Note: Started writing this on 9/12, then got distracted. Since then the US financial system has continued to implode, while the media chortles that the silver lining of depression is lower gas prices, and the worst major party presidential candidate since James Buchanan (at least) continues to hold even or better in the polls.

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In looking that his year's crop of 9/11 observations, it strikes me that people make more of it than is deserved, and still miss some very basic points.

1. Nations that respect the rights of all of their people, and respect the independence of all other nations, are never targets of terrorist violence. As 9/11 showed, the US was no such nation.

2. The only appropriate response to an act of terrorism is to examine the history that provided the pretext, and to make amends to render that pretext obsolete. The US did not do this, and nearly all Americans to this day have no clear idea why Americans were attacked. Even those Americans who recognize that the US projects imperial power and significant hegemony far beyond our borders often fail to see any connection to Americans being targeted by terrorists.

3. The actual US response, which was to attack and overthrow the government of Afghanistan, was possible only because the US possessed military capability far beyond any reasonable defensive needs. No other nation could have lashed out like the US did because no other nation had the wherewithal. (Given how Afghanistan worked out, the US may not have had the capability either, but the Bush administration, and most Americans, thought it did.)

4. The US reaction validated the terrorists' rationale. Had the US responded within the procedures of international law, admitting redress for just grievances, we would have shown the terrorists to be mere criminals. Instead, we admitted their case and added to its rationale.

5. The US reaction was predicated on two unexamined assumptions: 1) that the US has a right to police the world, without any sort of checks and balances; and 2) that when US authority was challenged the only possible response was to reassert that authority even more emphatically, which given the US military fetish meant more violently. Given that violence is the most readily understood form of injustice, we've only added to the store of rationales that terrorists use to target us.

6. As America's knee-jerk violence increased it has exposed the limits of American power, especially how incompetent the US is when it comes to dominating and controlling people beyond US borders, language, and culture. These failures exposed first the hollowness of the superpower conceit and ultimately the viability of the whole imperial venture.

7. The ideology that underlies the US response to 9/11 is so pervasive that any administration would likely have struck out the same way, but the Bush administration, with its deep conservative faith in power and private wealth, its corruption and cronyism, its inability to conceive of government ever contributing to any sort of public interest, has been especially disastrous. The full extent of Bush's failure will take many years to reckon, and will be hard for most people to fathom. We are buried in debt, because we have lived the last few decades on the illusion that the rich are responsible for wealth, rather than merely the recipients of political favoritism. We are increasingly buried in ignorance -- a stance that becomes all the more precarious in a technological society on the cutting edge of resource and complexity limits. We have, for instance, seen such unthinkable things as more and more people sinking below the poverty line, and life expectancy shrinking.

The latter paragraph could go on and on, but let's go back to the initial point and underline it: the initial US reaction to 9/11 was very peculiar, an irrational burst of violence that was predicated on self-delusion. No other nation in the world would have reacted in that way, yet to us it still seems as normal as apple pie -- even after every step advancing the reaction has proven to be an abject failure. Until we can get our minds around this simple truth we will continue to blindly hurt ourselves and everyone else around us, until we expire from our own failures. It's happening, and it cannot be stopped until we face up to what we have done. Unfortunately, our whole political system militates against that sort of self-examination.

It is certainly true that some politicians are less blind and less stupid and less deceitful and less arrogant than others, but how can they be so and still sell optimism, which remains the coin of the realm even as we slide into hell.

Andrew J Bacevich: Illusions of Victory. This is an excerpt from Bacevich's new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008, Metropolitan Books). At least at a high level, Bacevich calls into question just what the US military can do. The following seems a pretty fair synopsis of the last seven years:

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts.

Two of those fronts -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America's military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved.

In Afghanistan, U.S. forces failed to eliminate the leadership of Al Qaeda. Although they toppled the Taliban regime that had ruled most of that country, they failed to eliminate the Taliban movement, which soon began to claw its way back. Intended as a brief campaign, the Afghan War became a protracted one. Nearly seven years after it began, there is no end in sight. If anything, America's adversaries are gaining strength. The outcome remains much in doubt.

In Iraq, events followed a similar pattern, with the appearance of easy success belied by subsequent developments. The U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003. Six weeks later, against the backdrop of a White House-produced banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." This claim proved illusory.

Writing shortly after the fall of Baghdad, the influential neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle declared Operation Iraqi Freedom "a vivid and compelling demonstration of America's ability to win swift and total victory." General Tommy Franks, commanding the force that invaded Iraq, modestly characterized the results of his handiwork as "unequalled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war." In retrospect, such judgments -- and they were legion -- can only be considered risible. A war thought to have ended on April 9, 2003, in Baghdad's al-Firdos Square was only just beginning. Fighting dragged on for years, exacting a cruel toll. Iraq became a reprise of Vietnam, although in some respects at least on a blessedly smaller scale.

How did the US get into this mess? Bacevich identifies three illusions. The first was the idea that "The Pentagon had devised a new American Way of War, investing its forces with capabilities unlike any the world had ever seen." You know: technology, speed, precision, like that. The second was that "American civilian and military leaders subscribed to a common set of principles for employing their now-dominant forces" -- the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which was meant to prevent politicians from flying off half-cocked and landing us into future Vietnams, in large part by the politically loaded need to call up reserves in order to implement any significant military action. The third illusion was that "the military and American society had successfully patched up the differences that produced something akin to divorce during the divisive Vietnam years." This was accomplished by switching to an All-Volunteer Force, although the end result of that was to make future military operations optional and incidental to all but the few Americans who volunteered to be in harm's way.

When it came to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, civilian willingness to conform to its provisions proved to be highly contingent. Confronting Powell in 1993, Madeleine Albright famously demanded to know, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Mesmerized by the prospects of putting American soldiers to work to alleviate the world's ills, Albright soon enough got her way. An odd alliance that combined left-leaning do-gooders with jingoistic politicians and pundits succeeded in chipping away at constraints on the use of force. "Humanitarian intervention" became all the rage. Whatever restraining influence the generals exercised during the 1990s did not survive that decade. Lessons of Vietnam that had once seemed indelible were forgotten.

For Bush, 9/11 was an opportunity to make a clean break with all past inhibitions against using military force. In a neat trick, all past U.S. policies were vindicated by the terrorist attack, as opposed to being called into question:

With the president denying any connection between the events of September 11th and past U.S. policies, his declaration of a global war nipped in the bud whatever inclination the public might have entertained to reconsider those policies. In essence, Bush counted on war both to concentrate greater power in his own hands and to divert attention from the political, economic, and cultural bind in which the United States found itself as a result of its own past behavior.

Conclusion:

Between what President Bush called upon America's soldiers to do and what they were capable of doing loomed a huge gap that defines the military crisis besetting the United States today. For a nation accustomed to seeing military power as its trump card, the implications of that gap are monumental.

It is refreshing to look at the failures of the Bush administration as failures of the US military itself. That's a view that no electable Democrat can disclose since "the troops" have been turned into an unquestionable icon. The antiwar side may be most guilty of this. By "support our troops" the prowar side always meant "support our mission"; instead of just pointing out that the hawks are hiding behind the uniforms, and going on to the real front of contention, the mission, too many antiwar spokesfolk have tried to co-opt the slogan, arguing that the best way to support the troops would be to get out of stupid, senseless wars. True enough, but those wars -- the only kind there are -- are the troops' bread and butter.

Bacevich may try to tone down his critique by praising the valor, courage, discipline, etc., of the soldiers, but the key point is that they're not fit for their assigned mission. Again, you can see all aspects of this misfit in HBO's Generation Kill, even without factoring in that what's being shown is pretty much a best case scenario: the early days of the war when there were still clear enemies, a relatively disciplined elite group of Marines, etc. I don't yet know how far Bacevich will go with his critique, but I do know that there is plenty of terrain for someone to light up.

Two short pieces on the news page of the Wichita Eagle this morning are noteworthy follow-ups to my recent Afghanistan post. They show once again how the US cannot fight "terrorism" without screwing up worse. First, from Afghanistan:

Nine Afghan police killed by mistake

KABUL, Afghanistan -- U.S.-led troops and Afghan forces killed nine Afghan poice Sunday, calling in airstrikes and fighting on the ground for four hours after each side mistook the other for militants, Afghan officials said.

In a separate incident, NATO said it accidentally killed at least four Afghan civilians Saturday night. A NATO soldier also was killed in the east.

Then, from Iraq:

U.S. forces kill son, nephew of Iraqi governor

BAGHDAD -- American Special Operations forces shot to death the son and nephew of the governor of Salahuddin province on Sunday during a raid in the northern city of Bayji.

