not freaking out, I just think the small government argument is always presented with the false subtext that the federal government is a monstrous behemoth that is growing at an exponnetial rate.
Paying the army you just dissolved is. They are paying unemployed people to stay unemployed. Did you read the news today? Excerpted for Mr Clutch: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...raq_lat,1,843043.story?coll=la-home-headlines . . . Still, plans for a new military remain far below the number of Hussein's ex-soldiers that Bremer abolished last month, leaving 400,000 jobless. . . . "This country was grotesquely over-militarized," Slocombe told a news conference. "It is a fact that most people who were in the old army will not be able to continue military careers.". . . . In an effort to bring greater stability, Slocombe also said today that up to 250,000 former Iraqi solders, excluding senior level Baath Party members, would receive monthly payments ranging from $50 to $150.
Well okay. But I seriously doubt that Bush plans to install socialism or to pay them forever. It is a smart move for the short term. Having these guys completely out of money is a bad idea, I think we can all agree on that.
Yes. We should just hire them as human shields for our guys, at least we'd get some use out of them. edit Now we really are going after Syria, well at least not respecting their borders... Too bad we are wussies with Pakistan or Bin Laden would be dead by now. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...4jun24,1,4355590.story?coll=la-home-headlines 7:35 PM PDT, June 23, 2003 E-mail story Print U.S. Troops Crossed Syrian Border in Hunt for Hussein Military destroyed a convoy believed to have included leaders of former Iraqi regime. Three border guards were wounded. By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — U.S. special operations troops entered Syria in pursuit of a convoy believed to be carrying former Iraqi regime leaders last week and wounded three Syrian border guards in a firefight, senior defense officials said Monday. The clash with the Syrians occurred as U.S. aircraft or commandos on the ground crossed the frontier as they closed in on the convoy. The incursion into Syrian territory underscored the risks the administration is willing to take in its stepped-up hunt for ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his sons, whom defense officials described as potential targets of the action. AC-130 gunships, other fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters destroyed the six-vehicle convoy near the Iraqi city of Qaim, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. Qaim is a border town in Iraq's western desert. American scientists will gather DNA "if appropriate" to determine if remains found at the scene of the strike match Saddam's DNA, a second Pentagon official said. The official added that the Defense Department has no details about the fate or identities of Iraqis in the convoy. Pentagon officials said that five Syrians were being held by U.S. forces and three received medical treatment. U.S. forces plan to turn the Syrians over to their government. The Americans detained about 20 others during the incident, who were later freed, Pentagon officials said. The assault targeted Iraqi "regime leadership," but the intelligence apparently was unclear on whether Saddam or either of his sons, Uday and Qusai, were in the convoy. . . .
This sounds so stupid as to be unbelievable behavior for the army doctor in question. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...ap/20030623/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_turned_away_4 Burned Iraqi Children Turned Away Mon Jun 23, 6:35 PM ET By DONNA ABU-NASR, Associated Press Writer BALAD, Iraq - On a scorching afternoon, while on duty at an Army airfield, Sgt. David J. Borell was approached by an Iraqi who pleaded for help for his three children, burned when they set fire to a bag containing explosive powder left over from war in Iraq (news - web sites). Borell immediately called for assistance. But the two Army doctors who arrived about an hour later refused to help the children because their injuries were not life-threatening and had not been inflicted by U.S. troops. Now the two girls and a boy are covered with scabs and the boy cannot use his right leg. And Borell is shattered. "I have never seen in almost 14 years of Army experience anything that callous," said Borell, who recounted the June 13 incident to The Associated Press. A U.S. military spokesman said the children's condition did not fall into a category that requires Army physicians to treat them — and that there was no inappropriate response on the part of the doctors. The incident comes at a time when U.S. troops are trying to win the confidence of Iraqis, an undertaking that has been overwhelmed by the need to protect themselves against attacks. Boosting security has led to suspicion in encounters between Iraqis and Americans. There are increased pat-downs, raids on homes and arrests in which U.S. troops force people to the ground at gunpoint — measures the Iraqis believe are meant to humiliate them. In addition, Iraqis maintain the Americans have not lived up to their promises to improve security and living conditions, and incidents like the turning away of the children only reinforce the belief that Americans are in Iraq only for their own interests. For Borell, who has been in Iraq since April 17, what happened with the injured children has made him question what it means to be an American soldier. "What would it have cost us to treat these children? A few dollars perhaps. Some investment of time and resources," said Borell, 30, of Toledo, Ohio. "I cannot imagine the heartlessness required to look into the eyes of a child in horrid pain and suffering and, with medical resources only a brief trip up the road, ignore