Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR): Bush's Iraq Policy ?'May Even Be Criminal'
Quote:GORDON: I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that any more. I believe we need to figure out not just how to leave Iraq but how to fight the War on Terror and to do it right.
I am wondering if the atmosphere might not be ripe for investigations and dare I even mention impeachment after all if this kind of talk keeps up from even republicans. Stranger things have happened.
Iran looks like the winner of the Iraq war
The Islamic Republic's clout in the region, confirmed by the Iraq Study Group, could cost the United States.
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
December 10, 2006
PARIS ?- The report issued last week by the blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group provides fresh proof of Iran's strengthened hand in the Middle East since the U.S.-led invasion: It mentions the Islamic Republic more than 50 times and makes clear that the U.S. will have to seek Iran's help for any resolution.
"The report told the Iranians, You are mighty now in the region and in Iraq. The Iranians feel now they are untouchable," said Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Gulf Research Center, an independent think tank in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
The Bush administration no longer has much leverage to stop Iran from pursuing uranium enrichment, diplomats and analysts said. And the price of cooperation, Alani said, will be very high.
"They are looking for a grand bargain that includes the nuclear issue, recognition of their influence and position in Iraq, and their position in the balance of power in the region," he said.
Far from spreading democracy through the region, the Iraq war has strengthened a theocracy in which unelected religious figures make many of the crucial decisions.
"So far, Iran won the Iraq war," said George Perkovich, the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They gained the most by far."
He said the U.S. hand was already weak on the nuclear issue because of Russia's reluctance to go along with sanctions against the Islamic Republic. But the report makes clear that Iran has substantial leverage in any negotiation, he said, because of Iran's importance in helping to quell the civil war in Iraq. "We have to deal with reality," Perkovich said.
Israel views the situation with alarm. "The idea was to make Iraq a partner in the moderate Arab camp. Instead, it has come under the influence of Iran, a state that calls for Israel's destruction," said Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defense minister.
Is this the reason we invaded Iraq; for Israel? (my comment)
Underpinning Iran's increased clout are the U.S. failures in Iraq ?- a state with a Shiite Muslim majority, among whom Iran has long exercised influence ?- and Tehran's deft diplomacy around the nuclear issue. In a region dominated by Sunni Muslim governments, Shiite-ruled Iran has set itself up as a leader in the confrontation between Islam and the West.
Western diplomats are reluctant to describe Iran as a victor but concede that for the moment, at least, it looks that way.
"Iran won the first round," said a senior Western diplomat in an Arab state. "But there is a long way to go, and if the U.S. leaves Iraq and other countries in the region come in ?- Saudi, Syria ?- Iran's position could weaken."
Since Iran was reported to the U.N. Security Council nearly a year ago for failure to comply with the United Nations' nuclear inspections, the Islamic Republic has undertaken a major lobbying campaign in the undeveloped world, which includes many Muslim countries, aimed at shoring up support for its nuclear program.
Iranian officials have framed the Security Council action as a scheme engineered by the West to stifle the progress of less developed countries, and they have encouraged countries to assert their nuclear rights. Signatories of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are guaranteed the right to pursue the nuclear fuel cycle for peaceful purposes such as generating electricity as long as they forswear nuclear weapons.
Iran says it seeks nuclear technology for civilian purposes such as electricity and medical treatment, but because it kept its program secret for 18 years and there are many questions about aspects of its atomic research, Western countries believe its goal is to gain the capability to make nuclear bombs.
Funny the UN nor the world communities have protested Israel's nuclear weapons. (my coment)
In what has been described as a battle between nuclear haves and have-nots, Iran has altered the debate terms to the point that a number of countries that hadn't previously expressed interested in nuclear technology are now considering it ?- among them Egypt, Algeria, Nigeria and Indonesia.
"We want to protect our right to civilian nuclear energy," said an African nation's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran has also tried to identify itself with the Muslim Middle East, rather than allowing the ethnic and religious differences between Iran and other Mideast countries to dominate the debate as they have in the past. In addition to being Shiite-ruled in a region dominated by Sunnis, Iran is Persian; nearly all other Mideast countries are Arab.
