The War in Iraq

Site Issues 2008 Archive Room
#141

Friday, Mar. 07, 2008
Ominous Rise in Baghdad Bombings
By Charles Crain/Baghdad

Thursday’s double bombing in Baghdad, which killed nearly 70 people and left hundreds more wounded, was the worst attack in Iraq since June 2007. It continues a troubling trend: a slow but steady increase in deadly bombings across the country. The troop surge is ending and the U.S. has begun withdrawing soldiers from Baghdad, but these attacks may indicate that a military or political solution to the Sunni insurgency may be as far off as it was a year ago.

The attacks capped off a violent week. Last Sunday more than 20 people died in bombings across the capital. And last month nearly 100 people were killed when two women detonated suicide vests in a crowded Baghdad market. According to statistics released by the U.S. military such attacks declined sharply for most of 2007, bottoming out in December. Since late last year, though, car bombings and suicide vest bombings have increased steadily.

Despite this week’s carnage the absolute number of bombings is still far lower than it was one year ago. The problem, however, is not simply lives lost, but also what the slow increase in attacks says about the resiliency of the Sunni insurgency. Battered by Shi’ite militias, the U.S. military and the defection of more moderate insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other radical insurgent groups are much weaker now than they were just last summer. But, as U.S. officials are quick to acknowledge, they still have the men, the money and the organization to pose a serious threat.

The question now is how that threat will be kept under control. American troop levels in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq will return this year to about the same level as 2006 — the year that saw the worst of the country’s sectarian violence. Helping to fill that void, supposedly, will be former members of the Sunni insurgency: thousands have become U.S.-paid counter-insurgents and, in some cases, members of the Iraqi government security forces. Unlike the mostly Shi’ite Iraqi army and police, these Sunnis have credibility in their towns and neighborhoods and have proven effective in fighting their former insurgent allies.

The trouble is that this ground-level military solution may be in conflict with other government efforts to reduce the violence and foster stability in Iraq. The Karrada bombing came on the heels of a state visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and struck a neighborhood that is home to Iraq’s largest Shi’ite political party and many Shi’ite government officials. The timing and location of this bombing may have been a coincidence, but Karrada makes a nice target for Sunni militants who frame their fight as a struggle against Iranian domination.

The long-term difficulty for the United States and the Iraqi government is that this suspicion of Iran is not simply a fantasy of radical Sunni insurgents. It is a very real fear of Sunni former insurgents currently cooperating in the fight against al-Qaeda. Former insurgent leaders routinely scorn the Iraqi government’s intentions, casting it as a pawn of the Iranians. So, as the Iraqi government strives to reduce violence by improving its relationship with Iran, it may be setting the stage for continued conflict with disaffected Sunnis.

Time

#142

Studies: Iraq Costs US $12B Per Month
Studies: Iraq War Will Cost $12 Billion Per Month in 2008, Tripling Rate of War’s Early Years
By CHARLES J. HANLEY AP Special Correspondent
The Associated Press

A US soldier of 3rd Brigade Combat team, 3rd Infantry secures the area as smoke a pall rises from fires in background, during a military operation at Al-leg area about 60 kilometers (40 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq, on Friday, March 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris) (AP)
The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing “significant” future resources to the wars, “requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge.”

These numbers don’t include the war’s cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

In their book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.

That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.

Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004’s, the CBO reports.

The reasons are numerous: the “surge” of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to “reset,” that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.

Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early — to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes — and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.

Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.

This factor figures most in the category of veterans’ medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.

“The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything,” Bilmes noted in an interview.

For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans’ brain injuries, a costly category.

The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don’t encompass many “hidden” items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost — on which CBO approximately agrees — and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.

Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.

Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.

When Stiglitz testified on Feb. 28 before the congressional Joint Economic Committee, the ranking Republican, New Jersey’s Rep. Jim Saxton, complained that such projections are too imprecise to help determine relative costs and benefits of the Iraq war.

