Guess who wants us back?

After rebuking a continued [and legally protected] US presence via a renewal of the Status of Forces Agreement in 2011....and the statement by new Iraqi PM rejecting ground forces just last month...the Provisional Council of Anbar Province is apparently leading an effort to have more Americans die for Iraq.

Iraqi officials have issued a desperate plea for America to bring US ground troops back to the embattled country, as heavily armed Islamic State militants came within striking distance of Baghdad. 

The warning came from Sabah al-Karhout, president of the provisional council of Anbar Province, the vast desert province to the west of Baghdad that has now largely fallen under jihadist control.

Link

Thanks but no thanks. We took out an oppressive, yet stable Sunni counterweight to Iran...and enabled a Shari'a compliant Shia ally...and are surprised by the nine year disaster now being ground zero in the ever continuing war over Muhammad's ghost?

Megan Kelly is a hottie.....and a shill

Just compare her "fair and balanced" approaches to those who toe the right wing party line regarding the US withdrawal from Iraq, and that towards Jon Stolz from VoteVets, who offered a reasoned, yet dissenting voice.

Political theater for the bobble-heads.

But Megan is still hot.

The bankruptcy of political rhetoric

The bobble heads in the right wing media are still banging the drum that "Obama withdrew US forces from Iraq" and that this event foretold the rise of ISIS. They regurgitate this pablum for the masses even though the previous Administration agreed to the 2008 SOFA that not only stipulated US forces withdraw NLT 31 December 2011....but also decreed that any future SOFA agreements would have to be ratified by the Iraqi Council of Representatives [CoR]. As we well know.....the CoR was not about to ratify any renegotiation of the SOFA in 2011, at least not with legal immunity for US forces from the Iraqi judicial system. So either these bobble heads are stupid...or they think that their audience is stupid. Or, they would sacrifice the immunity of US forces to a corrupt and Iranian-backed regime in Baghdad.

These same bobble heads attempt to castigate the current Administration for announcing a withdrawal date for US forces in Afghanistan....when the previous Administration did exactly the same for US force in Iraq.

It makes me feel icky any time I have to speak up for the current regime at 1600 Penn....but when the opposition is just as shallow and bereft of reason.......I see any hope for our future dim.

So much for no 'boots on the ground'.....

The U.S. is sending another 300 troops to Iraq to beef up security at the U.S. Embassy and elsewhere in the Baghdad area to protect U.S. citizens and property, officials said Monday. 

That raises the total U.S. troop presence in Iraq to approximately 750, the Pentagon said.

Link

I'm fully behind sending in the FAST [Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team] and the CRE [Contingency Response Element]...this is exactly what we have stood the units up for. But we've already exceeded that mission. Now, when the first attack comes against these guys, either at static sites or in transit, we'll have justification to further expand the footprint and the scope.

This is how it begins. Again.

The Iraq blame game

With the news of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS] blazing a path through northern Iraq, the chattering class is again harping on the withdrawal of US forces in 2011. And predictably, the charges are rampant, that Obama "pulled the troops out early" and/or "refused to pursue a Status of Forces Agreement [SOFA]" with the Maliki regime.

Sadly for both talking points, the agreement reached between the Bush and Maliki negotiation teams, that stipulated US forces exit Iraq by Dec 31st, 2011....was a Status of Forces Agreement. It's accurately titled the Agreement Between the United States of America and the Republic of Iraq On the Withdrawal of United States Forces from Iraq and the Organization of Their Activities during Their Temporary Presence in Iraq.

During those negotiations, the Iraqi's made it clear that "We will not accept any memorandum of understanding if it does not give a specific date for a complete withdrawal of foreign troops" BBC

Now, one could argue that the Bush Administration was simply having no luck in keeping US forces in country past 2011.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says no U.S. troops will be left in his country after 2011, calling the agreement for all American soldiers to leave by then "not subject to extension, not subject to alteration." Politico

But then one is going to have to acknowledge the same luck for the succeeding Administration.

So the politically and media driven noise machine is forced to support ignorance of this fact, forced to suppress any questions as to why the Bush Administration couldn't or wouldn't extend the withdrawal date....just as it supports an enforced ignorance of the differences between terrorism and insurgency....and the various groups involved with either....so that servile, patriotic fervor can be whipped up for campaign season..and for issues such as this.