Analysts emphasized, far more than the report's authors did, that Iran's strengthened position means the nation is unlikely to see any reason to help the U.S. unless Washington meets Iran's demands.
And, they said, Iran will put such a high price on cooperation that it will be impossible for Washington to agree.
"Iran certainly would want recognition of their enrichment program, what they claim to be their rights to uranium enrichment . They would also want lifting of [existing] U.S. sanctions, particularly on investment in oil and gas," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.
The United States and Britain, along with France and Germany, have been the strongest proponents of requiring Iran to cease all nuclear-related activity before sitting down to negotiate.
"It's ironic that Bush, after having coined the 'axis of evil' phrase, now finds it very hard to address the Iran problem because of the failure of the Iraq policy," Fitzpatrick said. "So now they have to deal with the demons."
At the same time, the prospect that the U.S. might open negotiations with Iran strikes fear among states in the Arab world that traditionally have been U.S. allies: Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. It's a Catch-22 in which the U.S. loses if it fails to reach out to Iran but risks alienating friends if it does so.
"Any deal the U.S. makes with Iran will generate huge suspicion in the region: Saudi, Kuwait, the gulf," Alani said.
Carnegie's Perkovich echoed such comments. "The U.S. has no relationship with Iran; you have to fix that. On the other hand, the people with whom you have relationships, the moderate Arab regimes, say you're going to sell them out," he said.
"Now, how do you square that problem?"
Israel, a longtime ally of the United States, also is dismayed by the idea that Washington might make a deal with Iran.
"We're not in a position to give advice to the American administration, but we must express our deepest concerns," Sneh said. "We look to the United States, the lone superpower, to lead the struggle against terrorism and an international effort to thwart the Iranian nuclear project."
Although Iran is often coupled with Syria in the Iraq Study Group report ?- both countries come in for criticism for meddling in Iraqi affairs ?- diplomats and experts say the power and influence wielded by Tehran far outstrips that of Damascus.
"Of all the neighbors, Iran has the most leverage in Iraq," the report said.
"Syria is not going to march its army into western Iraq. The Iranians might well send troops into southern Iraq," a Western diplomat said.
In all likelihood, moderate Arab neighbors and Israel need not worry, because even the report's authors appear to think it unlikely that a deal could be struck ?- unless the U.S. were willing to guarantee it would not try to oust Iran's leaders.
For the moment, the chances of the U.S. agreeing to such a guarantee appear small indeed.
[email protected]
Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Iraq army weapons wind up on black market
By C.J. Chivers
The New York Times
SULAIMANIYA, Iraq ?- The Kurdish security contractor placed the black plastic box on the table. Inside was a new Glock 19, one of the 9 mm pistols that the United States issued by the tens of thousands to the Iraqi army and police.
This pistol was no longer in the custody of the Iraqi army or police. It had been stolen or sold, and it found its way to an open-air grocery stand that does a lively black-market business in police and infantry arms. The contractor bought it there.
He displayed other purchases, including a short-barreled Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock that makes it easy to conceal under a coat or fire from a car. "I bought this for $450 last year," he said of the rifle. "Now it costs $650. The prices keep going up."
Prices soaring
Weapon prices are soaring along with an expanding sectarian war, as more buyers push prices to levels several times higher than those that existed at the time of the American-led invasion nearly four years ago. Rising prices, in turn, have encouraged an insidious form of Iraqi corruption ?- the migration of army and police weapons from Iraqi state armories to black-market sales.
All manner of infantry arms, from rocket-propelled grenade launchers to weathered and dented Kalashnikovs, have circulated within Iraq for decades.
But three types of American-issued weapons are now readily visible in shops and bazaars here as well: Glock and Walther 9 mm pistols, and unused Kalashnikovs from post-Soviet Eastern European countries. These are three of the principal types of the 370,000 weapons purchased by the United States for Iraq's security forces, a program that was criticized by a special inspector-general this fall for, among other things, failing to properly account for the arms.