Saxton said a rapid U.S. pullout could lead to full-scale civil war and Iranian domination of Iraq, “enormous costs” that he said should be weighed in any calculation.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

[i]Gee, I wonder why we’re in a recession… :rolleyes:

Well, the Surge (and out $12 billion a month) made Baghdad safe for Ahmadinejad to walk around while throngs of Shiite gov’t officials kiss his arse…


Is this your guy, America?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/02/iraq-ahmadineja.html[/i]

#143

[b]Scions of the Surge

Five years on, the war is transforming the American officer corps.[/b]
Babak Dehghanpisheh and Evan Thomas
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 1:00 PM ET Mar 15, 2008

A doctor’s son, Tim Wright was a Latin scholar with a 3.8 average in high school. Admitted to Princeton, he chose to go to West Point instead. “People looked at me like I had a third eye,” Wright says, but he was drawn to the discipline of the U.S. Military Academy. He became a squared-away soldier, demanding of his troops yet sleeping and eating with them, and sharing their privations and dangers. His gung-ho attitude earned him the nickname “Captain America” from some of his grunts, half in jest, half out of respect.

But Wright is not the warrior he expected to be or that he was first trained to be. When he became a young infantry officer out of West Point in 2000, he entered an Army whose mission was to win wars by overwhelming force. This was the Army that blasted its way into Baghdad in less than three weeks in the spring of 2003. It is also the Army whose guns-blazing tactics helped fuel an angry insurgency, and that quickly became bogged down—worn, bloodied and baffled—by IEDs and street fighting in Iraq.

Wright, 30, was a captain in Baghdad last spring when the situation seemed bleakest. Walking down a street in the tormented neighborhood of Bayaa, chatting with a private named Oscar Sauceda,

Wright watched as Sauceda was hit in the head by a sniper’s bullet. “He was dead before he hit the ground,” Wright says, choking up at the memory. The captain wondered if he had failed his soldier by not clearing a nearby building. “That’s the tough thing about this job,” says Wright, blinking back tears. “If you f––– up, sometimes people die.” Less than three weeks later, one of his company’s Humvees was hit by a roadside bomb. Wright’s staff sergeant, Matt Lammers, lost both legs and his left arm. Wright was crestfallen when he saw Lammers in the hospital. Baghdad seemed hopeless then. “It makes you think,” Wright says, recalling his feelings at the time. “Is this place too far gone?”

Many Americans were asking that question last spring and summer. While it’s too soon to say Iraq has turned the corner, the violence in Baghdad and most of the country has since declined precipitously. Much of the credit has gone to Gen. David Petraeus, the commander who has changed the way the U.S. Army fights. “You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency,” Petraeus told NEWSWEEK, in an interview in his Baghdad headquarters last month. He has moved soldiers out of their secure megabases and into small outposts deep inside once alien and hostile neighborhoods, and he has ordered his men out of their armored convoys. “Walk … Stop by, don’t drive by,” says Petraeus, reading from a “guidance” he is drafting for his soldiers. The objective, he repeats over and over, is no longer to take a hill or storm a citadel, but to win over the people.

But this new way of war needs a new kind of warrior, and it needs tens of thousands of them. Five years into the longest conflict the U.S. military has fought since Vietnam, young officers like Tim Wright have been blooded by multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’ve learned, often on their own, operating with unprecedented independence, the intricacies of Muslim cultures. Faced with ineffective central governments, they have acted as mayors, mediators, cops, civil engineers, usually in appalling surroundings. Most recently, and hardest of all, they’ve had to reach out and ally themselves with men who have tried and often succeeded in killing their own soldiers. Brought up in rigid, flag-waving warrior cultures that taught right from wrong, black from white, they’ve had to learn to operate amid moral ambiguity, to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of their enemies.

