Who Lost Iraq?

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.

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)

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)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?"

Iraq army weapons wind up on black market Prices soaringRifles 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

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.

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.