The governor, Hamed al-Qaisi, threatened to resign in protest and said he would suspend cooperation with U.S. officials.

Iraqi and U.S. officials offered sharply different accounts of the attack, though the deputy provincial governor said U.S. officials had already apologized.

The governor's son and nephew appeared not to have been the targets of the raid. Instead, the U.S. military command in Baghdad said the house had been raided to capture a "suspected al-Qaida in Iraq operative."

Not sure whether to put any special weight in the fact that these stories managed to get reported at all. Most such stories don't get reported, and even when they do they come slathered with spin. Nobody questions the appropriateness of calling airstrikes against "militants" or "suspected al-Qaida in Iraq operatives," but such airstrikes almost invariably add to the collateral damage, undermining US political credibility (if such a thing even exists).

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Big story on the page was "Most food aid not reaching Haitians": only 2 percent of 16,000 tons of aid food reaching Haiti's harbors have been distributed to the people who need it. Article doesn't explain why.

Tom Engelhardt: Welcome to the Age of Homeland Insecurity. Starts with something about Tai Chi, then makes a point I've tried to argue for 5-6 years now:

Now, jump to September 11, 2001 and its aftermath -- and you know the Tai Chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke -- that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

Terrorism is an act of the desperate as much as the dastardly. The terrorist act itself settles nothing. What really matters is the reaction. Rarely the reaction is to cave in -- like Britain did in surrendering to the Stern Gang, or Reagan backing out of Lebanon after realizing that his provocations had backfired -- but in those cases the underlying power dynamics were already tilted against the targets. Slightly more often terrorism cracks open an existing fissure, but only if it provokes a harsh and unconscionable reaction -- the Boston Tea Party kicked off the American Revolution but only because the British cranked up the repression, outraging hitherto unconcerned colonists. Again, this works only where the latent political power favors the terrorists.

Al Qaeda had no such power base -- not at all in the US, and not really anywhere else, even in Afghanistan where the ruling Taliban was torn between their traditional courtesy of respect for guests and their dislike of Osama Bin Laden's mischief. But Al Qaeda hit the bullseye on 9/11, not only in terms of record numbers of people killed but more importantly in how they pushed George W Bush's button. Since then the US has done all the heavy lifting in its own bankrupt self-destruction. The rest of the piece documents that decline, with the emphasis on bankruptcy.

Al Qaeda is never going to triumph in even their small part of the world, no matter how poorly the US fares. They simply don't have the political appeal to mainstream Muslims, let alone anyone else, and the weaker the US becomes the more their one legitimate calling card fades away. Now the big problem is that Bush and his supporters have painted themselves into a corner by arguing that any US retreat will be seen as a victory for terrorism. The real answer is that both sides have lost, and sheer stubbornness keeps them losing more. Someone needs to come up with a politically palatable explanation for that -- my own is that no one wins at war, so it's always better to reduce conflict.

Dahr Jamail: Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (2007, Haymarket Books)

Along with Nir Rosen and Patrick Cockburn, Jamail has been one of the few reporters who have covered the invasion and occupation of Iraq from outside the confines of the US "safety net" -- not just the Green Zone but the US propaganda mission that seeks to control how we view what has happened in Iraq. I picked this up from the library, and unfortunately didn't get very far into it -- too many other distractions, too little time. The following are a few quotes. With more time I'm sure I could have found more. Some day I will.

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(pp. 37-38):

Some of the men we spoke with in the fuel line were aware of the fact that Halliburton subsidiary KBR had just been caught by the Pentagon for grossly overcharging them by importing gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait at $2.65 per gallon. Iraqi concerns were able to do the job for just under one dollar per gallon. Halliburton, which had Dick Cheney as its chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000 before he relinquished his position in order to become vice president of the United States, was unabashedly looting the Pentagon. By this time, Cheney's old company, which he still had financial ties with, had obtained billions of dollars of contracts in Iraq. (No one knows exactly how much money has been contracted in total, but as of the time of this writing, Halliburton's overall contracts for LOGCAP and oil infrastructure rebuilding have totaled approximately $20 billion in Iraq. Total expenditures on U.S. corporations operations in Iraq on reconstruction and other services is about $50 billion. LOGCAP is a Logistics Civil Augmentation Program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is Halliburton's largest government contract. Under this contract, Halliburton is responsible for providing supplies and services to the military on a global basis. Services include construction of military housing for troops, transporting food and supplies to bases, and serving food.

It's worth noting that it was Dick Cheney, as defense secretary in 1992, who spearheaded the movement to privatize most of the military's civil logistics activities. Under Cheney's direction, $9 million was paid by the Pentagon to KBR to conduct a study to determine whether private companies like KBR should handle all the military's civil logistics. KBR's classified study conveniently concluded that greater privatization of logistics was in the government's best interest. Shortly thereafter, on August 3, 1992, Secretary Cheney awarded the first comprehensive LOGCAP contract to KBR. The Washington Post reported, "The Pentagon chose [KBR] to carry out the study and subsequently selected the company to implement its own plan." Three years later Cheney became CEO of Halliburton.

(pp. 44-45):

I had met [translator] Harb [al-Mukhtar] a few days before this second trip to Ramadi. At that time, he had been finishing up his work with a depleted uranium (DU) study team from Japan. He'd taken them all over southern Iraq with their Geiger counters to measure what he said were extremely high levels of radiation in particular locations. DU munitions are used during combat because they are extremely effective. Made of radioactive heavy metals that can effortlessly cut through armor, they leave a radioactive dust upon impact that filters through the air, water, and ground, contaminating everything it touches.

Uranium is a heavy metal and a radioactive poison whose toxicity is not debatable, even according to the director of the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute, who stated in a report mandated by Congress, "No available technology can significantly change the inherent chemical and radiological toxicity of DU. These are intrinsic properties of uranium." In fact, even the primary U.S. Army training manual stated, "NOTE: (Depleted Uranium) Contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumptions." Nevertheless, hundreds of tons of DU munitions were used in the prior Gulf War, and the Pentagon admitted to using much more during this war. The effects on the Iraqi people had already been shown to be devastating.

(p. 60):

Things were already going poorly for the occupiers. According to the Department of Defense, by December 2003, U.S. soldiers reported to be sick, injured, or dead from the invasion/occupation numbered over ten thousand, a figure that kept rising, alarmingly, by the day. Resistance attacks on Americans were averaging over thirty per day, which amounted to an average over over 1.3 soldiers killed per day.

But, it was far worse for Iraqis. One of the doctors I interviewed at the Baghdad medical center informed me that the number of Iraqi children dying from malnutrition and disease had doubled sine the invasion, and natal mortality among women had tripled. Fear of kidnappings led to most children being kept at home. Women faced a constant threat of rape and abduction from criminal gangs on the rampage. Gunfire at all hours of the night and day had become familiar and commonplace in most areas of Baghdad.

It was gut-wrenching to witness the heavy toll that a dictatorial regime, multiple wars, sanctions, and now the occupation had taken on this ancient land. Environmentally, Iraq was a disaster area. Most people I knew, including myself, had the "Baghdad cough" from the impossibly high levels of pollution in the capital city. Many areas in southern Iraq were uninhabitable due to the presence of contaminated soil and water from the use of depleted uranium munitions by the U.S. military during the 1991 Gulf War. The scars of war were visible everywhere: on the buildings, the landscape, and the people.

Fred Kaplan: Stonewall Petraeus. Last week's big no-new-news event was the testifying of Petraeus and Crocker before Congress. Yes, we've made progress, but no, not really. No, we can't withdraw any troops, because even if we've made progress it won't hold without the troops. Oh, and Iran is causing us a lot of trouble, although no way near as much as they might if they tried.

Fred Kaplan: Bush's Double Talk on Iraq. As usual, Bush heard what he wanted to hear from Petraeus, then made up some more for good measure.

Tony Karon: Iraq: Ain't a Damn Thing Changed. Karon was so impressed by the Petraeus-Crocker testimony that he decided to re-run a column he wrote on April 26, 2007, unchanged.

Helena Cobban: Iraq: A Sinkhole, Not a Quagmire. The semantic differences betwen sinkhole and quagmire are overstated -- even if quagmire suggests that there's a end point to slog to, it doesn't offer much confidence in one's ability to get there. Otherwise, a good summary of the present situation.

Frank Rich: The Petraeus-Crocker Show Gets the Hook. Once and future drama critic: "The best General Petraeus could muster was a bit of bloodless Beltway-speak . . . He couldn't even argue that we're on a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people. That would require him to acknowledge that roughly five million of those people, 60 percent of them children, are now refugees receiving scant help from either our government of Nuri al-Maliki's." Last paragraph is worth quoting, referring back to the new Errol Morris documentary, Standard Operating Procedure:

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

Missed posting yesterday, after posting at least something every day in March.