It is hard to overstate the achievement of this Petraeus Generation of officers, but their success is terribly fragile. Their newest allies—some of them former outlaws, insurgents, terrorists—may yet betray their trust. Living among them, walking the streets every day, is critical to maintaining their loyalty, yet with each passing month the pressure to draw down troops is likely to grow. And while the skills these American officers have gained are crucial in murky conflicts like Iraq, they are not universally valued or trusted within the Pentagon. Petraeus has fought many battles with his bosses—including CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon, who resigned last week—over getting the resources needed to make his counterinsurgency strategy work. As his heirs move up the ranks, they will face similar struggles over which wars America chooses to wage in the future—and the way the Army fights them.

Many have already had to do battle with superiors who have been slow learners, if not clueless. Wright, a tall, square-jawed athlete who looks a little like Jack Kerouac, is nothing if not a thoughtful warrior. He grew up in a nonmilitary family in Maine; his older brother now works for an NGO resettling African refugees, his sister for the NBA. At West Point, he majored in American history and focused part of his research on Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine senator who spoke out against McCarthyism. There at the Academy, as well as at the Infantry Officer Basic Course and the more advanced Ranger School, Wright was trained to pursue and defeat an enemy using technology and superior firepower. But he learned the limits of that training in Afghanistan in 2004.

For three months, Wright and his fellow soldiers fruitlessly searched an area the size of Vermont for Taliban insurgents. “Chasing guys through the mountains of Afghanistan at 10,000 feet didn’t [work]. The intel people always talk about ‘ratlines’,” Wright says, wriggling his fingers. “The ‘ratlines’ are bulls––t. Why would a guy hike over a snowy mountain with a bag of IEDs when they can drive it in a truck?” Wright realized that what he needed was an ally who could identify the jihadists who were right in front of him.

For weeks, Wright and his fellow soldiers had been hunting for a militant leader named Jan Baz. Finally Wright’s boss, Lt. Col. Walter Piatt, decided that if they couldn’t kill or capture the fugitive, they’d co-opt him. Piatt asked the local Afghan governor to set up a face-to-face meeting, where the American colonel offered Jan Baz the job of local police chief. The militant, eager to cement his authority in the area, accepted. “Was there some shadiness going on there?” Wright asks. “Yes. But it worked.” After Jan Baz was put on the American payroll, attacks dropped.

When Wright wrapped up his tour in 2005, he wrote an article in Infantry Magazine, an Army publication, criticizing the traditional “light infantry” tactics that had flopped in Afghanistan. He recommended more-flexible approaches, like mixing with the locals and (more implied than directly stated) buying off the enemy. When Petraeus drafted his counterinsurgency doctrine in 2006, he was able to draw on the experiences of resourceful frontline officers like Piatt and Wright. “All the stuff in the Petraeus manual, we had kind of figured it out there [in Afghanistan],” says Wright. “It was all the stuff we had seen work on the ground.”

American officers learned very similar lessons in battling the Viet Cong. But much of that knowledge was simply lost. “It’s said we fought that war nine times, a year at a time,” says Petraeus, noting that because they had been drafted rather than volunteered, many combat-hardened troops left the Army as soon as their yearlong tours in Vietnam were up. By contrast, with the Army stretched thin and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragging on, soldiers like Wright find themselves heading back into the fight for a second (or third or fourth) tour. “They have a level of experience that I don’t think our Army has had at that rank certainly since Vietnam, and maybe not even then,” says Petraeus.

Petraeus has institutionalized that knowledge. Herding a team of researchers at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, he was able to get his manual written and approved about three years after the invasion of Iraq, lightning speed in Pentagon time. But even Petraeus says that the much-lauded document can provide only principles to follow. The hard work is still being done in the streets of Baghdad. “What they’re dealing with is much more complex and much more nuanced than what we were trained to do when I was a captain,” he says. “You have to understand not just what we call the military terrain … the high ground and low ground. It’s about understanding the human terrain, really understanding it.”
…
The rest @ Newsweek

#144

A really really dark landscape for the U.S military there, hopefully the new administration will bring some solutions for the conflict.

