Vetoed

The President vetoed a bill that I don't really understand last week, but it at least made gestures at getting the US out of Iraq. There's now something of a standstill, in which Congress needs to either defund the troops, which no one seems to want, or pass some sort of bill that the President will sign. John Edwards is asking for money to run an anti-war ad directed at Congress in DC, and John Kerry has a great diary at DailyKos already thinking ahead to targeting key Republicans in '08.

Congressional tactics are very very complicated, especially to the extent they intersect with procedural matters, but I think the thing to do is to pass a bill that funds the troops for 2-3 months. When the President comes back to ask for more, pass the bill he just vetoed, or a stricter one. If he vetoes that, give him funding for another short period of time. Right now we just don't have the votes to end the war, but its sure not getting any more popular. If Pelosi makes the Republicans vote to stay in Iraq and support Bush every 2 months until November of 2008, they will have a worse election then than they did in 06. Either that, or sometime between now and then we will see major Republican defections, big intra-party clashes, and hopefully an earlier (but long overdue) end to the American involvement in the disaster in Iraq.

David Brooks! II

David Brooks came out with his new column today. He gives his (brilliant!, as usual) advice to republican presidential candidates.

"First: Be the Snowball. The conventional view is that Feb. 5 is going to be the decisive day of the race, when California, New Jersey, Illinois and a bunch of other states will probably have their primaries. That’s wrong..." Gosh, my presidential campaign should have momentum and win early primary states!? Thanks, David Brooks!

"Fourth: Be the Change. You are running to lead a traumatized party. Many Republicans think their party can recover from recent setbacks by returning to the old verities: cutting spending, cutting taxes, attacking government bureaucrats..." David Brooks thinks Republicans should act less like Republicans, and here at least I'm inclined to agree.

"Sixth: Get Ready for Phase II. Over the next several months, the surge in Iraq will dominate debate. But by late summer, the surge will either have succeeded or failed. A new, broader debate will start. One candidate will define the landscape by coming up with a new Grand Strategy for the war against extremism. Be that guy." Christ, what to say? He actually capitalizes "Grand Strategy" and I'm pretty sure he's not being ironic. You know what would have been a really effective "Grand Strategy" after 9/11? Read David Brooks' column every week, memorize his recommendations, and don't do them. This man bears no small personal responsibility for the war in Iraq, yet manages to act like not only does the war not have anything to do with him, but he's actually in a position to give advice about it! Here's a nice compilation of some choice Brooks Iraq predictions. You can watch him argue here that the surge is going to benefit John McCain politically if it succeeds and if it fails. But Brooks opposes it. But he thinks if we'd done it three years ago, then it would have worked, just like John McCain said. But he doesn't mind that John McCain supports it now. . And even though the surge is a bad idea, anyone who thinks we should pull out of Iraq is still a coward. Well, I have a prediction of my own. By late summer, the surge will have failed, and David Brooks will still not take any responsibility for the disaster that is Iraq.

"Seventh: Win the T.R. Primary. Many of you admire Theodore Roosevelt. You’ve got his picture on your walls. Every day, as the campaign madness swirls around, wake up and ask, Would T.R. be proud of what I’m doing? If not, take a risk. Do something else." I'm always amused by Republicans claiming the mantle of Roosevelt or Lincoln. Are the presidential primary candidates going to break up the big trusts? Massively expand America's national forests? End slavery like Lincoln did? The only T.R. policy that Republicans are likely to follow is deposing the leaders of weaker countries because we don't like their policies. And um... well, that's been tried by a modern Republican president.

Liberated Women

Riverbend is a woman who operates the blog Baghdad Burning from inside Baghdad. She posted recently about Sabrine Al-Janabi, a woman who was brave enough to report her rape at the hands of American-trained Iraqi Securtiy Forces, and use her real name. Her post ends:

"Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."

Counter Insurgency = teh fun!!1

1,500 British troops should leave Iraq in the next "several weeks." They expect to have only 3,000 of their current 7,200 left by the end of 2007.

Meanwhile, in Somalia, we find out that not only does invading Muslim countries for no good reason and occupying them indefinitely not work well, but convincing proxy states to do it also sucks.

And here's more stuff on Afghanis and Iraqis (and Al-Qaeda!) trading all the awesome new tactics they are developing fighting the American occupation. I wrote about that here and here.

And according to Fox, this Texan was training with Al-Qaeda in Somalia, so presumably the Islamic Courts Union there will be using those same tactics any day now.

Cost of War II

As a follow up to this post, the Washington Post's second article in their series on how we treat the kids who volunteer to risk their lives in Iraq.

"Those who aren't old enough to buy a drink at the bar huddle outside near a magnolia tree and smoke cigarettes. Wearing hoodies and furry bedroom slippers, they look like kids at summer camp who've crept out of their rooms, except some have empty pants legs or limbs pinned by medieval-looking hardware. Medication is a favorite topic.
...
'I didn't take my Seroquel last night and I had nightmares of charred bodies, burned crispy like campfire marshmallows.'
...
If a taxi arrives and the driver looks Middle Eastern, soldiers refuse to get in. Even among the gazebos and tranquility of the Walter Reed campus in upper Northwest Washington, manhole covers are sidestepped for fear of bombs and rooftops are scanned for snipers.
...
While Mologne House has a full bar, there is not one counselor or psychologist assigned there to assist soldiers and families in crisis -- an idea proposed by Walter Reed social workers but rejected by the military command that runs the post.
...
Dogs are periodically brought in by the Army to search the rooms for contraband or weapons. When the fire alarm goes off, the amputees who live on the upper floors are scooped up and carried down the stairwell, while a brigade of mothers passes down the wheelchairs.
...
Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.
...
Sgt. Steve Justi would get the slightest cut on his skin and drop to his knees, his face full of anguish, apologizing over and over. For what, Oscar did not know.
...
The talk turns to their friend Steve Justi. A few days earlier, Steve was discharged from the Army and given a zero percent disability rating for his mental condition ... 'They gave him nothing, they said his bipolar was preexisting.'"

