We have Seen the Enemy and He Is Us

Last train from Baghdad
Improbably, an opportunity has arisen in Iraq for the United States to attain two of its most important goals, namely obtaining some legitimacy for the "government" of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and getting American troops out of his country at the same time.
This could be the last international express leaving Baghdad Central Station, and the United States and its armed forces should be on it.
The opportunity arises from a breakdown in negotiations to draw up a status of forces agreement and a so-called security framework, which is an unequal alliance in all but name.
Washington should be dancing in the streets. There could at this point be no better way for American troops to exit Iraq than in response to a request from the Iraqi "government." Contrary to the neocon's promises, the Iraqis did not welcome American troops with flowers, but they might be willing to toss a few in front of U.S. forces as they pull out.
The United States could then withdraw from a failed enterprise with flags flying and drums rolling, maintaining a halfway credible pretense that the American nation did not lose the war in Iraq. American policymakers are not likely to do better than that.
At the same time, the Maliki "government" in Baghdad has a heaven-sent opportunity to acquire what it needs most, namely some legitimacy. So long as it is propped up by American troops, it will remain in the eyes of almost all Iraqis as acquiescing in a foreign and non-Muslim occupation of a Muslim country, a 21st century equivalent of the Vichy regime in France that collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces during World War II.
But if the Maliki government ordered the Americans out, it would suddenly begin to look like a real Iraqi government. That is far from enough to restore a state in Iraq, but it would be a step in the right direction.
There is little doubt that if a referendum were held in Iraq on sending the Americans home, it would win in a landslide. Iraqi politicians know where their public is on this issue, and like politicians everywhere they want to swim with the tide.
Moreover, some seem to sense that the Americans' time in Iraq is ending if not over. As usual, the Desert Fox, Moqtada Sadr, is making all the right moves. He is positioning himself as leader of all Iraqi resistance to the American occupation, not just head of a Shiite faction.
By welcoming Iraqi troops -- many of whom are his militiamen -- into areas he controls but fighting the Americans, Sadr is splitting his opposition. Most importantly, he is maintaining his credentials as the Iraqi leader least willing to condone a continued occupation, thereby gaining that decisive quality, legitimacy.
If the Iraqi government orders American troops out, the result would be a win-win situation. America would win, and so would Iraq. In fact, it would be a win-win outcome, and there's the rub. The third winner would be Iran. A Shiite-dominated Iraq free of American occupation would have a close relationship with Iran. In fact, in order to defend itself in a nasty neighborhood Iraq would probably conclude a formal alliance with Iran.
The Bush administration's response should be a rapprochement with Iran. After all, the United States' real enemy is not any state but the non-state forces of Fourth Generation War. But that is not how the Bush administration will view the matter.
On the contrary, faced with the possibility of an Iranian strategic victory, courtesy of the American troops who overthrew Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the U.S. government is likely to take the fool's way out, escalation. Inside the White House bubble, the argument for attacking Iran might become irresistible, driven as it would be by panic.
The outcome of such folly could very well include the loss of the American army now in Iraq, not to mention another doubling in the price of oil. As usual under the second-worst president in American history -- Woodrow Wilson still ranks No. 1 -- we have seen the enemy, and he is us.
All the U.S. government has to do to get out of Iraq with some dignity while strengthening the government it installed there is to push that government into ordering U.S. forces home. That should be easy enough; what intransigence in the ongoing negotiations cannot achieve a few million Swiss francs should certainly manage. Instead, the Bush administration will refuse to board the last train out of the station, then blow up the railroad. If it were happening to someone else, it would all be comical.

Some Thoughts of a Layman on Economics

Historically, it is no accident that excessive consumption has profoundly permeated our culture. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), developed by Simon Kuznets in 1941 and the leading economic indicator for measuring the health and prosperity of national economies, is virtually useless in achieving its putative objective. Defined as “the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period of time”, GDP results in economic policies that are formulated to ensure the maximum growth of GDP from year to year. To reduce the concept of GDP to its simplest terms, an economy is defined as healthy only if people consume more.

Forming the basis for many other economic measurements, it weakens their usefulness. For example, when comparing national debt or tax revenue to previous time periods or to other countries, the methodology requires using the ratio of these amounts to GDP because total tax revenues and debt are meaningless without comparing them to the wealth of a country.

Alarmingly, the rate of growth as measured by the GDP has risen by 261% since 1972 based on the current value of the American dollar. The implications for pollution waste, global warming, water, energy are directly related to the growth in consumption.

By only measuring consumption, GDP is rife with flaws that completely undermine its value as a measurement of human well-being financially or otherwise. Consider the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989 in Prince William Sound where ten million gallons of crude oil were spilt. Estimated total costs of recovery from this disaster were US$7 billion and included cleanup costs, loss of vessel, loss of cargo, salvage costs, fines, penalties, insurance payouts and legal costs. In addition, it is impossible to measure the loss of 33,126 birds, 3,000 sea otters, and the impact on bears, whales, sea lions, salmon and a myriad of other animals.

Every single dollar spent on the Exxon Valdez disaster would have contributed to the GDP as every expense reflected the consumption of a good or service. In other words, US$7 billion was part of the” total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country [U.S.].” The GDP was boosted by the disaster but there were no benefits to a single citizen of the U.S. (unless you want to count the employment of people in the industries which were part of the recovery in which case you would have to define the US$3 trillion spent on the war and occupation of Iraq as a benefit to society). Referred to as negative counting which includes divorce, cigarettes, alcohol, and automobile accidents, it artificially boosts the value of the GDP without providing any benefits.

As well, GDP fails to reflect the distribution of income in society or who is doing the consuming. Despite the fact that the GDP has been continuously rising over the previous decade, the gap between the rich and poor has widened. In fact, Simon Kuznets predicted income equality for both poor and rich countries with his inverted U-shaped curve. His explanation for the growing inequality in countries with increasing wealth resulted from a shift from agricultural to industrial sectors.

One of the measurements used to calculate the distribution of income is the Gini Coefficient which ranges from zero (perfect equality) to one (all wealth is concentrated in one person). In 1967, the Gini Coefficient was .394 in the U.S. whereas in 2001, it was .466. To emphasize the inefficacy of the GDP, it must be noted that although the United States has the highest GDP among all nations, the United States has the highest Gini Coefficient among thirty of the wealthiest countries.

Using linear regression least-squares analysis comparing the Gini Coefficient to GDP, the regression coefficient for the years between 1992 and 2001 is .679 which shows a fairly strong linear relationship. In other words, as the GDP increased, the gap between the rich and poor increased.

A very significant deficiency in the GDP is the failure to incorporate externalities into its calculation. Externalities are costs that are excluded from the price but paid for either by society or people who suffered as a result of production. Externalities include damage to the environment, health costs borne by those who suffer from the lack of health and safety measures in the workplace or toxic substances used in production or that result from production and depletion of natural resources.

Development of alternatives to the GDP began in 1989 but have been routinely ignored by political leaders and captains of industry inasmuch as GDP does not measure pollution, depletion of resources, or inequitable distribution of income. Recognition of these flaws would pressure the government to adopt policies that actually benefited all members of society and respected the environment.

One of these alternatives is the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) which incorporates the following factors: income distribution index, value of household work and parenting, value of higher education, value of volunteer work, cost of crime, loss of leisure time, cost of underemployment, cost of household pollution abatement, cost of automobile accidents, cost of water pollution, cost of air pollution, loss of wetlands, loss of farmland, loss of primary forests, depletion of nonrenewable energy resources, carbon dioxide emissions damage, and costs of ozone depletion.

Comparing the variations in the GDP to GPI from 1982 to 2004 reveals the extent to which incorporating factors related to the quality of life for everyone varies the outcome.
Richard Nixon (1970): “Our gross domestic product will increase $500 billion in the next years.”

