An Inescapable Truth

Here's where the Bush Administration paints itself into a corner:

WASHINGTON - The situation in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan where al-Qaida has established a safe haven presents a "clear and present danger" to the West, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Sunday NBC's "Meet the Press."

Hayden cited the belief by intelligence agencies that Osama bin Laden is hiding there in arguing that the U.S. has an interest in targeting the border region. If there were another terrorist attack against Americans, Hayden said, it would most certainly originate from that region.

"It's very clear to us that al-Qaida has been able for the past 18 months or so to establish a safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border area that they have not enjoyed before, and that they're bringing in operatives into the region for training," he said.

Hayden added that those operatives "wouldn't attract your attention if they were going through the customs line at Dulles (airport, outside Washington) with you when you're coming back to the United States — who look Western."

What do we learn from the public pronouncements of General Hayden?

1. The war in Iraq is NOT the central front in the war on terror.

2. The US is NOT threatened by al Qaeda in Iraq in any way, shape or form.

3. Pakistan is where we need to pursue terrorists who want to attack the West.

4. The Bush Administration has broken our military and we don't have the troops available to choke off al Qaeda in the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

5. Every day we leave troops in Iraq is a day spent fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong place with troops we desperately need to refit, retrain and rest.

They should really be careful not to let people like General Hayden speak publicly. Instead of rallying the American people, this administration's failure to coordinate its message and get everyone rowing in the same direction only further humiliates our country in the eyes of the world.

This is what happens when lackeys staff your administration

In the months before the invasion of Iraq was launched, a congressional fact-finding junket comprised of three Democratic congressmen and members of their respective staffs. The trip was organized by an American citizen who was also a covert Iraqi intelligence agent, and who accompanied the delegation. On Wednesday, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Muthanna al-Hanooti , charging him with one count of conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein, one count of violating the International Emergency Economic Powers act, and three counts of making false statements.

The Michigan resident began working for the Iraqi intelligence service without registering with the Justice Department and was paid for his services with 2 million barrels of oil, the indictment said.

The trip was organized by a Michigan charity, Life for Relief and Development, that looked legitimate but in fact was connected to the Iraq government, according to the indictment.

The October 2002 trip included three members of Congress, the indictment said. Between 1999 and 2002, the Michigan man had been providing the Iraqi intelligence service with strategic advice on getting Congress to lift sanctions against Iraq, the indictment added.

The members of Congress were innocent and unwitting victims of the scheme, according to officials familiar with the case.

"None of the congressional representatives are accused of any wrongdoing, and we have no information whatsoever that any of them were aware of the involvement of the Iraqi Intelligence Service,” Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The government did not name the lawmakers. But The Associated Press said the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington and Mike Thompson of California and then-Rep. David Bonior of Michigan.

I am sure that if I went to the right side of the blogosphere, I could find all manner of crowing and squawking about the congressmen who were on that trip. Some slavering simpleton has no doubt pounded out a treatise on why questioning the patriotism of Democrats is now okay; nay, it is it is demanded of all true and noble upright citizens!

Never mind that the fault for this lies squarely at the feet of the State Department, who vetted the trip. Let me put it this way - at one point, during the vetting process for a security clearance, the FBI found and interviewed my freakin' prom dates mother during the vetting process for a security clearance. I would expect them to do a better job vetting the trip and it's organizers, especially in that political climate.

When the Detroit News called David Swanson for comment on the indictment, he basically shrugged and said "so?"

Of course, at that time, Hussein was screaming the truth to the world: "I have no WMDs," and an important corner of the world was refusing to listen. Instead, the White House was telling us that Saddam Hussein might blow us all up at any moment, that a "war" with him would take no more than a few weeks and cost no more than $50 billion, and that Iraqi oil would pay for that war. So, if a few congress members unwittingly got Iraq to pay for a trip aimed at saving millions of lives, that's more than Bush has accomplished wittingly or otherwise. He invaded, slaughtered, and is sticking our descendants with a bill for trillions of dollars (including another $102 billion from Congress next month unless we help Congress find a spine).

Well, that works too.

It certainly doesn't reflect poorly on the congressmen. But the lackeys and ideologues who have destroyed every federal agency from a to z? They don't get the same pass.

Cliff May Reveals the Insanity of Modern Conservatives and the War

Get ready to see some goalposts moved around...

Five years ago this month, American troops liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Then came the hard part.

American intelligence had been wrong about Saddam’s stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction: They were nowhere to be found. Most academic experts had failed to perceive the currents of religious extremism and sectarianism running just beneath Iraq’s secular surface. State Department consultants and U.N. advisors proved unequal to the task of building democratic political institutions quickly from scratch.

The media had understated Saddam’s barbarism: It had been too risky to report in depth on the mass graves Saddam filled with dissidents; the tens of thousands of Kurds gassed to death in their villages; the camps where Saddam trained terrorists for assignments abroad. As a consequence, few anticipated how severely Iraqis had been traumatized.