#145

off course it is dark,… :cool:

tykty.jpg

#146

Notwithstanding the fact that Bush and his idiot clique, or more accurately claque, have caused the Iraq problem, why not hope that the Iraqis do something to bring solutions to their own problems, many of which are longstanding and were suppressed by Hussein and unleashed by Bush?

Expecting a new American administration to solve that problem by itself is in the same category as expecting it to solve the Israel problem.

#147

Well, they have a moral responsability, to bring a end ( a good end if possible) to the mess caused by an earlier administration, I believe is not the first time it happen.

#148

heard about grenada before?

#149

Yes we do…and ? what is the relationship with the todays facts in irak?

#150

it was a messy intervention by us also

#151

U.S. Soldiers Testify About War Crimes

Dozens of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans publicly testified about crimes they committed during the course of battle - many of which were prompted by the orders or policies laid down by superior officers.
+
Cpl. Jason Washburn told his commanders encouraged lawless behavior. “We were encouraged to bring ‘drop weapons’ or shovels, in case we accidentally shot a civilian, we could drop the weapon on the body and pretend they were an insurgent.”
+
Marine John Michael Turner tore off the medals he earned during two tours in Iraq and threw them on the ground. “Apr. 18, 2006 was the date of my first confirmed kill. He was innocent, I called him the fat man. He was walking back to his house and I killed him in front of his father and friend. My first shot made him scream and look into my eyes, so I looked at my friend and said, ‘Well, I can’t let that happen,’ and shot him again. After my first kill I was congratulated.”

source:
http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/158957/1/3319

_

#152

Agreed, but when did morality ever overwhelm national interest in decisions made by politicians?

Ordinary people can see the injustices in such things, but it’s the politicians who make the decisions.

Ordinary people don’t have close links with Halliburton and Big Oil. American politicians, notably the current administration, do.

In the case of my country, we couldn’t have cared less about Iraq from any national standpoint before we attacked it. It’s just a re-run of Vietnam and GW1, where our participation is about earning Brownie points with America in case we need its help again, which our governments never grasp will happen if it’s in America’s interests and won’t if it’s not, regardless of what American actions we might have supported in the past.

My country’s moral obligation to Iraq was not to get involved in attacking Iraq for our own interests unrelated to Iraq. Having ignored that moral obligation, we’re hardly likely to suddenly put Iraq’s interests ahead of our own, which are to support America like the sad little lap dog we usually are.

#153

Well, perhaps you are right and my toughs are simple wishful thinking, however I believe that still is possible to clear the mess .

How ?..I dont know.

#154

Nobody does.

The Coalition of Dills went in with great and very successful tactics for winning a war but no idea of what to do afterwards, let alone planning for how to deal with the jihadist focus they turned Iraq into, which they didn’t see coming.

#155

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

From the horror of 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq; the truth about WMD to the rise of an insurgency; the scandal of Abu Ghraib to the strategy of the surge – for seven years, FRONTLINE has revealed the defining stories of the war on terror in meticulous detail, and the political dramas that played out at the highest levels of power and influence.

Now, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the full saga unfolds in the two-part FRONTLINE special Bush’s War. Veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk draws on one of the richest archives in broadcast journalism – more than 40 FRONTLINE reports on Iraq and the war on terror. Combined with fresh reporting and new interviews, Bush’s War will be the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation’s history.

“Parts of this history have been told before,” Kirk says. “But no one has laid out the entire narrative to reveal in one epic story the scope and detail of how this war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government.”

In the fall of 2001, even as America was waging a war in Afghanistan, another hidden war was being waged inside the administration. Part 1 of Bush’s War tells the story of this behind-the-scenes battle over whether Iraq would be the next target in the war on terror.

On one side, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet squared off against Vice President Dick Cheney and his longtime ally, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The battles were over policy – whether to attack Iraq; the role of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi; how to treat detainees; whether to seek United Nations resolutions; and the value of intelligence suggesting a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks – but the conflict was deeply personal.