Anne Flaherty: Military Feels Fuel-Cost Gouge in Iraq. AP article, noticed it in Wichita Eagle this morning. Reports that the US military is paying an average of $3.23/gallon for fuel in Iraq (about what we're paying here in Kansas), which given the Pentagon's penchant for gas guzzlers works out to $88 per soldier per day.

Some lawmakers say oil-rich allies in the Middle East should be doing more to subsidize fuel costs because of the stake they have in a secure Iraq.

Maybe they realize that the US isn't doing squat to stabilize and reconstruct a secure Iraq. Maybe they just appreciate the up side of free markets, which allows scarce commodities to rise in price until pain pinches demand. Bush in Iraq actually works both sides of this equation: adding to the demand while taking much of Iraq's oil off the market. Exxon Mobil doesn't flinch from taking advantage of the market. Why should Saudi Aramco? This is about the only positive payback the Saudis have received from billions of dollars they've paid out to subsidize US war aims, especially in Afghanistan from 1980 to when we pulled the rug out from under their buddies in the Taliban.

Tony Karon: A Teachable Moment in Basra. Summary quote, followed by a long list of examples (Somalia, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iraq):

The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular "enemy" group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as "clarifying" matters, demonstrating "resolve," or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the "birth pangs" of a brave new world. Each time, the "enemy" proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary's power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.

That the US (especially Bush) can screw up so consistently and not incur the wrath of American voters just goes to show that the consequences of success or failure in the Middle East are relatively trivial for most Americans -- contrary to all those admonitions on how we can't afford to lose.

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While the analysts -- at least the ones I bother reading -- are pretty much unanimous that the Basra offensive hurt Maliki (and the US) and helped Sadr (and Iran, diplomatically more so than because they have much of a stake in Sadr), it has led to a major purge of the Iraqi Army, with those who refused to fight the Sadrists out and much or all of ISCI's Badr Militia (the ones actually trained in Iran) joining in. This augurs for similar offensives in the future, which Bush will no doubt support as enthusiastically as he did this one.

Juan Cole: Why Al-Maliki Attacked Basra. The analysis is starting to come out now, not to mention the spin. Why did Maliki launch this "predictable fiasco, another in a long line of strategic failures for the sickly and divided Iraqi government, which survives largely because it is propped up by the United States"?

Three main motivations present themselves: control of petroleum smuggling, staying in power (including keeping U.S. troops around to ensure it), and the achievement of a Shiite super-province in the south. A southern super-province would spell a soft partition of the country, benefiting Shiites in the long term while cutting Sunnis out of substantial oil revenues, both licit and illicit. But all of the motivations have to do with something President Bush established as a benchmark in January 2007: upcoming provincial elections.

Still, this only adds up if you think Maliki thought he could decisively defeat the Sadrists. What I find striking is not only that he couldn't, but that he threw in the towel so quickly. He doesn't really want the provincial elections --they've always been part of the US reconciliation plan, but would only serve to weaken Maliki's central government (such as it is). So it's at least possible that he went along with the hair brained scheme to show Bush that elections will just hurt the US. Whether the message has gotten through isn't clear, but it's pretty clearly been sent.

Charles Crain: How Moqtada al-Sadr Won in Basra. Argues that one thing that Maliki's act of force clarified is that Moqtada al-Sadr is in effective charge of the Mehdi Army. More specifically, he's in a position where he can restrain the militia for political reasons, but doesn't necessarily direct it when it springs into action. He is a man to be dealth with, cautiously.

Helena Cobban: US Position in Iraq Eroding Fast. Whether the US started the attack on Basra, ushered it along, or just went along for a joy ride, it's clear now that the only force in the region that wanted stability and was able to do something about it was Iran. I'm sure that matters little to a Bush Administration that still fancies Iran as the Great Satan, the sole unrepentant member of the once notorious Axis of Evil. On the other hand, if some future administration finds it wants to get something accomplished to start disengaging from the abyss, it looks like Iran is the answer. Bush has done little but play into Iran's hands the last six years anyway, taking out Iran's enemies and installing Iran's friends in their place.

I suppose we should have known we were in for big trouble last week (March 24, to be exact) when Frederick Kagan announced, "The civil war in Iraq is over." The Surgemeister has never been right yet, but even by his standards this is pretty spectacular. With Dick Cheney and John McCain touching base in Iraq recently, with General Petraeus due for a DC dog and pony show on how the Surge has brought peace and prosperity to Baghdad, with the withdrawal promised back at the start of the Surge on indefinite Pause, it looks like all the planets were aligned to tug Kagan's brain even further than usual out of orbit.

I've read a few theories about why Maliki decided to lapse from his well established habits of do-nothingism to pick a war with the Sadr faction of Iraqi Shiism that brought him to power, but I haven't read anything convincing. Most likely the orders came from Washington, given how readily everyone from Bush on down fell into line, with US air power and tanks already taking over much of the fighting. But why Washington would push for a plan like this is hard to fathom. You'd think they'd be happy just to leave well enough alone and try to play out the clock, leaving the mess for the next administration. But that line of thinking assumes they're conscious enough to realize they're fucked and there's nothing much they can do about it. Since they have done something about it, we need to focus on dumber lines of reasoning, since clearly they're not smart enoguh to stay clear of this mess.

One question is whether they think they can effectively defeat Sadr. One problem is that the military damage they do manage to inflict will be self-limiting: the more dominant they are, the more they will drive the Mahdi Army underground into a protracted guerrilla war. Their chances at a military rout of a well armed, popularly supported, and increasingly decentralized movement are vanishingly small. The far bigger problem is political: it's inconceivable that US-backed Maliki unleashing war in Shiite neighborhoods will do anything but boost the Sadr movement's legitimacy as the only credible force willing and able to stand up against the US and their Iraqi cronies.

Any way you slice it, this sure looks like a losing move. So why? Here you have two basic choices. On the one hand, you can guess that the US thinks it can win this war, because the idiots-in-chief always think they can win everything no matter how often they're proven wrong. With Bush and Cheney, it's hard to dismiss this possibility no matter how stupid it looks. On the other hand, it's doubtful that Maliki is that stupid, which raises the other option. It's possible that Sadr, working behind the scenes of his cease fire, was on his way to putting together some sort of alliance that could send the US packing and Maliki into hiding. That might make one desperate enough to wage a preemptive strike, even if the prospects of it working for long were slim -- and with the US time is especially important.

As you'll recall, the US occupation was on the ropes back in spring 2004, with the US fighting Sadr as well as the Sunnis, and losing spectacularly on both fronts, but more dangerously with Sadr backing the Sunnis. The US backed off, making deals with both sides, most of all to keep them separate. Sadr, for his part, hurt himself immensely when he sat by idly while the US punitively destroyed Fallujah after the 2004 election. His sectarian Islamism and fanatical anti-Baath stance undercut his appeal as an Iraqi nationalist, and that's kept him on the sidelines ever since. But nobody else's in a position to do what needs to be done. Right-wingers like Fred Barnes have been saying all along that sooner or later the US has to take out Sadr. For them, later is coming sooner now -- hitting Sadr later in the election may be too much, and waiting until the election's over may be too late. They may figure this is the best chance they're going to get, so caution be damned.

One side effect of the siege that we're already seeing is the shutdown of Iraq's remaining oil exports, pushing pump prices up to soon-to-be record levels. Presumably that's not the reason, but Cheney may find the synergies gratifying.

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Glenn Greenwald: Fred Kagan on Monday. The Kagan quote and more, including several updates.

Other than Bill Kristol and Fred's brother, war cheerleader Robert Kagan, nobody has been more wrong about more things with regard to Iraq than supreme war theorist Fred Kagan. He's also deemed by the establishment media and the Bush administration to be the most respectable and knowledgeable expert on Iraq. Within that depressing contradiction lies most of the answers as to why we have destroyed that country and will continue to do so indefinitely.

Fred Kaplan: Warlord vs. Warlord. An early attempt to sort out what's happening in Basra. I like the parenthetical line: "The lively blogger who calls himself Abu Muqawama speculates that Bush officials have embraced ISCI because, unlike Sadr, its leaders speak English." ISCI is the former SCIRI -- founded, trained, and armed originally by Iran, but close to the US occupation, unlike Sadr's group, which is wholly based in Iraq with no foreign entanglements. This points to the sort of shallow reasoning the US specializes in, even though it leads to all sorts of insane confusion about which bad guys Iran must be backing even though Iran's real allies in Iraq are actually our so-called good guys.