This series should be held up as the model for wartime reporting. Our newspapers and televisions and bookstores should be filled with Steve Justi's story every day that Americans are being asked to live out this horror. Read, the whole thing, and Part I, there is so much more than I pasted here.

Me: Slightly Ahead of the Curve

Well, I wrote this post about Iraq and Afghanistan and helicopters, and then I just read a very informative New York Times article verifying much of what I had said. The article reports that the recent spate of downed helicopters is not coincidence and is the result of new tactics, (which may well be exported to Afghanistan) not new weapons. The insurgents are also planting car bombs nearby to kill Americans who arrive on rescue missions.

There's also this: "The Feb. 7 attack on a Marine CH-46 Sea Knight transport helicopter near Karma, an insurgent stronghold near Falluja, was initially attributed by military officials to mechanical problems. But this week they acknowledged it had been downed by hostile fire, most likely a shoulder-fired missile and heavy-caliber machine-gun fire." So maybe that crash in Afghanistan was enemy fire after all.

What's the moral of the story? The disaster in Iraq can and will get worse, it will undermine our ability to salvage Afghanistan, it will lead to countless more deaths and staying there will not ever, ever lead us to a stronger position in the world. We need to get out of Iraq now, on our own terms. If we choose to stay, we will lose.

The Cost of War

Right now, there are 18 and 19 year old Americans who, instead of worrying about homework or plane tickets for spring break, are standing around in a foreign city, guns in hand, worrying about being shot at and killed.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and countless inconceivably excruciating external injuries affect tens of thousands of our soldiers in Iraq. The heroism of our dead soldiers is unanimously praised, but those who survive their ordeal get something far short of a hero's welcome when they return.

Shakespeare's Sister and Litbrit (at Ezra Klein's blog) detail it more eloquently than I possibly could.

Our country and our society have a true sickness. We should never forgive ourselves for allowing this awful war in the first place, but to vote for tax cut after tax cut while condemning our children to their hellish existence requires a cruel indifference horrifying to contemplate.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives in both the House and Senate take a week off for President's day.

Too Many Wars

One of the many awful things about the war in Iraq that people don't really talk about because they aren't as sexy as torture and beheadings is how much Iraq is undermining our efforts in Afghanistan. Ostensibly, we are in Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban and establish a government that won't harbor Al Qaeda. Unfortunately, as this USA Today article discusses, we have fewer troops than we would if we weren't in Iraq, we have less money to spend on reconstruction, and our diplomatic capital (to say, convince Pakistan to stop harboring Taliban fighters) is totally spent. This all certainly helps explain why things there are not really improving.

But now, the good news. Oh no, wait, it's more bad news. According to this article from late last year, insurgents and fighters in Afghanistan are able to pick up (often over the Internet) tactics developed and honed by the insurgency in Iraq. Super. Which brings us to today's news. The New York Times reports that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan, killing 8 Americans. The Taliban has taken credit, though the military says that it was engine failure, not enemy fire, and I'm more inclined to believe them. But more downed copters in Afghanistan may be something we should watch out for, because as Josh Marshall has covered extensively, there has been a nasty up-tick of helicopters shot down in Iraq in the past couple of months, and it appears to be new tactics, not new weapons, that has allowed it to happen.

The sooner we leave Iraq, the sooner the operators of counterinsurgency101.blogspot.com find something better to do than develop and disseminate more and more effective anti-American tactics.

Democracy in action!

The House of Representatives recently passed a resolution "expressing disapproval" (but not doing anything about) President Bush's plan to send 20,000ish more soldiers into the disaster that is Iraq. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gave up on the various attempts the Senate has made to pass a similar resolution, and simply adopted the exact language passed in the House one. It seemed like a savvy move, but unfortunately, the Republicans have successfully filibustered it.

So, what we saw in the Senate today was our Democratic Senate fail to even get enough votes to override a filibuster to allow another whole vote on a resolution that, if passed, would not really have any actual effect on the President's plan to escalate the war in Iraq. A war which has, and this can't be said enough, already cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and probably (low-estimate) half a million lives, thousands of those American.

To their credit I guess we can say that they did at least try to hold a vote to officially not really do anything to stop a truly insane move that only 13%! of Americans actually support. Kudos to them.

The upside? The guilt for the many deaths likely to result from this tragic failure of our government can rest squarely on the shoulders of:

1) John Sununu, from New Hampshire, most endangered Republican up for re-election in 2008.
2) Sam Brownback, Chuck Hagel and every other senator/presidential candidate who voted against cloture.
3) Last but not least, everyone's favorite presidential candidate, supporter of the surge even before it was cool, John McCain. He gets special brownie points for being too busy campaigning to even show up and vote for his pet policy!