Oil and Blood

July 28, 2005
by Bob Herbert
New York Times

It is now generally understood that the U.S.-led war in Iraq has become a debacle. Nevertheless, Iraqis are supposed to have their constitution ratified and a permanent government elected by the end of the year. It's a logical escape hatch for George W. Bush. He could declare victory, as a senator once suggested to Lyndon Johnson in the early years of Vietnam, and bring the troops home as quickly as possible.

His mantra would be: There's a government in place. We won. We're out of there.

But don't count on it. The Bush administration has no plans to bring the troops home from this misguided war, which has taken a fearful toll in lives and injuries while at the same time weakening the military, damaging the international reputation of the United States, serving as a world-class recruiting tool for terrorist groups and blowing a hole the size of Baghdad in Washington's budget.

A wiser leader would begin to cut some of these losses. But the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."

You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.

All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," which was the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.

It's the oil, stupid.

What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.

Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.

The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.

Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.

The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.

But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.

Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.

That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

You Call This a War?

July 12, 2005
From: http://www.sobran.com/columns/2005/050712.shtml
by Joseph Sobran

The London terror bombings make one thing clear: the United States and the United Kingdom are never going to win the "war on terrorism." The reason is simple: it isn't really a war. And nobody can win or lose it.

We should stop talking about it as if it were a war. It's a clash of wills. The enemy is obscure, but can't be fought or defeated as if he were a state. He has no vital secrets or single mastermind that can be found by, say, taking, questioning, and torturing captives.

"He," in fact, is a loose federation, not a centralized power. His numbers aren't huge, but he has millions of sympathizers who share his hatred of us. He has no ambition to conquer us or destroy our freedoms; such talk is foolish. "Democracy," if that's what you want to call it, isn't at stake. The enemy merely wants to harass and shock us until we stop irritating him.

And our government has no intention of doing that. It will keep doing what it does, and he will keep retaliating. This will go on indefinitely, since neither side can force the other to do what it wants. What costs can random acts of terrorism against a few civilians impose on the politicians who make the decisions? Don't such acts in fact reward and encourage them?

What incentive could cause President Bush to change his course? Every new terrorist act fortifies his determination not to change. Nothing he does gives the enemy any reason to change, either. He even profits by the stalemate. From his point of view, the Iraq war isn't futile.

For a time it appeared that Prime Minister Tony Blair might suffer political damage for supporting the war. But he survived his last election easily, winning by a larger margin than Bush did last November.

Does Bush feel the same frustration most of us feel? Somewhat, probably; but not enough to make him reconsider. He is a patient, stubborn man, but not the sort of creative thinker whose mentality is disturbed when reality doesn't yield to his will. "What am I doing wrong?" isn't the kind of question he asks himself.

Because he thinks of himself as engaged in war, he is content with old "lessons" of war he learned as a youth. For him this is World War II all over again, and his role is to act like the "heroes" of that war, Roosevelt and Churchill.

The same is probably true, more or less, of the enemy. He can wait. If his occasional strikes kill innocent people and cause an uproar, he has his reward; his conscience has long since ceased to bother him. He isn't trying to "convert" Bush, and he no longer cares, if he ever really did, whether the Western public changes either.

Both sides are adapting to a new way of life, in which neither victory nor defeat is a prospect. Each has made its arrangements and alliances; there is no turning back. The rest of us may as well come to terms with it, since, as James Burnham used to say, when there's no solution, there's no problem. This is just the way we're going to live from now on.

Expensive "security" measures, most of them useless, will be a permanent feature of our lives and economies, like the huge military budgets of the Cold War. We are still paying hundreds of billions in taxes for weapons systems we never needed; more to the point, we pay most of the money for military salaries and pensions that have become an ineradicable part of modern existence, like a second welfare state.

Do you get a regular check from the government? If not, you may be missing the point of the whole thing. Government programs ostensibly begin with the purpose of "protecting" us from something - poverty, old age, deadly enemies, carcinogens in the water and air. But our "protectors" keep on getting paid long after any danger has passed.