Year GDP GPI

1982 +4.0% +1.2% Ronald Reagan

1983 +8.7% +4.2%

1984 +11.2% -1.2%

1985 +7.3% +2.3%

1986 +5.7% +0.9%

1987 +6.2% -1.9%

1988 +7.7% +0.6%

1989 +7.5% +1.3% G.H.W. Bush

1990 +5.8% +0.6%

1991 +3.3% -0.8%

1992 +5.7% -0.3%

1993 +5.0% +1.3% Bill Clinton

1994 +6.2% +0.3%

1995 +4.6% +3.8%

1996 +5.7% +1.9%

1997 +6.2% +0.5%

1998 +5.3% +2.2%

1999 +6.0% +5.4%

2000 +5.9% +1.0%

2001 +3.2% -3.9% George Bush

2002 +3.4% +3.5%

2003 +4.7% +1.3%

2004 +6.6% +2.5%

Average +5.9% +1.1%

An average growth rate of 5.9 in the GDP would be considered a healthy expansion of the economy while a growth rate of 1.13% in the GPI would be considered very poor. In fact, a recession is considered to be two consecutive quarters of negative growth and there were five years of negative growth in the GPI. Business and political leaders would be confronted with a formidable challenge if they were forced to explain the contrast in these two measurements and why they have not implemented policies to correct the problems exposed by the GPI. A genuine answer would divulge the synergistic relationship between big business and government.

New Danger Ahead in Iraq

It is not all going very well in Iraq, but we did not notice because we looked at the race for the Presidency of the USA to observe the effects of Barack Obama’s trip to the Near East and Europe. Renewed increase of violence caught our attention. What’s going wrong?
The Voice of Iraq – Aswat Alraq had some of the answers.

BAGHDAD, July 26 (VOI) – A parliamentarian from the Iraqi National List (INL) on Saturday said that the delay in passing the provincial council elections law does not serve the interests of the country or the political process.
"We, the Iraqi National List, will vote again for the law inside the parliament because we believe that it is not in the interest of the country or the political process to delay it," Izzat al-Shabandar told Aswat al-Iraq- Voices of Iraq- (VOI).
"If the law is passed against by the parliament, it will be a success for the political process. If not, the Iraqi people will have to take a stance on it," the parliamentarian noted.
The INL holds 20 seats in the 275-member parliament.
On Tuesday, the Iraqi parliament, with the approval of 127 deputies out of 140 who attended the session, passed the law on provincial council elections, which includes an article postponing the elections in the city of Kirkuk sine die.
Lawmakers from the Kurdistan Coalition (KC), the second largest bloc with 53 out of a total 275 seats, had withdrawn from the session in protest against Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani's decision to have a secret balloting over article 24 of the law, pertaining to the status of Kirkuk. Balloting over all the other paragraphs of the law, however, was open.
On Wednesday, the presidential board, with the unanimity of President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies Adel Abdelmahdi and Tareq al-Hashimi, rejected the law in a rapid reaction one day after the Iraqi parliament passed it during a session that raised hue and cry over its constitutionality.
The law drew angry reactions from the Kurds, who considered the way the law was passed as a "twisting of the constitution," threatening to use the right of veto, granted by the Iraqi constitution for the presidential board, headed by President Talabani, a Kurd, to reject the law and return it to the parliament for debate.
The local elections should be held by the end of this year. All political blocs agreed on a new law on elections, hoped by the Iraqi government and other political parties to help end violence in the country through containing a number of armed groups into the current political process.
The law on provincial council elections, seen as supplementary to the law on regions and non-regional provinces, specifies the system of government in Iraq, and if applied, a federal system may be established in the country with three separate regions, a call echoed by some Iraqi political parties.

It is not very strange with the Kirkuk question unsolved. The Kirkuk region is oil rich and original Kurdish territory. During the Baath regime Kurds were pressed to leave and Sunni and Baath Arabs came in their places. After the fall of the regime the Kurds came back demanding the ownership of their confiscated houses and properties again. Most Arabs refused and so the conflict came alive. The Kurds want all their territories back. Juan Cole, the astute observer, says: "The conflict between Kurds and Arabs over Kirkuk is a crisis waiting to happen." He also cites Al-Hayat, as claiming that not only do the Kurds want to control Kirkuk, an oil-rich province in Iraq's north, but they plan to annex three other provinces where Kurds live: Diyala, Salahuddin, and Ninewa. That's not likely, but they do want Kirkuk, and the vetoed election law would have limited the Kurds' ability to press their gains there.
Of course, that’s very likely, no doubt about that, but there is another question involved too. Like all the states in the Near East has Iraq a Wahabitisch kind of Islam too and this fanatic Arab Sunnis, a minority, are on the side of Al Qaeda in Iraq, most foreign combatants but not all, and the remains are under protection of some sheiks in the West and of course they were most active to take over Kirkuk during the Baath regime while Baath was dominant in their home regions. So, as far as Al Qaeda in Iraq still exists it is there, in the West and in Kirkuk and from there they attack pilgrims, occupiers and government’s institutes with suicide attacks.

SULAIMANIYA, July 30 (VOI) - Thousands of the Sulaimaniya residents on Wednesday staged a demonstration protesting the passage of the provincial council elections law.
"Thousands staged today a peaceful demonstration in separate areas in Sulaimaniya and they gathered in front of the Sulaimaniya province's building at the center of the city," Aswat al-Iraq - Voices of Iraq (VOI) correspondent in the city said.
Local police chief Brigadier Hassan Nouri had said Tuesday tight security measures have been put in place in preparation for a demonstration that is scheduled to take place in Sulaimaniya city condemning the passage of the provincial council elections law.
On Monday, a total of 22 civilians were killed and 150 others were wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up among a crowd of demonstrators, who took to the streets in downtown Kirkuk, condemning the passage of the provincial council elections law, which includes an article postponing the city's elections.
Last July 22, the Iraqi Parliament, with the approval of 127 deputies out of 140 who attended the session, passed the law on provincial council elections.
Last Wednesday, the Presidential Board, with the unanimity of President Jalal Talabani and his two deputies Adel Abdelmahdi and Tareq al-Hashimi, rejected the law in a rapid reaction one day after the Iraqi Parliament passed it during a session that raised hue and cry over its constitutionality
Sulaimaniya, the capital city of Sulaimaniya province, lies 364 km north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad.

A statement from the Iraqi president office branded “passing the law for provincial councils as an unconstitutional violation and against the will of the main second Iraqi constituent (Kurds) and the principle of national accordance”.
The announcement added “president Talabani urged the presidency board not to pass the law”.
The Sadrist bloc holds 30 out of the parliament’s total 275 seats while Kurdish coalition has 53.
Tarzi branded “the walkout of Kurdish lawmakers as a legal right since it did unsettle the quorum”.
Kurds make up one of three main groups, and their boycott of the vote means the bill could be sent back to parliament through a president’s veto.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants the election to take place on October 1, but the Electoral Commission says it will not have time to organize it by then, even with the law in place.
Earlier, Faraj al-Haidari,time was running out to hold polls this year, because the commission needed time to prepare, and decided to postpone them until December.
The law had been held up by a dispute over what to do about voting in multi-ethnic Kirkuk, where a dispute is simmering between Kurds who say the city should belong to the largely autonomous Kurdistan region and Arabs who want it to stay under central government authority.
Arabs and Turkmen believe Kurds have stacked the city with Kurds since the downfall of Saddam in 2003 to try to tip the demographic balance in their favor in any vote. Arabs encouraged to move there under Saddam Hussein's rule fear the vote will consolidate Kurdish power and they sought to postpone it, a proposal Kurdish politicians have rejected.
Parliament decided to postpone the vote and add another article that the Kurds found unacceptable: that each ethnic or sectarian group gets a set allocation of seats and voting is between individual candidates from those groups. Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen get 10 seats each. Minority Christians get two.

"We walked out because of the illegality of this article and because the speaker wanted a secret vote, which is not constitutional," said Fouad Massoum, head of the Kurdish bloc.
Washington has been urging a speedy provincial election, which it sees as a pillar of national reconciliation, but the poll is also proving a potential flashpoint for tensions.

