The death of nine U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan Sunday in a Taliban attack underscored the deteriorating security situation there, and the collateral costs of the Bush administration’s ongoing distraction in Iraq.
Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently that the United States faced a “very complex problem” in Afghanistan that required a buildup of U.S. forces — but a surge in Afghanistan couldn’t happen as long as U.S. troops were tied down in Iraq.
Barack Obama called Monday for sending an additional two combat brigades to Afghanistan as part of a refocused war-on-terror strategy. “Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and al-Qaida has a safe haven,” Obama wrote in a New York Times commentary. “Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been.”
John McCain said that the “status quo is not acceptable” in Afghanistan and has pledged three more combat brigades of about 3,500 troops each.
In a big policy reversal, President Bush this week authorized a top State Department diplomat to attend upcoming nuclear negotiations between Iran and the European Union.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said the United States would be there “to listen, not to negotiate,” but it’s still a major change from the administration’s position that it wouldn’t participate in even preliminary meetings until Iran suspended its uranium enrichment program.
Just a few months ago, Bush was calling Barack Obama’s willingness to meet with Iran “appeasement.”
A photo of a U.S. medic carrying a wounded Iraqi child was published throughout the world in 2003. But now the soldier from the photo has died from a substance overdose apparently connected to his struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Joseph Dwyer couldn’t “get over the war,” his mother said. It’s a reminder of how difficult life can be for some returning soldiers — and the need to provide support services.
An Eagle reader asked whether the natural uranium removed recently from Iraq was evidence that Saddam Hussein was, in fact, developing weapons of mass destruction. No, it wasn’t. The United States has long known about the uranium, and it wasn’t part of an active WMDs program. Rather, it was left over from the Tuwaitha nuclear complex near Baghdad, which was dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. The material — which would have to be enriched before it could be used for a nuclear bomb or even a dirty bomb — had been kept since that time under the seal of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Ironically, after the U.S. invasion in 2003, Tuwaitha was left unguarded, and the barrels used to store the yellowcake were stolen and sold to local people, which created potential health risks.
Barack Obama is catching heat for seeming to waffle on his pledge to remove U.S. troops from Iraq within 16 months. He now says there’s a chance he could have a longer timetable for the pullout, depending on conditions on the ground.
It does look like Obama the campaigner is acknowledging some of the practical realities of governing in his recent moves to the center. But some flexibility on the timetable is a good sign that Obama recognizes the complexities and potential dangers of the Iraq endgame.
And Obama’s shift probably reassures some voters who want out of Iraq but also want, in Obama’s words, to do so “responsibly,” in a way that doesn’t endanger our troops.
It’s ironic, though, that Obama’s move comes at a time when the improved security situation in Iraq is leading to optimism from military analysts about the prospects for major U.S. troop withdrawals in 2009.
“I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November - whether things get better there or worse. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue,” wrote columnist Thomas Friedman. “It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not al-Qaida or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card - one way or another - is, in my view, seriously deluded.”
Friedman’s advice to voters: “We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.”
Per a New York Times article: “According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been ‘massively scaled back this year.’ Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007.”
A pro/con on Wednesday’s Opinion pages debated why this is happening. Cal Thomas blamed the decline in coverage on the liberal media not wanting to report good news. But Frank Rich noted that there isn’t much reporting on the bad news either, and he argued that the public has made up its mind on Iraq and is more interested in “Cindy versus Michelle, not Shiites versus Sunnis.”
This week’s McClatchy investigative series in The Eagle about prisoner abuse and wrongful detention at Guantanamo and other facilities should shock and outrage Americans, we argued in Wednesday’s editorial.
As the articles amply document, many of these supposed “terrorists†and “worst of the worst†were nothing of the sort. They were low-level criminals, or Taliban foot soldiers, or innocent villagers swept up in the fog of war.
The beatings and harsh treatment many detainees faced in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and other sites produced little of intelligence value, say former intelligence officials, but they did succeed in turning many prisoners and their families into avowed enemies of America.
The series and editorial have sparked some predictable cries of “Why should we care about these people?â€
But if you care about the Constitution and living in a nation of laws — if you think this nation is better than its enemies — then you should care about the Bush administration’s cynical and secretive torture policies and end runs around the law.
Those responsible for these abusive policies, from the White House on down, should be held accountable.
There’s no doubt that U.S. and Iraqi forces have made real progress against the insurgency in recent months. “Violence is down, armed extremists are in disarray, government confidence is rising and sectarian communities are gearing up for a battle at the polls rather than slaughter in the streets,” Associated Press reported, calling it a possible “turning point.”
