Norman Rockwell: No Leaking

In keeping with the Norman Rockwell theme we’ve seen over the past couple of days around the liberal blogsphere, initiated by Harry Taylor’s Freedom of Speech moment, Dood Abides, over at DailyKos.com, brings us “No Leaking”:

“No Leaking” is inspired by news that…

President Bush authorized White House official I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to disclose highly sensitive intelligence information to the news media in an attempt to discredit a CIA adviser whose views undermined the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, according to a federal prosecutor’s account of Libby’s testimony to a grand jury.

The court filing by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time places Bush and Vice President Cheney at the heart of what Libby testified was an exceptional and deliberate leak of material designed to buttress the administration’s claim that Iraq was trying to obtain nuclear weapons. The information was contained in the National Intelligence Estimate, one of the most closely held CIA analyses of whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war.

Washington Post | Friday, April 7, 2006

You can find more of Dood Abides’ inspired works here.

Iraq Invasion: A Construct of Delusion

I must accept that I will never know the full story of how it was that my country was mis-lead to war by the conservative Bush Administration. Perhaps my kids, or my kids’ kids will one day learn the truth, after historians have had the opportunity to make sense of the record. A record that, it is clear, is warped and intentionally distorted… a record that the Bush Administration and its supporters will do their darndest to keep secret and in the dark — but, eventually, even in the darkest corners, light seeps in, and one day an intrepid historian will uncover how many of my contemporaries allowed themselves to be hypnotized by the Administration’s drums of war.

Now, while the full record may not be uncovered any time soon, if ever, little by little light is seeping:

After the fall of Baghdad, three years ago, the United States military began a secret investigation of the decision-making within Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. The study, carried out by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, drew on captured documents and interviews with former Baath Party officials and Iraqi military officers, and when it was completed, last year, it was delivered to President Bush. The full work remains classified, but “Cobra II,” a recently published book about the early phases of the war, by the Times reporter Michael Gordon and Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, has disclosed parts of the study, and the Pentagon has released declassified sections, which Foreign Affairs has posted on its Web site. Reading them, it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.

[...]

The President and the members of his war cabinet now routinely wave at the horizon and speak about the long arc of history’s judgment—many years or decades must pass, they suggest, before the overthrow of Saddam and its impact on the Middle East can be properly evaluated. This is not only an evasion; it is bad historiography. Particularly in free societies, botched or unnecessary military invasions are almost always recognized as mistakes by the public and the professional military soon after they happen, and are rarely vindicated by time. This was true of the Boer War, Suez, and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and it will be true of Iraq. At best, when enough time has passed, and the human toll is not so palpable, we may come to think of the invasion, and its tragicomedy of missing weapons, as just another imperial folly, the way we now remember the Spanish-American War or the doomed British invasions of Afghanistan. But that will take a very long time, and it will never pass as vindication. — The New Yorker, Issue of 2006-04-03.

Now go and tell this to the 2,342 Americans that have died in this conservative president’s "construct of delusion;" and, then, turn around and tell the over 30,000 dead iraqis that they must wait decades to witness the fruits of their "liberation."

General Zinni: Rumsfeld Should Resign

I don’t know how to feel about this… on the one hand here’s a highly decorated, knowledgeable and respected Marine general telling us what many of us that opposed Bush’s war of choice against Iraq knew from the get go, essentially: the Bush Administration lied the country into a strategic blunder in the Persian Gulf. But that’s not what am ambivalent about; instead, what I don’t quite get is, why didn’t the good general come forward before the start of the war? Of course, while I don’t know the exact answer to that question, I can guess at the myriad of reasons as to why general Zinni did not speak out before the start of the war — the conservative noise machine that vilified Bush Administration critics and, too, the Bush Administration itself, which was not shy about going after its critics. Just look at exhibit A: army general Shinseki, whom had the temerity to suggest that a US invasion force would require hundreds of thousands more troops than what the Bush Administration was saying it would need to control post-invasion Iraq. After general Shinseki publicly stated that the invasion force would need to be much larger than what the Bush White House was telling the American people, Bush’s conservative henchmen went after the general:

Hardly any of this the reached public domain until last month when Gen Shinseki told a congressional committee that he thought an occupying force in the hundreds of thousands would be required to police postwar Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld publicly repudiated him, saying he was "far off the mark".

In semi-private, the Pentagon’s civilian leadership was far more scathing. A "senior administration official" told the Village Voice newspaper that Gen Shinseki’s remark was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars".