Patrick Cockburn: Iraq Implodes as Shia Fights Shia. Another report:

Mr Sadr's followers believe the government is trying to eliminate them before elections in southern Iraq later this year, which they are expected to win. [ . . . ]

The supporters of Mr Sadr, who form the largest political movement in Iraq, blame the Americans for giving the go-ahead for Mr Maliki's offensive against them and supporting it with helicopters and bomber aircraft.

Cockburn notes that Sunnis seem to be supporting Maliki, seeing the Mehdi Army as little more than a death squad. This suggests Sadr hasn't made much progress in forming a united anti-US front. His short-sighted failure to do so is what allows the occupation to carry on, despite its destruction and unpopularity.

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If these events prove anything, it's that the argument that the US has any sort of moral obligation to stay in Iraq to fix or at least steady things that it wrecked is completely at odds with the actual US presence in Iraq. Balancing conflicting forces and nudging them toward some sort of political compromise might be desirable, but that's not part of the skill set Bush et al. have brought to the country. They persist in picking sides, backing favorites, working out longstanding grudges. They think force works, and they see politics as just another means to extend their force. If it was ever going to work, you'd think you'd see some sign by now. As this proves, there is no such sign.

John McCain's latest view of the future: "Today in Iraq, America and our allies stand on the precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism." Precipice? My dictionary gives two definitions: 1) An extremely steep or overhanging mass of rock; 2) The brink of a dangerous situation. Even the less metaphorical first defintion begs a question: how many allies can you fit on a precipice? (About as many as the US has?)

In the Wichita Eagle's article on the 4000th US soldier killed in Iraq, they go on to report a few more events of the day:

In Sunday's worst attack, a suicide bomber blew up a tanker laden with explosives at the entrance to an Iraqi army base in Mosul, a northern city described by the US military as the last urban stronghold of Sunni militants loyal to the group al-Qaida in Iraq.

At least 12 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 30 others injured along with 12 civilians, said army Brig. Gen. Mohammed Ahmed.

Another suicide car bomber attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in Mosul, killing one officer and injuring 10 other people, police said.

Militants pounded the capital with at least 16 rockets and seven mortar rounds Sunday, including three barrages aimed at the Green Zone, the Interior Ministry said. US officials did not immediately say who was responsible for the attack, but typically they blame rogue elements of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia for such attacks.

Sadr has ordered the militia to stand down until August, a move US officials credit with helping to reduce violence in Iraq. But a series of clashes with US and Iraqi security forces in Baghdad and south of the capital in recent days has frayed the truce.

Shiite neighborhoods also were hit in Sunday's rocket and mortar fire, which police said killed at least 13 people and injured 29, suggesting Sunni militants may have been firing rounds.

Gunmen in three cars sprayed bullets at commuters waiting to board minibus taxis, killing seven people and injuring 16 others in the mostly Shiite southeastern neighborhood of Zafaraniya, police said.

In the northwestern Shiite neighborhood of Shula, police said a suicide car bomber attacked a line of people waiting for gasoline, killing seven of them and inuring 12. The US military described the method of attack as a parked car bomb and put the toll at five dead and seven wounded.

Police in Baghdad also recovered the bodies of six people killed execution-style.

Northeast of the capital, two police officers were killed in drive-by shootings in Baqubah and Balad Ruz in Diyala provine, police said. Two other policemen were injured in the Baqubah attack.

South of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb exploded near an Iraqi military convoy, killing four soldiers, police said.

In other developments, the US military said it had verified the identities of six people killed in a helicopter strike near Samarra the previous day and determined that none of them were members of a US-backed neighborhood guard force known as the Sons of Iraq. A military statement said they were killed after five people were spotted conducting "suspicious activity" in an area known for raodside bombs. An Iraqi army commander and a local guard leader had said the men were manning a Sons of Iraq checkpoint.

The decision of tens of thousands of mostly Sunni Arab fighters to defend their neighborhoods against the insurgents they once backed or tolerated was another decisive factor in the ebb in violence. But tensions are building after a series of mistaken US strikes against the guards.

Meanwhile, George W Bush concluded: "The surge is working. And as a return on our success in Iraq, we've begun bringing some of our troops home. The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror."

It's hard to imagine what Bush could possibly mean by victory. But McCain has a point about the precipice: it's the point from which every direction heads down, most (for lack of a better word) precipitously.

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Michael Schwartz: How to Disintegrate a City. The history of the Battle of Baghdad. The Bush and McCain quotes above come from Tom Engelhardt's introduction. Schwartz has a book coming out in June, based on his remarkable series of TomDispatch posts: War Without End: The Iraq War in Context.

There was a gathering in a park here in Wichita last Saturday to mark the 5th anniversary of the Bush invasion of Iraq. Laura Tillem gave a short speech, and this is what she said:

Let's talk about why getting out soon is better for the Iraqis.

Let's be clear: what the US as represented by the Bush administration does in Iraq has not been and will not be concerned with the interests of Iraqi people. They are interested in having a power base in Iraq with which to exercise power over the entire Middle East. Refusing to leave now that we have sowed destruction has nothing to do with stopping a civil war (in fact we are arming the Sunnis so when we do have to leave the civil war will be more deadly). Instead it is because they do not want to give up the idea of a pliant government there and they do not want to admit what the whole world knows: the US cannot just impose its will on another people.

But let's talk about this idea that staying can help fix Iraq. That is, fix what we have broken. As though it was not us that destroyed the institutions that ran Iraq and replaced them with nothing but Halliburton boondoggles.

Staying in Iraq means, at best, the level of violence in spring 2005. This means that in a nation that used to have the highest educational levels in the Middle East, it is now and will be mostly impossible to send your kids to school.

Staying in Iraq means forcing more Iraqis to be branded collaborators if they oppose militias. Forget secular and feminist organizing -- the US has taken up all the space for those ideas.

We should focus instead on what is not there because we are there. For example, no other country will come to help the Iraqi people while we are there. Recently a group of Iragis called for UN to replace US for security. This cannot happen while the US is there.

So think about that. By staying there we doom them to have the most incompetent and illegitimate force possible, the US, trying to fix things. Not that the soldiers are incompetent but they are led by nincompoops and nuts like Bush and McCain.

Another bad result of our staying there is that it makes it impossible for the different factions to come to terms with each other. We prop up a government that has so little legitimacy it cannot stand without us. Maybe if we get out, then the Sadr movement will find an accommodation with the Sunnis. Maybe not, but it sure won't happen while we are there.

Put it this way. We know what will happen if we stay: the same thing that has been going on for 5 years. We don't know exactly what will happen when we leave, but it cannot get better while we are there.

The point about collaborators is one that we've been thinking a lot about lately, partly because of Neve Gordon's review of Hillel Cohen's book, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration With Zionism, 1917-1948. Actually, collaboration is an essential concern in any counterinsurgency. No foreign occupation can stand without considerable support from the local population providing information about insurgents and assuming roles in support of the occupation. Conversely, no insurgency can possibly succeed without persuading, by force if necessary, the local population not to collaborate.

This is a constant theme throughout the dozen or so cases of insurgencies that William R. Polk surveys in his recent book, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq. In the case of the American Revolution, Polk points out that at the start of hostilities, only about 2 in 10 Americans were against the British, 2 in 10 were loyalists, the rest were undecided or unconcerned. In that context, the insurgents fought not only the British troops and crown, but also anyone who might collaborate with the British. (If you watched HBO's John Adams series, you've seen some examples of this, including tar and feathers.) In the end, the British didn't lose the military engagement so much as they lost any chance of restoring loyalty.

So this is key: the American Revolution was from its very start, and necessarily so, a civil war between Americans against and in favor of the British crown. These same dynamics force every insurgency into civil war, and that civil war persists as long as the insurgency fights and is opposed. Polk's examples show that insurgencies only end under two cases: when the foreign occupation withdraws, or when the insurgency accepts some sort of accommodation -- possibly because the insurgency is exhausted, but even then usually with some sort of tangible gains. (The IRA in Northern Ireland is an example of the latter.)

It shouldn't be had to see how Iraq fits into all of this. Iraq was primed for an insurgency before the US invaded. There were many reasons for this which hardly need to be listed given that the insurgency (or several) actually happened. The first thing the insurgency did was to divide the country between the insurgents and those who collaborated with the occupation, and that was the start of the civil war. In other words: the occupation was met with an insurgency which in turn engendered civil war. The civil war would have happened even in a completely homogeneous population where the only difference was collaboration, but it really took off given the existing fault lines, which were readily manipulated by the occupation and the insurgents.