their plight as though they are insignificant," he added. Maj. David Accetta, public affairs officer with the 3rd Corps Support Command, said the children's condition did not fall into a category that requires Army doctors to care for them. Only patients with conditions threatening life, limb or eyesight and not resulting from a chronic illness are considered for treatment. "Our goal is for the Iraqis to use their own existing infrastructure and become self-sufficient, not dependent on U.S. forces for medical care," Accetta said in an e-mail to AP. The incident came to light after an AP photographer took a picture of Borell being comforted by a colleague after the doctors refused to care for the children. When Borell's wife, Rachelle Douglas-Borell, saw the photo, she contacted AP with a copy of a letter he sent her describing what happened. When Borell talks about the children, he pauses between sentences, keeps his head down, clears his throat. Seated on a cot in a bare room at an Army air base in Balad, 55 miles northwest of Baghdad, Borell said when he saw the three children, especially the girls, Ahlam, 11, and Budur, 10, he visualized his daughters, Ashley, 8, and Brianna, 5. Borell, who spoke to the family through an Iraqi bystander with some English, did not understand exactly what happened to the children. But the children's father, Falah Mutlaq, told AP they set fire to a bag of explosives they found on a street in their village, Bihishmeh, a few miles from the base. Mutlaq, 36, who has 14 children from two wives, said he took the children to a hospital in Balad, but they were turned away because the facility could not treat them. He then took them to the base. Borell's eyes cloud with pain when he describes the children. Madeeha Mutlaq was holding her son, Haidar, 10, fanning him with a piece of cardboard. His legs, arms and half of his face were singed. Ahlam, Haidar's full sister, and Budur, his half-sister, had fewer but still extensive burns. What struck Borell was the children's silence. "They did not utter a single sound," he said. Borell radioed his superiors, who contacted the base hospital. Two Army doctors, both of them majors, responded. One of them, according to Borell, "looked at (Haidar) ... didn't examine him, didn't ask him questions." "(He) never looked at the girls," said Borell. "Through the interpreter, one of the doctors told the father that we didn't have any medicine here ... and were not able to provide them care," said Borell. "And he also expounded on the fact that they needed long-term care." Borell said the combat hospital was fully stocked. "Right before they left, I looked at the one doctor, asked him if he could at least give them comfort care," said Borell. "He told me they were not here to be the treatment center for Iraq." "He didn't show any compassion," the sergeant added. Borell grabbed his first-aid kit and gave the father some bandages and IV solution to clean the wounds. Mutlaq, who grows oranges and apples with water he gets from the Tigris River, laughed when he recalled the doctor's words. "He lied," Mutlaq said. "The world's greatest power going to war without burn medicine? Who can believe that?" Mutlaq took the children the next day to Baghdad for treatment. Budur, a chubby, giggly child with light brown eyes, seems to have recovered except for a large scab on her right arm. Ahlam and Haidar are covered with yellowish scabs scattered over raw red flesh. Haidar keeps his left fingers bent and hops on his left leg because it's too painful to use the right one. A smile rarely leaves his face despite the discomfort. Mutlaq said he often hears the children whimper at night from the pain. Despite their suffering, Mutlaq said he feels no bitterness. "How can I not love the Americans? They helped me with a flat tire the other day," he said. Borell said he felt betrayed by the Army, which he joined after high school. Besides the letter to his wife, he also wrote to his congresswoman and several media outlets describing the incident. His superiors have not said a word, said Borell, "although I get the impression that they're probably not very happy." Borell's wife gave him a silver bracelet that says: "Duty, Honor, Country." He wears it to remind him why he's in Iraq. "After today, I wonder if I will still be able to carry the title 'soldier' with any pride at all," said Borell.
We either got Saddam or a bunch of sheep. Since ordinary forensic DNA testing doesn't do a species test, we may never know with this administration. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24409-2003Jun23.html Iraqi Villagers Say Strike Was Case of Mistaken Identity Attack on Home, Convoy Breeds Anger By Anthony Shadid Washington Post Foreign Service Tuesday, June 24, 2003; Page A15 QAIM, Iraq, June 23 -- Ahmed Hamad, a burly shepherd and smuggler, awoke to his mother's shouts. He looked at his watch. It was 1:10 a.m., he recalled. He gazed across a horizon illuminated by destruction, where U.S. aircraft were raining fire on four trucks. About a half-hour later, he said, a missile slammed into his house, killing his sister-in-law and her 1-year-old daughter. The rest of his family, 10 in all, survived. On a hot summer night in Iraq's western desert, they had been sleeping outside on cots. "Praise be to God," Hamad, 27, said from his hospital bed, shaking his head. U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy. Angry and resentful, residents of the village interviewed today at Central Qaim Hospital, where two people wounded in the U.S. strike were taken, acknowledged that they could not know for certain all the occupants of the vehicles. And as smugglers, with a penchant for secrecy, they left some questions unanswered -- why the trucks were apparently empty, for instance. But they insisted the attack was a case of mistaken identity, that their houses were