple fingers?

I get that they must still be counting the votes, but in this 24-hour news world, how can it be that we aren't getting nightly updates of how things are looking, when the results will be in, what the implications are?

Have we all had our memories cleaned? Or am I just missing something here...?

Is this the week Iran won the Iran-Iraq war?

I read the news today and got a cold feeling inside. Have we just spent all this blood and treasure to create the perfect opening for an oil-rich anti-western Iran-Iraq alliance, complete with US-trained and armed troops? And will Bush's great purple-stained success this week turn out to be yet another naive move by wide-eyed, naive, idealistic conservatives, and perhaps the biggest strategic blunder in modern US history?

I sure as hell hope not.

Iraqi elections are a good thing

That should go without saying. Opposing the war, thinking the opportunity costs weren't weighed properly, despairing of U.S. leadership - none of that constitutes opposition to democratic elections. While I may have my doubts and pessimism about the entire operation and I may worry about how it will all come out, I don't see any reason to detract from today's election.

Corporate libertarian values liberal Jeff Jarvis takes the anti-war bloggers to task for their pessimism about the election. In the overall context of Bush-era mendacity and geopolitical spasms, I think it's understandable to have doubts or to be wary about cheerleading for anything with the fingerprints of this administration on it. But to me it's like being glad Saddam is out of power. I may argue about whether the cost was worth it (see previous post) but you can't make me say it's a bad thing in and of itself.

Truth and consequences

Good discussion in the comment thread for a recent post at Max Sawicky's weblog (MaxSpeak, You Listen!):

That Hussein and the Ba'athist government of Iraq no longer seek a nuclear weapon is good, but if one had given me $200 billion and authorization to get up to 1400 Americans killed and ten thousand wounded to insure that Saddam doesn't get a nuclear weapon for the foreseeable future, with the agreement that I get to keep the change and revel in the transcendant joy of sending each of the surviving, able-bodied Americans home to his grateful family, I suspect I could have done an awful lot better than George W. Bush has.

And that's not mentioning the number of Iraqi dead and hurt from military or [Iraqi] criminal activity, malnutrition, and the like.

And that's what we're talking about: efficiency in a world of relative value and limited resources. Not absolutes. Having been beguiled by absolutes and been made servant to our fears, we've bogged down half of America's ground forces in a vast undermanned nation-building mission, a task far more daunting than merely keeping Saddam and The Bomb in separate rooms.

Why not admit that critics of the Bush Administration might find its [stated] aims - a safe, free world - admirable, but believe that Bush deliberately avoids counting the costs to us and to the world? And that a real, transparent discussion and popular acceptance of the costs is essential to the success of the enterprise?

Indeed, acknowledgement of costs are missing from critiques like [Instapundit Glenn] Reynolds', and absent from policy statements from the White House in all but the vaguest terms. We are effectively assured, then, that a total committment to world freedom doesn't really mean a total dedication of this nation's future, its economy, its youth, to reaching it....

I realize, now, that considering costs was never part of this "Bush Doctrine", because costs are, intrinsically, questions, and questions are obviously, doubts, which faith, true belief, can't admit. To mention costs is to imply choice, to impugn destiny, to face the possibility of failure. And, well, to do that is treasonable, even if history's dustbin is full of leaders and ruling elites who launched grand schemes on misplaced faith.

What are they thinking?

The Poor Man read the Moonie Times to learn that we've got Israeli-trained Kurds and Saddam-loving terrorists infiltrating Iran in the north and the south.

The second group, working from the south, is the Mujahedeen-e Khalq, listed by the State Department as a terrorist group, operating from southern Iraq, these sources said.

The use of the MEK for U.S.-intelligence-gathering missions strikes some former U.S. intelligence officials as bizarre. The State Department's annual publication, "Patterns of Global Terrorism," lists them as a terrorist organization.

