THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

First Benchmark Missed?

Here's a story that has gotten almost no attention whatsoever: The Iraqi government appears to have failed to achieve the very first concrete benchmark that White House officials announced as part of the new combined US-Iraqi security push in Baghdad.

At a White House briefing on January 10 by two anonymous senior administration officials, one made this startlingly verifiable promise to a press corps highly skeptical of the administration's amorphous benchmarks for Iraq:

"SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, here's -- but you're going to have to -- you're going to have some opportunities to judge very quickly. The Iraqis are going to have three brigades within Baghdad within a little more than a month. They have committed to trying to get one brigade in, I think, by the first of February, and two more by the 15th. . . .

"So people are going to be able to see pretty quickly that the Iraqis are or are not stepping up. And that provides the ability to judge."

Alright, so now it's past the first of the month, and how's it going?

Steven R. Hurst reported on Thursday (Feb. 1) for the Associated Press: "Local commanders. . . . said only about 2,000 of the additional troops had reached Baghdad or were nearby. . . .

"An Iraqi army brigade from Irbil, about 3,000 men in principle, will have at most 1,500 men when it finally arrives in Baghdad. The commander says 95 percent of the men don't speak Arabic. A brigade from Sulaimaniyah, also in the Kurdish north, has reached the Muthana Airport in central Baghdad, but it is only 1,000-men strong, not the expected 3,000."

At a Defense Department briefing on Friday (Feb. 2) Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace confirmed that Iraqi troop strength is not where it ought to be.

" Q Mr. Secretary, yesterday General Casey said that of the Iraqi units that have shown up with the new Baghdad security plan, they are at 55 to 65 percent strength. Do you consider that meeting the commitment that the Iraqis made?

" SEC. GATES: Well, I think that partly it will depend on how quickly they get back up to strength. . . . I guess my answer is, 55 percent probably isn't good enough. But I'm not sure that that's -- what the end strength of that unit is going to be when the time comes for it to go into combat.

" General, do you want to --

" GEN. PACE: Well, I think the secretary has it right. There's good news and bad news. The good news is that contrary to what has happened in the past, the units that were designated to arrive in Baghdad have begun to arrive on the schedule they were supposed to be there. The first brigade is there; the second brigade is en route, and the third brigade will foreclose by the end of February.

" However, you're correct in that right now, the initial units got there with about 60 percent. And therefore, they do need to continue to flesh out those units, get all those who may be home taking their money to their families, and get them in. So they're not at the level we would like them to be total strength-wise, but they are showing up on the time on they said they would.

" Q Whatever the reason, does that -- does a unit, an Iraqi unit at two-thirds strength, constitute meeting their part of the deal here?

" GEN. PACE: It needs to be stronger than that."

revel wrote:

...
Right; what motive would Iraqis have to detain an Iranian envoy? We are violating international law.

We I see you wrote [emphasis added]: "what motive would Iraqis have to detain an Iranian envoy?" Their motive is obvious. The Iraqis suspect the Iranian envoy of aiding and abetting their enemy. There is no international law that prohibts a government from protecting its people against their enemies.

Senate Democrats and Republicans disagreed yesterday over the meaning and importance of a Defense Department inspector general's conclusion that a Pentagon policy office produced and gave senior policymakers "alternative intelligence assessments on Iraq and Al Qaida relations" that were "inconsistent" with the intelligence community's consensus view in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Acting Defense Department Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had no evidence that the Pentagon activities were illegal and said they were authorized by then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz.

But, he said, "the actions, in our opinion, were inappropriate."

The office's assessments, according to an unclassified summary of Gimble's report released yesterday, "evolved from policy to intelligence products, which were then disseminated." The summary said the intelligence community's consensus view and "available intelligence" at the time, late in the summer of 2002, did not support the policy office's conclusion that a "mature symbiotic relationship" existed between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

An article in yesterday's Washington Post misattributed to the inspector general's report critical comments about the Pentagon operation made by committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.). In a statement he released Thursday, Levin, not the inspector general, said the Pentagon effort used intelligence reporting of "dubious quality or reliability." [See correction, A2.]

Douglas J. Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, sharply disputed the inspector general's conclusions in a series of interviews yesterday. "My office was trying to prevent an intelligence failure," Feith told National Public Radio. "We had people in the Pentagon who thought that the CIA's speculative assessments were not of top quality; they were not raising all the questions they should raise and considering all the information they should consider."

His office "did not present an alternative intelligence analysis," Feith said, it "presented a criticism."

After weeks of discussion over President Bush's strategy for the ongoing U.S. involvement in Iraq, yesterday's hearing once again plunged the Senate into discord over how the United States got there in the first place.

