Antiwar.com Blog

If you’d like to know more about warbloggers, Salam, Zeyad, etc., from today’s column, I recommend these two pieces, one from shortly after the Lileks debacle and another from two weeks ago. I was going to include both in the essay, but I’m trying to be conscientious about over-linking–some people have made their annoyance known.

Spanish Troops Withdrawing Now

Jose Bono, speaking after the new government’s first cabinet meeting, said that the process had already started.

He said that a plan was in operation and would “conclude swiftly”.

Another account:

Bono revealed after the new Socialist government’s first cabinet meeting that the pullout operation was under way.

“We already have an operative plan,” Bono said, adding that the troops would return “as soon as possible and with maximum security. The process has started and will conclude swiftly.”

Today is the 11th anniversary of our government’s brutal gassing and incineration of “its own people” at Waco, TX, for the crime of exercising their Constitutional rights. With that in mind, Vice President Cheney’s address to the National Rifle Association on Saturday is worth noting.

I watched the speech on C-Span, mainly to gauge the crowd’s reaction. The Bush administration, after all, has done all the things NRA folks hissed at the Clintons for, but on a much larger scale: erosion of civil liberties through the PATRIOT Act, support for the extension of the “assault weapons” ban, not to mention the world’s largest and bloodiest act of coercive disarmament since the days of Stalin and Hitler. So what were the attendees chanting? “Four more years! Four more years!”

I have no illusions about the NRA, having quit the group long ago. Contrary to liberal myth, the NRA is at best a Jello bulwark against gun control. They eventually cave to every new gun law and plead for tougher enforcement of every old one. They give money to candidates (usually incumbents, especially Republicans) for no reason other than to bolster their “success” rate. They have even bullied the most ardently pro-gun member of the U.S. Congress for sticking to Constitutional principles.

But as I listened to the raucous cheering for Cheney–curiously, he spent about two minutes talking about guns, an hour saluting state aggression– it became clear that, far from being even a tiny impediment to statism, the NRA is an accomplice in it. Those of you who support the NRA financially should be aware of what you’re buying. You could join the far better Gun Owners of America and send the $15 bucks you save on membership fees to us. Just a thought.

AFP Reports:

Ramadi – Insurgents’ assaults on supply convoys west of Baghdad landed a blow to United States marines’ stomachs on Monday as their bases in al-Anbar province began rationing food amid fears their stocks could run low.

Since Sunday, all 1st Marine Division camps have rationed food, said spokesperson 1st Lieutenant Eric Knapp.

Some bases are down to one hot meal a day while others are still serving two, Knapp said.
[…]
“We don’t want to run out so we’re conserving because chow is not more important than someone’s life,” said Staff Sergeant Denise Ruiz, the dining hall manager at the main base in Ramadi, home to about 1 200 marines.

“It’s not that there is a shortage. We just want to make sure our contractors get here safely.”

The military’s catering is contracted out to the American firm Kellogg, Brown and Root.

Ruiz said they had not received a food delivery in at least a week, but a shipment was expected very soon.

This account from an Army lawyer blogging from Tikrit also addresses the problem of convoys being sabotaged:

Life here is falling into a relatively predictable pattern for most of us here on the staff – wake up, work, eat, sleep…repeat. Like I’ve said before the quality of life here is actually pretty good. Far, far better than what soldiers faced 14 years ago during Desert Storm. But the recent “problems” we’ve been having over here have had some interesting side effects. Many of the civilian truck drivers who are working in this area have refused to drive on our convoys and that has slowed down delivery of everything from mail to food (I’m going to stock up on my favorite MREs for when they close the mess hall). I’ve heard that something close to 200 KBR drivers have quit and the Turkish drivers aren’t going past Mosul. So much for Rumsfeld’s notion that we can “outsource” all the non-essential jobs in the army to contractors. Unlike a soldier, you can’t force a civilian trucker to drive if they don’t want to.

Sewell Chan in the Washington Post:

The deaths occurred the same day the military abruptly closed sections of major highways to all traffic except military and contractor vehicles, severely slowing the movement of people and goods to and from the Iraqi capital.

U.S. military commanders said the shutdown applied to 180 miles of roads leading into the capital from the north, south and west. Persistent attacks on convoys have lead to shortages of food and other essential supplies on American military installations and inside the headquarters of the U.S.-led occupation authority.

Army engineers erected prefabricated modular steel bridges to temporarily replace spans south and west of Baghdad that were damaged in an apparently coordinated series of roadside bombings that began two weeks ago.

Military logisticians have tried to adapt to the hazardous conditions by using alternate and less-direct routes off major highways and by prioritizing the delivery of supplies according to the urgency with which units need them, a military official, Army Maj. Richard W. Spiegel, said yesterday.