A Classified Mea Culpa on Iraq

But will the allegedly liberal media cover it?

CIA Analysis Acknowledges Intelligence Failure on Iraq's WMDs

COINsanity

I've followed the ongoing debates around the Counterinsurgency [COIN] theory of warfare for quite some time, especially during my ramp up to spend 15 months in Baghdad during the much vaunted 'Surge'. Folks like Gentile, Metz, McMasters and Nagl would take to the wonkish forums like Small Wars Journal and the Center for Defense Studies to defend their strategy of taming asymmetric warfare in the 21st century. The discussions waxed and waned over topics like understanding indigenuous cultural values and the efficacy of armor and artillery in a COIN environment. These men are not superstars outside of their arena, as the media has not given due diligence to the architects of strategies that have influenced national policy and news cycles....though one name had stood out the brightest and for the longest. LTC John Nagl [Ret] wrote Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, which was published in 2002, and soon became the rising star of a cadre nicknamed the COINdinistas.

COIN soon became the new currency of strategic success, coming at a time when our outlook for obtainable metrics in Iraq was rapidly diminishing. But as many have noted, COIN is not a band aid for bad national policy, nor poor planning.

Nagl is leaving the world of strategic studies and the Center for a New American Security, but the debate still rages on.

Learning to Eat Soup with a Spoon
The American Conservative

Cogent commentary on the TAC article
Small Wars Journal

Defining the Surge rhetoric

If you follow the story of the Iraq Surge, and it's aftermath, you quickly realize that there is an official story...one dutifully endorsed by the media. A story where the increase of US forces quelled the insurgency. A similar meme exists where Obama somehow 'lost the peace'....but I digress.

Doug Ollivant of the New America Foundation penned a piece last summer regrading this 'new orthodoxy', that I somehow missed until now; but found thanks to Musings on Iraq. He lays a fair amount of blame at the feet of President Obama for institutional ambiguity on Iraq and Afghanistan, while laying out a pretty solid counter-argument to the generally accepted dogma of how the violence in Iraq decreased, somewhat.


Countering the New Orthodoxy: Reinterpreting Counterinsurgency in Iraq

After engaging an upstanding fellow in a debate over the conclusion of the Iraq adventure and the current problems in Afghanistan over at TAH, I dug up one of the many files in my digital library for anyone else who may be a foreign policy nerd.

SSI

Iraq Dossier scripted to make the case for war? Say it ain't so.......

A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.

In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."

His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government's claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, responsible for commanding and delivering raw and analysed intelligence, said: "I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given."

Guardian

That doesn't stop proponents from taking the few instances of Gulf War era [Sarin and Mustard] artillery and mortar rounds being found/exploited in Iraq as justification for the invasion and occupation.

They can send me a bill me for damages I caused........

it will give me something to start a fire with.

Baghdad city hall wants $1 billion in damages

BAGHDAD — Baghdad's city hall has demanded $1 billion and an apology from the US military, accusing the force that led an invasion to oust Saddam Hussein of turning a "beautiful city into a military camp."

In a statement published on its website late on Wednesday, the city council cited damage done to the city by the erection of concrete blast walls, seen throughout the Iraqi capital, as well as the use of Humvee military vehicles.

"Baghdad city council demands the United States pay compensation estimated at $1 billion as a result of damage to infrastructure and issue an apology to the people of Baghdad," the statement said.
"Anyone can recognise what American forces have done to Baghdad by turning this beautiful city into a military camp and destroying streets and communities."

The statement added that it was asking for the damages "because of mistakes by the American army and its neglect of projects completed by Baghdad city hall" in previous years.

Concrete blast walls are a ubiquitous sight across Baghdad, notably protecting government ministries and the heavily fortified Green Zone. Humvees, now used by the Iraqi army and police, frequently rumble through the city's pothole-filled streets.

AFP

Is anyone surprised?

Curveball: How US was duped by Iraqi fantasist looking to topple Saddam

In a small flat in the German town of Erlangen in February 2003, an out-of-work Iraqi sat down with his wife to watch one of the world's most powerful men deliver the speech of his career on live TV.