After hearing countless Bush declarations of “turning points” in Iraq, there’s reason for skepticism about this latest defining moment. It could be a calm in the storm - a massive truck bomb killed 63 people and wounded scores in Baghdad Tuesday, the deadliest bombing in three months. But the reduction in violence is a good sign that the insurgency is on the defensive, if not in its last throes.
“Let me tell you something. If I invade IHOP, pancakes are going to be cheaper in my house.†— Chris Rock, on the high cost of gas, despite the Iraq war
“The disconnect between what Democrats are saying about Iraq and what is actually happening there has reached grotesque proportions,†columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote. “Democrats won an exhilarating electoral victory in 2006 pledging withdrawal at a time when conditions in Iraq were dire and we were indeed losing the war. Two years later, when everything is changed, they continue to reflexively repeat their ‘narrative of defeat and retreat’ (as Joe Lieberman so memorably called it) as if nothing has changed.
“It is a position so utterly untenable that John McCain must seize the opportunity and, contrary to conventional wisdom, make the Iraq war the central winning plank of his campaign.â€
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., drew the eye of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” Monday night for Roberts’ long-ago promises, when he chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, to fast-track the “Phase II” reports examining the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence on Iraq. “I’ve got tennis shoes and track shoes on, on Phase II,” Roberts was shown saying in a clip from November 2005. Stewart saved his ire, though, for the media’s neglect of the Phase II report’s eventual release last week — in favor of stories about kissing lesbians, Web gossip and a French daredevil who climbs buildings. “Yes, he was climbing the New York Times building, perhaps looking to read the story about the administration misleading us into a war that you didn’t cover at all,” Stewart responded to one ABC News clip.
President Bush and his top policymakers exaggerated Saddam Hussein’s links to terrorism, according to the long, long-awaited final “phase II” report released today by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The 171-page report also says that intelligence reports at the time supported most of the administration’s statements about Iraq’s weapons (since proved untrue), but that the administration didn’t disclose the internal debate about the accuracy of that intelligence.
“The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the (Sept. 11) attacks to use the war against al-Qaida as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said in written commentary on the report. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false pretenses.”
Most, though not all, of the Republicans on the committee objected to the findings and issued a minority report noting that Democrats were also wrong about the Iraq threat. But the committee’s findings match former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s account of how the administration conducted a misleading campaign to sell the war.
Cal Thomas argues that Democrats committed fraud in telling voters in 2006 that they would end the war in Iraq. He points to a video of Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., in which he says Democrats “sort of stretched the facts” about their intention to end the war and bring troops home. Democrats have made several votes related to ending the war, which haven’t made it through the Senate or President Bush. But Thomas argues that if that Democratic lawmakers really meant what they told voters, they could have withheld funding for the war. Of course, Thomas is disingenuous in defending voters, as he supports the war and would be furious if Democratic lawmakers withheld funding. But what do you think? Were Democratic candidates dishonest? Should they withhold funding?
Critics have long charged that the Bush administration misled the public in making its case for war in Iraq. Now its own former spokesman is making the same allegation.
In his new book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says that the administration sold the war using sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war,” the Washington Post reported.
“Over that summer of 2002,” McClellan wrote, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”
Looking back on it now, what does McClellan think about the decision to go to war? “War should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary,” he wrote.
“I guess President Bush must think Defense Secretary Robert Gates is an appeaser of terrorists. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, too. And U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker,” wrote columnist Trudy Rubin. She noted that all three support having direct talks with Iran, as Barack Obama does. “What makes the president’s remarks even more hypocritical is the abject failure of his own Iran policy,” she wrote. “No one has strengthened Iran’s hand more in the Mideast region than George W. Bush.”
Rubin argued that John McCain is hypocritical, too. “There is no way Iraq can be stabilized and U.S. troops withdrawn safely without the cooperation of Tehran,” she wrote. “McCain is fooling himself and the public if he thinks he can avoid the issue of talks.”
FYI: In case you haven’t seen it, here is the video of “Hardball” host Chris Matthews trying to get talk-radio host Kevin James to explain what former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain did wrong.
Include FBI agents among those who objected to the interrogation techniques used on detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Agents repeatedly complained that the techniques might violate the law and jeopardize future criminal trials, according to an exhaustive report released Tuesday by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine. But those protests didn’t appear to trigger any response from the National Security Council, which includes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Excerpts from Randy’s column today:
If there’s one place that’s synonymous with family fun, it’s Baghdad. So it didn’t surprise me to hear that American developers are planning to build a Disney-style amusement park in downtown Baghdad. Right next to the Green Zone.
I’m not kidding. You can’t make this stuff up. It’s too crazy.