targeted unnecessarily and that the four vehicles were part of a smuggling attempt gone bad. Residents said the U.S. blitz lasted two hours under cover of night. And they said they were left wondering why a village -- whose biggest change in the wake of the government's fall is that its sheep can graze closer to the Syrian border -- is now occupied by American forces. "During the war, they flew over our village and never attacked us," Hamad said. "Why now?" The U.S. military in Qaim refused to comment today on the attack. "The bottom line is it's an ongoing operation," said Capt. Aaron Barreda of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is based locally in a cement factory outside the city. Dhib, about 70 miles southwest of Qaim, is one of a handful of villages that dot Iraq's western desert, a vast expanse of barren wadis and rocky escarpments bisected by the lush valley of the Euphrates River. Taking its name from wolves said to have once gathered there, Dhib is barely a town -- 20 houses built of brick and settled by shepherds that belong to the Abu Fahad tribe. It sits just five miles from Syria, a border sufficiently porous for lucrative livestock smuggling that has permitted Dhib's residents to buy satellite dishes, generators, Toyota and Nissan pickups and about five satellite phones to facilitate their trade. Residents said that the village was abuzz with that trade last Wednesday. One smuggler, Majid Lahij, had brought 10 trailers of sheep destined for Syria from the northern city of Mosul to the village. At 10:30 p.m., he briefly stopped by Hamad's house, joining eight other guests who spent the evening watching the Arab satellite news channel Al-Arabiya. Soon after, Hamad said, he turned off the generator and the family went to sleep. Within minutes of the departure of Lahij, who carried a satellite phone, helicopters were heard overhead. "They were circling the village all night," Hamad said. About two hours later, Hamad's mother awoke to shooting in the distance. Hamad said he recalled "continuous firing," targeting what the villagers said were four trucks used to transport livestock about five miles from the village, along the Syrian border. "We were watching the shooting," Hamad said. "We saw the helicopters firing on the trucks." At least two survivors from the vehicles, dressed in dishdashas, or long tunics, and traditional Arab headdress, fled through the village. They told residents that two people were killed in the attack -- one of whom they identified as Jumaa Abu Zaatir, a smuggler from the Abu Eissa tribe, which they said owned the four vehicles. The villagers did not know the identity of the second man. At about 1:30 a.m., as the four trucks burned, the first of about five missiles struck Hamad's brick house, he said. Although everyone was sleeping outside, debris killed his sister-in-law, 20-year-old Hakima Khalil, and her daughter, Maha. Khalil's husband, Mohammed, was wounded in the foot. Hamad, his 24-year-old brother Mahmoud and his mother, Rasmiya Mishaal, 62, were also hurt. Mahmoud suffered the severest injuries, with deep cuts to his back and face. After the attack began, villagers said cries pierced the air. Some contended that cluster bombs were used. Other villagers insisted that was wrong, that it was heavy machine-gun fire. They said they were saved by fleeing their homes. "When they hit Ahmed's house, it was like an alarm," said a neighbor, Mohammed Naim, 29. "Everybody ran away from their homes." By the time the barrage ended, four houses were destroyed, along with two storage shacks, residents said. Villagers sitting in the hospital listed their losses like an insurance claim: three pickups, three tractors, one truck and 13 heads of sheep. "We're not guilty," Hamad said. "Why are they attacking families? We want to know the reason they're attacking families." Hamad and others said they did not know the occupants of all the vehicles. But they denied sheltering former Iraqi officials. "No one came here, I swear to God," said Hamad, who suffered a cut to his left arm. "Impossible," added a cousin, Asfug Arrak, 29. "We're just shepherds," Naim said. At that, a hospital assistant, Nasser Abdel-Halim, interrupted. "You're smugglers, tell the truth," he said. Villagers said four U.S. armored vehicles arrived in the village at about 3 a.m., soon after the air attack ended. Soldiers followed, and the villagers took the wounded to the hospital in Qaim about an hour later. "For the next two days, 24 hours a day, the helicopters were flying overhead," Arrak said. Over the past week, armored vehicles and troops have surrounded the destroyed houses and the area where the vehicles were demolished, they said. On Sunday, helicopters landed nearby, unloading boxes of equipment. Villagers said Lahij, the smuggler coming from Mosul, was arrested on the road to Jordan on Wednesday morning, but they did not know the circumstances. Outside the hospital, along houses built of stone and cement straddling the weathered cliffs of the Euphrates, several residents had heard rumors that Hussein might have died in the attack in Dhib. But without exception, no one was willing to believe them. "The Americans want Iraqis to forget Saddam," said Shihab Ahmed, 30, a shepherd in a red-and-white kaffiyeh driving a tractor along the city's main road. "If they say they've killed Saddam, the Iraqi people can start forgetting him." Nearby, selling gasoline from jerry cans lining the street, sat Nasser Jassim, 18. He spoke with conviction. "No one can kill Saddam," he said. "No one can find him in order to kill him."
Have we found some damn weapons of mass destruction yet? That's all i wanna know. If we don't find sh*t....
Don't worry. WMDs will miraculously be found...about a month and a half before the 2004 Presidential election, thus supplying Bush with the popularity bump he will need to win.
