September in Civilization

Saudi Arabia agrees to host training of moderate Syrian rebels

Something about the idea of moderate Syrian rebels cries out for a Monte Pythoning, I suppose. A training room somewhere outside Riyadh run according to the tenets of moderate rebellion.

What civilization hath wrought, given six thousand years and home field advantage: the Saudi royals underwrite a proposed replacement for the current Syrian government composed of "moderate" rebels, while the utterly compromised Iraqi govenment lies in tatters, suffering reconstitution just the other day by the newly installed Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, whose administration currently faces the loss of considerable amounts of territory once presumed to be Iraq but held, forcibly for now, by an entity called ISIS as part of its newly proclaimed caliphate, which entity is now targeted for bombing by the USA. Politically the situation could not be more fluid, if by fluid the full flavor of catastrophe might be conveyed.

Ten Years After in Song and Story

A speech given in Washington D.C. by the President of the United States on March 17, 2003, text in full:

My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision.

For more than a decade, the United States and other nations have pursued patient and honorable efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime without war. That regime pledged to reveal and destroy all of its weapons of mass destruction as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Since then, the world has engaged in 12 years of diplomacy. We have passed more than a dozen resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. We have sent hundreds of weapons inspectors to oversee the disarmament of Iraq.

Our good faith has not been returned. The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament.

Over the years, U.N. weapons inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraq regime have failed again and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men.

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people.

The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends and it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al-Qaida.

The danger is clear: Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country or any other.

The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety.

Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed.

The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me as commander of chief by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep.

Recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly last year to support the use of force against Iraq.

America tried to work with the United Nations to address this threat because we wanted to resolve the issue peacefully. We believe in the mission of the United Nations.

One reason the U.N. was founded after the Second World War was to confront aggressive dictators actively and early, before they can attack the innocent and destroy the peace.

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council did act in the early 1990s. Under Resolutions 678 and 687, both still in effect, the United States and our allies are authorized to use force in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

This is not a question of authority, it is a question of will.

Last September, I went to the U.N. General Assembly and urged the nations of the world to unite and bring an end to this danger. On November 8th, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441, finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations and vowing serious consequences if Iraq did not fully and immediately disarm.

Today, no nation can possibly claim that Iraq has disarmed. And it will not disarm so long as Saddam Hussein holds power.

For the last four and a half months, the United States and our allies have worked within the Security Council to enforce that council's long-standing demands. Yet some permanent members of the Security Council have publicly announced that they will veto any resolution that compels the disarmament of Iraq. These governments share our assessment of the danger, but not our resolve to meet it.

Many nations, however, do have the resolve and fortitude to act against this threat to peace, and a broad coalition is now gathering to enforce the just demands of the world.

The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours.

In recent days, some governments in the Middle East have been doing their part. They have delivered public and private messages urging the dictator to leave Iraq so that disarmament can proceed peacefully.

He has thus far refused.

All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.

For their own safety, all foreign nationals, including journalists and inspectors, should leave Iraq immediately.

Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them: If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you.

As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need.

We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free.

In free Iraq there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms.

The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

It is too late for Saddam Hussein to remain in power. It is not too late for the Iraq military to act with honor and protect your country, by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Our forces will give Iraqi military units clear instructions on actions they can take to avoid being attacked and destroyed.

I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services: If war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.

And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning: In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war and every measure will be taken to win it.

Americans understand the costs of conflict because we have paid them in the past. War has no certainty except the certainty of sacrifice.

Yet the only way to reduce the harm and duration of war is to apply the full force and might of our military, and we are prepared to do so.

If Saddam Hussein attempts to cling to power, he will remain a deadly foe until the end.

In desperation, he and terrorist groups might try to conduct terrorist operations against the American people and our friends. These attacks are not inevitable. They are, however, possible.

And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail. The terrorist threat to America and the world will be diminished the moment that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.

Our government is on heightened watch against these dangers. Just as we are preparing to ensure victory in Iraq, we are taking further actions to protect our homeland. In recent days, American authorities have expelled from the country certain individuals with ties to Iraqi intelligence services.

Among other measures, I have directed additional security at our airports and increased Coast Guard patrols of major seaports. The Department of Homeland Security is working closely with the nation's governors to increase armed security at critical facilities across America.