It seems that orthodox muslims are used for the new surge of violence, happily to do it out of their feelings of revenge on the Awakening who defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq. A one-day round-up:

A roadside bomb planted outside the residence of Dawa Party member, Abdulrahman Mohammed Dawood in Zafaraniyah, southeastern Baghdad exploded injuring Dawood and two of his security detail at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Gunmen attacked a checkpoint manned by Awakening Council, a US backed militia, in Adhamiyah at 9 a.m. killing two members. The gunmen used silencers on their weapons, said Iraqi Police.

One unidentified body was found by Iraqi Police, Thursday. It was found in Nidhal Street, central Baghdad.

Nineveh: A suicide car bomber targeted a checkpoint manned by Iraqi Army in al-Intisar neighbourhood, eastern Mosul killing two soldiers, injuring two others.

Diyala: A female suicide bomber wearing an explosive belt targeted an Awakening Council Commander in Baquba, Naeem al-Dulaimi at 3 p.m. Thursday. The explosion, which took place in a car dealership while Dulaimi was checking a car killed him, his two security guards and four civilians, injuring at least twenty four others including women and children. '

The final crisis-to-be is the Sadr vs. Badr one. The Times today suggests that Sadr is weakening:
The militia that was once the biggest defender of poor Shiites in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, has been profoundly weakened in a number of neighborhoods across Baghdad, in an important, if tentative, milestone for stability in Iraq.
Don't believe it. Sadr's rivals, ISCI, don't have anything like the popular base that Sadr has. And underneath Sadr is a volatile mix of neighborhood, local and regional militias, mosques, and economic fiefdoms that won't yield easily to ISCI and Maliki. Perhaps in future fighting, when politics don't serve to gain the unity-state, Sadr's forces are dependent on Iran, however, for arms and cash, Iran may be in the driver's seat.
Just the other day, the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps crowed that the United States has failed to establish install an anti-Iranian regime in Baghdad, and he's completely right.
So Iraq is still poised to explode, and Iran may be in control. McCain's solution: provoke a showdown with Iran. Obama's solution: try to make a deal with Iran to stabilize Iraq. I'm not sure either "plan" will work, but with support of Russia and the European Union Obama has the best papers. McCain is chance less, because what he says is always over strained by his desire to “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran…” That’s where Russia - most likely the EU too - is on the side of Iran to guarantee Iran’s safety against foreign threats which can urge Iran to go nuclear.
McCain will love the Iranian nuclear option, because he has by then a clear mandate to start WWIII, bur the Obama-USA, Asia, Russia and Europe are not admiring such a mass destruction of suicidal Republican America and the world.

The Way to a Time Table

One of the major questions in Iraq is the position of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi Army. Is he really independent and not leaning on help from Iran? If he gets Iranian help he is not different from the Badr militia which is the military arm of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Dawa Party of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. Maliki has been in exile in Iran and Syria during the Baath regime and the Badr militia are trained and armed by Iran. That’s no secret. It is the reason why Muqtada al Sadr finds more support in the Iraqi people who don’t want to become a satellite of Iran. This is an ethnic question, because most of the Iraqi Shiites are Arab citizens and Iranian Shiites are Persians. The ancestors of Muqtada al Sadr came from Lebanon and they have a more modern feeling about freedom of religion and still be themselves very orthodox, guarding their societies against strange influences. Well, that’s not to call very radical in the Near East, but you cannot imagine that Muqtada al Sadr will allow strange Persian Shiite influence and also not a western influence from foreign occupiers or extreme Sunni combatants of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
Until march 2008 Nouri al Maliki was cooperating with the occupiers and of course this was held for collaboration with the enemy by the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, from which 94% wants the foreign troops out of their country. Especially for the Shiites the Iraqi country is a kind of holy land with different holy cities and there is an infidel in charge or no infidel presence to be allowed. So, the collaboration of the government of Maliki meets harsh resistance from different groups, the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shiites and Nouri al Maliki’s friendship with Iran and their support makes things more worse for him, but he is the protection for Persian Shiites. The fight for power between Al Sadr and Al Maliki has to be fought in Bagdad’s Sadr City and the harbour town Basra with other cities in the Southern regions where Shiites are dominant. To gain control over Basra was the goal of Al Maliki’s attacks in March 2008 and he did not succeed. The governments army, police and other institutes are heavily infiltrated by Muqtada’s followers and so he is not out of control when he announces a cheese fire to limit the losses. His military power is not very strong, with a lack of weaponry in the Mahdi Army and his fighters have to feed their families. When they fight, they levy taxes on the public and when that situation has to last too long, they become unpopular. The function is that Muqtada al Sadr can show his great influence. He can invoke massive violence and he can take violence down as he wishes. The Mahdi Army disappears from the streets, but don’t think that the “winner” is in charge. After all Muqtada al Sadr has a strong coalition with Sunnis and Kurds and leads the opposition in the Parliament, his primary battleground.
So, when Nouri al Maliki could not weaken the position of Muqtada al Sadr, Al Maliki became in great danger, because of the developments in the neighbouring state Iran, where Russia guaranteed the security against attacks from outside with something in return. The former Sovjet giant does not like the Iranians to have atomic weapons, nor that they gain great influence in Iraq, which is a threat for the Arab nations. So, they want to control both against dangerous developments and with a friendly state at the Gulf they can put through their products like oil and natural gas to the Indian Ocean, a centuries old Russian wish.
So, Iran is not allowed by its mighty friend to interfere in Iraq and risk an American attack for that. In that case they lose the Russian support, but the consequence is, that Nouri al Maliki stands alone as soon as the allied occupiers are going home. He needs new protection and the best protection is to stand up against the USA. That has united the different political parties and by now the government gains its first country wide support. The difference is still that Nouri al Maliki wants a federal state, divided by ethnic and religious borders, while the opposition wants restoration of the unity-state, like during the Baath regime, but without a dominant group in charge, a balanced power sharing and sharing the wealth of the oil to be spent in public services and equal benefits.
It will be a hell of job to clean the institutions from corruption and power abuse but the concept is admirable. Political unity and descent rivalry on some political differences is no danger. There are elections at October 1, 2008. Therefore we have now the idea of a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops, and it is no longer the exclusive point of view for a Democratic candidate to be the Democratic nominee for Presidency. The idea is shared by Iraq from Al Maliki to all the parties and down in the public. The year 2010 seems to be the common agreement.
There are three figures opposing this, President Bush, who wants only to speak about a time horizon, Republican nominee John McCain, still looking for a long term control over Iraq and Tehran.
Tehran?
That’s right. As has happened so often in recent years (driving the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, Iran’s greatest foes, from power), Mr. Bush finds himself pushing a policy that coincides with Iranian interests. From the start, Tehran has wanted to frustrate American goals in Iraq but not defeat them. So long as the United States is bogged down there, the clerics reason, it won’t have the desire, domestic political support and wherewithal to attack them.
How did we reach this point?
The Iraqi about face on timetables came to light in news reports about talks between the U.S. and Iraq on security agreements. U.S. troops are currently operating under a United Nations mandate that will expire in December and needs to be replaced if the American military is to continue to operate legally inside the country. It quickly became clear that any deal was likely to be short-term, and unlikely to openly sanction the long-term presence of American forces. But details of that future agreement are under dispute.
The Elections Complicate Everything
Iraqi leaders fear that they could be punished in provincial elections planned for later this year if they agree to a deal that spells out a long-term presence for American forces. Some clerics have pushed the Iraqi government to reject any kind of deal with the Americans. It’s possible that any deal may have to be postponed until after the provincial elections.
Of course, the American elections have not made anything clearer, as the bickering about Senator Obama’s timetable underscored. There is some support for a short-term deal that could be renegotiated later, with the eventual winner of the presidential campaign.
Any Deal May Be a Short-Term Deal
The New York Times’ Alissa J. Rubin reported that American officials are no longer confident that a complete security agreement can be reached this year. Iraq’s foreign minister has raised the possibility that even if an agreement was reached, it would be a short-term pact.
Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has also said that he favours a short-term deal over a longer four-year agreement.