What starts as a means eventually becomes an end in itself. What we thought was only a specific emergency measure turns out to be a whole way of life. Some very brainy people never catch on to this.

Iraq's catalogue of death

July 19, 2005
by Robert Greenall
BBC News

There has been no bigger gray area in the Iraq conflict than the number of ordinary Iraqis killed and injured.

More than 1,700 US and dozens of other coalition troops are known to have died. But the figures for civilian dead had never been more than rough estimates, ranging wildly from 10,000 to 100,000.

Figures for the injured and for people killed in what has been described as a surge in criminal activity since the invasion were simply unavailable.

A report by the UK-based group Iraq Body Count (IBC), in combination with the Oxford Research Group, says it aims to remove some of the uncertainty by producing the most detailed picture yet of civilian casualties in the two years since the 2003 invasion.

The goal of the IBC is to fill the information vacuum, it says, with a comprehensive analysis of over 10,000 press and media reports.

It describes the death toll as the "forgotten cost" of the decision to go to war.

But some critics have questioned the groups' methods of compiling statistics, and indeed the ability to produce reliable data. The Iraqi government has already responded by describing the report's results as "mistaken".

The US and UK governments, meanwhile, have always maintained that chaos in the war-torn country has made it impossible to gain accurate information.

'Few excuses'

Middle East analyst Toby Dodge told the BBC that reports like this were bound to be sketchy.

"It's on the conservative side, if anything it underestimates the casualty figures," he said.

The report attempts to show that Western governments are at least partly wrong in their assertion that counting bodies is futile

Nearly two-and-a-half years on, neither the US or UK have begun to systematically measure the impact of their actions in terms of human lives destroyed," Professor John Sloboda, one of the authors of the report, said.

"Our report has shown that what is lacking is not the capacity to do this work but the will."

The internet has proved an essential tool for the research, Professor Sloboda adds.

"This is in fact a new type of research on war and its effects, research which would have been impossible to conduct without the World Wide Web and search engines," he said.

'Higher concentration of death'

The report - A Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 2003-2005 - provides a grim catalogue of death and injury.

A total of 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years of the conflict, beginning with the invasion, almost 20% of them women or children.

This means approximately one in every 1,000 Iraqis has been killed since March 2003.

The report's assertion that 37% of deaths were caused by the US-led forces may cause dismay among Western governments, especially as only 9% are attributed to insurgents.

But even if another 11% attributed to "unknown agents" is included in the second figure, the report says coalition forces are still the main cause of death.

The US-led coalition maintains that it has never targeted civilians, while insurgents quite clearly do.

Professor Sloboda accepts this argument, but says the dossier's data proves that precision-guided weapons - even if targeted elsewhere - do far more harm to civilians than hand-held firearms.

"Shock and awe invasions using massive air power and overwhelming force caused a far higher concentration of deaths, injuries and child fatalities than even the intense insurgency we are experiencing now," he said.

"This is a fact which must be taken on board if hearts and minds are ever to be won back."

Child victims

The report builds up a picture of who the victims were - where and when they were killed or injured, what weapons were used against them and by whom and - where known - what their names, professions, genders and ages were. The result suggests that no sector of Iraqi society has escaped violent death

Some conclusions make especially sober reading - for instance that children made up almost half the victims of air attacks, but only 6% of those from small-arms fire.

Unexploded ordnance such as cluster bombs have proved the most lethal for children, because of their curiosity about foreign objects.

The report also details the media which reported the casualties and the sources they used - from eyewitnesses to mortuaries - all, it says, rigorously checked by the project's 20-odd volunteer staff.

Injuries

And while the dossier obviously records well-reported deaths like those from suicide attacks or roadside bombs, it also covers a less-known source of violence - criminal killings.