The weapons are easy to find, resting among others in the semihidden street markets here, where weapons are sold in tea houses, the back rooms of grocery kiosks, cosmetic stores and rug shops or from the trunks of cars.
"Every type of gun that the Americans give comes to the market," said Brig. Hassan Nouri, chief of the political investigations bureau for the Sulaimaniya district. "They go from the U.S. Army to the Iraqi army to the smugglers. I have captured many of these guns that the terrorists bought."
"Now the Sunni want the weapons because they fear the Shia, and the Shia want the weapons because they fear the Sunni," said Brig. Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, the chief of security in the Sulaimaniya district. "So prices go up."
Phillip Killicoat, a researcher who has been assembling data on Kalashnikov prices worldwide for the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based organization, put it another way: "When households start entering the market, that's a free-for-all," he said.
Arms dealers say that rising prices have led to more extensive pilfering from state armories, including the widespread theft of weapons the United States had issued to Iraq's police officers and soldiers.
"In the south, if the Americans give the Iraqis weapons, the next day you can buy them here," said one dealer, who sold groceries in the front of his kiosk and offered weapons in the back. "The Iraqi army, the Iraqi police ?- they all sell them right away."
No weapons were displayed when two visitors arrived. But when asked, the owner and a friend swiftly retrieved six pistols, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and three Kalashnikovs from a car and another room.
Rifles spotless
The rifles and the grenade launcher were wrapped in rice sacks. He slipped two of the rifles out of the cloth. They were spotless and unworn, inside and out, and appeared never to have been used.
The dealer said they had recently been taken from an Iraqi armory. "Almost all of the weapons come from the Iraqi police and army," he said. "They are our best suppliers."
Tracing U.S.-issued weapons back to Iraqi units that sell them is especially difficult because the United States did not register serial numbers for almost all of the 370,000 small arms purchased for Iraqi security forces, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
The weapons were paid for with $133 million from the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. Among them were at least 138,000 new Glock pistols and at least 165,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles that had not previously been used, according to the report.
Lt. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, agreed that weapons provided by the United States had slipped from custody.
"I certainly concede that there are weapons that have been lost, stolen and misappropriated," Dempsey said. He noted that the inspector-general had estimated that 4 percent, or about 14,000 weapons, were lost between arriving in Iraq and being transferred to Iraqi forces
Defections and resignations have also been common in Iraqi police and army units, they said, and often departing soldiers and officers leave with their weapons, which are worth more than several months of pay.
Aaron Karp, a small-arms researcher at Old Dominion University, said Iraq resembled African countries that had had extraordinary difficulties with the police selling off their guns. "The gun becomes the most valuable thing in the household," he said.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
America's `Iraq syndrome'
ANALYSIS | As it becomes increasingly clear that the war is lost, LBJ's Vietnam dilemma returns to haunt those who must decide what to do next.
Dec. 10, 2006. 01:00 AM
BILL SCHILLER
His voice is distinctive ?- plainspoken and folksy to a fault, with that unmistakable Texan drawl.
And he's worried ?- worried about the number of American dead, the number who will die in the coming weeks and months, but most of all he's worried about how much worse it will be, "if we pull out.
"I don't want to pull down the flag and come running home with my tail between my legs."
Later, he says, "I can't get out. I just can't be the architect of surrender."
The voice is that of Lyndon Baines Johnson; the time, the mid-1960s; the subject, how to get out of Vietnam.
A decade later, the Stars and Stripes was pulled down and American soldiers did come home, but in the intervening years 58,000 of them perished in the killing fields of Vietnam, as did an estimated 1 million civilian Vietnamese.
Earlier this year in a hallowed hall of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, Johnson's taped voice came sailing from loudspeakers across an audience of prominent Americans gathered to grapple with the lessons of Vietnam, beneath the swelling storm of the Iraq war.
Now, months later, their deliberations seem more prescient and relevant than ever as President George W. Bush struggles with a Johnsonian-like dilemma: how to extricate oneself from a mounting mess in which a majority of Americans no longer believe and at the same time salvage America's honour.