Of course, it's possible by now that the Iraqi civil war will take on a life of its own, following the grim cycle of atrocity and revenge. But what started it all was the US invasion and occupation, the revolt of a self-sustaining number of Iraqis against that occupation, and the struggle of both sides for the collaboration of the people. There is no chance that this will end in the submission of all Iraqi resistance to US hegemony. That leaves only one way to end the conflict, which is for the US to bow out, to give up on struggle for collaborators.

Some people will argue that the US has been making headway in recruiting collaborators, and that the more this happens, the more marginalized the "dead enders" become, the closer to "victory" we are. The levels of violence don't support any such optimism: Iraq is still far too dangerous to make any sort of reconstruction and economic recovery. The terms that the US has accepted to gain collaboration also appear to be exceptionally temporary: the Mahdi Army agreed to a truce, the Awakening to fight limited skirmishes while building up its own armed strength. For now, all sides have reasons to bide their time. This is mostly because the American people, unlike Bush and McCain, see little or no reason to cling to a thin and tattered tissue of sovereignty in Iraq. For all the talk about "staying the course," the inevitable course has always been that sooner or later the US would quit Iraq. The vast destruction that we have wrought only starts with the bombs and bullets the US has spent there. More profound is how we've deranged the country, split it into civil war camps, by coercing and/or tempting collaborators. Needless to say, the longer we stay, the more such damage we produce, and the harder it will be to heal.

William R. Polk: The Iraq War and the Presidential Election. Well, not so much about the election, which is just as well. The first long section is about what the war is costing "us" -- which at this point is probably the Achilles heel of the misadventure. It seems impossible to reach any sort of consensus on whether Iraq would be better off or worse off without US troops there, but deep down it's hard to find any Americans who actually care about Iraqis -- from day one the war has always been about us, and the Iraqis have never been more than pawns or collateral damage. On the other hand, the question of whether our costs justify the cheap thrills and petty vanities of the politicians who started the war -- that's a question that deserves to be kept front and center. I don't think Polk has identified all of the costs, and many of them are incalculable -- e.g., the war was presumably the reason Bush was elected in 2004, leading to four more years of all sorts of mischief. But this is a good list to start from, to show to doubtful friends and to consult for 5th anniversary speachmaking. Polk writes:

A leading member of the Neoconservatives, James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, said he hopes it [what he calls "the Long War"] will not last more than 40 years. The cost of such a generational conflict has been estimated at more than $17 trillion dollars.

More important, in the long period of stress, the American way of life would be severely challenged, perhaps irreparably damaged. The real cost could be the destruction of the world in which we live and the replacement of our civic, cultural and material "good life" by something like nightmare George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984.

Polk also summarizes some of two of his books. One is called Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq, which takes about ten cases widely scattered in space and time and draws out common themes, like the near impossibility of crushing such insurgencies. The other was coauthored with George McGovern, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now -- would be a very useful book if anyone in a position to get out of Iraq actually wanted to.

Dean Baker: The War and the Recession. Baker writes usefully about the present costs of the Iraq war and cites some chilling modelling on future costs of extended war ("by the tenth year, the economy was projected to have lost about half a million jobs, mostly in manufacturing and construction"), but he argues that the real cause of the recession is the $8 trillion housing bubble collapse.

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News today (aside from the 8 US troops killed in Iraq, a bit of a bump from the usually reported tranquility): Admiral William Fallon resigned at Centcom commander. Fallon has recently been quoted as saying that the US won't attack Iran on his watch, so I guess that promise has expired. It seems likely that's what did him in: the Bush hawks like the principle of keeping the option of nuking Iran on the table even if they don't intend to do it. Otherwise, like, the enemy might think we're rational, and, like, we can't have any of that get out.

PS: Also looks like Fallon was pushing to draw down some troops from Iraq, and clashed with Petraeus over that.

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Other news is that Obama won the Mississippi primary today, something like 60% to 38% for Clinton. It looks like that was closer than it would have been due to open votes. Salon reports some exit poll breakouts: Republicans voting in the Democratic primary favored Clinton 77-23; voters with favorable opinion of John McCain favored Clinton 71-29. Some guess as to the size of the crossover vote can be made based on the fact that the race breakdown of voters was 49-49, where normal expectations were that the Democratic primary electorate would be 60-70% black. This doesn't look like just some casual drift. Of course, it could just be Republicans trying to fuck with Democrats heads. It doesn't necessarily mean that Republicans like Clinton more than Obama, or hate Obama more than Clinton, but most likely it does mean that they'd rather run against Clinton. Maybe she's not as vetted as she thinks?

PS: Here's a report about Republicans crossing over in the Ohio primary.

Samantha Power: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008, Penguin Press)

The Jan. 7, 2008 issue of The New Yorker has a piece by Samantha Power called "The Envoy: The United Nations' doomed mission to Iraq." The article is presumably excerpted from Power's forthcoming book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. The following quotes are from the magazine article:

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The introduction talks about how UN officials feared US success in the 2003 invasion of Iraq (p. 43):

On April 9, 2003, when a U.S. Marine tank helped topple the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad's Firdos Square, many officials at the headquarters of the United Nations, in New York, averted their eyes from the celebratory images unfolding on CNN. A few days later, when a wide-shot photograph revealed that relatively few Iraqis had participated in the statue demolition, U.N. employees rapidly disseminated the image through e-mail. "We didn't wish bad things for the Iraqis," a U.N. official recalls. "But we were terrified that if the Bush Administration got away with talking all over international law it would jeopardize everything we stood for."

The Security Council had withheld support for the invasion, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. diplomats had warned of the human suffering that it would cause; they were chastened by the ease with which the American-led Coalition had reached Baghdad, and by the relative bloodlessness of the battle. A swift victory, U.N. officials worried, would establish a dangerous precedent, emboldening member states to go to war even in the face of firm international opposition. Annan, speaking with colleagues, lamented the possibly irreparable loss of U.N. relevance.

Of course, that's what Bush's neocons were aiming for. But the UN had already sacrificed its relevance, starting in 1948 when it and the world powers who had launched it failed to their first major problem: Palestine. That continuing failure has reminded the world of their irrelevance ever since. Over the years the US has paid less and less lip service to the UN, under Bush only going to the UN for the most cynical political cover: e.g., 1483 (p.43):

Whatever the Europeans' aims, U.S. diplomats, who were still basking in their apparent victory, largely dictated the terms of Security Council Resolution 1483, offering other countries no say in how Iraq was governed, providing no timetable for departure, and handing the U.N. an ill-defined, subservient role. Although the U.N. resolution technically obliged the occupiers to abide by the Geneva Conventions -- which prohibit occupying authorities from exploiting a country's resources or making fundamental changes to its government -- the international norms of occupation were superseded. Resolution 1483 effectively granted the Americans and the British the legal authority to choose Iraq's political leaders, to spend its oil revenue, and to transform its legal, political, and economic structures. It also called on other U.N. member states to contribute personnel, equipment, and other resources to the Coalition's effort. For the first time in history, the Security Council was upholding the occupation of one U.N. member state by another. Mona Khalil, a lawyer at headquarters, set up a screen saver on her computer that read "The U.N. Charter has left the building."

Despite reservations, the UN took the crumbs given it, and sent veteran diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, against his better judgment, to Baghdad (p. 46):

When Vieira de Mello first arrived in East Timor, in 1999, the Timorese had been deeply grateful to the U.N. for having staged a referendum that had led to its independence from Indonesia. But in Iraq U.N. civil servants like Vieira de Mello were tarred by their association with the weapons inspectors whom the U.N. had sent into the country during Saddam's regime; they were equally resented for the sanctions that the U.N. member states had imposed on Saddam's regime, crippling the economy. Some Iraqis even saw officials working for the humanitarian Oil-for-Food program as agents of punishment. There were advantages, however, to having a history in Iraq. Whereas the Coalition relied disproportionately on Iraqi exiles for intelligence, the U.N. had three thousand Iraqi staff members who had remained in the country, even during the invasion. Vieira de Mello thought that it would be easier for him to get a read on the Iraqi street than it was for Bremer.