Should enemies strike our country, they would be attempting to shift our attention with panic and weaken our morale with fear. In this, they would fail.

No act of theirs can alter the course or shake the resolve of this country. We are a peaceful people, yet we are not a fragile people. And we will not be intimidated by thugs and killers.

If our enemies dare to strike us, they and all who have aided them will face fearful consequences.

We are now acting because the risks of inaction would be far greater. In one year, or five years, the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over. With these capabilities, Saddam Hussein and his terrorist allies could choose the moment of deadly conflict when they are strongest. We choose to meet that threat now where it arises, before it can appear suddenly in our skies and cities.

The cause of peace requires all free nations to recognize new and undeniable realities. In the 20th century, some chose to appease murderous dictators whose threats were allowed to grow into genocide and global war.

In this century, when evil men plot chemical, biological and nuclear terror, a policy of appeasement could bring destruction of a kind never before seen on this earth. Terrorists and terrorist states do not reveal these threats with fair notice in formal declarations.

And responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense. It is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now.

As we enforce the just demands of the world, we will also honor the deepest commitments of our country.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, we believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty, and when the dictator has departed, they can set an example to all the Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.

The United States with other countries will work to advance liberty and peace in that region. Our goal will not be achieved overnight, but it can come over time. The power and appeal of human liberty is felt in every life and every land, and the greatest power of freedom is to overcome hatred and violence, and turn the creative gifts of men and women to the pursuits of peace. That is the future we choose.

Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent, and tonight, as we have done before, America and our allies accept that responsibility.

Good night, and may God continue to bless America…

Argument: On History On

James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer:

That Old Refrain

Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!

Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.

Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.

For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.

The Futures Market for Violence in Afghanistan Holds Firm

Recently, for some reason I had cause to remark that some of the best political writing of the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Somehow, almost overnight, noticing Rolling Stone's political writing is the new black.

General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.

On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.

And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.

This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.

So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.

The Truth Untold vs. the Told Untruth

"I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf war and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew," he said.

"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."

— John Major, former British Prime Minister, quoted in the Guardian, Jan 2, 2010

Mr. Major suggests that you wouldn't have found all the facts from what he was willing to let on in public at the time of the first gulf war. Being politic, he reserved some facts from what he was saying. Mr. Blair, contrarily, publicly suggested what couldn't be found in the facts at all.

Mr. Major suggests that he had a lot of verified information, not all of which he divulged in public, when he spoke as Prime Minister during the Gulf War. This is a testable proposition. A skim through the archives would quickly establish how much of the information claimed as verified by Mr. Major was actually verifiable in the event, and alternately, how much of it remains on inspection unverifiable or provably false.

Inevitably some portion of what Mr. Major knew at the time was the product of the sort of fundamentally weightless chatter forever emerging from Britain's military and diplomatic bureaucracy by institutional imperative, the sort of constantly offered muttering of what's politic to report that bubbles up to any PM's ear in confluence with any utterly certain facts on offer.


He, Major, doled out a subset of this avowedly true information ("I said less than I knew") when it came time to remark on the subject of the Gulf War, and assumed that Tony Blair, when speaking during the runup to the later invasion of Iraq, was operating under the same constraint, saying less than he knew to be true, but conforming his remarks to some urevealed verifiable something or other, not publicly contradicting that withheld yet verifiable something, or affirming some something that could not be found anywhere at all among the said and unsaid facts of the matter.

Mr. Blair's public statements surfed along on a forceful wave of potentially false but for the moment unprovably false rhetoric, stealing along on the imaginary axis bound by the magnitude of the existential threat posed to, e.g., oh, let's say Cyprus, by an arsenal of inexistent, potent chemical and biological and intercontinental weapons of destruction said to belong to evil Sadaam Hussein by Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair willingly suggested many many things during the runup to the invasion of Iraq based on facts not in evidence, which, had they been true facts, rather than false suppositions, might have been used plausibly enough to justify the increasing militancy of his rhetoric, but which, being only potentially verifiably true or false as he spoke of them (and in the event proven thoroughly false), did nothing to advance the argument that it was ever truly a good idea to invade Iraq, however much his words advanced the actual invasion itself, which of course was the admitted reason for his rhetoric in the first place.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Major's statements, however circumspect at the time, were all in for the Gulf War. Functionally, they served precisely the same end as Mr. Blair's; each committed Britain to enlist in a major Middle Eastern military action being shopped by the US, delivering Britain's congenitally far-flung military into action when time came to war in the gulf or invade Iraq with that same famous verve, professionalism and alacrity recognized as hallmarks of British military adventurism down the ages.