AH!!! Leave it to the actors! ------------------------------------------------ Despite the Odds, Iraqi Theater Lives On By TAREK AL-ISSAWI, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - Halfway through an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello, the power at the al-Rashid Theater goes off. An usher apologizes as the audience grumbles and the lead actor disgustedly shakes his head. But in a moment, he begins improvising, clicking his fingers and stomping his feet for sound effects, earning him an encouraging ovation. Performing in sweltering heat and at the mercy of unreliable electricity, Ali Taleb and his Mardookh group of actors fight against all odds to complete the 45-minute adaptation, titled "Obey the Devil." "The message we're trying to spread is that we still have life. Not all Iraqis are looters and nothing is impossible," said Taleb, the play's 28 year-old director and lead actor. Audience members, many fanning themselves with newspapers, seem to appreciate Taleb's ingenuity. "It gives me an immense sense of hope," said Shafeeq al-Mahdi, an Iraqi playwright. "Being here and seeing so many other people here signifies that, despite everything, life goes on." Like most things in Iraq , the Iraqi theater is in disarray. The al-Rashid was looted and torched in the wake of the battle of Baghdad. It sits next door to the blackened ruin of Iraq's former Information Ministry. Of the building's nine floors, only one theater hall and a few small rooms escaped the vandals. Sami Qaftan, one of Iraq's most prominent actors and playwrights, took it upon himself to salvage what he could of the theater, one of 12 in the Iraqi capital. "We managed to protect one hall. The stage and seats are intact. Luckily, the sound and lighting systems were not damaged," he said. Qaftan and others take heart that they're part of a budding revival of Iraq's once rich arts and culture scene. Financed through donations and the production team's own money, entrance to "Obey the Devil" is free. The props and costumes are simple. The effort is not. Qaftan, considered by his peers as a pioneer of the Iraqi theater, thinks Iraqis must forget about the past. "It's a new journey," said Qaftan, 61. "The old regime gave no alternative for Iraqis but to watch poor shows. In the short-term, this is likely to continue, because Iraqis have lost their identity and were given a poor standard of work." Qaftan said he is preparing an Iraqi version of the 1960 drama "The Confused Sultan," by Egyptian author Toufic al-Hakim. The story revolves around a leader who is given a choice between using the rule of law or the sword to prevent his people from criticizing him. Qaftan said the play's obvious parallels to Saddam Hussein 's regime made it impossible to stage until now. "If Saddam had turned to the law, we would not be going through these times now," he said. Qaftan is optimistic about the future of the Iraqi theater because of what he sees as the bubbling enthusiasm of newly freed Iraqis. "We're like a fish that needs water," he said. "We need to perform to survive. Uncertainty and instability make an artist hold back involuntarily. We need security and financial support to prosper." Unlike other actors and artists who have fled Iraq over the years, Qaftan says he plans to stay. "I am an Iraqi palm tree, my roots are here," he said. "I won't stop until my heart stops."
Maybe we should have a different thread - post some good news coming out of Iraq cause most of the news is bad. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28227-2003Jun24.html?nav=hptop_tb Inexperienced Hands Guide Iraq Rebuilding U.S. Military Lacks Skills For Task, Some Officials Say By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, June 25, 2003; Page A01 BANI SAD, Iraq -- Two months after the fall of Baghdad, the critical task of postwar rebuilding and governance of most Iraqi cities remains in the hands of U.S. military personnel, almost all of whom lack expertise in government administration and familiarity with the Arab world. Some current and former U.S. officials involved in the reconstruction effort contend that the failure to more quickly include civilian reconstruction specialists in the postwar occupation has delayed resumption of local government operations and led to resentment among the nearly 20 million Iraqis who live outside the capital. "The reliance on the military has been a mistake," a senior U.S. official here said. "You need civilians in an operation like this. This is both a political and a military operation. We need to emphasize the political dimension more." Although there are about 1,000 people working for the U.S.-led civil occupation authority in Baghdad, almost all of them are based in a vast presidential palace complex on the banks of the Tigris River. Outside the capital and a few other large cities, the job of local administration and reconstruction remains the responsibility of the military's civil affairs teams, which are staffed largely with reservists. The teams were established and trained to provide emergency humanitarian aid, deal with refugees and perform basic infrastructure repair -- not to rebuild town governments, set up courts, disburse salaries, sort out agricultural problems or take on many of the other chores they have been forced to perform in postwar Iraq. "We've been given a job that we haven't prepared for, we haven't trained for, that we weren't ready for," said a senior civil affairs officer in central Iraq. "For a lot of the stuff we're doing, we're making it up as we go along." Although their mandate is to work with the civilian population, civil affairs personnel are soldiers first. They wear fatigues, carry weapons, drive around in Humvees and report up the military's chain of command. They have little communication, if any, with civilian reconstruction officials in Baghdad. Their continued involvement in reconstruction -- and the absence of civilian personnel -- has perplexed and annoyed many Iraqis. "We would rather deal with civilians," said Rasul Said, 51, a local tribal leader in Bani Sad, a dusty farming town about 30 miles north of Baghdad. "The military men are there to wield power. It is the civilians who do humanitarian