(pp. 46-47):

When Vieira de Mello and his U.N. team entered the former palace where Bremer had chosen to work, they saw Americans emerging from offices identified as various Iraqi ministries. Resolution 1483 had envisaged the Coalition as a temporary authority in Iraq; Vieira de Mello now realized that the Coalition considered itself an actual government. At the meeting, Bremer explained that he saw Phase One of the transition as the uprooting of the Baathist regime and the establishment of law, order, and basic services. Vieira de Mello worried that these goals were at cross-purposes: uprooting the old regime would undermine the state's power to provide the services and stability that Bremer recognized were essential. Yet Bremer seemed unconcerned. "We expect to turn the corner in the next month or so," he said. Phase Two, Bremer went on, included economic reconstruction, job creation, and the formation of democratic bodies. He intended to appoint a group of Iraqis that would select the drafters of a new constitution. Vieira de Mello winced at the idea that a constitution would be drafted before general elections were held, and it would seem like an illegitimate American charter. But he held back his views, characteristically reluctant to alienate somebody before he had first had the chance to win him over. (Douglas Stafford, the former Deputy U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, once described Vieira de Mello as "a man who doesn't know how to make an enemy.")

Vieira de Mello returned to the Canal Hotel, where he had a heated discussion with his top staff. Jamal Benomar, one of his Arab-speaking advisers, insisted that the U.S., by taking over the governing functions of Iraq, and acting as a full sovereign, had already violated Resolution 1483. He urged Vieira de Mello to press for the immediate creation of an Iraqi government. Otherwise, the U.N. would appear complicit in an occupation despised by Iraqis. Vieira de Mello countered that Bremer would respond badly to criticism. He believed that the U.N. had to work with the Americans in order to change their approach. "We can't just sit at the Canal Hotel and do nothing," he told his team. "You can't help people from a distance."

(p. 51):

Vieira de Mello liked to repeat what he had learned after years of frustration: "Soldiers make bad policemen." After the looting and chaos that followed the fall of Saddam's regime, the Justice Department had drawn up plans to deploy to Iraq more than six thousand police trainers. But only fifty trainers had arrived so far. Electricity, water, and other utilities operated intermittently at best. Vieira de Mello reminded Bremer that much of Kosovo and all of East Timor had been burned to the ground when the U.N. arrived but that the U.N. administrators had managed to mobilize international resources for recovery. Yet Bremer seemed unwilling to give the U.N. a substantive role; around this time, Vieira de Mello told George Packer, a reporter for this magazine, that the "neocon side of Bremer's personality" was emerging.

In meetings with Bremer and General Sanchez, Vieira de Mello asked about the thousands of prisoners being held at a U.S. base near the Baghdad airport who had been crammed into facilities without air-conditioning or sufficient oversight of guards. He argued that human rights were the cornerstone of all that had been wrong with Saddam's reign. He stressed the importance of creating a database for Iraqis in detention, and he asked that family members and lawyers be granted access to the detainees. He urged that the preventive-detention period be reduced from twenty-one days to seventy-two hours, that status review be instituted, and that something like a public-defender system be created. "I'm not accusing your soldiers of abuse," he told Sanchez. "I'm saying, 'You don't have the checks and balances in place to guard against abuse.'"

Vieira de Mello was careful to convey these complaints in private and without shrillness.

The latter is the critical point. By not criticizing the US occupation in public the UN failed to leverage its reputation either to change US policy or to gain good will from Iraqis; as such, the UN blended into the US occupation. The US could use the UN presence to enhance its legitimacy in the west, while the UN became just another occupation target in Iraq.

A little hubris here, but the general point is likely true (p. 52):

Vieira de Mello's dealings with U.N. headquarters were making him especially tense. He had always been exasperated by the organization's delayed responses, the administrative hassles, the obliviousness to a field staff's daily trials. But in Iraq these problems were magnified. As devoted as he was to the U.N., he exploded in frustration. "The U.N. is unable to attract the best," Vieira de Mello complained to Salamé. "And on the rare occasion that the U.N. happens to find the best it doesn't have the slightest idea how to keep them. If the U.N. ever succeeds, it is by accident."

(p. 54):

Vieira de Mello began to see the growing insurgency as the consequence of an increasingly malignant occupation. Hemmed in by Resolution 1483, however, he concluded that the only way to improve security in Baghdad was to work even harder to get the Coalition to give up power. Coalition troops, he told a Brazilian journalist, had to "have greater sensitivity and respect for the customs of the people." They had to focus on the dignity of Iraqis, which was being trampled daily: Iraqis had lived under a barbarous regime; the war with Iran had killed hundreds of thousands; they had suffered years of devastating sanctions; their government had been overthrown by outsiders; and now, in "one of the most humiliating periods in the history of this people," they had almost no say on how they were being ruled.

Vieira de Mello began drafting an op-ed article. An occupation, he wrote, can be "grounded in nothing but good intentions. But morally, and practically, I doubt it can ever legitimate: its time, if it ever had one, has passed." He urged the Americans and the British to "aim openly and effectively at their own disappearance."

Article ends with Vieira de Mello dying, trapped for hours under rubble when the UN building in Baghdad was bombed. A second bombing finally drove the UN out of Iraq, leaving Bremer and the Americans to enjoy their tainted sovereignty.

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Just as I was getting ready to post this, I noticed that Power was forced to resign from her perch advising the Obama campaign. Greg Mitchell reports:

Latest firestorm in campaign: Harvard prof and star author Samantha Power calls Hillary a "monster" . . . a little too late says that's off-the-record, gets in the paper. Problem: She is a top Obama foreign policy adviser, his "Condi," as some have said. She quickly apologizes, but today the Clinton team calls for her ouster. Andrew Sullivan, a big Obama backer, weighs in: "The good professor blurts out the truth. There is something monstrous about a couple so intoxicated with money, power and secrecy and so unencumbered by any ethical constraints that they will do anything, say anything, be anything in order to stay ahead." This comes the day after the Clinton team likened Obama to Ken Starr.

I'm not sure which of many angles to this semi-story is the most sordid. I wouldn't call Clinton a monster, but can't guarantee I'd be able to suppress a chuckle if someone else did. I don't exactly agree with what Sullivan said, but there's some truth to it. I'm not a fan of Power -- she strikes me as one of those "dangerous do-gooders" the Marine in Generation Kill refers to -- but she certainly knows more about the UN and how to work with it than 9 out of 10 foreign policy wonks in America these days, and I can see that as a useful resource (although hardly critical at this stage in the campaign). Most of all, I don't like the current vogue of summary execution for misspeaking, but Clinton's had to sack people in her organization for comparable gaffes. On the other hand, the media and much of the electorate seem to be so shallow at this point that elections can turn on this nonsense.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

I came late to this book, largely because I was peeved by how readily Chandrasekaran would parrot any US propaganda line when he frequently appeared in PBS news reports from Baghdad. I suppose his payback was access to the inner workings of the CPA, and he payed them back impressively in his perfectly titled book. It focuses on what for most reporters should have been the easy part, covering Paul Bremer's CPA in Baghdad's safe, secluded Green Zone, showing what should have been obvious from the start: that the party hacks the Bush administration sent to Baghdad were the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong place with the wrong ideas and skill sets.

Still, the biggest problem is that this ends when Bremer leaves. The CPA/Bremer period is by pretty well documented by now, at least compared to the much more secretive occupation command that followed, first under John Negroponte then under Zalmay Khalilzad. This was the period when it became unsafe for reporters to leave the Green Zone, so it's all the more disappointing that so few bothered to do some actual reporting on what was actually happening inside the palace.

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Welcome to the Green Zone (p. 15):

It was Saddam who first decided to turn Baghdad's prime riverfront real estate into a gated city within a city, with posh villas, bungalows, government buildings, shops, and even a hospital. He didn't want his aides and bodyguards, who were given homes near his palace, to mingle with the masses. And he didn't want outsiders peering in. The homes were bigger, the trees greener, the streets wider than in the rest of Baghdad. There were more palms and fewer people. There were no street vendors and no beggars. No one other than members of Saddam's inner circle or his trusted cadre of guards and housekeepers had any idea what was inside. Those who loitered near the entrances sometimes landed in jail. Iraqis drove as fast as they could on roads near the compound lest they be accused of gawking.

It was the ideal place for the Americans to pitch their tents. Saddam had surrounded the area with a tall brick wall. There were only three points of entry. All the military had to do was park tanks at the gates.

The Americans expanded Saddam's neighborhood by a few blocks to encompass the gargantuam Convention Center and the al-Rasheed [hotel], a once-luxurious establishment made famous by CNN's live broadcasts during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They fortified the perimeter with seventeen-foot-high blast barriers made of foot-thick concrete topped with coils of razor wire.

Interviewing Iraq's proconsul, Paul Bremer shortly after arriving, Chandrasekaran asks what is his top priority? (p. 70):

Economic reform, he said. He had a three-step plan. The first was to restore electricity, water, and other basic services. The second was to put "liquidity in the hands of the people" -- reopening banks, offering loans, paying salaries. The third was to "corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises," and to "wean people from the idea the state supports everything." Saddam's government owned hundreds of factories. It subsidized the cost of gasoline, electricity, and fertilizer. Every family received monthly food rations. Bremer regarded all of that as unsustainable, as too socialist. "It's going to be a very wrenching, painful process, as it was in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said.