“Friendships were dashed,” Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage tells FRONTLINE. As the war within the administration heated up, Armitage and Powell concluded that they were being shut out of key decisions by Cheney and Rumsfeld. “The battle of ideas, you generally come up with the best solution. When somebody hijacks the system, then, just like a hijacked airplane, very often no good comes of it,” Armitage adds.

Others inside the administration believe they understand the motivation behind some of the vice president’s actions. “I think the vice president felt he kind of looked death in the eye on 9/11,” former White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke says. “Three thousand Americans died. The building that the vice president used to work in blew up, and people died there. This was a cold slap in the face. This is a different world you’re living in now. And the enemy’s still out there, and the enemy could come after you. That does cause you to think [about] things differently.”

More than anything else, the Iraq war will be the lasting legacy of the Bush presidency. Part 2 of Bush’s War examines that war – beginning with the quick American victory in Iraq, the early mistakes that were made, and then recounting the story of how chaos, looting and violence quickly engulfed the country.

As American forces realized they were unprepared for the looting that followed the invasion, plans for a swift withdrawal of troops were put on hold. With only a few weeks’ preparation, American administrator L. Paul Bremer was sent to find a political solution to a rapidly deteriorating situation. Bremer’s first moves were to disband the Iraqi military and remove members of Saddam Hussein’s party from the government. They were decisions that the original head of reconstruction, Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), begged Bremer to reconsider at the time. Now they are seen by others as one of the first in a series of missteps that would lead Iraq into a full-blown insurgency.

But Bremer has his defenders: “We believed, Bremer believed, and I think the leadership in Washington believed that it was very important to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that whatever else was going to happen, Saddam and his cronies were not coming back,” Walter Slocombe, the national security adviser to Bremer, tells FRONTLINE.

Garner was not the only one on the outside. As senior officials complained about inattention at the top, Gen. Tommy Franks and his deputy, Gen. Michael DeLong – the generals who had planned the war – found that decisions were being made without them as well.

“All the recommendations that we were making now in the Phase IV part weren’t being taken – weren’t being taken by Bremer or Rumsfeld,” DeLong tells FRONTLINE. “That’s when Franks said, ‘I’m done.’ They said, ‘Well, you’ll be chief of staff of the Army.’ He said, ‘No, I’m done.’”

What followed is well documented: insurgency, sectarian strife, prisoner abuse and growing casualties. But within the administration, a new battle over strategy was being fought – this one between a new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The clash between America’s top diplomat and its chief defense official would go on for more than two years and be settled only after the Republican loss in the 2006 congressional elections. It was then that the president forced Rumsfeld out, ended his strategy of slow withdrawal and ordered a surge of troops. FRONTLINE goes behind closed doors to tell the most recent chapter in this ongoing story, and asks what Bush will leave for a new U.S. president both in Iraq and in the larger war on terror.

#156

April 20, 2008
Message Machine
Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
By DAVID BARSTOW

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

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.

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. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

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.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

CONTINUED HERE!

#157

Ive had 3 grandsons fighting in Iraq, and 4 cousins, they say Yes we are succeeding.
One cousin has been there for three tours, a Police Sgt from Tallahassee, training police officers there. He just re-enlisted for an unlimited term, because he believes in what he is doing and they are succeeding.

I look at it from a couple of points of view;

  1. Suddam needed to be eliminated.
  2. Once this happened we should have left and allowed the people to decide their own future

If I were Iraqi i would have cheered the coalition for their help and politely told them to piss off and get out of my country.

If you listen to the Media, you get that opinion. But, I worked for two newspapers after the Korean War, and learned you can not believe more than 10-15% of what they say. Today, it is much worse, I believe even less.

Newspapers and TV are not in business to give you the truth.
They are in business to make a PROFIT, to sell advertising. They write or slant the news, in whatever way they believe their readers think or feel, and make more money that way. Anyone who believes more than the bare facts, is naive. Where something happened, the time it happened, the date it happened, who it happened to or who did it. You can not even believe what happened any longer of how it happened. They ALL slant the news to their advantage.