Levin, who has long questioned Feith's prewar intelligence operation, was harshly critical. "Senior administration officials used the twisted intelligence produced by the Feith office in making the case for the Iraq war," Levin said. Calling the inspector general's report a "devastating condemnation of inappropriate activities," he said he would hold further hearings on the subject.

"I don't think in any way that his report could be interpreted as a devastating condemnation," Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) quickly countered. Feith's office, he said, "actually provided a service" by bringing intelligence community failures to the attention of policymakers.

Inhofe described the disagreements outlined in the inspector general's report as a simple "turf battle" between government departments.

Democratic senators used Gimble's report and testimony to bolster their contention that the administration misused intelligence to promote the urgency of invading Iraq. Republicans implied that the intelligence community had soft-pedaled crucial reports of a close al-Qaeda relationship with Saddam Hussein and that Feith's office had put them in the proper perspective.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is in the process of producing a "Phase II" of its investigation of the lead-up to the war, dealing with allegations that the administration emphasized unproven intelligence that supported its charges against Hussein and played down information that undercut them. The committee has been awaiting the inspector general's report.

Gimble repeatedly emphasized yesterday that his report "was an investigation of a process" at the Pentagon and not of any individuals. That process was inappropriate, he said, because it purported to produce an "intelligence product" but its conclusions did not acknowledge alternative views within the intelligence community.

"The condition occurred because the role of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense Policy was expanded from the mission of doing defense policy to analyzing and disseminating alternative intelligence," Gimble said. "As a result, the office did not provide the most accurate analysis of intelligence to the senior decision-makers."

"I don't know whether it was intentional or whether it was a good-faith judgment," Gimble said. "That's not my position, and I wouldn't have a thought on that. All I can tell you is, at the end of the day, when those things went forward, there was two sets of facts out there; one of them got passed over, and it would happen to be the one that's in the very community that we look to to have this kind of information."

Focused on the question of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda, Gimble's report concentrated on findings that Feith's office presented in three briefings in August and September 2002 -- one to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, one to the CIA, and one at the White House to then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.

Laying out a chronology of events, Gimble said Wolfowitz asked Feith in January 2002 "to assess the links between al-Qaeda and Iraq." The following July, he told the committee, a group of Pentagon employees assigned to Feith's office "compiled a position paper that was later translated into a briefing."

The briefing, titled "Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making the Case," was given to Rumsfeld on Aug. 8. In a memo to Feith's office that day, Wolfowitz described it as "excellent."

"The secretary was very impressed," Wolfowitz wrote. "He asked us to think about some possible next steps to see if we can illuminate the differences between us and the CIA. The goal is not to produce a consensus product, but rather to scrub one another's arguments."

Rumsfeld then directed that the briefing be presented to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Before an Aug. 15 briefing for Tenet, however, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and other agencies critiqued the briefing. In particular, they questioned Feith's conclusion that a "known contact" had taken place in Prague in April 2001 between a senior Iraqi intelligence agent and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in September of that year. "Essentially, they disagreed with more than 50 percent of it and either agreed or partially agreed with the remainder," Gimble said yesterday.

The CIA described the intelligence concerning the alleged contact with Atta as "contradictory at best," a Gimble aide testified at yesterday's hearing.

At the subsequent CIA briefing, Tenet called the presentation "useful," Gimble said. But Tenet remarked in an interview with the inspector general's office, Gimble said, that "he only said that it was 'useful' because he didn't agree with it and he was just trying to nicely end the meeting."

For the CIA briefing, Gimble said, Feith removed a slide concluding that there were "fundamental problems with the way the intelligence community was assessing the information." Gimble said that Feith told the inspector general's office he had taken it out "because it was critical of the intelligence community." The slide was reinserted for the later White House briefing.

After his session with Feith's group, Tenet arranged for a meeting between the group and intelligence community analysts to go over agreements and disagreements. As a result of that Aug. 20 session, Gimble said, the CIA agreed to make "some minor changes" in its analysis and to "footnote" its disagreements with the Pentagon presentation. Such footnotes are normally used in community intelligence documents to warn policymakers that there are other opinions.

Briefing Hadley and Libby, Gimble said, Feith's group did not mention that the intelligence community disagreed with more than half of its conclusions. Tenet, Gimble said, did not learn of the White House briefing until two years later.

Hadley, he said, declined to be interviewed by the inspector general's office, on the advice of the White House counsel. Libby was not asked for an interview, Gimble said. Levin said yesterday that he wants to question both.

I not only mistrust Bush and this administration, but also include the "democratic" congress. They'll talk on the floor of congress to play politics while our men and women get killed, and we spend two billion dollars every week. At the end of the day, all they have done was to prolong this unwinnable war.

Talk about a quagmire!