Obama Printed Flyers for Speech in Germany IN GERMAN!

How dare a presidential candidate have the audacity to use any other language than American? Ever?!
Patrick Ruffini, another one of those puzzlingly well-placed Republican blogger-consultant-columnist-Webmaster-operatives, as well as a general all-around cigar cutter and Kool-Aid drug mule, thinks he's found a good one:

Obama Campaign Prints German-language Flyers for Berlin Rally
by Patrick Ruffini | July 22, 2008 at 10:36 PM This is pretty extraordinary. A candidate for the American Presidency is using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally in Berlin on Thursday. This flyer can be found on a bilingual page on BarackObama.com advertising the event:

The German flyers bear Obama's campaign logo and say "Paid for by Obama for America."

Get that? ...For America! For America! But it's in German!!!

I'm surprised at this lapse in judgment in an otherwise well-oiled and professional Obama campaign. The last time they printed up campaign paraphenalia in a foreign language, it didn't work out so hot for them.

Here he's referring to the tongue spoken in Lata, and also in its former colonies in Latin America. This attempt to pander to the Latts was widely derided by fellows such as Patrick Ruffini (whose name means "Patrick, the Little Ruff" in his native dialect of Miscegenated Catholic Immigrant). When English is declared as the official language of the United States, there'll be no more of this 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' and 'Semper Fidelis,' not to mention 'Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc' or what's that other one? Oh yeah, 'E Pluribus Unum.' It's a veritable Tower of Babel; it's tearing this country apart.

So, this isn't just some sober, high-minded foreign policy speech, part of a foreign trip occurring under the auspices of his official Senate office. It is a campaign rally occuring on foreign soil. They are using the same tactics to turn out Germans to an event as they would to any rally right here in America.

Tactics like telling people where the event will be, and at what time.

This after Obama's campaign said this:
"It is not going to be a political speech," said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background. "When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally.
"But he is not president of the United States," a reporter reminded the adviser.

And he therefore has no right to travel overseas and speak to foreigners. Has he forgotten that there are foreigners who want to kill us? This unconditional meeting-with-foreigners sends a dangerous message, emboldening those who have rejected America by choosing to back foreign regimes, etc.

The sea of Germans drummed up by the Obama campaign will be used as props to tell us Americans how to vote, and the campaign isn't trying to pretend otherwise.

As is demonstrated by the campaign saying otherwise without declaring it to be Backwards Day -- because if it is Backwards Day, they must backwardsly not declare it to be; and you can see how their little scheme falls apart from there.
But the campaign is clearly attempting to make it seem as if Obama can attract an audience, using the crowds that attend Obama events as pawns in their crooked game. These cynical attempts to make the candidate look good, and thus to tell us how to vote, are beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse.
On the other hand, do you know who else used to drum up a sea of Germans to be used as props, and who did not try to pretend otherwise? I'm not going to say, but he sure did cause quite a "furor."

That's breathtakingly arrogant, and par for the course for Barack Obama.

So to sum up: The sea of Germans drummed up will be used as props, and while this is breathtaking, it is par for the course. That would be a geographic metaphor, a music or sales metaphor, a stage or film metaphor, a metaphor based on a bodily sensation, and then a golf metaphor, all smashed together like the cars of a wrecked circus train.
Yes, we'll go for the cheap shot. 'Arrogance' is writing a broadside like Ruffini's, and doing it in such crappy English.

Ayatollah Will Not Allow US-Iraq Deal

Iraq's most revered Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has strongly objected to a 'security accord' between the US and Iraq.

The Grand Ayatollah has reiterated that he would not allow Iraq to sign such a deal with "the US occupiers" as long as he was alive, a source close to Ayatollah Sistani said.
The source added the Grand Ayatollah had voiced his strong objection to the deal during a meeting with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in the holy city of Najaf on Thursday.
The remarks were made amid reports that the Iraqi government might sign a long-term framework agreement with the United States, under which Washington would be allowed to set up permanent military bases in the country and US citizens would be granted immunity from legal prosecution in the country.
While the mainstream media keep mum about the accord, critics say the agreement would virtually put Iraq under the US tutelage and violate the country's sovereignty.
The source added Ayatollah Sistani, however, backed PM al-Maliki's government and its efforts and that of the nation to establish security in the country.
The mandate of US troops in Iraq will expire in December 2008 and al-Maliki's government is under US pressure to sign 'a mutual security agreement' which would allow the long-term presence of US troops in Iraq.
Washington's plan has so far faced fierce protests by religious figures including Ayatollah Seyyed Kazem Haeri, another senior Shia cleric, and it is expected that other religious figures join the efforts to prevent the deal.
The US has signed similar agreements with countries like Japan and South Korea and thousands of US troops are now stationed in the countries.
The main goals of the agreement:

- A part of the agreement covers issues regarding 'sustainable security': this section of the agreement will allow the US to build 3 to 12 military bases on Iraq's soil to maintain control over the country's military for an indefinite period. Under the agreement Iraqi military and security forces would not be able to carry out any operations independently and they would have to ask for permission from the US Military Command in Iraq. This section of the agreement would virtually result in the colonization of Iraq and would undermine the sovereignty of the country.

- Another section of the agreement would regulate the authority of US troops in Iraq: thorough this section the US would extend the privileges given to its troops and not only its military forces but also private US contractors like Black Water would be granted immunity from prosecution. All visa restrictions would be lifted for US nationals and they could freely travel to the country. In fact such humiliating conditions have never been imposed on any country even the defeated ones after World War II.

- The US would also be able to decide on agreements between Iraq and other nations and it would have the authority to veto any agreements between Iraq and US opponents. This section was in sharp contrast with Iraq's national interests and would have dire consequences for the nation's ties with other Middle Eastern states.

- Iraq's cultural affairs would be controlled by the US. In this way the US would be able to undermine the Islamic identity of Iraq, westernize the country and replace Islamic values with the Western ones.

US Laying Foundation For Iraq Colonization

'Selling Iraq to the US' is what best describes a secret security accord between the Bush administration and the government of Iraq.
Washington drew out a draft proposal for a security deal in January 2008, a preliminary part of which was signed by officials of the two countries on March 17. The negotiation, set to conclude in late July, will not only establish the basis for a long-term US occupation of Iraq, but will also turn the country into a US colony and yet another military base for Washington in the Middle East.
The accord with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government will replace the UN mandate and allow multinational military presence in the country. This 'firm handshake' between the US president and the Iraqi prime minister is referred to by the Western media as the Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

While every revealed article of the agreement is tied to security and military arrangements, Western media portrays the accord as mere cooperation in the areas of politics, economics, culture and security. All the provisions of the agreement have been introduced in a haze of ambiguity as transparency in the issue would certainly provoke an outcry among the weary people of Iraq.
One look at Article 10 of the treaty makes it apparent that the US administration hopes to quietly impose the binding contract and legitimize its indefinite military presence in the country. "As long as Iraqi security/military forces are not well-trained, security hasn't been ensured, the neighboring states pose a threat, and terrorist attacks continue, the treaty will be officially binding and both parties are obliged to implement it."

The first article of the treaty allows the US Army to carry out military operations in Iraq at any time and any place.

Under Article 2, American and British troops can arrest suspects at any time without the consent of the Iraqi government.

Article 3 reinforces Article 10 by asserting that there are no time limits for the presence of American forces, thus annulling the 1790 UN Security Council anti-occupation Resolution.

The contents of the treaty will dissipate all hopes of a sovereign Iraq, turning the country into a US colony.

According to Article 4, American servicemen and non-servicemen are not obliged to attend any court hearings in Iraq, literally granting them capitulation privileges.

Article 7 puts the Iraqi ministries of defense, interior and intelligence under the direct supervision of US officials, ensuring Iraq will be officially governed by the United States.