Then the general said it again. "It could be as high as several hundred thousand," he told another committee. "We all hope it is something less." Most of the media were too distracted by the build-up to war to notice. Serious analysts, however, were staggered by the insubordination.

This appears to have been round two of another, more immediately relevant, dispute about how many troops are needed to win this war. In this case, the military prevailed over the original civilian notion that fewer than 100,000 could do it. As even more soldiers rush to the Gulf to bring the number closer to 300,000, the original Rumsfeld plan looks in hindsight to be what the army said at the time: a recipe for possible catastrophe.

The full reality on the ground may not become known until Saddam Hussein has fallen, but no one can now seriously believe - as many top Pentagon civilians appear to have done a week ago - that the main problem for an occupying force will be what to do with all the floral gifts.

I’m sure that with the above as backdrop, general Zinni was reluctant to speak out against the march towards war; however, now we see that general Shinseki was prescient in his estimate and has not been fully vindicated; while the Bush White House and its supporters have been proven to be utter fools.

It’s no wonder how now general Zinni can demand Rumsfeld resignation without hesitation — I would go a step further, the entire Bush Administration should resign. Every. Single. Last. One. Of. The. Fools!

The Wounded of the Iraq War

The LA Times brings us a powerful story of US military personnel wounded in Iraq — where there have been an estimated 16,653 wounded and an estimated 2,327 KIA (Killed in Action).

As is typical in the military, the LA Time’s story captures some of the dark humor that service personnel oftentimes rely on as a coping mechanism for all the shit that they must endure:

Worrell glanced down and was surprised to see a Purple Heart resting between his legs. Somehow the medal made him think of his wife, Jayme.

"My wife’s going to be pissed," he told the doctor. "She specifically gave me instructions not to get perforated over here."

At that moment, Jayme Worrell was driving to the couple’s ranch-style home in Fayetteville, N.C. She did not yet know that Vinny, the gangly boy she had dated in high school, the restaurant cook who had joined the Army to give meaning to his life, was about to be cut open inside a tent in the Iraqi desert.

I look forward to the rest of this three part series from the LA Times — you can see some images and a preview of parts 2 and 3 here:

Come Again, What’s the Cause?

Those that have mapped the twisted and winding road that Bush & Co. set America on when their cabal set their sights on Iraq know that we’re a longs way off from the original course: finding and destroying Hussein’s WMDs.

However, it comes as no surprise to those of us that saw through Bush & Co.’s smoke screen, and recognized that, as the Downing Street Memo puts it, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [of invading Iraq].” However, while the original pretext for going to war against Iraq was obviously based on hype;during moments of self-doubt one could imagine that Bush & Co. truly did believe on the righteousness of their crusade to “change the climate of the region” by establishing a beachhead in Iraq for “Liberal Democracy” (i.e., Western styled rule of law). Of course, such a prospect was an overly optimistic long-shot at best, or just another smoke screen at worst.

Well, at last, we appear to have an answer and, once again it would seem, Bush & Co. have abandoned the road map they set for us, and are taking America (and Iraq) on a road to who knows where:

Iraq secularists denounce “Islamist” constitution

24 Aug 2005 13:50:28 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Andrew Hammond

BAGHDAD, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Secular Iraqis said on Wednesday a proposed new constitution left no room for doubt about the Islamist path the country was heading down two years after a U.S.-led invasion was supposed to produce greater freedoms.

The document presented to parliament on Monday is suffused with the language of political Islam in defining the state, and assigns a primary role to Islam as a source for legislation.

“The draft aborts the democratic process Iraqis hoped for and is a big victory for political Islam,” said writer Adel Abdel-Amir. “Islamic law, not the people, has become the source of authority.”

The draft says Islam is the official religion of the state and there can be no law that contradicts the “fixed principles of its rulings”. The preamble says the constitution responds to “the call of our religious and national leaders and the insistence of our great religious authorities”.

[...]

“Human rights should not be linked to Islamic Sharia law at all. It should be listed separately in the constitution,” said Safia Souhail, Iraq’s ambassador to Egypt.

[...]

“When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened — we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It’s a big disappointment.”

So, Mr. President, our public servant, how do you respond to Cindy Sheehan’s question?

I came [to Crawford] two and a half weeks ago for one reason, to try and see the president and get an answer to a very simple question: What is the noble cause that he says my son died for?