As US secretary of state, Colin Powell gathered his notes in front of the United Nations security council, the man watching — Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, known to the west's intelligence services as "Curveball" — had more than an inkling of what was to come. He was, after all, Powell's main source, a man his German handlers had feted as a new "Deep throat" — an agent so pivotal that he could bring down a government.

As Curveball watched Powell make the US case to invade Iraq, he was hiding an admission that he has not made until now: that nearly every word he had told his interrogators from Germany's secret service, the BND, was a lie.

Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy - one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell's presentation revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot. Something else left him even more amazed; until that point he had not met a US official, let alone been interviewed by one.

 Guardian

This is why I ended up in Baghdad

Just 15 days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush invited his defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, to meet with him alone in the Oval Office. According to Mr. Rumsfeld’s new memoir, the president leaned back in his leather chair and ordered a review and revision of war plans — but not for Afghanistan, where the Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington had been planned and where American retaliation was imminent. 

“He asked that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq,” Mr. Rumsfeld writes.
“Two weeks after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, those of us in the Department of Defense were fully occupied,” Mr. Rumsfeld recalls. But the president insisted on new military plans for Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld writes. “He wanted the options to be ‘creative.’ ” 

When the option of attacking Iraq in post-9/11 military action was raised first during a Camp David meeting on Sept. 15, 2001, Mr. Bush said Afghanistan would be the target. But Mr. Rumsfeld’s recollection in the memoir, “Known and Unknown,” to be published Tuesday, shows that even then Mr. Bush was focused as well on Iraq. A copy was obtained Wednesday by The New York Times.

NYT

The true state of knowledge in America

h/t Rucksack to Backpack

I'm certainly no prophet, since anyone with a pulse could have predicted this -

But I have in the past stated that just such a thing would occur:

Members of United States-allied Awakening Councils have quit or been dismissed from their positions in significant numbers in recent months, prey to an intensive recruitment campaign by the Sunni insurgency, according to government officials, current and former members of the Awakening and insurgents. 

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters — many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military — appear to have rejoined Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.

The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shiite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from Al Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq’s inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided Al Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters.

NYT

Great piece on Iraq and recent history

From the Nieman Watchdog:

The more we learn about how the Iraq War began the worse the story gets. For all we thought we knew, now a new set of formerly secret records of both the Bush administration and the British cabinet of Tony Blair sheds glaring light on the prewar machinations of both governments designed to make the conflict happen. Posted as a three-part series by the National Security Archive, the documents, along with extensive analyses by Archive Iraq Project co-directors Joyce Battle and myself, plus British journalist Christopher Ames, lay out the case in unprecedented detail. The analysis demonstrates that the Bush administration swiftly abandoned plans for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi adventurism by means of sanctions, never had a plan subsequent to that except for a military solution, and enmeshed British allies in a manipulation of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic designed to generate support for a war. This time the case is made with actual secret government records, not merely the press releases and talking points of the neo-cons.

Read the National Archive documents here.

...and by the way...hey allegedly liberal media, where are you?.....hello....

The Iraq War Ledger

From the Center for American Progress:

Though the level of violence has declined from its 2006-07 peak—when dozens of bodies could be found on Baghdad’s streets every morning—Iraq still endures a level of violence that anywhere else in the world would be considered a crisis. Still, the end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future. But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits.

The tables and charts below tell the tale. We have grouped these costs into three categories:

• The human costs, dealing with American and Iraqi casualties
• The financial costs, dealing with the expense of the war and of the continued care for its veterans
• The strategic costs, dealing with the impact of the Iraq intervention on U.S. power and influence in the Middle East and on the global stage

Before turning to those tables and charts, however, we would like to make two additional points.
First, it is critical to remember the shifting justifications for the Iraqi invasion. The Iraq war was sold to the American public on Saddam Hussein’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction and his alleged relationship with Al Qaeda. When both claims turned out to be false, the Bush administration justified the intervention on the idea that a democratic Iraq would be an ally in the “war on terror” and an inspiration for democratic reform in the Middle East. These arguments remain highly questionable.
Second, the authors would like to make clear that this analysis of the cost of the Iraq war in no way diminishes the sacrifice and honor displayed by the U.S. military in Iraq. Americans troops have served and died, and continue to serve and die, in Iraq at the behest of the American people and two of their commanders-in-chief. This is why it is important to draw the correct lessons from our nation’s invasion of Iraq. In order to do that, its costs must be examined honestly and rigorously.