The Back of Me Brogans to Yeh

Bush declares that he's not insulted by Shoe Guy's action, but I don't think he's the decider in this. People will make up their own mind about how insulting Shoe Guy managed to be. For my money he crossed the border into perfect effrontery with the first shoe, and the emphatic second one sealed the deal.

Insult? A+

Oliver Stone's Head A-Splode!!

Four well-placed and separate sources told ABCNEWS that initial tests detected bentonite, though the White House initially said the chemical was not found.

The first battery of tests, conducted at Ft. Detrick, Md., and elsewhere, discovered the anthrax spores were treated with the substance, which keeps the tiny particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together making it more likely that they could be inhaled.

The inhaled form on anthrax is far more deadly than the skin form.

As far as is known, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons, but officials caution that the presence of the chemical alone does not constitute firm evidence of Iraqi involvement.
[…]
The official said the Ft. Detrick findings represented an "opinionated analysis," that three other labs are conducting tests, and that one of those labs had contradicted the bentonite finding. But, the official added, "tests continue."

—ABC News, October 29, 2001.

Intriguingly, the Headline for the above story on the ABC News website reads, "Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi," with the sub-head, "Tests find laced anthrax, Atta met Iraqi."

Everyone now knows the ballocks in the repeated claim that Atta met Iraqi. There's no further room for argument on that. Atta did not meet Iraqi, though it was convenient to say so for many highly placed [cough Vice President] administration officials talking on and off the record in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Even when confronted with contradictory evidence, the Vice President repeated the claim publicly again and again.

Privately he and his minions provided unsourced comments linking Atta with the anthrax based on the suspect report from Fort Detrick claiming to have found a uniquely Iraqi chemical signature on the anthrax used in those shocking terrorist mailings that began one week after 9/11.

The meeting, along with Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons, have led some to question whether Atta and Hussein were not somehow behind the anthrax attacks in the United States.

Yep. A suggested connection sourced to "some" between "the meeting" [no qualifier there, no "purported," no "hypothetical," no "unsubstantiated" -p.r.] in Prague connecting Al Qaeda with Iraq, and the anthrax attacks as a second wave of terror from the same source. The same "some" who peddled the Atta met Iraqi balderdash were promoting the "opinionated analysis" from Ft. Detrick with all the CSI-like sciencey stuff in it to show that Iraqis had to have made the anthrax. That too was false, though equally convenient.

Fort Detrick is the home of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Bruce E. Ivins worked, Bruce E. Ivins who couldn't account for his lab being contaminated with anthrax numerous times over a five month period beginning in late 2001 and ending in April 2002, but also where the FBI sent one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes to be investigated. Was it Ivins whose analysis of this envelope so clearly and conveniently for the Vice President's purposes pointed to the Iraqis? Yes. Yes, it was his work.

Bruce E. Ivins is said to have committed suicide Tuesday, ingesting a whole bunch of Tylenol with codeine just as Federal authorities got around to informing him that they were finally ready to press charges against him after all these years.

Signs Of Progress In The Iraq War

I hear John Conyers asked an assembled crowd today in Philadelphia whether any of them would object to impeaching the president. No one objected. Then he asked whether anyone would object to impeaching Cheney. Again, no one objected. I don't know the full context of Conyers' remarks, but the timing indicates it is related to Bush's admission.

—Booman, via Atrios.

The Big Story Is That Things Have Gotten Better

Updated at 8:15 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2008

Fighting in Sadr City has subsided dramatically, but violence still took the lives of 68 Iraqis across Iraq. Almost half of them were found in a mass grave. […]

A mass grave containing 33 bodies was found in Mahmudiyah. The bodies were found together in a house and appear to have been dead for over a year.[…]

In Baghdad, a U.S. airstrike left five dead and four injured in Sadr City in one attack; two boys were among the dead. Another person was killed and four more were wounded in a second bombing. At least two other people were wounded during these or other air strikes. U.S. forces killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday. No casualties were reported after an IED blasted a U.S. patrol. Also, the Iraqi army blockade of Sadr City will end on Saturday.