Only reports of mortuary records have allowed the IBC to reveal the "extraordinary levels" that this form of violence has reached, it says.

Around 14 people died every month in criminal-related violence before the invasion - over 372 more have died every month since.

The dossier has recorded 42,500 wounded (the actual count, not an estimate), but this is based only on reports of deaths where the numbers of injured could also be determined.

It estimates that approximately 12,500 more injuries have gone unrecorded.

Comment on such things from a reader: “Why won't/can't the top brass Joint Chiefs, Flag Officers in the U.S. Military services surround the WH and give bush/cheney/rove an offer they can't refuse?  They gave Nixon that offer thirty years ago... and he took it-he boarded the plane out of D.C. ASAP.” DH, Los Angeles

'Enemies of humanity' quote raises Iraq PR questions

News release quotes from unidentified Iraqis are the same
July 24, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The U.S. military on Sunday said it was looking into how virtually identical quotations ended up in two of its news releases about different insurgent attacks.

Following a car bombing in Baghdad on Sunday, the U.S. military issued a statement with a quotation attributed to an unidentified Iraqi that was virtually identical to a quote reacting to an attack on July 13.

After questioning by news media, the military released the statement without the quotation.

Lt. Col. Clifford Kent, spokesman for the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, said use of the quote was an "administrative error." He said the military was looking into the matter.

The car bomb killed 25 people and wounded 33 others near the al-Rashad police station, Baghdad emergency police said.

A statement about the attack by Task Force Baghdad 3rd Infantry Division contained a three-sentence quote attributed to an unidentified Iraqi. The statement said the Iraqi called the attackers "enemies of humanity" and vowed to "take the fight to the terrorists."

The quote was virtually the same as a quote contained in a Task Force Baghdad 3rd Infantry Division statement released after a car bombing on July 13. That attack killed several children.

The statement about the July 13 attack quoted an unidentified Iraqi saying terrorists were attacking "the children." In Sunday's quote, an unidentified Iraqi said terrorists were attacking "the ISF" (Iraqi Security Forces).

Following are the two quotes as provided by the U.S. military in news releases:

Sunday's news release said: "'The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the ISF and all of Iraq. They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists,' said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified."

The July 13 news release said: "'The terrorists are attacking the infrastructure, the children and all of Iraq,' said one Iraqi man who preferred not to be identified. 'They are enemies of humanity without religion or any sort of ethics. They have attacked my community today and I will now take the fight to the terrorists.'"

CNN's Cal Perry and Kevin Flower contributed to this report.

US majority doubts America will win Iraq war:  poll

July 27, 2005
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A majority of the U.S. public doubts the United States will win the war in Iraq and believes the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans over Iraq's weapons capabilities, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll.

The poll in Wednesday's USA Today also showed that despite the doubts, a majority believes it was right to send troops to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

It was the first time that the poll found that more than half of Americans -- 51 percent -- believed the administration was deliberately misleading when it asserted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, USA Today said.

U.S. President George W. Bush cited Iraq's capabilities or intentions for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as the primary justification for launching the U.S.-led in 2003, but no such weapons were found.

Bush's credibility on Iraq has been slowly eroding in the polls in recent months amid a continuing bloody insurgency.

Disclosures of White House involvement in leaking the identity of a CIA agent whose husband was a prominent critic of the Iraq war have focused new attention on how the administration made its case for the 2003 invasion.

According to the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 32 percent of the respondents said they did not the United States can win the war in Iraq; another 21 percent said it could win but they do not think it will. Just 43 percent were confident of victory in Iraq, the newspaper said.

A 53 percent majority said it was not a mistake to send U.S. troops to Iraq, the strongest support for the war since just after the Iraq elections in January, the newspaper said.

However, 58 percent said they doubted the United States would be able to establish a stable democracy in Iraq, similar to the results in April 2004, USA Today said.

The poll was conducted July 24. It has a margin of error of 3 to 5 percentage points, USA Today said.