June 18, 2006
The Learning Curve
Baghdad blasts mock US claims of Iraqi progress
Following death of Zarqawi and visit by Bush, leaders fail to bring end to cycle of violence
By David Usborne in New York
Published: 18 June 2006
A series of explosions ripped through Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 23 people and dealing a shattering blow to the new Iraqi government's attempts to impose a security blanket on the capital.The seven separate blasts at locations across the city are likely similarly to frustrate the efforts of the White House to demonstrate a degree of progress in Iraq since the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi earlier this month, and the surprise visit to Baghdad last Monday by President George Bush.
In the meantime, a new Pentagon investigation revealed details of abusive treatment of detainees in Iraq early in 2004 by members of US special forces. The report said the soldiers were continuing to use interrogation techniques that had been ruled unacceptable several months earlier by the Pentagon because they were too harsh, including feeding one inmate on bread and water only for 17 days.
After President Bush stressed to Iraqi leaders the importance of their taking greater responsibility for security, the new government responded on Wednesday with a huge deployment of forces in Baghdad designed to bring an end to the cycle of violence.
The security campaign included a ban on the use of private cars during the hours of prayer on Friday. However, even that measure was thwarted when a suspected shoe bomber detonated a powerful explosion inside one of Baghdad's most important Shia mosques, killing 13 people.
Police described scenes of carnage in the capital after yesterday's bombings, which began with a mortar attack on one of Baghdad's oldest markets in the prominently Shia suburb of Kazimiyah. At least four people died. Shortly afterwards another market was struck by a bomb left in a plastic bag, killing two civilians. And a car bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol left seven dead and 10 wounded.
The renewed violence comes as President Bush was seeking to take advantage of the death of Zarqawi to convince a sceptical American public that the situation in Iraq was starting to improve. However, a new CNN poll showed 54 per cent of Americans still believe the war was a mistake, and the political pressure on Mr Bush is growing in the run-up to crucial mid-term elections for the US Congress.
The White House public relations campaign on Iraq is also being clouded by the investigation into claims that a group of US Marines went on a rampage in the town of Haditha in November 2005 and indiscriminately killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including 10 women and children. Against this background, the new Pentagon report on the conduct of Special Operations forces in Iraqi prisons, released in heavily censored form to the American Civil Liberties Union, threatens to make President Bush's job still more difficult.
Some of the contents of the investigation, carried out by Brigadier General Richard Formica, were passed to members of Congress a year ago. No charges have been brought against the soldiers involved, as Gen Formica concluded that the problem lay with "inadequate police guidance" rather than "personal failure" on their parts.
Aside from the man on a ration of bread and water, other detainees were locked in cells so small they could neither lie down nor stand for several days, while interrogators played loud music to stop them sleeping.
The report also said that interrogators sometimes stripped detainees of their clothes, doused them with water and allowed them to stand shivering in air-conditioned rooms. It said one detainee subject to such treatment by Navy Seal interrogators in Mosul had died during questioning.
A series of explosions ripped through Baghdad yesterday, killing at least 23 people and dealing a shattering blow to the new Iraqi government's attempts to impose a security blanket on the capital.
The seven separate blasts at locations across the city are likely similarly to frustrate the efforts of the White House to demonstrate a degree of progress in Iraq since the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi earlier this month, and the surprise visit to Baghdad last Monday by President George Bush.
In the meantime, a new Pentagon investigation revealed details of abusive treatment of detainees in Iraq early in 2004 by members of US special forces. The report said the soldiers were continuing to use interrogation techniques that had been ruled unacceptable several months earlier by the Pentagon because they were too harsh, including feeding one inmate on bread and water only for 17 days.
After President Bush stressed to Iraqi leaders the importance of their taking greater responsibility for security, the new government responded on Wednesday with a huge deployment of forces in Baghdad designed to bring an end to the cycle of violence.
The security campaign included a ban on the use of private cars during the hours of prayer on Friday. However, even that measure was thwarted when a suspected shoe bomber detonated a powerful explosion inside one of Baghdad's most important Shia mosques, killing 13 people.
Police described scenes of carnage in the capital after yesterday's bombings, which began with a mortar attack on one of Baghdad's oldest markets in the prominently Shia suburb of Kazimiyah. At least four people died. Shortly afterwards another market was struck by a bomb left in a plastic bag, killing two civilians. And a car bomb targeting an Iraqi army patrol left seven dead and 10 wounded.
If this is Bush's idea of "progress" then I wonder what the "long, hard slog" looks like.
For those who haven't been paying attention, we are losing Iraq and have been since the day this unplanned and badly executed campaign was launched. You can't "do" war on the cheap and off the cuff and that's the Bush "plan," a man of small mind who thinks you can just make this stuff up as you go along. Iraq is the object lesson in how that school of thought doesn't work. Too bad that the object lesson requires so much death, but that doesn't seem to bother the Commander in Chief.