jobs." In Bani Sad, the jobs of mayor, utility manager, public security chief, school superintendent, agricultural problem-solver and general complaint-taker have fallen to Capt. Ian Cromarty, an easygoing Army reservist who normally works as a respiratory therapist in New Hampshire. Although he has no experience in civil administration, Cromarty is saddled with a variety of complex reconstruction duties, from getting electricity running again to screening candidates who hope to run for a new town council. "What we're doing now is never something we expected to do," he said. "We figured we'd provide some emergency assistance and then we'd be out of here." Cromarty's boss, Lt. Col. Randy Grant, a hospital training administrator from Colorado Springs, said he had assumed that if his unit were asked to perform tasks other than humanitarian assistance, it would be given specific instructions. But, he said, none were issued. "I had an expectation that when all the fighting was said and done, somebody would hand you a book and say, 'Here's the game plan,' " said Grant, who is responsible for the province of Diyala, which sprawls from Baghdad's northeast fringe to the border with Iran, about 60 miles away. U.S. officials involved in the reconstruction said the decision to rely on military civil affairs units outside Baghdad was driven by a personnel shortage in the civil occupation authority. "We didn't have the people to head out to each province," the senior official said. "Before the war, nobody stopped and said, 'Aren't we going to need a bunch of people in the provinces?' " "The military guys said they had the people to do the job, and since this operation was run by the Pentagon, they went along with it," the official said. Some people in the occupation authority believe the U.S. government needs to create a modern version of the old British colonial service, dispatching legions of young diplomats and others with specific technical experience to small towns and provincial capitals. "But that would have required a degree of planning in which the United States government did not engage," the official said. "Using the military for postwar governance should have been the last option, not the first." In central Iraq, where resistance to U.S. forces has been escalating, some residents said they have been reluctant to cooperate with military civil affairs personnel out of fear they would be branded as traitors by their neighbors. Others regard ongoing security operations as a drain on resources that might otherwise be used to rebuild the country. Civil affairs officers say their problems have been compounded by a shortage of staff. Grant has only 35 soldiers -- just 16 of them civil affairs personnel -- for the entire province, which has 1.4 million people. Cromarty is the only officer assigned to Bani Sad and the surrounding areas, which are home to about 186,000 people. As a consequence, he is able to visit the town only twice a week for meetings in the former mayor's office, where he hears complaints, makes promises and delivers apologies for his inability to fulfill earlier commitments. "We need full-time staff here working on their issues," said Cromarty, 43. "There's going to come a point when they say, 'These little meetings are ridiculous. You don't support us.' " But Cromarty, a former paratrooper who is more willing to listen than talk, is still trying to get Bani Sad back on its feet. His meetings with a score of sheiks, technical experts and self-proclaimed community leaders have the feeling of town council meetings -- with Cromarty playing the role of mayor. Sitting behind an imposing wooden desk that belonged to the previous mayor -- a member of ousted president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party -- Cromarty listened to a series of progress reports at a meeting last week. Electricity remains the biggest problem, he was told. The town has an average of two hours of power per day. "Bani Sad is a disaster," he muttered to his interpreter. He proposed setting up two or three portable generators in the city, but others in the sweltering room -- there was no power to operate the fans -- rejected the idea. "This is impractical," insisted Mohsen Ali, the electricity director. "We have about 50 neighborhoods. If I give electricity to just two or three neighborhoods, we will have even more problems." The solution, Ali said, would be to fix a French-made generator at a nearby grain silo that would be large enough to power the entire town. Cromarty took the suggestion under advisement. For the next two hours, Cromarty was inundated with requests, which he recorded in a notebook. Farmers were upset that the silo had rejected their wheat. The hospital director said he needed help replacing outdated medicines. A police captain wanted to know when training would begin for a new force. Teachers needed transportation to school. Irrigation water was running low. Finally, after he had filled a half-dozen notebook pages and a sheen of perspiration covered his forehead, Cromarty beseeched his interpreter to end the meeting. "Tell them I'm doing the best I can," he said. "There's just one of me and so much to do." When the war began, the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division, which is responsible for Diyala province, was assigned just six civil affairs soldiers, Grant said. It was not until the scope of the reconstruction task became clear that 10 more were sent his way. But when he asked for more, he said, he was told none were available. Finally, faced with the need to reopen local courts and restart phone service -- two areas in which his teams had no expertise -- he managed to get the 2nd Brigade's legal officer and a unit of field communications specialists to help. Grant said he expected his work would be augmented, if not superseded, not just by civilians working for the U.S. government but also by humanitarian aid groups. But Diyala still is considered too dangerous by many aid organizations because of the presence of resistance fighters near the border and the belief that many militiamen loyal to Hussein are still hiding in the province. "We could use the help," he said. "This is too big a job for 35 soldiers." © 2003 The Washington Post Company