"But won't that be very complicated and controversial?" I asked. "Why not leave it up to the Iraqis?"

Bremer had come to Iraq to build not just a democracy but a free market. He insisted that economic reform and political reform were intertwined. "If we don't get their economy right, no matter how fancy our political transformation, it won't work," he said.

(p. 78):

After accepting the job as CPA administrator, [Bremer] spent a week in briefings and meetings at the Pentagon. He asked for proposals that could be put into action right away. He heard about plans to repair schools and power plants, but he knew Iraqis wouldn't see the results immediately. Shooting looters on sight would be bold, and he even proposed this at his first staff meeting in Baghdad, but he eventually concluded that such an action would be too politically risky. Forming an interim government at once, as Garner was trying to do, would be significant, but Bremer feared that Iraqi political leaders weren't ready. Then he heard about de-Baathification.

Bremer had concluded on his own that senior members of Saddam's Baath Party would have to be purged, and that lower-ranking members would have to renounce their affiliation. He compared it to the de-Nazification undertaken by the Allies after World War II. But he didn't know much about the Baath Party's structure and operations.

Bremer evidently didn't know much about de-Nazification either. Immediately after the war, the Americans and Russians were scrambling to hire ex-Nazis, especially if they knew how to build rockets or might be useful spying on each other. As soon as the Germans could, they quietly abandoned the rest of the program.

(p. 80):

Feith's office drafted a one-and-a-half-page executive order titled "De-Baathification of Iraqi Society." Not only did it include a prohibition on employing firkas [the fourth level down in the Baath hierarchy: group members] and above, but it also banned regular members from "holding positions in the top three layers of management in every national government ministry, affiliated corporations and other government institutions." The document was shown to Pentagon lawyers and to Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld but not to Rice or Powell, who believed the policy drafted in Feith's office did not represent the compromise forged at the March 10 war cabinet meeting. The final draft was printed in the Pentagon and carried to Baghdad by one of Bremer's aides.

Bremer's first meeting with the exiled Iraqi political leaders: Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Ibrahim al-Jafari, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, Jalal Talabani, Massoud Barzani, Adnan Pachachi (pp. 88-89):

After an opening round of pleasantries, Bremer got right to the point. There would be no interim government. The United States was not going to be ending its occupation anytime soon. He was the viceroy, and he was in charge. When one of the exiles interrupted him to say that Iraqis wanted Iraqis in charge, not Americans, he bristled. "You don't represent the country," he said.

It was a breathtaking volte-face in American policy. Bremer and his aides tried to fob the responsibility off on the White House, but it was the viceroy's decision. Before he left Washington, everyone had sought to influence his political plan. Doug Feith had urged him to form an exile-led interim government. Paul Wolfowitz had urged him to hold elections as soon as possible. State had urged him to convene caucuses aimed at promising internal candidates. Bush, however, har urged Bremer to take stock of the situation and make his own judgments. The president told Bremer to slow it down if he needed to. The goal, Bush said, was to create an interim administration that represented the Iraqi people.

(p. 95):

The Iraqi police were almost nonexistent. They had fled their stations as American troops converged on Baghdad. Most were at home. Some had even joined the orgy of looting. The few who had reported back to work were too scared to enforce the law. They had pistols. The criminals had AK-47s.

It didn't take long for the experts to conclude that more than 6,600 foreign police advisers should be sent to Iraq immediately.

The White House dispatched just one: Bernie Kerik.

(p. 131):

The neoconservative architects of the war -- Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, and Cheney -- regarded wholesale economic change in Iraq as an integral part of the American mission to remake the country. To them, a free economy and a free society went hand in hand. If the United States were serious about having democracy flourish in Iraq, it would have to teach Iraqis a whole new way of doing business -- the American way.

The CPA appointed Peter McPherson, president of Michigan State University and a Cheney friend, as economic policy director (pp. 135-137):

To McPherson, looting was a form of much-needed shrinkage. If the theft of government property promoted private enterprise -- such as when Baghdad's municipal bus drivers began driving their own routes and pocketing the fees -- it was a positive development in his view. "I thought the privatization that occurs sort of naturally when somebody took over their state vehicle, or began to drive a truck that the state used to own, was just fine," he said. Fellow CPA officials were aghast. Hundreds of police cars had been stolen and turned into private taxis -- good for the private sector but bad for law enforcement. The same problem plagued the Ministry of Trade's food-distribution system. Many of the trucks that had transported monthly rations were being used to haul private reconstruction supplies. "The Robin Hood philosophy might have sounded good to the economists inside the palace," one CPA ministry adviser said, "but when you looked at the real-world impact, it was lunacy."

McPherson also believed that his shrinkage strategy would help to address a vexing issue for his economic team. Nobody could be sure how much money various state-owned enterprises had in the bank -- or how big their debts were. Bank records had been destroyed, as well as files at the Ministry of Industry. How much did the state oil company owe the al-Faris Company for products that had been delivered before the war? How much did al-Faris, in turn, owe the State Company for Iron and Steel Products? And what did that firm owe the government mining company? Sorting through everyone's assets and obligations would require a battalion of accountants. Borrowing a term suggested by Walt Slocombe, the architect of the dissolution of the army, McPherson called that challenge a "hopeless entanglement." [ . . . ]

McPherson advocated a clean-slate approach. All debts and assets would be nullified. State-owned enterprises would start from scratch.

This decision effectively bankrupted all Iraqi state enterprises, even ones that had previously established their economic viability.

(pp. 140-141):

With privatization abandoned in favor of shrinkage, McPherson turned his attention to other policies designed to create a capitalist utopia in the Middle East. He persuaded Bremer, who shared his dream of a vibrant priate sector, to eliminate import duties. Saddam's government had charged taxes as much as 200 percent on some imported luxury products. With no more fees, truckloads of cars, televisions, and air conditioners were shipped into Iraq from every neighboring country. Baghdad's Karrada Street, the capital's main shopping boulevard, was lined with new vehicles and electronic appliances for sale. Curious Iraqis pawed the products. Wealthier ones removed the dollars they had been hiding under their mattresses and purchased the newly arrived goods, which had long been out of their reach. The scene was just what the press strategists at the White House had long sought: liberated Iraqis reveling in a free market.

Emboldened, McPherson became even more ambitious. He seized upon the tax code -- without waiting for the BearingPoint consultants -- and took an ax to it. He slashed Iraq's top tax rate for individuals and businesses from 45 percent to a flat 15 percent. It was the sort of tax overhaul that fiscal conservatives long dreamed of implementing in the United States. No matter that most Iraqis never bothered to pay taxes. The details would be worked out later by BearingPoint, whose contract required them to develop a program to assign Iraqis taxpayer identification numbers.

The centerpiece of McPherson's agenda was a new foreign-investment law. Iraq, like almost all of its neighbors, restricted the degree to which foreigners could participate in the local economy. In most cases, a foreigner could own no more than 49 percent of a business. The rule, designed to protect indigenous firms, was out of sync with the globalizing world economy, but it played to the Iraqi public's conspiratorial, xenophobic fears that investors from Israel would seek to take over Iraqi companies. To McPherson, though, foreign investment was key to economic recovery. The way to create jobs, he reasoned, was to lure multinational firms into Iraq with the promise of being able to own not just 49 percent, but 100 percent, of the businesses they established. He figured that they would set up factories that would employ thousands of Iraqis, obviating the need for the CPA to resuscitate many state-owned firms. He pitched his idea to Bremer, who became an early convert.

(pp. 143-144):

A month before McPherson left, Bremer told him he would no longer have to worry about private-sector development. That job would belong to Thomas Foley, an investment banker and a major Republican Party donor who had been President Bush's classmate at Harvard Business School.

A week after arriving, Foley told a contractor from BearingPoint that he intended to privatize all of Iraq's state-owned enterprises within thirty days.

"Tom, there are a couple of problems with that," the contractor said. "The first is an international law that prevents the sale of assets by an occupation government."

"I don't care about any of that stuff," Foley told the contractor, according to her recollection of the conversation. "I don't give a shit about international law. I made a commitment to the president that I'd privatize Iraq's businesses."

When the contractor tried to object again, Foley cut her off.

"Let's go have a drink," he said.