The TRUTH is, the majority of Iraqi & Muslims people want us to stay.
My grandsons say it is 7% or less of the Iraqi people cause the problems. Think about it, it the % was higher, a lot more men would be dying. In Korea, more were Killed in three months (over 1500 a month average) than the entire Iraqi War. Over SIX Million civilians died in 3 years.

I may be over simplifying the matter but I do understand why these people are fighting back. They see us as an occupying force not unlike the Germans in WWII.

“These people are not fighting back,” the majority fighting are terrorists or dissidents, who do not like the Govt, and want to control it themselves. Many are Saddam’s old henchmen, officers from his army, who want to take over. They want all the wealth they used to have, that they lost when Saddam was dethroned. They do not want a Democracy, but a Dictatorship.

If we removed ourselves and looked in on the situation from an outsiders prospective we would possible see these people as freedom fighter or a resistance movement.

The Iraqi people do not see them as “freedom fighters” they see them as enemies. One of my cousins who has a movie camera has sent dozens of movies to our family website, to show life in Iraq. He has driven around Baghdad for an hour many times, taping it all. No fighting, no fires, no explosions, people walking their dogs.l Children playing in the streets or on their way to schools in the morning, waving at the soldiers. Going to schools they love, that US Engineers have built, and GI’s have paid for their books, pencils, and other things kids have in school. The Iraqi, even those who lost homes and family from the war, do not want Saddam’s henchmen back. The Media never shows these things, they only show explosions or wreckage.

My Grandsons say much of what they see in the news is old news. That many stations run old pictures of their units taken even a year ago, and tell recent events as if the pictures are new. The media makes so much of it each time a US soldier is killed. My Grandson says, “More young people per 100,000 are killed in auto accidents in MA each day in the US, than in Iraq. It is safer for me in Iraq. Yet, you do not see in the media how many are killed each day in the US.”

People will believe the worst, if one person dies in Iraq, it is a tragedy.
But, it is also a tragedy for the families each time someone dies in the US.

Don’t let the Media do your thinking for you, think for yourself.

#158

“A gulag” does not feed prisoners better than in our own state prisons or give them better medical care than many Americans get, even when they pay for it. Such terms are used to get maximum attention, to get maximum viewers, to make the maximum money when selling advertising.

IF this were all true, then the slant of the entire Iraq war given by the media would be quite different. As I said before if you believe more than BARE FACTS from the media, you are naive. David Barstow, is one more reporter sensationalizing the news. They will say anything to get people to watch the news.

Back in the 40’s the media printed more of the truth. By the 50’s they had learned they can make more money selling advertising, by telling people what they want to hear than by the truth. It used to be papers only editorialized on the editorial page, now the entire paper or TV news is an editorial. It used to be TV news never made a profit, because it was boring only a small percentage tuned in. Today, News programs are some of the biggest profit makers, because they manipulate the news.

There may be some truth in the above, the bare facts. Like they took talking heads to see the prison, so they could counteract some of the stories the media was making up to sensationalize it.

One big example of what the media does, is stories you see or can witness in the US. Like an earthquake in LA. The damage as shown by the media looks ten times or more greater than the actual damage. They shoot pictures of one apartment house that collapses, from four or more angles, at many times during the day. Then, they talk about it showing the pictures in the background. People watching think they are seeing 8 or 10 different apartment houses. They do the same with bridges that collapsed, etc, and the public gets fooled.

You can’t believe more than 5-10% of what is in the media, and even less of what you read on the Internet. Some of these websites publishing what they call News, are making thousands of dollars per day. Some websites make as much as $30,000-60,000 month or more from advertising. Websites like CNN, make even more. They will do or say anything to keep getting the “hits” on the site, so they can make more per advertisement. :evil:

#159

This is a bit tangential, but it illustrates the way even the supposedly impartial legal process has been manipulated by the Adminstration and Pentagon in pursuit of the so-called war on terror, which is part of the overall White House spin doctor position that links the war in Iraq to that ‘war’.