White House must prepare US for extended troop commitment in Iraq: Biden "The administration went into the process with, quite frankly, the wrong assumptions," Biden continued, saying that US officials were caught flat-footed by the absence in Iraq of a functioning bureaucracy, army and police force, as well as the extent of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’ neglect of the country's power grid and other infrastructure. "The result has been massive problems in terms of getting basic services back and restoring security." In addition, he said, "we've seen looting, political sabotage against power, oil and water plants, and some organized resistance," further hampering Iraqi reconstruction. He called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's expectation to be able to draw down US forces on the ground in Iraq to about 30,000 troops by the end of the year "absolute fantasy." "Not only have we not leveled with the American people about the nature of the commitment, ... we also have to sustain and probably increase our military force in Iraq," Biden said. "Somebody's got to fill this gap." Biden was also incredulous that the administration has not sought the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's help in shouldering some of the burden of peacekeeping and reconstruction. "Nobody's asking them," Biden said. He added that US taxpayers can expect to be presented with an enormous bill for the war and post-war operations, saying that while it costs roughly three billion dollars each month to keep US troops in Iraq, the country's oil revenues are expected to total just five billion dollars this year and 15 billion dollars next year. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...p/us_iraq_rebuild_politics&cid=1521&ncid=1473
He added that US taxpayers can expect to be presented with an enormous bill for the war and post-war operations, saying that while it costs roughly three billion dollars each month to keep US troops in Iraq, the country's oil revenues are expected to total just five billion dollars this year and 15 billion dollars next year. Who cares about the taxpayers? Bush has made out well with his popularity ratings. Halliburton, Bechtel and don't forget daddy's Carlyle Group have done well, too. BTW Biden as a big supporter of the war should blame himself also and apologize to especailly Democrats many of whom did not support the war.
Here's a different take : Saddam was a mad genius who planned to break American will during occupation : http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-carr25jun25,1,2468479.story?coll=la-headlines-oped-manual COMMENTARY Stop Blaming, Wise Up to Postwar Realities A clever foe may have an 'occupation fatigue' strategy for victory by Caleb Carr, Caleb Carr, a military historian and a novelist, is the author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians" (Random House, updated 2003) and "The Alienist" (Random House, 1994). Americans have a long tradition of blaming their own civilian and uniformed commanders for wartime setbacks instead of recognizing the success of an enemy's efforts. There's a very good chance that this tradition is alive, well and hard at work in Iraq today. The occupation goes badly. The press, the media and members of Congress demand to know: Who is to blame? As perhaps befits the most narcissistic (along with the most advanced and generous) society in world history, we Americans don't like to believe that our fate is ever out of our own hands or that anyone else in the world can beat our best efforts. When we fail, it must be the fault of our own incompetence. Take Little Big Horn, for example. Gen. George Armstrong Custer was an arrogant fool, runs the standard wisdom, who rode blindly into an obvious trap. Actually, the Sioux chieftains Sitting Bull and, especially, Crazy Horse were two of the greatest — and cleverest — unconventional warriors in modern history. And Pearl Harbor? Americans were asleep, runs the same strain of thinking, insensible to the dangers around them. Actually, the American armed forces knew that such an attack was possible and had even war-gamed it; but no war game could prepare them for the precise planning and the truly astounding daring of one of the premier offensive geniuses of World War II, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto. And what of the only war the United States ever lost (an arguable epithet), Vietnam? Didn't we go down in defeat because our people and politicians stabbed our commanders in their collective back after making them fight the war with one hand tied behind it? Actually, no. American soldiers were overwhelmingly well supplied and fought bravely; but their commanders — often men who had acquitted themselves well in prior conflicts — were simply outwitted by Ho Chi Minh and his creative and determined military right arm, Vo Nguyen Giap, both past masters of a variety of war with which we had little or no experience. To put those experiences in terms that our plain-talking President Bush might understand, we got whupped; and right now, we may — may — be on our way to getting whupped in Iraq. We like to believe that when Saddam Hussein spoke of dragging the United States into Armageddon, he meant a war involving weapons of mass destruction, and that we were simply too quick and overpowering to allow such a scenario to develop. But what if the Iraqi dictator actually realized that we would be so overpowering? And what if, acting on this realization, he abandoned a biochemical campaign before the war started, destroying or hiding his weapons of mass destruction deep underground, in terrain controlled by his most ardent supporters, while stockpiling enough cash to bankroll a different kind of Armageddon? I'm speaking here of a carefully planned effort to sow anarchy and thus a desire among the Iraqi people for the return of a strong hand, as well as a complementary effort to destroy American domestic will when it comes to sustaining a gruesome and grueling occupation. If "occupation fatigue" is indeed taking root in the American consciousness, it is not the fault of failed or cooked intelligence — the subjects that are getting