(p. 149):

SAIC had been contracted by the Pentagon to run the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), which would comprise the national television station, a national radio station, and a newspaper printed six times a week. SAIC had no experience running media operations in a post-conflict environment; it specialized in designing computer systems for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. Nevertheless, the Pentagon offered the Iraqi media contract to SAIC without inviting other firms to bid. The contract was written by Doug Feith's office. Feith's deputy, Christopher Ryan Henry, had been a vice president at SAIC before joining the Pentagon. SAIC hired Robert Reilly, a former Voice of America director, to head the IMN project. During the Reagan administration, Reilly had headed a White House information operations campaign in Nicaragua to drum up support for the Contra rebels.

Don North's first task for SAIC was completed on American soil. He helped produce a documentary about Saddam's crimes against humanity that the U.S. government wanted to broadcast in Muslim nations to build support for the war. When it was finished, North asked his new bosses what he could do to prepare to run Iraq's television station. "But they said, 'Okay, Don, you can do whatever you want right now. We'll see you again in Baghdad, after the fall of Baghdad,'" he recalled. "I said, 'Yeah, isn't there something we can be doing? Planning? I mean, in my experience it takes years to plan programming and structure for a new TV and radio station.'

"'No. No. We got a few people that will be buying equipment. We're not quite sure what we'll find when we get to Baghdad, but don't worry about it.'"

When North arrived in Kuwait, he took stock of the equipment that SAIC had purchased. There were thirteen tripods, but all lacked a base plate upon which a camera could sit. The receiver for satellite transmissions didn't have a power cord. Nothing had instruction booklets. "It was like they bought everything from a flea market in London," North said.

(p. 185):

When it came to economic reform, Bremer and his policy planners weren't daunted by the challenges Glenn Corliss and Brad Jackson were facing with the Ministry of Industry. Privatization of state-owned enterprises was to begin by October. A trust fund modeled after one in the state of Alaska was to be established to provide Iraqis with annual cash rebates from oil sales. Monthly food rations were to be converted into cash payments by November. The food subsidies, along with below-market prices for gasoline and electricity, were to be eliminated after February. Iraq was to prepare to join the World Trade Organization, which meant the elimination of tariffs, the creation of new laws to protect businesses, and the entry of foreign-owned banks. "It's a full-scale economic overhaul," Bremer said. "We're going to create the first real free-market economy in the Arab world."

(p. 187):

John Agresto arrived in Iraq with two suitcases, a feather pillow, and a profusion of optimism. His title was senior adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education, but he envisioned the job in grander terms. It was not just to oversee but to overhaul the country's university system. He wanted to introduce the concept of academic freedom and to open liberal arts colleges. He hoped to restock libraries with the latest books and to wire classrooms with high-speed Internet connections. He regarded the postwar looting, which had eviscerated many campuses, as a benefit. It provided "the opportunity for a clean start" and was a chance to give Iraqis "the best modern equipment."

(p. 189):

Agresto knew next to nothing about Iraq's educational system. Even after he was selected, the former professor didn't read a single book about Iraq. "I wanted to come here with as open a mind as I could have," he said. "I'd much rather learn firsthand than have it filtered to me by an author."

Robert Blackwill was a State Department diplomat thrown into the planning for establishing some sort of Iraqi constitution and goverment, an issue where the CPA was at loggerheads with Ayatollah al-Sistani, who insisted on elections of Iraqis to write the constitution (p. 233):

With the caucus plan imploding, [Blackwill] viewed the United Nations as America's best hope in Iraq. He began lobbying Rice, Powell, and others in the administration to back al-Hakim's request.

The fight betwen Blackwill and the CPA over UN involvement was so acrimonious that when he returned to Baghdad in January, he no longer trusted aides in the palace to transmit his secure messages to Rice in Washington; he brought his own communications team from the White House. [ . . . ]

Blackwill's choice to lead the United Nations team was former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi. Bremer's political advisers regarded Brahimi as an anti-American Arab nationalist who might manipulate the process in ways that did not serve American interests. But Blackwill was insistent. He was impressed with the work Brahimi had done as the UN's point man in Afghanistan after the United States ousted the Taliban. He eventually invited Brahimi to the White House for meetings with Rice, Powell, and, finally, Bush.

(pp. 238-239):

The story of Yarmouk Hospital was the same as that of nearly every other public institution in Iraq. In the 1970s, it had been one of the best medical centers in the Arab world. Jordanians, Syrians, and Sudanese traveled to Baghdad for operations. That changed, of course, after the invasion of Kuwait and the imposition of sanctions. Although Saddam eventually won the right to sell his oil in exchange for food and humanitarian supplies, the hospital never had enough medicine. The government blamed the United Nations for screwing up the purchase orders. The United Nations blamed the government for ordering the wrong items and for steering contracts to cronies instead of to reputable suppliers. The Bush administration believed that Saddam's government, which was trying to generate international support to overturn the sanctions, was deliberately depriving Yarmouk and other hospitals of needed supplies.

However bad the place was before the Americans arrived, it got much, much worse when the U.S. Army rolled into the city.A tank shell struck the hospital the day Saddam's government fell, knocking out the generator and sending doctors fleeing home. With nobody to watch over the building, looters carted away not just all the beds, medicines, and operating room equipment, but also the CT and ultrasound scanners. When doctors returned to work, they struggled to provide basic first aid with makeshift implements.

(pp. 239-240):

Once the Americans arrived, the job of rehabilitating Iraq's health-care system fell to Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., a physician with a master's degree in public health and postgraduate degrees from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and the University of California at Berkeley. Burkle was a naval reserve officer with two Bronze Stars and a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He taught at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, where he specialized in disaster-response issues. During the first Gulf War , he provided medical aid to Kurds in northern Iraq. He had worked in Kosovo and Somalia. And in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he had been put in charge of organizing the American response to the expected public health crisis in Iraq. A USAID colleague called him the "single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government."

A week after Baghdad's liberation, Burkle was informed that he was being replaced. A senior official at USAID told him that the White House wanted a "loyalist" in the job. Burkle had a wall of degrees, but he didn't have a picture of himself with the president.

Burkle's job was handed to James K. Haveman, Jr., a sixty-year-old social worker who was largely unknown among international health experts. He had no medical degree, but he had connections. He had been the community health director for the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, who recommended him to Wolfowitz. Haveman was well-traveled, but most of his overseas trips were in his capacity as a director of International Aid, a faith-based relief organization that provided health care while promoting Christianity in the developing world. Prior to his stint in government, Havemanran a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that urged pregnant women not to have abortions.

(p. 242):

[Haveman] approached problems the way a health-care administrator in America would: He focused on prevention measures to reduce the need for hospital treatment. He urged the Health Ministry to mount an antismoking campaign, and he assigned an American from the CPA team, who turned out to be a closet smoker, to lead the public-education effort. Several members of Haveman's team noted wryly that Iraqis faced far greater dangers in their daily life than a little tobacco. The CPA's limited resources, they argued, would be better used raising awareness about how to prevent childhood diarrhea and other fatal maladies. I was reminded of a comment made by my Information Ministry minder before the war, when I asked him why a pack of cigarettes cost only about thirty cents.

"Ali, your government keeps complaining that it doesn't have enough money," I said. "Why don't they tax cigarettes like they do in America?"

"In our country," Ali said, "it would not be wise to tax a tranquilizer."

(p. 258):

The CPA's economic team had no shortage of ambition. They began studying the feasibility of giving each family a debit card loaded with the cash value of all the rations they were due. The cards would be automatically replenished each month. Otwell was aghast. Nobody in Iraq used credit cards. There were no automated teller machines. Phone service and electrical power were unavailable for much of the day. How did the CPA expect merchants to process debit cards? Who would purchase the processing equipment? To Otwell, it was another crazy ivory-tower scheme invented in the Emerald City.

Bremer agreed to implement this scheme by the sovereignty handover date. The scheme wasn't implemented. It was killed by the US military, stretched thin enough without having to face food riots.

(p. 312):

Some of [the CPA staffers] began to question the management of Iraq outside the walls of the Green Zone. Taking on al-Sadr at the same time the marines were attacking Fallujah seemed ill-conceived. "Did we have to go after him right now?" one senior CPA official told me at the time. "It should have been delayed. Dealing with both these problems at one time is crazy, if not suicidal."

(p. 326):

But where the CPA saw progress, Iraqis saw broken promises. As Bremer prepared to depart, electricity generation remained stuck at around 4,000 megawatts -- resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes -- instead of the 6,000 megawatts he had pledged to provide. The new army had fewer than 4,000 trained soldiers, a third of what he had promised. Only 15,000 Iraqis had been hired to work on reconstructions projects funded with the Supplemental, rather than the 250,000 that had been touted. Seventy percent of police officers on the street had not received any CPA-funded training. Attacks on American forces and foreign civilians averaged more than forty a day, a threefold increase sine Januar