According to the State Department report, the MEK were allies with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in fighting Iran and, in addition, assisted Saddam in "suppressing opposition within Iraq, and performed internal security for the Iraqi regime."

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Subduing California (a fable)

In Ungrateful Californians, the author the Iraqi Letter to America blog posits a hypothetical fairy tale in which it isn't the medfly but Californians themselves, in their flowered shirts, who are targeted for "help."

You loved them in Salvador; you'll trust them in Iraq

According to this Newsweek option, The Salvador Option, "we" are considering arming and training death squads to help quell the insurgency in Iraq and to improve our image in the Muslim world. Well, maybe not that latter part.

Yes, I know this has been the talk of the left blogsophere for over a week. Many of our readers, though, aren't obsessed blogjunkies, and this plan needs as wide an airing as possible.

Were we really paranoid about them putting people like Negroponte back into power?

Will they ever forgive us?

Grand Forks Herald | 12/06/2004 | COLUMNIST LLOYD OMDAHL : Honoring a Guardsman's request (via Eschaton)

War goes well, if you watch it on FOX

Quoting from J. Bradford DeLong (Most Valuable Outfielder):

In the Agora wins the most valuable outfielder award with this catch:

In the Agora: Ummm... Reverend Jerry Falwell, guest hosting on yesterday's Crossfire, said that the Iraq war "goes pretty well if you watch it on FOX." You can watch the video clip here. We report, you decide.

Simply wonderful, on many levels.

How to win hearts and minds in Iraq

The following consists of some tactical suggestions for engaging with the population in Iraq from an active duty soldier currently stationed in Iraq who prefers to remain anonymous:

One thing I would do is start taking an honest accounting of collateral damage. Moral considerations aside, refusing to count civilian casualties is blinding us to a serious grievance on the part of the Iraqi people. The insurgency is able to exploit this grievance. In addition, without counting civilian casualties we have little incentive to move toward tactics and technologies that can reduce collateral damage. An increased emphasis on sub-lethal technologies might yield good results. For example, instead of using explosives against an insurgent strong point, perhaps we could use concussion rounds and riot agents, and then follow swiftly with an infantry assault. (Just speculating on specific tactics here - I'm not an infantryman and I don't have a combat-eye view of what's actually going on.)

I would also push translation capability down to the lowest level possible. In many cases translators, if they are available at all, are often tied up at staff levels instead of going out on patrol with the grunts. If I had my way, every platoon would get a good translator to help the platoon read the street and the situation. Currently most of those translators would be contractors - there simply aren't enough trained military personnel to fulfill that role. Concurrent with this effort I would be seriously revamping the Arabic language program at the Defense Language Institute - and implementing new programs in languages like Kurdish and Pashtun, which are still very under-represented. In fact, the Army historically has an absolutely lousy track record when it comes to linguistic capability. Case in point: Guess by what percentage the Arabic faculty grew at DLI after Gulf War I? Zero percent, that's how much. I still can't wrap my head around that.

In addition, I think we just need more soldiers here. The Pentagon claims we have plenty of soldiers, but I've yet to meet a guy in uniform who believed that. If we have all these soldiers available, where the hell are they? There are generally not enough troops in place here to actually provide both meaningful stability and contingency force projection into trouble areas. In other words, if we need to go on a major offensive, we get spread rather thin. The Pentagon continues to argue against a permanent increase in force structure, saying that those soldiers may not be needed in the future and would be expensive to maintain. So we continue to tax our regular Army and Marine units with repeated tours (my own unit will be returning to theater within nine months of going home) while attempting to plug the gap with poorly trained and equipped Gaurd and Reservists. To me this like maxing out your credit card while simultaneously failing to put up good long-term investments. Only instead of money, it's blood.