the most attention from critics of the Iraq undertaking. We should remember, after all, that American leaders from the founding fathers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and beyond have flat-out lied about war aims, threats and intelligence in order to get the American people — who generally have no taste for war — to fight. The American Revolution did not, ultimately, fulfill its promise of making all or even most men, to say nothing of women, equal (although few would argue this was reason to abort the separation from Britain); and FDR told legendary lies about such things as the Greer incident (in which the U.S. Navy provoked a German submarine attack on the destroyer, after which Washington tried to spin the event as German aggression) and the Lend-Lease program (which saw American supply and weapons shipments reach Britain before Congress had approved their dispatch). Even if the Bush administration exaggerated the immediacy of the threat of Iraqi WMDs, it did not create the fact of Hussein's addiction to such weapons, any more than FDR fabricated the danger that totalitarian states posed to the world when he misrepresented what was going on in the North Atlantic before Pearl Harbor. This is not to say that the American intelligence community did not make grievous mistakes before and during the Iraq war. But analysts trying to determine why we're in such a mess in Iraq right now by deciding which American leader or agency got us there are ignoring the possibility that Hussein may have had this mess in mind all along. And if that is the case, then we're in even deeper trouble than we thought: Hussein has been planning and organizing his unconventional resistance for a considerable period, while we have only begun to figure out a way to counteract it. The continuing violence means that Iraq is not yet ready for the Middle Eastern Marshall Plan we were once so convinced that the Iraqis wanted. Let's remember that in order to implement the Marshall Plan, we destroyed Germany and dealt with the German populace ruthlessly. Had anyone in the former Nazi Reich mounted the kind of violent dissatisfaction with the pace of our charitable intentions that we're seeing in Iraq, they would have been arrested or wiped out, no questions asked. Do we now want to shift gears toward a similarly draconian preparation for reconstruction in Iraq? Perhaps not, but the war is clearly not over, despite what Bush said during his patently silly amateur theatrics on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. The Pentagon must, however reluctantly, send in not only additional Special Forces units (the only troops we have that are capable of handling this situation without alienating the Iraqi people) to pick apart the resistance machine, but also police troops to meet the public safety emergency, as well as extra engineering units to restore services quickly. We were all supposed to be happy friends in Iraq by now. But our antagonist may have proved, once again, to be a damnably clever opponent. Before we get entirely swept up with finding people on our own side to blame (there will be ample time for that later), we ought to be about the business of devising new schemes to neutralize our foe — schemes even more imaginative than those admirable plans that brought us into Baghdad so quickly.
This is old but relevant. Neocon folds. Shinseki was right after all. Posted 6/18/2003 10:10 PM U.S. troops may be in Iraq for 10 years By Tom Squitieri, USA TODAY WASHINGTON — Two top U.S. defense officials signaled Congress on Wednesday that U.S. forces might remain in Iraq for as long as a decade and that permanent facilities need to be built to house them there. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave no explicit estimates for the time U.S. forces would stay in Iraq, but they did not dispute members of Congress who said the deployment could last a decade or more. The comments were among the most explicit acknowledgements yet from the Bush administration that the U.S. presence in Iraq will be long, arduous, costly and a strain on the military. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that the Bush administration will eventually come to Congress to seek more money for the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Wolfowitz said the size of the supplemental funding request will be determined in the fall. But he did not dispute an estimate by Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., that the military would need an annual budget of $54 billion — $1.5 billion a month for Afghanistan, $3 billion a month for Iraq. The money would be for costs in fiscal 2004, which starts on Oct. 1 of this year. Former White House budget director Mitch Daniels has said the major combat came in under budget and the administration will not seek additional funds for the Iraq war in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Pace told the committee that the U.S. force in Iraq is just under its peak of 151,000 combat troops and that the number will not be reduced in the foreseeable future. He said military officials want to build a 60,000-strong Iraqi police force to free U.S. troops for other duties. U.S. troops are now guarding 500 sites and conducting 2,300 patrols a night, Pace said. Wolfowitz urged Congress to vote for money to train Iraqi and Afghan troops, both to ease the burden on U.S. forces and to free them for other duties, including "a possible contingency in Korea." "We are still in a phase where we need some significant combat power to take on these remnants of the old regime," Wolfowitz said. "I can't predict how long they (U.S. troops) will be there," he said. "It's got to be driven by conditions and not the calendar." Wolfowitz and Pace said they believe the burden on U.S. servicemembers will ease as troops from other countries enter Iraq. But the arrival of those troops now does not appear likely to happen before September, Pace said. Pace said about 12,000 non-U.S. troops from eight countries are in Iraq, almost all of them British. He said 17 nations have promised to send a total of up to 20,000 troops. He also said India and 48 other countries are being asked to send forces to boost that number to 30,000.