It is a dilemma ?- like that of Vietnam ?- for which there may be no solution.
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Last week, applying the kind of presidential hubris for which he is well known, Bush rebuffed a set of recommendations from a bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel that had convened to counsel a new approach.
The Iraq Study Group, led by Republican James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton, poured forth with a catalogue of recommendations. But the cumulative message was clear: this war is lost; America must re-learn the lesson that military might alone cannot assure safety; and other forms of statecraft must be applied.
It was a difficult message for an administration long criticized for having a toolbox full of hammers ?- and to which everything looks like a nail.
But some held out hope.
"This is a pivotal moment in the war," Harvard presidential scholar David Gergen told an interviewer last week. "Just think if we had had a report like this three or four years into the Vietnam War that forced everybody to take a second look, realize how difficult it was, that it was not winnable, that we really ought to move in with some sort of disengagement? We could have saved thousands and thousands of lives."
Gergen would know. He served in the White House of Gerald Ford on that fateful day in April 1975 when ?- after 495 sorties ?- Ford had to call a halt to the helicopters ferrying out loyal South Vietnamese from the roof of the U.S. embassy. It was a scene seared into the American psyche: the final few, desperate and begging, clinging to the struts of the last chopper as it lifted into the muggy air above Saigon, banked, then disappeared.
Those on the ground were left to their bloody fate.
As mechanized brigades of the North Vietnamese army advanced, the city collapsed into a cauldron of chaos. An estimated 10,000 were killed and more than 100,000 were placed in "re-education" programs.
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For many analysts, analogies with the Vietnam War are useful; for others, they are anathema.
Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow in defence policy at the Council on Foreign Relations concedes there are similarities. But he cautions against taking them too far. Vietnam was "a people's war," he notes, a class-based insurgency against a ruling regime. Iraq, by comparison, is a "communal civil war," a battle in which sectarian factions are fighting for survival.
And there will not be a repeat of the Fall of Saigon in Baghdad, he says. There are no mechanized divisions advancing on the city.
But there will be an "Iraq Syndrome," he stresses ?- just as there was a "Vietnam Syndrome" that followed the Vietnam War, a cooling period during which Americans will be loath to endorse the kind of "forceful foreign policy" that leads to expensive and bloody military adventures.
Prof. John Mueller of Ohio State University agrees. He says the syndrome will take hold "big time." In fact, it's already taking hold.
"The attitude to North Korea has mellowed, even when they exploded a weapon," he notes. "As for Iran, the idea of (America) doing anything militarily seems to be declining."
At the Boston conference this year, the similarities between the Iraq and Vietnam wars ?- and the lessons from the latter ?- were on everyone's mind.
Many of the key historical figures attended: Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Walter Cronkite, Kennedy confidante Ted Sorenson, LBJ's former aide Jack Valenti and the war's most famous reporter, David Halberstam.
Halberstam, whose pinpoint-accurate dispatches from the front as a 28-year-old reporter for The New York Times infuriated the Kennedy White House, vigorously warned of what he called, "The Lying Machine."
"Washington had created ?- and it is something that we have to deal with any time we talk about Vietnam ... a great lying machine.
"And what is a lying machine?" said Halberstam, tall and muscular at 72. "A lying machine exists on a major issue when an administration has a policy that does not, for historic reasons, work out, but where the administration believes it is important to continue it ?- for a variety of domestic political reasons ?- and to pretend that it works. So it forces its employees at the top to be disingenuous and punishes those government employees who dare to tell the truth ...."
Critics of the Iraq war have long claimed the Bush administration has been nothing if not disingenuous and that the war itself was launched on a lie: that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
And those who dared to tell the truth were indeed punished: former ambassador Joseph Wilson was smeared, his CIA agent-wife Valerie Plame was outed, National Security Council adviser Richard Clarke was discredited and four-star Gen. Eric Shinseki ?- who warned that a real army of "several hundred thousand" U.S. troops would be required to defeat and stabilize Iraq ?- was ridiculed.