Article 6 allows the US to set up 14 military bases in Iraq; Article 8 provides American forces with the authority to supervise arms sales as well as train Iraqi military and law enforcement personnel.

Article 9 argues that as a member of the international community Iraq must recognize Israel and unconditionally support Washington's Middle East policies.

Which government can claim it has the right to delegate the fate of the nation that has entrusted it with executive powers?
Yet, there is but a shred of a doubt that this treaty has no objective other than handing Iraq over to the United States. One must ask what has made al-Maliki and political leaders of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and al-Dawa party sink so low as to consider signing such a degrading and demeaning accord. The US has clearly been successful in duping certain Iraqi officials into launching a crackdown on the resistance fighters of Mahdi Army, claiming the lives of a myriad of innocent civilians.
It is evident that Washington deliberately dragged Iraqi echelons into the battlegrounds as part of a devious plot to cause a rift between Shia parties in the hope of debilitating resistance movements. These extortionist plots, however, considering the current situation in the war-torn country and the growing hatred toward the occupiers seem to have been in vain.
According to senior Iraqi politician Mohsen Hakim, the Iraqi government conceded to the accord only on certain conditions: US forces should not establish large-scale military bases in the country, should avoid using Iraqi territory for military purposes, and need to recognize Iraq's right to secure deals with other countries. These conditions, although deficient, do not counter the humiliating effects of the other contractual obligations of the treaty, thus compelling Iraq to go under the yoke of the United States. SOFA is yet another US attempt to gain tacit support of two main Shia parties al-Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council in a bid to foment discord and manipulate public opinion regarding the county's Islamic resistance movement, setting the stage for a new puppet government in the country.
What is even more astonishing is that Iraqi political leaders are falling for this political legerdemain and are willingly digging their own graves. Of course, one should not forget that if the US conspiracy succeeds, the same people who brought the current Iraqi leaders to power will withdraw their support and entrust their future to another Islamic government.

Can President Bush be next at the ICC?

The decision by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to charge the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir with genocide and war crimes continues to stir controversy with critics saying that the requested indictment sets a dangerous precedent. It is the first time that the Hague-based court issues charges against a sitting head of state.
Moreno-Ocampo charged on July 14 that President al-Bashir waged a campaign of extermination against three Darfur tribes, the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa that has allegedly claimed up to 300,000 lives and displaced more than 2.2 million people since the conflict erupted in February 2003. Sudan claims that 10,000 have been killed. Moreno-Ocampo filed 10 charges against al-Bashir for masterminding a campaign of extermination and rape specifically targeting three Darfuri tribes. The charges include three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes.
On 31 March 2005, the UN Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, adopted Resolution 1593, referring "the situation in Darfur since 1 July 2002" to the prosecutor of the ICC. In May 2007, the ICC issued arrest warrants for two Sudanese suspects, Ahmed Harun, the current Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, and Ali Kushayb, a militia leader. The arrest warrants refer to crimes allegedly committed between August 2003 and March 2004 in the Darfur region. The ICC urged the Sudanese government to arrest them both and to hand them over to the Court. The government of Sudan, however, announced the suspension of all its cooperation with the ICC in March 2007, refusing to surrender the men. Sudan, which is not a party to the ICC, argues that the court has no jurisdiction over the case and that the matter relates to the Sudanese judicial system.
Although Sudan is not a signatory to the ICC, UN Security Council Resolution 1593 obligates Sudan to fully cooperate with the Court and to provide any necessary assistance to it and its prosecutors. The reaction to the ICC's requested indictment of President al-Bashir was mixed. Sudan's ambassador to the UN, Abdal Mahmood Abdal Haleem Mohamed, told Press TV on July 9th that the ICC is perpetuating 'insurgency' in Sudan as the Darfur rebels would not enter into talks with a government branded 'criminal'.
US President George W. Bush, whose country is not a member of the ICC, offered only an ambivalent reaction. He said he wanted to see how an international prosecutor's arrest warrant for al-Bashir "plays out." Bush also warned that Khartoum could face more sanctions. Observers say the US administration is reluctant to take steps that lend legitimacy to a court whose jurisdiction it has questioned and whose treaty it refuses to sign.
"The requested indictment marks a major step forward in international justice," said Jean-Marie Fardeau, head of the NGO Human Rights Watch France. Fardeau believes the indictment against a serving president indicates the end of impunity for world leaders. Ayman El-Amir, a former correspondent for the Al-Ahram in Washington says the ICC decision may be a blessing in disguise for the multi-ethnic population who have endured untold suffering.
Many critics have said that the decision by the ICC prosecutor was influenced by political intents. At a July 17 UN press conference, part of a series of events held at the UN to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rome Statute establishing the court in 1998, Moreno-Ocampo rejected charges that it was a politically motivated decision to ask the court for an arrest warrant for al-Bashir just in time for the 10th anniversary celebration of the court. The decision stirred negative reactions specifically in the Arab and African countries not only because it could derail the already fragile peace talks in the troubled region of Darfur but also for its repercussions for Sudan's sovereignty and the dangerous precedent it sets. The African Union (AU) expressed "concern" over the consequences for the shaky peace process in Sudan.
In an emergency meeting on July 19th, the Arab League foreign ministers criticized the ICC move as unbalanced, saying it would undermine the country's sovereignty. In a strongly-worded statement, the Arab League voiced solidarity with Sudan "in confronting schemes that undermine its sovereignty, unity and stability and their non-acceptance of the unbalanced, not objective position of the prosecutor general of the Internal Criminal Court". Djibouti Foreign Minister Mahmoud Ali Youssef, who chaired the meeting, criticized the decision by the ICC prosecutor as "double standards" adopted by the international community. He said "the world watches Palestinian suffering without moving" to end it. The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) also warned that the indictment of al-Bashir could further complicate the already tense situation in Darfur. Former Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella has said that the charges could be "an unconstitutional way of pushing aside a head of state."
China expressed "grave concern and misgivings about the ICC prosecutor's indictment of the Sudanese leader." Expressing concerns over the internal ramifications of the move for Sudan, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said, "The ICC's actions must be beneficial to the stability of the Darfur region and appropriate settlement of the issue, not contrary." Others, including the spokesman for the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, Nsereko Mutumba believe the ICC move "is another US-driven and economically-motivated move to steal Sudan's oil resources."
Algerian daily Algerie-News wrote, "The International Criminal Court is charging the Sudanese president... But what is it doing about the other crimes committed in the world and those carried out by the American administration in Iraq." The ICC's proposed indictment of al-Bashir also gives ammunition to critics of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who say war crimes and massive human rights violations have been committed in these two countries as a result of the US invasion. They rightly argue that the casualty and refugee figures dwarf those of Darfur. They also argue that the ICC decision is a reflection of double standards and a Western-model of universal justice. Roland Marchal, an expert on Sub-Saharan Africa at the French-based CNRS research center says "The developing world sees the ICC and Western law as unrelentingly hounding the (African) continent." L. Ali Khan, Professor of Law at the Washburn University School of Law says the ICC ignores "the crimes" of Western leaders and generals. "The ICC has so far shown no interest in prosecuting President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and State Secretary Colin Powell for the crimes they planned, organized, incited, and committed with the help of lethal weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq," Ali Khan says.
A majority (over 62%) of 2382 respondents surveyed in an online poll said the ICC should first hear the case of President Bush's war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paul Craig Roberts, who was a US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, says he wonders why Pres. al-Bashir is picked by the ICC from the assortment of war criminals. He asks, "Is it because Sudan is a powerless state, and the International Criminal Court hasn't the courage to name George W. Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals."
Moreno-Ocampo's office reported in February 2006, that it had received 240 communications in connection with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 which alleged that various war crimes had been committed. In response to the communications, Moreno-Ocampo explained that the legality of the invasion was not within his competence because crimes against peace have not yet been incorporated into the Rome Statute; and that in the other cases none of them were of 'sufficient gravity' to warrant forwarding to the ICC. He, however, did not explain what level of gravity the cases should have to allow them to be brought up at the ICC.
Michael Kelly of Creighton University School of Law asks, "Now that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has been indicted for war crimes, could George W. Bush be next?" Kelly says the American exceptionalism is more the rule than the exception in modern international law.

YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG

Is an American candidate for Presidency able to say: Our troops in Iraq, even during the surge, did not contribute to the nations security, abroad nor on our own soil?
Such a statement is unthinkable, but if given it to the public, it would be true.
All the progress to a better Iraq is the outcome of military and political progress of Iraqi, still not perfect, but on the way onward a unity-state with balanced power and growing confidence in a peaceful future for all, by the time the common enemy of terrorists and foreign occupiers are gone and no foreign dominant influence becomes instead.
That’s reasonable, because the Arab Shiite majority does not want the Sunni hegemony by support of Saudi Arabia and does not want the country ruled by Persian Shiites. Sunni Arabs don’t want to be cut off from the oil wealth in Kurdish an Shiite regions. The Kurds need the strength of a unity-state for their own security. So, at last Iraqi have discovered they need each other and together they can get rid of all the foreigners, Al Qaeda, the USA, the UK and all others. By then they demanded a planned withdrawal to be finished in 2010.
As true as this is, it can not be said by a presidential candidate.
So you read this:
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?
McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as-- such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history.
But we know that de Sunni Awakening Forces began to form with the help of Saudi Arabia to fight the foreign Al Qaeda combatants a year before the surge. In fact, as Spencer Ackerman and Ilan Goldenberg have reported, the record firmly establishes the opposite: instead of being caused by the surge, the key signs of the Anbar Awakening occurred not only before that strategy was implemented, but before it was ever conceived.
And here is the NY Times talking about the Anbar Awakening back in March 2007.
The formation of the group in September shocked many Sunni Arabs. It was the most public stand anyone in Anbar had taken against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Residents in parts of Anbar say the split in the Sunni insurgency is widening, with moderate tribal leaders and nationalist guerrillas pitted against fundamentalist warriors and rival tribes. That has led to a sharp increase in Sunni-on-Sunni violence across Anbar, especially in the past week, deepening the chaos of Iraq's civil war.

And here is Colin Kahl in Foreign Affairs:

The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three "occupiers" as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.
This is not controversial history. It is history that anyone trying out for Commander in Chief must understand when there are 150,000 American troops stationed in Iraq. It is an absolutely essential element to the story of the past two years. YOU CANNOT GET THIS WRONG.

Obama to press Europe on security in Berlin

BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama is expected to call on Europe to do more in hotspots like Afghanistan when he speaks in Berlin on Thursday in his only formal address of a week-long foreign tour.
Obama held talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues ranging from the global economy to Iran, Iraq and Middle East peace on a trip he hopes will burnish his foreign policy credentials and boost his election chances against Republican challenger John McCain.
His evening speech at the "Victory Column" in Berlin's Tiergarten park is already being compared in the German media to former President John F. Kennedy's 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" address.
Thousands of Germans and some tourists, wearing Obama buttons, "Yes We Can" t-shirts and carrying campaign balloons, streamed towards the podium where he will speak. Under sunny skies, people drank beer and ate sausages in a summer party atmosphere.
"Obama stands for political change," said Dero Steinbach, 49, from the western city of Gelsenkirchen, who was visiting Berlin with his family.
"For him this is clearly a way to boost his foreign policy profile, but it's also good for Germany. It's quite special that he's chosen to speak here."
In the 45-minute open-air appearance, Obama will ask Europe to shoulder more of the burden to help deal with global security threats, an aide to the Democratic senator told Reuters.
Obama has described the situation in Afghanistan as precarious and both he and McCain have said Europe must step up its efforts there. Merkel has said there are limits to what Germany, which has about 3,500 troops in Afghanistan and expects to raise that later this year, can do.

IRAQ DIFFERENCES
Relations between the United States and Germany reached a post-war low under Merkel's predecessor Gerhard Schroeder, who strongly opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
But the conservative Merkel, who grew up behind the Wall in the communist East, has worked hard to repair ties and emerged as one of President George W. Bush's closest allies in Europe.
Robert Gibbs, a senior strategist for Obama, said the candidate and Merkel had discussed a range of international issues in their one-hour chat, in particular the "urgency" of stopping Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.
Obama applauded Merkel for promoting international efforts to combat climate change and affirmed his own pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, Gibbs said.
Merkel opposed the Obama campaign's initial plan to hold Thursday's speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the historic landmark that stood on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall for decades and became a potent symbol of the Cold War.
She has said the landmark -- where President Ronald Reagan famously urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" -- is a place for presidents, not candidates to speak and her advisers tried to convince the Obama campaign to hold the speech at a university or another low-key location.
A Pew Research Center poll showed Germans favor Obama over McCain by a 49-point margin. But some German officials have said Obama, who could become the first black U.S. president, risks disappointing Europeans because their expectations are so high.
Around 700 policemen are helping with security around the "Siegessaeule", a 230-foot (70-meter) high column built to celebrate 19th century Prussian military victories over Denmark, France and Austria.

Missed Deadlines; Sadrists in the Streets; "Security Agreement" Watered Down

First there was going to be a status of forces agreement between the US and Iraq, which would be ratified by the Iraqi parliament and would grant the US long-term bases. Private security guards and US troops would be immune from Iraqi law. US commanders would launch operations at will, would decide who a terrorist was, and would arrest and imprison Iraqis at will.
Then al-Maliki went to Iran for consultations. And Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forbade a giveaway of Iraqi sovereignty. And the Sadrists began demonstrating every Friday. Then the US launched a unilateral operation in al-Maliki's home town and killed his cousin.
So the private contractors won't have legal immunity. And the agreement will be just for a year, not long-term. And it won't be ratified by the Iraqi parliament, so it is just a vague agreement between two executives. It won't stipulate long-term arrangements, but its interpretive context will be one in which the Iraqi leadership has expressed a desire for US troops to leave in 2010. It isn't clear if US troops will have legal immunity or whether they will have full freedom of action or whether they will be able to arrest and incarcerate Iraqis at will.
And now, it won't be signed by the deadline of July 31.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.
No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like ... a legislative calendar.
John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.
You have to wonder whether the Iraqis and the Americans in the end won't have to go back to the UN for a troop mandate again. The Iraqis want out from under the UN but don't want to recognize that the American presence detracts from their sovereignty. D'oh.
No provincial election law again on Monday. Maybe Tuesday. Maybe not.
The Iraqi legislative calendar is more like "Waiting for Godot" than it is like ... a legislative calendar.
John McCain thinks that Iraq and Pakistan have a common border.
[Hat tip to Think Progress.]
Hey, everybody, ask McCain if he'll pull out US troops by 2010 if that is what the Iraqi government says it wants.
McCain keeps boasting about being "right" about the "surge" and saying Obama was "wrong."
Look, it is more important that McCain was consistently wrong. He was wrong about the desirability of going to war against Iraq. He was wrong about it being a cakewalk. He was wrong about there being WMD there. He was wrong about everything. And he was wrong about the troop escalation making things better. The casualty figures dropped in al-Anbar, where few extra US troops were ever sent. They dropped in Basra, from which the British withdrew. Something happened. Putting it all on 30,000 extra troops seems a stretch. And what about all the ethnic cleansing and displacing of persons that took place under the nose of the "surge?" McCain has been wrong about everything to do with Iraq. And he is boasting about his wisdom on it!
Guerrillas used a tractor bomb to kill 7 persons and wound 8 others in Diyala Province near Iran, where there is a lively contest for power among Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
Reuters reports other recent political violence in Iraq:
MOSUL -- A suicide car bomber killed two private security contractors serving as bodyguards to members of the Kurdish Democratic Party in an attack on their convoy in Mosul ... The blast also wounded eight civilians nearby.
MOSUL -- Gunmen killed two people when they opened fire on their vehicle in southeastern Mosul, police said.
MOSUL -- Gunmen killed two brothers and their cousin in a drive-by shooting in northern Mosul on Sunday, police said ...
MOSUL -- One body was found with gunshot wounds to the head in western Mosul, police said ...
BAGHDAD -- A parked car bomb killed one person and wounded four others on Sunday in Alawi district, central Baghdad, police said.
FALLUJA -- Five people were wounded by two roadside bombs exploding within minutes of each other on different streets in central Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad, police said.