Sobering.......

Seven Years Ago Today

I haven't decided if we owe Iraq some form of reparations.....but as always, Spencer Ackerman writes a thought provoking piece about news that is ignored by our media.

The United States invaded Iraq. We barely mark today with an anniversary, a sign that the Iraq war has lost not merely the centrality it once occupied in American political discussion but practically all of its purchase. In a manner breathtaking to behold considering the 90,000 U.S. troops who are still in Iraq — is that number even still accurate? — we simply consider the Iraq war done with; withdrawal a certainty; and continued argument useless. Some think we’re a bomb blast or two away from reconsidering that judgment. I think it’s irreversible. You can’t, in the final analysis, rekindle support for waging an exhausting war when the strategy is to end it. The historical reckoning with Iraq is yet to come.

For the Iraqis, the war is not ignorable, the circumstances of it are not escapable, and the reality of it is not optional. We should pay the Iraqis reparations, whether in the form of favored trade deals or otherwise. What we did to your country was obscene and uncivilized, a source of national and historical shame that we will have to work to overcome. Seven years too late, as a nation, we must demonstrate remorse and ask forgiveness.

Who Knew?

The allegedly "ultra-liberal" New York Times features a blog called Home Fires, highlighting the writings of veterans who have returned from war. Now part of my daily reading list......won't my boss be happy...

The Army, and especially the infantry, gives its junior leaders tremendous responsibility. The rough world of the 82nd Airborne Division was a steep learning curve for me, a freshly minted lieutenant accustomed to the studious habits of Stanford University, of its School of Engineering, no less. I learned an awful lot and, I think, emerged a better person.

More recently, I’ve realized some of my beliefs have formed so slowly and subtly that their learning has been entirely unappreciated. I’ve learned that no matter what, life goes on — it’ll do so with or without any one of us — and I’ve found a measure of respect for selfishness; for people who look out for themselves and their lives yet to come. This is surely cynical.

If there’s redemption in the selfishness, it has to do with loving life, with respecting yourself enough not to end your days prematurely or in futile pursuits. Yes, I said it. Somewhere between my second and third tours, I came to believe that our foreign, undeclared wars flouted our Constitution and made us less safe — from terrorism, from debt and from tyranny at home. Believing this wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it. Without faith in our military endeavors, my long-held notions about duty, heroism and fighting the good fight didn’t survive long.

I think you’re only a hero for as long as your image is useful, as evidenced most dramatically by then-Major George S. Patton’s cavalry charge against World War I veterans protesting for their pay in 1932, and General Douglas MacArthur’s zeal in pursuing them across the Anacostia River even after President Hoover ordered an end to the assault. If you’re not troubled by history, you’re not studying it correctly. Let’s choose our role models carefully.

We won in Iraq????

Hat tip to Disaffected and it Feels So Good........

We won. The Iraq War is over.

I declare November 22, 2008 to be "Victory in Iraq Day." (Hereafter known as "VI Day.")

By every measure, The United States and coalition forces have conclusively defeated all enemies in Iraq, pacified the country, deposed the previous regime, successfully helped to establish a new functioning democratic government, and suppressed any lingering insurgencies. The war has come to an end. And we won.

What more indication do you need? An announcement from the outgoing Bush administration? It's not gonna happen. An announcement from the incoming Obama administration? That's really not gonna happen. A declaration of victory by the media? Please. Don't make me laugh. A concession of surrender by what few remaining insurgents remain in hiding? Forget about it.

The moment has come to acknowledge the obvious. To overtly declare a fact that has already been true for quite some time now. Let me repeat:

WE WON THE WAR IN IRAQ

That is sobering look into the mindless mind of a chicken-hawking neo-con. Mark my words...we have created another tyrant in Maliki. I saw it with my own eyes, and we see in the the news that doesn't get reported in the US. How many Americans know that Maliki recently shut down an opposition news outlet? How many people know that Al Qaeda is resurgent in Iraq? How many people know that entire Iraqi Army Divisions are controlled by sectarian elements? How many people know that Iraq is #176 out of 180 of the most corrupt nations, as indexed by Transparency International? The list continues as well as the violence.

We didn't 'win' in Iraq....we created another problem.