Sometimes, the lying comes directly from on high. Vice-President Dick Cheney once famously assured the American public that the Iraqi insurgency was "in its last throes." Since then, more than 1,000 American soldiers have died.
Former LBJ special assistant Valenti also saw clear connections between the wars ?- ones that, on reflection, might even apply to Canada's involvement in Afghanistan.
The primary thing Valenti learned during Vietnam was as simple as it was crucial: "You cannot fight a war without public support.
"The second thing is, you cannot, no matter what mighty army you have, conquer a foreign land, you cannot win against an insurgency that springs from the population with their traditions and their religion and their culture. It has never been done in history, in Afghanistan, in Dien Bien Phu (France's defeat in Vietnam) or in the American colonies ?- you name it. There has never been an insurgency that didn't prevail against a mighty power.
"The third thing I learned was that if you're going to fight an enemy, you've got to know who they are. You've got to know their ancestral rhythms and their traditions, their mores, their customs."
The Bush administration no longer enjoys a majority of public support for the Iraq war; it has not ?- and likely will not ?- prevail against an ever-mounting insurgency; and it has demonstrated little respect, let alone knowledge of, Iraqi customs ?- especially when it comes to religion.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was Valenti's revelation that "60 to 70 per cent" of all Pentagon estimates and forecasts during the Vietnam War "turned out to be wrong."
Can America safely withdraw its 150,000 troops when the time comes? A resolute and unapologetic Henry Kissinger found his own task of removing 500,000 "a very complicated" affair.
"How do you extricate 500,000 troops technically ... surrounded by a million North Vietnamese and a million South Vietnamese who could turn on you if you suddenly pulled the plug?"
For modern-day American decision-makers pondering the coming logistical challenge, analyst David Rieff, writing in last week's The New Republic, paraphrased what is said to have been Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's candid advice to LBJ in 1968.
"It is time to put the f---ing troops on the f---ing planes. Now!"
guess I was letting my partisan side do the thinking. I keep thinking, "man, if they can impeach a guy for fibbing about an affair...But your right, it would probably do more harm than good. Investigations might also do as much harm though. I mean its all kind of after the fact now. Might be better to concentrate on new ways of dealing with what all the messes on our plates now.
New Yorker
Talk of the Town
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2006-12-18
Posted 2006-12-11
Moments after the report of the Iraq Study Group descended on George W. Bush like a safe from a penthouse, its ten members fanned out in bipartisan squads to assure the world that they weren't blaming anybody. "In our report we say we are not going to review the past, we're going to be looking at where we go from here in the future," Lawrence Eagleburger, who was Secretary of State under Father Bush, told CNN. "We wanted to take the situation as it exists today," Chuck Robb, the former Virginia governor and senator, explained over at MSNBC. "As Senator Robb explained, we made a decision early on not to look back but to look forward," Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court Justice, concurred. "We wanted to describe the situation as we found it."
Given the provenance, authorship, and purpose of "The Iraq Study Group Report," no one need be astonished that it eschews the language of overt culpability. But because it does indeed "take the situation as it exists," and because the present is simply the past's ever-moving outer edge, it cannot help looking back. The indictment is there to see, and it is devastating. The Report's introductory "Letter from the Co-Chairs"?-James A. Baker III, Republican, the former Secretary of State (under Bush I), and Lee H. Hamilton, Democrat, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee?-frames what follows with the bureaucratic equivalent of "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here":
No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence, or a slide toward chaos.
The "Executive Summary" opens with this statement: "The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." And the "Assessment" section?-forty pages of relentlessly declarative sentences?-confirms what many capable journalists have reported. It lists what it sees as some of the consequences of a continuation of current policy: greater chaos; greater suffering for the Iraqi people; a humanitarian catastrophe; escalated ethnic cleansing; a broader regional war; Sunni-Shia clashes across the Islamic world; a sharp increase in the price of oil; a still stronger base of operations for terrorists; a reduction in America's global influence; increased chances for failure in Afghanistan; greater polarization within the United States. It lists the "basic services" with which "the Iraqi government is not effectively providing its people," and they are basic indeed: "electricity, drinking water, sewage, health care, and education." And that's the good news, relatively speaking: "In Baghdad and other unstable areas, the situation is much worse."