Cold Warrior

Dean Acheson arriving at the White House to meet with President Truman, April 1951.
Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. Robert L. Beisner, in “Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War,” his sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure, cites a scholar who, with meticulous pedantry, discovered that during the four years — 1949-53 — that Acheson served as secretary of state, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements about him on the Senate floor and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).

Dean Acheson with President Nixon, December 1970; he confessed that he was not immune to Nixon’s switch from “abusive hostility to respect.”

History has treated Acheson more kindly. Accolades for him have become bipartisan. Secretaries of state appointed by the party of his erstwhile tormentors have described him as a role model; Condoleezza Rice is the most recent example. Thirty-five years after his death, Acheson has achieved iconic status. This is all the more remarkable in view of his out-of-scale personality, so at odds with the present period, in which eminence seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the commonplace.
The debonair conduct, the bristling mustache, the Bond Street tailoring, the biting wit, the extraordinary analytical skill coupled with a defiant refusal to turn the other cheek bespoke an affirmation of the idiosyncratic over the conventional. Acheson was a man of high principle, whose hero was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an iconoclastic Boston Brahmin shaped by the 19th century, and whose best friend was Felix Frankfurter, the brilliant son of Jewish immigrants.
Though Acheson served during the transition when America emerged as a world power and enjoyed a nuclear monopoly, the scale of government was as yet relatively small, and Washington was still a comparatively provincial city. Its political conflicts were not shaped by public relations advisers or tested on focus groups; hence they were somewhat personal. That senior officials must remain blandly obliging while their veracity or honor is being systematically challenged was never part of the Acheson code. This explains the scene, unimaginable today, when Acheson, in the author’s words, at a hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee, admonished Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska not to shake his dirty finger in his face. When Wherry persisted, Acheson rose and launched a roundhouse swing at the senatorial gadfly, which was stopped at the last moment because Adrian Fisher, the legal adviser of the State Department, wrapped his arms around Acheson and pulled him down into his seat.
When Acheson became secretary of state, America had only just started its journey toward global involvement. Africa was still colonial; Britain was predominant in much of the Middle East; Indian democracy was only two years old; Germany and Japan were still occupied countries. The debate was not over aspirations to hegemony but over whether the nation should engage itself internationally at all, never mind permanently. It was appropriate that Acheson entitled his memoirs “Present at the Creation.”
The position of secretary of state is potentially the most fulfilling in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest. Lacking such a conceptual framework, incoherence looms in the face of the daily task of redefining America’s relationship to the world via the thousands of messages from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and the constant flow of communication from the Executive Department — all this against the backdrop of Congressional liaison and press inquiry.
Acheson served as under secretary of state and then as secretary during the period when a people that had known no direct continuing threat to its security since the early days of the Republic had to be brought to recognize that its permanent participation in the world was indispensable for peace and security. Inevitably this realization was painful and slow in coming, if indeed it has been fully achieved to this day. This is why Acheson was assailed from both political sides, by those insisting on an end to involvement through total victory over the threat and, on the other side, by those who thought there was no threat to begin with, or at least none that required Acheson’s militant response.
In this maelstrom, Acheson dealt with the five principal tasks of any secretary of state: the identification of the challenge; the development of a strategy to deal with it; organizing and motivating the bureaucracy in the State Department and in other agencies; persuading the American public; and conducting American diplomacy toward other countries. These tasks require the closest collaboration between the president and the secretary of state; secretaries of state who seek to base their influence on the prerogatives of the office invariably become marginalized. Presidents cannot be constrained by administrative flowcharts; for a secretary of state to be effective, he or she has to get into the president’s head, so to speak. This is why Acheson made it a point to see Truman almost every day they were in town together and why their friendship was so crucial to the achievements of the Truman years.
No secretary can fulfill all these tasks with equal skill — though Acheson came closer than any other of the modern period. His overriding challenge was to define a conceptual framework on which to base America’s involvement in global affairs. Beisner, a former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, describes this process in detail and with special emphasis on Acheson’s growing debate with George Kennan. Acheson turned Kennan’s seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” into the operating principle of American foreign policy. He interpreted it to mean that the task of foreign policy was to create situations of strength around the Soviet periphery to deter any temptation for aggression. Negotiation with the Soviet Union was to be deferred until these situations of strength had come into being; any attempt to begin diplomacy prematurely would undermine the primary task.
Acheson’s overriding priority, in the years immediately following World War II, was to restore Western Europe and create an Atlantic community to resist what then appeared as the Soviet colossus. He built the structure that sustained democracy during the cold war, with the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO and the return of Germany and Japan to the community of nations. But Acheson was less precise about the role of diplomacy in this process once the architectural phase was completed.
Kennan represented the other strand of American thinking. He rejected what he considered the militarization of his own views, inaugurating a debate that has not ended to this day. Acheson implicitly believed that situations of strength would be self-enforcing, and he played down the importance of diplomatic engagement with the adversary. Kennan raised the question of how to gain Soviet acquiescence in the process and urged negotiation, even while the ultimate structure was being built. Acheson treated diplomacy as the more or less automatic consequence of a strategic deployment; Kennan saw it as an autonomous enterprise depending largely on diplomatic skill. The danger of the Acheson approach has been stagnation and gradual public disenchantment with stalemate. The danger of the Kennan approach has been that diplomacy might become a technical exercise in splitting differences and thus shade into appeasement. How to merge the two strands so that military force and diplomacy are mutually supportive and so that national strategy becomes a seamless web is the essence of a continuing national controversy.
Beisner shows how the failure to do so with respect to the Korean War was the cause of the single greatest error of Acheson’s tenure: initially, the placing of Korea publicly outside the American defense perimeter (though this was conventional wisdom at the time) and, later, the inability, after the United States crossed the 38th parallel, to correlate military operations with some achievable diplomatic objectives.
For someone like myself, who knew Acheson, Beisner’s portrait does not always capture the vividness of his personality, which emerges too much as a list of eccentricities. Acheson’s relationship with the Nixon White House, and to President Nixon himself, is too cavalierly dismissed as the result of ego and an old man’s vanity. As a participant in all these meetings, I considered that relationship an example of Acheson’s generosity of spirit. Nixon had made essentially unforgivable attacks on Acheson during his 1952 campaign for vice president. But when he reached out to Acheson, it was received with the consideration Acheson felt he owed to the office, as a form of duty to the country. Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited.
Acheson emerges from the Beisner book as the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period in the sweep of his design, his ability to implement it, the extraordinary associates with whom he surrounded himself and the nobility of his personal conduct. He was impatient with relativists who sought surcease from the complexity of decisions by postulating the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. His values were absolute, but he knew also that statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates, and this requires a willingness to achieve great goals in stages, each of which is probably imperfect by absolute standards.
This was the theme of an Acheson speech at the War College in August 1951: “There was not ‘one more river to cross’ but ‘countless problems stretching into the future.’ ... Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”
The importance of that perception has not changed with the passage of time.