I also think there needs to be a sea change in the way we equip our forces, starting from the ground up. In many ways our military is still focused on high-tech, maneuver warfare style weapons. Technology does have it's place - we are making a rather good thing of UAVs, for example. But the battle is really being won or lost by the grunts on the ground, and that's where we should be focusing our efforts in my opinion. We are doing this to some extent - the Rapid Fielding Initiative here in theater went a long way toward providing soldiers with things like better boots and sunglasses, things they would ordinarily have to shell out their own cash for. (I personally got a great pair of boots.) Weapons improvements have also been part of the RFI. But I think we need to do more. For example, the body armor is still really damn heavy. We might also do more with microelectronics - I wonder, for example, if a PDA-based translation program would be useful. I know such a system has been tested here, but I have yet to see it in wide use. And finally, I think we need to relook some of our basic weapons systems, even taking lessons from the insurgency. Every bad guy and his brother has an RPG here. Why not? It's light, it's cheap, and it's effective. We, on the other hand, have the AT-4. It's heavy, it's expensive, and you only get one shot - after firing it, you dispose of the tube. Kinda stupid. We need our own reusable-type RPG.

And of course, we need more HMMWV and other trucks which are hardened against RPGs and IEDs. The Army is also trying to do this. I am also seeing some very novel (often homemade) gun truck arrangments. Typically a truck has only one crew-served heavy weapon. Now we are seeing trucks which have two crew-serve weapons, one at the front and one at the rear. It makes sense.

Also, I would change the focus of our civil affairs work. According to my understanding, the civil affairs guys now go out and survey an area for local needs, and then attempt to find local contractors to build the needed service. However, this is still kind of a money-and-technology heavy focus. While that has its place, I would also look right at the dirt level for small but effective ways to improve the lives of the poorest locals. The idea here is appropriate technology. I would love to see Army guys teaching small-scale water purification or fired-earth housing technology, for example. It would be great if US military forces or associated NGOs could set up small remote communities with their own renewable power systems instead of relying on large centralized power plants.

And finally, we really need to be winning the perception management battle among Arabs and other ethnic groups in this area. (That includes Persians and Kurds.) This will require, among other things, more public presentations of the way we are helping the Iraqi people. And just using photo ops isn't enough, we need to be actually doing this in a big way. We already treat some local nationals in US military hospitals - that stuff needs to be on TV a lot more, and on Arabic channels instead of just western channels. And there needs to be more of it - I would say a crash program in creating and supporting local clinics, probably in conjunction with various NGOs, would help a lot. I don't think there is any such thing as healing too many people.

Those are a few tactical ideas, anyway. Don't know if we'll ever get to that point.

The Iraqization Program

But the police have performed poorly in the Sunni Muslim areas in central and northwestern Iraq.... A wave of attacks [in Mosul] on police stations and other government buildings prompted 3,200 of the city's 4,000 police officers to abandon their jobs.

DKo: The apparent reliance on former Kurdish militia as backup is explosive, especially with the oil wealth of Kirkuk literally on the provincial dividing line. The Coalition of Willing Allies will be rapidly dwindling in the next few months too. All of which tends to make Moktada al Sadr the tipping point, hence the kingmaker. Will the US accept that? Can Bush sell it as the successs that vindicates the war?

Bremer echoes Kerry's criticism of Iraq planning

From the Post, via MSNBC.com:

Bremer's comments were striking because they echoed contentions of many administration critics, including Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry, who argue that the U.S. government failed to plan adequately to maintain security in Iraq after the invasion. Bremer has generally defended the U.S. approach in Iraq but in recent weeks has begun to criticize the administration for tactical and policy shortfalls.

Read the whole story, here.

Absence of proof

Bad Attitudes journal reports on Rumsfeld's triumphal tour and the search for deadly precursors of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

"Listen," said the threateningly affable defense secretary, "wouldn't you expect a man like Saddam to hide his weapons of mass destruction? Last time I checked, hidden means you can't find them. In fact if we could find them, it would be proof that they weren't hidden and consequently proof of their nonexistence because we happen to know they are hidden."