Posted by Melanie at June 18, 2006 10:55 AM | TrackBackLooks like we'll just have to round up another al-Qaeda #2... the 14th or 15th so far.
A more accurate predictor of the arc of events in Iraq than Colin Powell's and Richard Armitage's "Pottery Barn Rule: You break it, you own it" is the bull in the china shop metaphor -- especially when viewed from the less often considered perspective of the bull.
The longer the bull stomps and thrashes about, wreaking evermore devastation and destruction upon the shop, the more clearly entirely predicatble consequences of letting loose the bull are seen.
The bull's footing becomes unstable. It slips, falls, cuts itself on the broken china and shattered glass. It bleeds.
The bull grows thirsty, but nothing in the shop, save the bull's own blood, can slake the thirst. The bull grows hungry, but nothing in the shop, save the shards of glass and broken china, can feed the hunger.
Eventually, the limits of utter devastation, destruction and chaos unto the china shop are reached. (Paraphrasing Madeleine Albright's comments on U.S. military power: "What's the point in having the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal if you never get to use it?")
From lack of nourishment in an increasingly polluted enclosed environment, the bull grows ever more weary and ever more weak. The process, of course, is accelerated should the bull drink its own blood, or feed upon the shards.
Unless the bull vacates the China shop, it will die there. It will die slowly - the death of a thousand cuts; cuts from the outside, and cuts from the inside. Eventually its carcass will rot, and scavengers will feed.
Who shall release the bull from the china shop?
The Bush administration appears hell-bent on committing U.S. forces and resources to Iraq indefininetly -- leaving us to hold our breaths, to say our prayers and to wait for a new, plain-speaking, avuncular-looking, telegenic president (knight in shining armor) to ride to the resuce, paraphrase Ronald Regan's edict of the war on poverty: "It's over. Terror won."
Or perhaps, Congress could do as John Kerry, speaking as one member of a group of one thousand (Vietnam War Veterans) suggested in 1971, and simply vote to cut off war funding.
And what shall be built upon the ruins of the china shop?
And who shall do the building?
And what shall become of those who loosed the bull?
Good final questions, Mark, but the first thing to do is to get the bull out.
And we need to stop waiting for the white knight. Seems to me the new talking point is to rip on W personaly, ignoring the men behind the curtain. W will be gone soon no matter what, but those men behind the curtain, some of them date back to Nixon, and some will go on for decades to come, giving us a chance to look back on W like we now do on others, wishing we had someone with Dan Quail's brains, Nixon's humility and moral fiber, Reagan's sense of nuance and diplomacy. W is merely one head of an old hydra, and if we cut it off now (back in '04 it would have done some good) we will just get more of the same. Need to chop and cauterize, chop and cauterize, a more than Herculean task*, it won't ever die completely.
* In the myth, Hercules was saved by a small boy with a torch and a brain. And Hercules eventualy committed suicide to escape from the pain of wearing a shirt with hydra blood on it.
Without question, the necessary first step is to exit Iraq.
Christorpher Hedges notes in War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, that while armies win wars and armies lose wars, politicians begin wars and politicians end wars.
The Iraq invasion began with a presidential order, and the occupation will end with a presidential order (or a hasty, disorganized and perilous retreat).
To exit Iraq is not really that difficult. The president need merely order it, although this president never will.
Or congress could cut off funding (as eventually happened to the U.S. war on Vietnam).
Thus, only a new U.S. political order can remove the troops from Iraq.
But the enduring problem, as you note, Mike, lies with the hydra-heads - the war mongers, the neo-cons and particularly their enablers, the transmitters.
The International Criminal Court in the Hague should deal with the obvious suspects (the recently disbanded PNAC left deep foot prints) and the even more guilty the media mongrels who played cheer leader for the Iraq invasion. War must be sold before it can be waged.
The U.S. could regain significant amounts of lost respect in the world by:
1) Joining the ICC and,
2) Offering for trial in the ICC, on the charges of crimes against humanity, some obvious suspects (start with PNAC) and the equally guilty, and even more responsible media members (owners of media outlets, commentators, etc. etc. - their numbers are legion) who sold the war to an American public, all to eager to buy into the idea.
With the pervasive influence and power of the military-industrial-politico-infotainment complex, such action is unlikely.
But without some serious chopping and cauterizing, the U.S. will go the way of all empires. The only questions being when (I'd guess sooner rather than later - decades rather than centuries) and how much more damage will we inflict along the way.
How many more china shops will we destroy before a new world order arises to grab us by the bulls?
And upon whom will the hydra-heads turn when the thruth of the limits of U.S. military power are revealed?