John McCain’s Polish Moment, Iranian Style

John McCain has executed an Islamic-style divorce from reality. Three times he’s said that Iran is training al Qaeda.
Wrong. Once he even admitted he was wrong, but his campaign HQ went back to the original goofiness two days later.
To some, the Republican candidate’s strange behavior was a replay of that historic 1976 campaign gaffe, when President Gerald R. Ford declared that Poland was “independent and autonomous” from the Soviet Union.
Millions of Poles found that surprising.
Ford had a chance to regroup, but he passed it up. He insisted that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
You could still hear the guffaws at the polling booth.
Likewise, McCain’s headquarters put out a reaffirmation of the candidate’s confusion about who was on what side in Iraq during a press conference in Jordan.
Mind you, this was two days after McCain, nudged by travelling companion Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman , I-Conn, corrected and amended his accusation that Iranian operatives in Iraq have been “taking al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”
Lieberman whispered in his ear.
“I’m sorry,” McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not al Qaeda”.
Well, yes, and some of those “extremists” are followers of Iraqi Shiite political parties in the government we are propping up in Baghdad.
McCain had it backward, in other words.
To be sure, elements in Iran, the Shiites’ Vatican, have indeed entered into a few marriages of convenience with their historical arch enemy, the Sunnis, by helping al Qaeda here and there.
But to insist that the fortunes of al Qaeda, whose roots go deep in Sunni asceticism, are tied to Shiite Iran, is absurd. It misses the whole point.
It’s like saying Northern Ireland’s Protestants were creatures of the Pope.
Haven’t we been here before?
Liberals bloggers and the media jumped all over McCain, the former Vietnam fighter pilot and prisoner of war, some recalling the widely circulated columns here exposing the ignorance of top American intelligence officials about the Middle East.
So, is McCain still a bottom-half-of-the-class student, like he was at the U.S. Naval Academy? Or does he understand the power of linking al Qaeda to Iran all too well?
Either way, it’s loser.
But what was missing in the heckling of McCain was the other half of the al Qaeda equation.
The inconvenient truth is that al Qaeda and its supporters gets their lion’s share of money and manpower from sources in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, Sunni bastions all, and America’s key allies in the war on terror.
In addition, Libya, a nascent U.S. ally (see below), and North Africa in general, has also proved to be fertile recruiting grounds for al Qaeda, according to a treasure trove of documents captured in Iraq last year.
The future suicide bombers are smuggled into Iraq in small groups from Syria, said the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., which analyzed the documents. They are Sunni Arabs, in other words, not Iraqi Shiites supported or trained by Iran.
Gerald Ford never recovered from his Polish moment, and lost to former Georgia Gov. and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.
Of course, he had other problems — the Vietnam and Cambodian debacles, domestic spying scandals, his pardon of the disgraced Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate affair.
But ever since, Ford’s Polish moment has been the measuring rod for campaign gaffes.
Will McCain suffer a similar fate?

A number of factors argue against it.
It’s too early, for starters.
Ford stumbled at the climax of both campaigns, when millions of Americans were riveted to the television debate.
In contrast, McCain’s moment occurred far away, and involved issues too complicated for most Americans to understand, not to mention members of Congress and national security officials themselves.
As for his campaign staff’s bizarre statement repudiation of their candidate’s apology, it’s unlikely it made it past the blogosphere to the water cooler.
Finally, while Ford’s Polish moment drew a national howl, conservative writers such as the New York Sun’s Eli Lake have been making a somewhat effective counterargument by stitching together instances of Iran-al Qaeda cooperation.
So McCain probably escaped relatively unscathed.
Still, he and his supporters must know this: He cannot afford another moment like that.

McCain asks Petraeus, “Do you still view al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat?” The general responded, “It is still a major threat, though it is certainly not as major a threat as it was say 15 months ago.” McCain added, “Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shi’ites all overall?” Petraeus answered, “No,” though McCain quickly added, “Or Sunnis or anybody else.”

I’ve watched the exchange a few times, and I keep coming to the same conclusion: by rhetorically asking if al Qaeda is a Shiite sect, McCain was once again demonstrating that he’s confused about the terrorist group’s religious background. He added, “Or Sunnis or anybody else,” not to necessarily to clarify, but to cover his bases — he figures al Qaeda has to be affiliated with an Islamic tradition, even if he doesn’t know which one.

Ilan Goldenberg added, “McCain did genuinely mix up Sunnis and Shi’a again…. Now, I know that there is a bit of gotcha going on here. But this man claims that his greatest qualification for the Presidency is that he understands foreign policy. But the differences between Sunni and Shi’a matter. They matter a lot! And this nasty habit of mixing it up just seriously needs to stop.”

Indeed, I’d say it’s the “nasty habit” that makes this morning’s mix-up especially interesting. If McCain had consistently demonstrated a firm grasp of events in the Middle East, it’d be easier to overlook confusion over whether al Qaeda is Sunni or Shi’ia.

But therein lies the point — McCain has struggled with this before.

* On Feb. 28, McCain told the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, Texas, “Al Qaeda is there [in Iraq], they are functioning, they are supported in many times, in many ways by the Iranians.”

* On March 17, McCain appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and said, “There are al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran and given training as leaders and they’re moving back into Iraq.”

* On March 18, McCain held a press conference in Jordan in which he repeated the same claim, twice, including his insistence that it was “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known.”

Eventually, McCain backpedalled, but only after Joe Lieberman whispered in his ear that he was wrong. Asked why he would repeatedly insist that Sunni al Qaeda was benefitting from training from Shiite Iran, McCain would only say he “misspoke.”

Complicating matters, McCain also appeared confused last week about events in Basra.

As recently as November 2006, McCain couldn’t even talk about his own opinions on the war without reading prepared notes on national television. As recently as March 2007, McCain was embarrassing himself by insisting that Gen. Petraeus travels around Baghdad “in a non-armed Humvee” (a comment that military leaders literally laughed at, and which CNN’s Michael Ware responded to by saying McCain’s credibility “has now been left out hanging to dry.”)

Add up the errors, and we see a Republican candidate whose problem is not with words but with facts.

Intellectual Laziness and the ‘al Qaeda’ Shorthand

About a year ago, it became painfully obvious that the president started lying about al Qaeda in Iraq as part of a cynical approach to bolstering support for the war. While that was hardly unexpected, the more noticeable problem was that the media started playing along with the White House’s scheme, and began characterizing everyone who commits an act of violence in Iraq as an al Qaeda terrorist.
The New York Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, eventually tackled the subject head on in a terrific column; the paper took steps to make amends; and news outlets have generally been more responsible about not equating all Iraqi violence with AQI.
Now, if only John McCain had been paying attention at the time.
As he campaigns with the weight of a deeply unpopular war on his shoulders, Senator John McCain of Arizona frequently uses the shorthand “Al Qaeda” to describe the enemy in Iraq in pressing to stay the course in the war there.
“Al Qaeda is on the run, but they’re not defeated” is his standard line on how things are going in Iraq. When chiding the Democrats for wanting to withdraw troops, he has been known to warn that “Al Qaeda will then have won.” In an attack this winter on Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the Democratic front-runner, Mr. McCain went further, warning that if American forces withdrew, Al Qaeda would be “taking a country.”
Critics say that in framing the war that way at rallies or in sound bites, Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is oversimplifying the hydra-headed nature of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that exploits the emotions that have been aroused by the name “Al Qaeda” since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Well, yes, critics do say that, but only because it’s true.
Some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.
The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.”
And McCain’s confusion on the issue inevitably leads him to say dumb things, such as making up Iran’s non-existent role in training AQI terrorists, getting confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia, and exaggerating what AQI is even capable of in this reality.
The political news was: McCain takes a roundhouse swing at Obama; Obama counterpunches elegantly. But what caught my Iraq-obsessed eye was this statement from McCain:
“And my friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”
They’d be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi’ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi’ites–the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians)–would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren’t too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either. (The usual caveats apply: AQI is barbaric, dastardly and intent on violating the Qu’ran by engaging in the annihilation of innocents. We can’t get rid of them fast enough.)
The sadness here is that McCain knows better. He knows the complexities of the world, and the region. But I suspect he’s overplaying his Iraq hand in order to win favor with the wingnuts in his party. That is extremely unfortunate: As McCain should know better than anyone, it is extremely dishonorable for politicians to play bloody-shirt games when the nation is at war.
It is dishonorable, but there’s no need to assume that McCain “knows better.” He’s either intentionally deceiving the public about the nation’s most serious terrorist threat, or he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s a close call, but I’m leaning towards the latter.

Is Puttin the president of Germany, as the "foreign policy expert" John McCain said?