The Last Chance
Saloon

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The first building erected at Caldwell was, appropriately enough, a saloon. Constructed of thick logs in 1869 by Curley Marshall, it was located about a mile southeast of this marker on the north bank of Bluff Creek. It was open for business in time to serve the great cattle drives which moved from Texas to Abilene over the then new Chisholm Trail.
A sign on the building greeted Texas drovers just as they crossed into Kansas, proclaiming it was the "First Chance Saloon", and as they rode back toward the Lone Star state, the sign stated it was the "Last Chance Saloon", as a reminder of the prohibition of liquor in Indian Territory.

In 1874 a posse from Caldwell, while in pursuit of outlaws, thought badmen had holed up in the Last Chance and burned the saloon to drive them out. Though their suspicions proved to be unfounded, the building had been destroyed.

The New York Times today published a front-page story by Michael Gordon which recites administration claims about Iran's involvement in Iraq "without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence." Greg Mitchell notes, via Glenn Greenwald, that it was Gordon "who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion."

The Times story comes even as evidence grows that the administration planned to release contained cooked intelligence in a "briefing" on Iranian involvement in Iraq .

In little noted comments on Feb. 2, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the Iran briefing washeld back because it was "overstated" and not "focused on the facts."

HADLEY: The reason we put the intelligence briefing on hold was really two reasons. One, we thought we'd better get the NIE out so people could see the full context, which you now can. And secondly, quite frankly, we want to make sure that if we put out intelligence, the intelligence community and MNFI can stand behind it, because we are sensitive to try and put out the facts as accurately as we can. …

Q And now [the briefing has] been pushed back. Can we conclude anything from that other than people looked at the intelligence that was set to offered and said, this is not good enough?

MR. HADLEY: No, I wouldn't -

Q Does that mean there was a willingness to overstate it?

MR. HADLEY: The truth is, quite frankly, we thought the briefing overstated. And we sent it back to get it narrowed and focused on the facts.

But a new report in the National Journal states that it was the intelligence community, not the White House, that demanded the briefing be "scrubbed" of overstated claims:

At least twice in the past month, the White House has delayed a PowerPoint presentation initially prepared by the military to detail evidence of suspected Iranian materiel and financial support for militants in Iraq. The presentation was to have been made at a press conference in Baghdad in the first week of February. Officials have set no new date, but they say it could be any day.

Even as U.S. officials in Baghdad were ready to make the case, administration principals in Washington who were charged with vetting the PowerPoint dossier bowed to pressure from the intelligence community and ordered that it be scrubbed again.

Despite the intelligence community's intervention, there is still no guarantee that the intel on Iran that is eventually made public will be factual or comprehensive. As yesterday's report on Douglas Feith reinforced, senior administration officials are perfectly willing to work around intelligence professionals to obtain the "facts" that justify their ideology.

It seems our country never learns from history. The media is doing the same thing on Iran they did on Iraq; nothing but push the Bush rhetoric to push for war.

How disgusting!

Michael B. Oren
is a Senior Fellow
at the Shalem Center,
a Jerusalem research
and educational institute. He is the author of the best-selling Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Oxford, 2002), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award; a history of the 1956 Sinai Campaign (Cass, 1993); as well as dozens of scholarly and popular articles on history and the politics of the Middle East.

Power, Faith, and Fantasy
America in the Middle East
1776 to the Present
W. W. Norton & Company
January 15, 2007

The first comprehensive history
of America's military, political,
and intellectual involvement
in the Middle East
from George Washington
to George W. Bush.

"If you think America's entanglement in the Middle East began with Roosevelt and Truman, Michael Oren's deeply researched and brilliantly written history will be a revelation to you, as it was to me. With its cast of fascinating characters - earnest missionaries, maverick converts, wide-eyed tourists and even a nineteenth-century George Bush - Power, Faith and Fantasy is not only a terrific read, it is also proof that you don't really understand an issue until you know its history."
Niall Ferguson,
author of Colossus and The War of the World


"A landmark achievement. This is an absolutely vital work that will change the way Americans look at their role in the Middle East and beyond. The story is riveting and the research encyclopedic."
Walter Russell Mead,
Council on Foreign Relations

Most people understand that simple truth; democdracy must come from within. Bush and the generals don't understand that simple fact; they think military might will speed up the internal demographics for change. All they're accomplishing is to delay it.

cicerone imposter wrote:

Most people understand that simple truth; democdracy must come from within. Bush and the generals don't understand that simple fact; they think military might will speed up the internal demographics for change. All they're accomplishing is to delay it.

Currently, the war in Iraq is not about establishing democracy in Iraq. It is about stopping or at least controlling the mass murder of non-murderers by suicidal jihadists, Baathist Sunni, and Iranian Shia.

ican, You get one guess: who precipitated this uncontrolled violence in Iraq?