That it was done to accommodate an Australian neo-con government obsession with getting the scalp of one of its own citizens for shabby political purposes doesn’t alter the fact that it was a gross executive interference in a legal process.

Prosecutor admits Hicks case political
John Wiseman | April 30, 2008

DAVID Hicks will not pursue action against the Australian or US governments despite startling admissions from the former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay that the military commission process that convicted him was politically influenced and that evidence was obtained through prisoner abuse.

Hicks’s lawyer David McLeod said last night that Hick’s instructions to him remained firm: he simply “wanted to get on with life”.

However, Mr McLeod added that if Hicks chose to challenge what had happened to him, there would be a number of paths he could pursue.

“If the wheels start to fall off the validity of the military commission wagon, those circumstances may permit Hicks to agitate the fairness and lawfulness and validity of what happened to him in Australia,” Mr McLeod said.

Appearing as a witness before the same tribunal in which he prosecuted Hicks, US Air Force Colonel Mo Davis said yesterday politicians had forced him to prosecute Hicks.

Colonel Davis, who quit as the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay late last year because of outside interference, said that, if it had been his choice, Hicks would not have been charged because the case against him was not serious enough.

Hicks pleaded guilty to a single minor charge of providing material support for terrorism as part of a plea bargain that saw him returned to Australia to serve seven months in an Adelaide jail after five years’ detention in Guantanamo Bay. He was released at the end of December.

Colonel Davis said he had “inherited” the Hicks prosecution, but he had wanted to focus on cases serious enough to carry 20-year jail terms and the case against the Australian did not meet that test.

Hicks’s father, Terry, said yesterday the testimony ended any doubt that his son was charged with war crimes for purely political reasons. “Mo Davis is re-iterating what we have been saying for quite a while,” Mr Hicks told The Australian. “It has all been rigged politically and now Mo Davis has come out and said it.”

A spokesman for Attorney-General Robert McClelland said Labor was not privy to communications between the Howard government and US authorities and questions on that should be put to the Coalition.

Former prime minister John Howard declined to comment on Colonel’s Davis testimony and former foreign minister Alexander Downer was unavailable.

Terry Hicks said his son was still undergoing psychological counselling and recovering from his imprisonment.

Colonel Davis made his remarks in a pre-trial hearing for Guantanamo detainee Salim Hamdan, who is accused of being the driver of Osama bin Laden.

As a witness, Colonel Davis said the military commissions, which exist outside the normal military justice system, had been corrupted by politics and inappropriate influence.

Hicks is the only Guantanamo Bay detainee to have been convicted and his is the only case to have a resolution before the commissions.
My bold http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23620579-5013404,00.html

#160

Out of about four veterans of the War, including a SFC that worked in special ops and had only recently returned and another a guy who had PTSD making him undeployable, I have yet to meet one vet that has much good to say about the war’s conduct or its stated objectives. Yet I keep running across posters on the Internet that know lots of military that think the War is “being won” even though the people I’ve spoken too seem to think that there is no real “victory” per say that whole thing is very muddled with thoughts of victory meaning we can “go home” or John McCain’s seeming desire to be able to continue the occupation for another “100 years.” They thought that it’s only a matter of time inevitably since the Iraqi gov’t ultimately is the one that must make the peace, they seemingly have little desire to do so, and the gov’t will inevitably be run by a Shiite militia which will tell us to leave…

Yes, I guess I am mildly biased towards the (center)left, but I have never met anyone that was very gung ho about fighting for the Iraq Shiite dominated gov’t, which draws much of its secret support from Iran…

Perhaps we have a different perspective, but most of the comments I’ve heard are something to the affect that “we drive around waiting to get bombed or ambushed,” or that the Iraqis in the army and police (save for the elite) are useless or are infiltrated by militias…