“In certain cases, the recent increase in attacks may have changed the way we do business, but it has not affected the way we supply or support the troops,” said Spiegel, a spokesman for the 13th Corps Support Command, which manages logistics for the joint military command in Iraq. “Water, food, ammunition, fuel, spare parts and other critical supplies are still getting where they need to be when they need to be there.”

Of particular concern is a major expressway, called Main Supply Route Tampa by U.S. commanders, that carries the bulk of military traffic in Iraq. The expressway runs east from the Jordanian and Syrian borders toward Baghdad, before veering southeast toward Basra and the Kuwaiti border.

Ambushes and bombings along the highways amount to “a concerted effort on the part of the enemy to try to interfere with our lines of communication, our main supply routes,” and the effects could ripple through the Iraqi economy, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, warned Friday.

The owner of a trucking company in Baghdad, who gave his name only as Abu Abdullah because several of his drivers have received death threats for working with Americans, said his employees have begun to refuse work connected to the occupation.

For much of the past year, Abu Abdullah said, his company has transported concrete barriers, food and electrical supplies for Kellogg Brown & Root, the firm that has the major contract for transporting food and supplies for the U.S. military in Iraq. The trucking company often would take materials from the Balad air base, about 45 miles northwest of Baghdad, to smaller bases.

“Whatever we take, it’s dangerous now,” Abu Abdullah said. “The mujahadeen stop you on the road. They ask you: Who are taking these things for? They want to see the papers. If you lie and you don’t have the right papers, they will burn you with the trailer.”

He added that Kellogg Brown & Root, a unit of Halliburton Co., has begun offering trucking companies 1 million dinars — about $700 — for an overnight truck trip in some cases, a large sum in a country where $200 is considered a decent monthly salary. “The drivers still refuse,” Abu Abdullah said, even when the firm has offered armed escorts.

Kellogg Brown & Root suspended convoy trips after insurgents ambushed an Army fuel-truck convoy April 9, killing one soldier and an Iraqi driver. The company recently resumed the convoys, a Halliburton spokeswoman said.

The US is obviously trying to put a good face on their logistical problems, but they are quite severe.

As Steve Gilliard put so well on his blog yesterday:

Logistics is the way armies operate. Forget the tactics, if you can’t eat and change uniforms, you can’t fight effectively. If the guerillas have blocked the main supply lines from Kuwait, they have achieved a victory which is 200 times more important than their stand in Fallujah.

The generals behind the guerrillas have figured out that we can’t do two things: fight the guerillas on their turf and feed ourselves. We’re going to have to choose. Which is why going after Sadr was so incredibly bone stupid. Alienating the Shia means every mile of our supply lines could face attack.

Once again, CENTCOM says stupid things, while the facts say something else. The NVA never cut the supply lines to MACV. The insurgents are threatening to starve Baghdad or at least make food resupplies difficult. That’s a massive deal, it’s probably the most important development of the war to date

The US is issuing this face-saving statement:

The US-led coalition in Iraq has announced measures to end the military stand-off in the battle-scarred city of Falluja, west of Baghdad.

These include shortening the curfew and allowing unfettered humanitarian access to the people of Falluja.

Then they say they want the fighters in Fallujah to turn in their weapons. I’m sure they’ll get massive compliance on that one.

From the forthcoming issue of National Review:

Since the conclusion of the war, the Bush administration has shown a dismaying capacity to believe its own public relations. The post-war looting was explained away as the natural and understandable exuberance of a newly-liberated people. (Now some Coalition officials suggest that a crackdown would have sped the reconstruction.) Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld denied the obvious reality of a guerrilla resistance and compared it to urban street crime in the United States. Every piece of good news has been hailed as turning the corner, even as the insurgency has remained stubbornly strong. …

Even if the administration had avoided these mistakes and made all moves correctly, it is still possible Iraq would be very messy. But this concession points to an intellectual mistake made prior to the occupation: an underestimation in general of the difficulty of implanting democracy in alien soil, and an overestimation in particular of the sophistication of what is fundamentally still a tribal society and one devastated by decades of tyranny. This was largely, if not entirely, a Wilsonian mistake. The Wilsonian tendency has grown stronger in conservative foreign-policy thought in recent years, with both benefits (idealism should occupy an important place in American foreign policy, and almost always has) and drawbacks (as we have seen in Iraq, the world isn’t as malleable as some Wilsonians would have it).

Read every mind-boggling word of it. It would be hilarious if not for all the blood and viscera on these guys’ hands.

(Link courtesy of Marcus Epstein.)