The Study Group summarizes what it calls the "significant challenges" facing the Iraqi Army in a series of bullet points: "Units lack leadership." "Units lack equipment." "Units lack personnel." "Units lack logistics and support." All of which may be just as well, since there are "significant questions" about whether these units "will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda." Sound bad? Well, the dolorous accounting of the Army's condition is immediately followed by this:
The Iraqi Police
The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi Army.
Bada-boom. You can almost hear the rim shot. But there is nothing comic about the details: "Iraqi police cannot control crime, and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture, and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians." As for Iraq's Facilities Protection Services, which are charged with guarding government ministries, they are merely, in the words of a "senior U.S. official" quoted in the Report, "incompetent, dysfunctional, or subversive."
Further appalling nuggets lie buried in the recommendations section, which is titled, more hopefully than it reads, "The Way Forward?-A New Approach." We are told, for example, that "a continuing Iraqi commitment of American ground forces at present levels will leave no reserve"?-none?-"available to meet other contingencies," including urgently needed reinforcements in Afghanistan. We are told that, five years after the 9/11 attacks, our one-thousand-strong Embassy in Baghdad has just six fluent speakers of Arabic, plus twenty-seven who aren't fluent. (As the Report does not mention, fifty-five Arabic language specialists have been cashiered from the military for being gay.) And we are told that while eleven hundred attacks took place one day last July, the number officially reported was ninety-three, because "information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals."
The Report's narrative passages add up to a comprehensive condemnation not only of the conduct and consequences of the Iraq war but also of the Administration's over-all foreign policy, a condemnation all the more stunning coming from a panel led by Baker and including O'Connor, who, perhaps more than any other two people on earth, were responsible six years ago for promoting Bush from loser of the popular vote to President of the United States. But when the Study Group presents its actual recommendations?-seventy-nine of them, neatly numbered and italicized?-it loses its vigor and coherence. Some of its suggestions are sensible and to the point (use diplomacy, forswear permanent bases), others sensible but beside the point (be honest about budgeting, renew negotiations over the Israel-Palestine problem), and still others so bland as to be risible ("remain in close and frequent touch with the Iraqi leadership"). Yet if the Study Group's pitiless description of America's dilemma in Iraq is to be believed?-and it is?-then the hope of anything resembling a positive outcome is extremely slim. The Report promises no such outcome. It contends only that what it offers is less bad than the alternatives (though its case against one alternative?-what it calls, a little tendentiously, "precipitate" or "premature" withdrawal?-is more asserted than argued). That Bush's war in Iraq is an unmitigated catastrophe has been known for some time. What the Iraq Study Group has done is to make it official.
The day after the Report was issued, President Bush held a joint news conference with a visitor, Prime Minister Tony Blair. The President took the opportunity, as the Times put it, to "distance himself" from "the central recommendations" of the Study Group?-specifically, its calls for diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria and for pulling back American combat brigades. That was no great surprise. More alarmingly, Bush also distanced himself from the cold shower of reality the Study Group had aimed at him. "I think the analysis of the situation is not really in dispute," Blair said. But it was in dispute. "The thing I liked about the Baker-Hamilton approach is it discussed the way forward in Iraq," Bush said?-which was to say the thing he didn't like about it is it discussed what is actually happening in Iraq. When a correspondent suggested that he was "still in denial about how bad things are in Iraq," the President replied, "It's bad in Iraq. Does that help?" When another reporter noted that the Study Group wants leaders to be "candid and forthright with people," he tried. "We have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed," he said. "Progress is not as rapid as I had hoped," he said. His problem is success that is insufficiently fast, progress that is insufficiently rapid. Our problem is that he sees it that way.
December 11, 2006
Sunni and Shiite Insurgents Remain Mystery to U.S., Iraq Report Charges
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 ?- Nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States still does not understand the enemy that American troops are fighting, according to last week's report by the Iraq Study Group.