In other incidents taking place in the capital, one person was killed and four were wounded during a bombing in a central neighborhood. A roadside bomb near al-Shabb Stadium wounded six people. Two police officers were injured during a bombing near Sheik Abdulqadir al-Gailani Shrine. Three people were wounded when shells blasted their home in Bayaa. Also, two dumped bodies were found.

Antiwar.com tallies the dead in Iraq daily so you don't have to. U.S. forces, it says, killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday, many of them by aerial bombardment. Even all these years after the first Gulf War, the U.S. is firing on Baghdad from the air, and hitting the predictable child or two.

Apparently the dead found in a mass grave in Mahmudiyah have been added to today's 35 freshly killed from all over Iraq to arrive at the figure of 68 dead for Thursday, although it's reported that the bodies of the 33 were in a house in Mahmudiyah for over a year, not alive all that time, but until today not notably dead. Perhaps this is just a preliminary assignment, until the proper date of death can be unearthed by whoever might be spared to find it.

The sound of the opening of the odd mass grave on a day much like any other desperate day in Iraq (just scroll down through antiwar.com's meticulous daily coverage of the carnage for proof enough) is that disquieting noise in the background you may hear behind the dulcet tones of John Burns and Dexter Filkins recorded last night on the Charlie Rose Show, by way of DavidKurtz at Talking Points Memo.

Democracy has been getting knocks the past few years for being associated, notionally at least, with the bad crowd of other excuses given by the U.S. for invading Iraq: introducing democracy there was one of the bullet points of the war's champions before the invasion and it still gets predictable mention in all the justifying talk about Iraq to this day. In this sort of talk democracy itself has withered over the years to mean just the vessel for carrying global capitalism from place to place in a profitable and orderly way; implictly the war's champions believe democracy could be born in Iraq in shock and awe, democracy on their terms, born out of the public rape of an invasion, as handily as any other way. Foolish thought, that, as it turns out, betting on the rosy outcome of a rape.

With all my caveats aout the stuff, I like the raw unfiltered democracy better than I like the current brand, the one that the comic opera Coalition Provisional Authority tried to bring along to Baghdad, whose lads and lasses sat around in the Green Zone for endless days devising a stock market for Iraq because, well, that's what modern democracies have, right?

There are places with no hint of that sort of democracy, like Somalia, which is unhinged from the regular machineries of global capitalism in it own distinctive way, as are North Korea and Southern Italy and a host of other regions around the world where the regularities of global capitalism break down in the anomlies of overrirding local conditions: pirates, answering to no authority but their own (as is their ancient custom), hijacked a huge French cruise ship in the eastern Indian Ocean and brought it into port in Somalia today. The sort of democracy that serves global capitalism is historically opposed to piracy on the grounds of both profitability and order, doesn't countenance the stuff in the least and never has, but there's not a whole lot of recourse for the complainant here; those pirates got away to Somalia.

Five years on

How the war came to be, and how it went on and on.

Via Frontline, "Bush's War" at pbs.org.

Photo Op

By Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, via The New Yorker.

Surging Continues Apace On the Eve of Super Tuesday

A few weeks ago the United States military dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives on the Arab Jabour region south of Baghdad: 100,000 pounds. 50 tons.

Tom Englehardt outlines the other terrorism in Iraq at TomDispatch.

Maybe then, it's time for Seymour Hersh to take another look. Or for the online world to take up the subject. Maybe, sooner or later, American mainstream journalists in Iraq (and editors back in the U.S.) will actually look up, notice those contrails in the skies, register those "precision" bombs and missiles landing, and consider whether it really is a ho-hum, no-news period when the U.S. Air Force looses 100,000 pounds of explosives on a farming district on the edge of Baghdad. Maybe artists will once again begin pouring their outrage over the very nature of air war into works of art, at least one of which will become iconic, and travel the world reminding us just what, almost five years later, the "liberation" of Iraq has really meant for Iraqis.

Don't hold your breath, Mr. Englehardt. Artists are exhausting themselves in other pursuits, and journalists and bloggers have a presidential horse race to follow.