Piling on the neocons: http://slate.msn.com/id/2084881/ Delusions of Empire How is Paul Wolfowitz keeping a straight face these days? By Fred Kaplan Posted Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 4:08 PM PT The question of the moment is not "When will the MET-Alpha team find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?" (we've all long ago exhaled on that one), but rather "When will the neo-imperialist intellectuals go into hiding?" George W. Bush may be mildly vexed over the failure thus far to unearth vats of VX and anthrax. But Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and the other strategic brains behind the operation should be absolutely mortified over the past few weeks of Iraq's unraveling and America's postwar failure to secure and consolidate its dazzling military victory. The president, after all, can deal with his WMD embarrassment by noting that the absence of evidence doesn't prove the stuff was never there; besides, public opinion—the true gauge of a politician's success—considers that ousting Saddam made the war worthwhile anyway. But the president's high-concept guys are in a tougher spot. The currency of intellectuals is measured in the worth of their ideas, and the swaggering ambitions behind their advocacy of invading Iraq—to establish civil authority in Baghdad quickly after the war, then move on to redraw the map of the Middle East, and finally spread democracy around the globe—are looking particularly delusional just now. If they so badly miscalculated the ease of controlling a country that (as Donald Rumsfeld often reminds us) is the size of California, then how do they intend to change the planet? More to the point, how do they continue to offer advice on the subject while keeping a straight face? The unipolar world has its bright points (especially if you're a member of what was once called the English-speaking races), but it has also bred an insouciant arrogance not just within the power centers but among their academic annexes and recruiting grounds. Read Niall Ferguson pleading for America to settle into its imperial destiny, or Max Boot calling for a new "Pax Americana," or Robert D. Kaplan (no relation) waxing in the new Atlantic Monthly for a return to "the old rules"—meaning "the pre-Vietnam rules by which small groups of quiet professionals … help stabilize or destabilize a regime"—and for the promotion of American power "as an organizing principle for the worldwide expansion of a liberal civil society." You don't need to be Rip Van Winkle waking from a pre-W slumber—you have only to scan the past week's newspapers, with their stories of Iraqi ambush and mayhem—to wonder what the hell these people are talking about. It must be embarrassing enough for a prime mover like William Kristol to go back and read, say, his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, from Feb. 7, 2002, in which he offered assurances that, after a war to topple Saddam, "American and allied forces will be welcomed in Baghdad as liberators. Indeed, reconstructing Iraq may prove to be a less difficult task than the challenge of building a viable state in Afghanistan." The example of postwar modernization in Iraq, he went on, will foster "the principles of liberty and justice in the Islamic world" generally. Kristol—who headed the movement of analysts (some of them now administration officials) that most avidly and persistently made the case for invading Iraq—need not retire from the field of public policy for such utterly wrongheaded predictions; creaky skeletons lurk in every pundit's archival dungeon. However, he and other analysts like him should be held as responsible for their words as politicians are for their deeds. And so, before Kristol is taken seriously on his call to "take the fight to Iran" or "to change the North Korean regime" ("not simply to contain it or coexist with it"), someone should at least check out his track record. More to the point, someone should examine the assumptions underlying this track record. The key assumption is not only that the American military is strong enough to overwhelm enemy armies decisively and rapidly (which turned out, at least in Iraq's case, to be truer than many critics cautioned), but also that swift victory on the battlefield would translate, almost perforce, to an orderly "regime change" and an emulation—if not outright adoption—of our socio-political values. Amid the fashionable nostalgia for past empires and the permissibility of their "small wars," some awkward historical details often get lost in the haze. Robert D. Kaplan, in his Atlantic article, unironically titled "Supremacy by Stealth: Ten Rules for Managing the World," cites, rather remarkably, America's 1890s adventure in the Philippines as a model for contemporary imperial rule. In that section of his article (titled "Rule No. 7: Remember the Philippines"), Kaplan quotes Max Boot's description of the Philippines campaign, from his book The Savage Wars of Peace, as "one of the most successful counter-insurgencies waged by a Western army in modern time." Yet take a full look at Boot's chapter on the Philippines incursion. Its three years of fighting killed 4,234 American soldiers, 16,000 Filipino combatants, and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians. The ultimately successful U.S. strategy—isolating the Filipino guerrillas—was accomplished by forcing the civilian population out of their towns and into "protected zones." (Any able-bodied male found outside these zones without a pass was arrested or shot.) Other tactics included burning, pillaging, and torturing. By 1902, the guerrillas were decisively defeated. Even so, sporadic conflicts persisted, and American forces continued to occupy the place, for another 44 years. Boot wrote, "By the standards of the day, the conduct of U.S. soldiers was better than average for colonial wars," adding that "it is not entirely fair to apply 21st-century morality to the actions of 19th-century soldiers." He may well be right. By the same token, though, R.D. Kaplan is a bit out of line for extolling the campaign as an exemplar, if an admittedly somewhat brutal one, for 21st-century American Imperialism. The larger point is that empire is a tough, bloody business. It is also a business requiring immersion. The British willingly took, and dealt, thousands of casualties for the sake of its preservation. They set up whole ministries devoted to the study of their holdings (the India desk, the Arabian desk, and so forth). And yet, as David Fromkin points out in A Peace to End All Peace—his ceaselessly fascinating (and, at this moment, vital) book about Britain's attempt to remake the map of the Middle East before and during the First World War—they still bungled the whole enterprise, badly misreading major events, and allowing themselves to be led disastrously down primrose paths by local, power-hungry charlatans. Sound familiar?