The commission's final report harshly criticized United States intelligence officials for failing to answer basic questions about the nature of the Sunni insurgency or the increasingly powerful Shiite militias, both of which pose grave threats to American forces.
The intelligence community has had some success hunting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the report found, but that terrorist organization is small and is not the main enemy confronting American troops. The far bigger Sunni insurgency and Shiite militias are still largely mysteries to American intelligence, according to the report.
"While the United States has been able to acquire good and sometimes superb tactical intelligence on Al Qaeda in Iraq, our government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias," the report said. It said that American intelligence agencies were "not doing enough to map the insurgency, dissect it, and understand it on a national and provincial level" and that intelligence analysts' "knowledge of the organization, leadership, financing, and operations of militias, as well as their relationship to government security forces, also falls far short of what policy makers need to know."
A spokesman for John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence and the Bush administration's top intelligence official, issued a written statement that said Mr. Negroponte planned to review the study group's findings. The statement did not seek to argue with the report's assertions. Carl Kropf, the spokesman, said the "Iraq Study Group offered some concise, but important, assessments of our intelligence analysis and collection activities on Iraq."
"We want to study those assessments and how they were reached carefully before offering any judgments about them," he added.
The study group's findings echo complaints quietly voiced in recent months by a number of current and former American officials, who have warned of the failure by American intelligence officers in Iraq to adequately penetrate the Sunni insurgency. These officials say the level of violence in Baghdad makes it extremely difficult for American intelligence officers to move around the country to gather information, and as a result they rely far too heavily on Iraqis who come to them in the Green Zone or to other major American bases, and on information from the intelligence service of the new Iraqi government.
That leaves the Central Intelligence Agency and American military intelligence vulnerable to manipulation by Iraqis who feed the Americans disinformation because they have an ax to grind or simply as a way to make money by selling information to the United States.
The report quoted an unidentified United States intelligence analyst who told the Iraq Study Group that "we rely too much on others to bring information to us" and "do not understand the context of what we are told."
Bureaucratic obstacles in the American government and a failure by the Bush administration to make the issue a top priority have left the United States with gaping holes in its understanding of the insurgency, the report found.
For example, the report found that the Defense Intelligence Agency rotates its analysts from one posting to another so frequently that few develop any real depth of understanding of the insurgency. "We were told that there are fewer than 10 analysts on the job at the Defense Intelligence Agency who have more than two years' experience in analyzing the insurgency," the report said. "Capable analysts are rotated to new assignments, and on-the-job training begins anew. Agencies must have a better personnel system to keep analytic expertise focused on the insurgency."
An agency spokesman disputed the numbers used by the report and said that the agency had "hundreds of analysts focused on the Iraq situation," adding that a "considerable number of experienced analysts are forward deployed and are directly working the counterterrorism-insurgency issues."
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has not sought to significantly improve on-the-ground intelligence about the enemy, the report said. "The Defense Department and the intelligence community have not invested sufficient people and resources to understand the political and military threat to American men and women in the armed forces," the report said. "Congress has appropriated almost $2 billion this year for countermeasures to protect our troops in Iraq against improvised explosive devices, but the administration has not put forward a request to invest comparable resources in trying to understand the people who fabricate, plant and explode those devices."
The study group recommended that the director of national intelligence and the defense secretary "devote significantly greater analytic resources to the task of understanding the threats and sources of violence in Iraq."
At the same time, the study group found that United States officials had underreported the level of violence in Iraq, providing misleading information to American leaders and the public about the scale of the problem facing American troops.
The study group determined that on one day in July, American officials in Iraq reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence, but the study group's review found that 1,100 violent acts actually occurred that day. "The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases," the report said.
For example, the report said that a killing of an Iraqi might not be counted by American officials as an attack, and that sectarian violence was not included in American databases if the source of the attack could not be determined. In addition, it said, "a roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn't hurt U.S. personnel doesn't count."
The group did not charge that the widespread underreporting of attacks was politically motivated. Still, it raised questions about whether the underreporting was intended to conform with Bush administration policies. "Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals," the report stated.
