Month: February 2005

Saturday, between 4 and 6PM ET, Scott Horton will be interviewing former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, and our commentators Ivan Eland and Gordon Prather.
Listen live on the Republic Broadcasting Network.

A group of five armed men shot the 12 soldiers in the head after stopping the vehicle carrying them on a road leading to Kirkuk.

Some interesting facts on the New Iraqi security forces:

• *Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told senators that Iraqi Army units had absentee rates of up to 40 percent partly because many new soldiers had failed to return to duty after going home on leave.
• **Lt Gen Petraeus declined to specify the desertion rate for the Iraqi security forces.
• *At the hearing of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, read an e-mail message from a Marine colonel who complained about corrupt Iraqi commanders in his area.

  They have been lying about their numbers in order to get more money,” she read from the message, which an aide said was sent this year. “They say they have 150 when there are only 100. The senior officers take a cut from the top. We’ve caught soldiers in houses stealing property, and the commander won’t react to it. They have no interest in learning the job, because right now the Marines are doing all of that.

• **”There clearly was a huge challenge, particularly in the Sunni areas and in the area of Nineveh province, to a couple of regular army battalions,” Lt Gen Petraeus said.

  “This is an area where the insurgents were actually cutting the heads off soldiers as they were trying to come back from leave and so forth. Major challenge, retention in those units,” he added, but said “we’ve turned the corner with that.”

These items struck me because after almost two full years in Iraq, we actually have generals calmly discussing the effect beheadings have on retention rates. You’d think this might be somewhat discouraging, but Petraeus says confidently that they’ve “turned the corner on that.” Maybe he feels retention might improve when the Iraqi recruits are shot instead of beheaded?

*New York Times, Many Iraqi Troops Not Fully Trained, U.S. Officials Say

**Reuters, Beheadings slow Iraqi security force build-up

How predictable is this?

Look, no purple!

“I stood aside for the elections and did not stand against them as I did not want to show disobedience toward the Marjaiyah (senior clerics).

“I did not join these elections so that I wouldn’t be one of the West’s pawns.

“The West is so proud that they have held the elections but I would ask: who is responsible for the blood that day?

“I call on all religious and political powers that pushed towards the elections and took part in them to issue an official statement calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces from Iraq.”

The firebrand cleric gave notice that he would no longer hold his tongue about political developments in Iraq after keeping quiet for months.

Oh my, no purple finger for Moqtada al-Sadr. I’m so shocked. I suppose next we will hear that the guerilla war is still raging on.

The warbloggers realize that their purple-finger romantic haze hasn’t quite obscured the truth of their Iraqi Fantasy Elections, so they roll lame-o joker Arthur “Good News!!” Chrenkoff out to refute the argument of those who refuse to buy the democratic bait and switch they tried to pull with their patronizing Iraqi Heroes Justify Everything We Ever Did election scenario.

The killer point that they’re trying to smother is that Bush and Cronies did everything they could possibly do to stymie elections in Iraq up until the point that elections got shoved down their throat by Ayatolla Ali al-Sistani, while the Shi`a held their noses and made them swallow. If you’re among the confused, swopa laid it all out here.

Chrenkoff tries to sell the line that the Bushies always wanted to install a democracy in Iraq, so how can you pin the Iranian Theocracy/Independent Kurdistan with a side of Sunni Guerilla War on them? Which might work on those who can remember less than two years of history ( a largeish group, to be sure) but for those who remember that this is not a new argument, that it was in fact in use over two years ago when those of us opposed to the invasion tried, after the moral and the legal arguments got trampled in the rush to war, to make the pragmatic point to the Flowers and Candy CakeWalkers of Democracy that they would end up in the loser position of ushering in the first Shi`a Arab government ever while the Kurds demanded autonomy and the Sunni Arabs turned to violent resistance in a desperate war against both factions. Here’s poor Arthur, Warblogger Sacrificial Goat:

…the US originally wanted to ensure that Iraq’s new constitution is drafted in a process that involves all the ethnic and religious groups, particularly the Arab Sunnis who would otherwise feel most left out (thus the Administration was prepared to live with overrepresentation of some groups, such as the Sunnis, and underrepresentation of others, like the Shia). In the end, the Americans have bowed down to Ayatollah Sistani’s demands of “one person one vote” election to choose the National Assembly which would in turn draft the constitution. This arrangement guaranteed that the Shia would win the majority and the Sunnis would largely boycott the poll.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what we said would happen if they occupied Iraq with their moronic “democracy” plan in the first place. Oh, but the answer to that argument was to screech WMD!! repeatedly. Now, we’ll just pretend that the WMD phase never happened and that the antiwar argument never got hooted down by the Mushroom Clouders and you’re just all doing your very, very best to assure those adorable, purple-fingered Iraqis the best possible Western Democratic life ever. Unfortunately, reality is difficult to hide in the long term, no matter how much lipstick you apply to your democracy pig. Even the most credulous Red-Stater will eventually notice that, hundreds of billions of tax dollars and thousands of dead Americans later, they still can’t book a fabulous vacation on the Tigris or tour the famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon without being shot as infidels by one faction or another.

A few members of the Antiwar.com staff attended the West 2005 Convention in San Diego, “the largest event on the West Coast for communications, electronics, intelligence, information systems, imaging, military weapon systems, aviation, shipbuilding, and more. ” Here’s a taste of what we found:

Stay tuned for more…government?

Now They’re After Putin (Part XII)

I was wondering how long it would take them to blame the death of Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania of Georgia — felled by an accidental gas leak — on the Russians. The answer — a matter of hours — is in today’s New York Times:

“The circumstances of his death nonetheless gave birth to rumors and conspiracy theories, despite the official version.

“A member of parliament, Alexander Shalamberidze, insinuated that his death was part of a plot orchestrated by “certain forces” in Russia that included the bombing of a police station in the city of Gori that killed 3 and wounded more than 20 earlier this week. His statement prompted a pointed protest from Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

“A backgammon board was lying open on a table near an Iranian-made gas heater. Portable gas or wood-burning heaters are common in Georgia, where central heating networks are scarce, even in the capital. The official Russian Information Agency reported that 45 Georgians had died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the last three years.

“Guram Donadze, a spokesman for the interior ministry, said the heater was installed two days ago and seemed to work properly. But it appeared that the room lacked proper ventilation. ‘There are many rumors, suspicions, various versions,’ he said in a telephone interview. ‘However, what actually happened was gas poisoning – nothing else.'”