According to news reports, the Pentagon has given the green light to the attraction, which will include a cultural center, condos, shopping malls and restaurants around a lagoon, amusement rides and a giant skateboard park.
Thrill-seekers will love it. Talk about white-knuckle excitement — imagine being on the top of a giant Ferris wheel when the city’s electricity goes out! And the mortar rounds start coming in.
Those screams you hear? Just people having fun.
Baghdad residents, especially the children, need ‘normal’ experiences and outlets for fun. But are we really the ones to organize the good times?
My guess is that Iraqis don’t want a Cheesecake Factory. They just want us to leave.
U.S. troop deaths from postwar suicide might outnumber combat fatalities, according to Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, the government’s top psychiatric research arm.
It’s a shocking reminder of the ongoing and hidden costs of the Iraq war.
Insel blamed the problem in part on a failure to provide adequate care for returning soldiers.
His remarks came on the heels of a Rand Corp. study last month indicating that of the more than 1.6 million military members who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan, about 300,000 suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder — and only about half of those sought treatment. And for those receiving treatment, about half received substandard care.
It’s good that the Defense Department recently ramped up efforts to ensure that soldiers who seek mental health treatment aren’t stigmatized — 6 in 10 military enlistees in a recent survey said they believed that coming forward would hurt their careers.
Another key factor, according to Insel, is that many community mental health centers, especially in rural areas, aren’t prepared or equipped to handle the problem.
America will be living with the human costs of the Iraq war for a long time.
As many as 300,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder or serious depression, according to a Rand Corp. report released last week — and the costs could reach $6.2 billion in the next two years alone. About 1 in 5 vets of the war report symptoms of traumatic brain injury.
The study, titled “Invisible Wounds of War,†warned of “long-term, cascading consequences†for the country, including higher rates of veteran suicide, divorce, drug use and unemployment.
At the same time, the study found that major gaps in mental health care for vets remain: Only 53 percent of vets with PTSD sought professional help in the past year, and half of those who did get help received “minimally adequate†care.
Former generals serving as “military analysts†on television may not be the independent observers that most viewers assumed. Many of them have been recruited by the Pentagon and have financial ties to military contractors, the New York Times reported.
“Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks,†the Times determined after suing to obtain Pentagon e-mails and other documents. “Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show.æ. . . In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.â€
No doubt many military analysts are independent and aren’t improperly influenced by the Pentagon or business ties. But internal documents show that the Pentagon was involved in recruiting and cultivating “message force multipliers†and “surrogates†it could count on to deliver administration “themes and messages.â€
The Iraq war has become a “major debacle†that has actually made America less safe. That’s not an anti-war Democrat talking — it’s the conclusion of some of the Pentagon’s top military strategists, our editorial today notes.
The new report, from the Pentagon’s top education institute and based on interviews with former senior defense and intelligence officials, concludes that Iraq has become a “major war†with no clear outcome that has diminished America’s standing abroad.
Far from enhancing America’s security, our efforts in Iraq “have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East.â€
Moreover, the war has diverted “manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers†from “all other efforts†in the war on terror.
That key assessment is bolstered by another new report, this one from the Government Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, which supports the contention that the Iraq war has become a distraction from the war on terror and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida — the people who actually attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.
Another company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions, this time during a battle in Sadr City Tuesday night, the New York Times reported. Two weeks ago, more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers fled during the fight in Basra.
“It bugs the hell out of me,†said U.S. Sgt. George Lewis. “We don’t see any progress being made at all.â€
The U.S. military finally released Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein after holding him for more than two years, AP reported. About time. Hussein was part of AP’s team that won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2005. The military detained him and claimed that he had ties to insurgents but never filed any specific charges. AP denied any improper contacts and said Hussein was doing the normal work of a photographer in a war zone. “I have spent two years in prison even though I was innocent,” Hussein said after being freed.
On the McClatchy news site, economist Linda Bilmes, co-author of “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict,” explains why the Iraq war isn’t giving the economy a “war bump”:
Unlike World War II, the Iraq war “has had a net negative effect on the economy. This is for several reasons. First, the money that we spend every month goes largely to operational costs (fuel, laundry, cooking, transportation, repairs), much of which is performed by subcontractors from the Philippines, Nepal and other countries. So in effect, the dollars spent do not have any positive return for the U.S. economy. Second, because we have borrowed all the money to fight the war, largely from abroad, we have added to the deficit and to the national debt, which means we have to pay more interest and adds a burden onto the economy. Third, the war has contributed to the increase in oil prices, which of course take money out of the hands of consumers, and lower business margins, and transfer it to the oil producers.”