First of all, Cliff May is insane. He is a neocon without a fucking soul. Any person with even a shred of self-awareness would shut up about these things and try to hide. The truth of the Iraq war is wrapped up in the fact that these people have gotten 4,000 Americans killed for their own fantasy of an oil-rich state in the heart of the Muslim world, adorned with permanent bases and run by corrupt sycophants.

Who publishes this crap? The reason why "State Department consultants and UN advisors" proved unequal was because Don Rumsfeld shut them completely and utterly out of the process and did not allow them to participate in any meaningful way. People from the State Department quit because the policy was flawed. Many more have retired rather than pound sand. A good number of people have bravely tried--many UN personnel have died trying to help the US in Iraq. They were not "unequal." They were unable to operate inside of the whirlwind of chaos created by the failed strategies of Don Rumsfeld. Second of all, everyone and their brother knew Saddam gassed the Kurds--it was widely disseminated information. Third, those "international terrorists" have never really materialized because they really didn't exist. It was all Pentagon propaganda to help grease the skids for war. All now disproven, of course, by a Pentagon that was forced to come clean.

And America’s military, so adept at bringing down a dictator, was unprepared for the “small war” that would follow: terrorist attacks on innocent Iraqis that the “international community” would blame not on the perpetrators - but on America.

Like most military strategists of the late 20th century, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld envisioned wars of the 21st century as akin to computer games. Advanced technology, more than blood and sweat, was supposed to be decisive. And in a place like Iraq, it was believed, the U.S. “footprint” should be as light as possible because close proximity to American soldiers would surely incite the natives to violence.

It's nice that May realizes the only way to get through this column is to throw Rumsfeld under the bus. But where does he talk about Feith, Wolfowitz and all of the other neocon chickenhawks who never served in the military or in combat? Where does he admit that a cabal of incompetent sons of bitches smashed our military on the rock of and Iraqi insurgency? Where does he talk about Richard Perle and Bill Kristol, who opined that the Sunni and Shia were secular and have always gotten along? All of the assembled thinkers on the right were WRONG. Utterly and completely. You don't get something this wrong very often. And they were as wrong as possible. And that doesn't matter?

The result of so many errors and misjudgments was catastrophic. Three years after the liberation of Iraq from Saddam, much of the country had been taken over by al-Qaeda. Other areas were under the sway of Iranian proxies, in chaos, or close to civil war.

Absolutely, totally and completely WRONG: al Qaeda in Iraq is a loosely affiliated organization that was created to engage the Americans in Iraq. It is not the same "al Qaeda" that hit us on 9/11 or in Africa. And it has NEVER been responsible for more than 10% of the attacks on the US. Our main opponents are Sunni insurgents and Shia militiamen.

Iraq’s military had been disbanded by the American envoy, L. Paul Bremer. America’s forces were cooped up in heavily guarded Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) waiting for actionable intelligence that seldom arrived. When it did, they would drive their vehicles to battle down roads their enemies had lined with bombs.

Finally, after the 2006 election rebuke to President Bush, a new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, was assigned to the Pentagon, and a new commander, Gen. David Petraeus, was deployed to the field of battle. American forces set out to liberate Iraq - for a second time.

Bremer had nothing to do with the "strategy" of disbanding the army or cooping up troops in bases. That was all Rumsfeld, Myers, Franks, Abizaid, Sanchez and Casey. They made the calls. And it was the Pentagon hacks like Feith and Wolfowitz who were the civilian controlling authorities that forced these policies onto the backs of the military commanders. Bremer was a stooge, nothing more. He didn't make a single decision that didn't have the stamp of approval from Washington DC. And it was those incompetent idealogues that staffed Bremer's CPA with young Republicans who didn't have a fucking clue as to what they were doing.

There have been dozens of generals who have fought in Iraq. And out of that group, Petraeus was a division commander far down the line who came back to Iraq to "train" the Iraqi police. And he failed at that. So after dismal failures and a wave of retirements from the men who fought in Iraq during the first two years, all they had left was Petraeus.

The Petraeus strategy was nothing if not counterintuitive: He gave the enemy more targets and assigned them to more vulnerable positions - outside the well-guarded FOBs and in the shadowy streets. But once the Iraqis understood why the Americans were there - to defend them from terrorists - they provided a wealth of intelligence. Before long, Americans and Iraqis were fighting side by side against their common Islamist enemies.

That was historic. It should have been big news. But the media were not much interested. As one well-known reporter told me: “It doesn’t matter.” The important action, he said, was taking place not in Baghdad but in Washington, where politicians were reading the polls and finding Americans discouraged and ready to cut their losses.

No, they weren't fighting "side by side" and they certainly won't ever again get that opportunity again--thanks to the fact that we've failed to pay the Sunnis their ten dollars a day. Too many of the Iraqis that have tried to fight alongside US troops have turned their weapons on our troops. Too many of them are militiamen in disguise. And far too many of them cannot organize themselves into units and sustain the fight for themselves. How many Iraqi battalions can stand up and fight on their own? We cannot know that number until it is briefed to us next month, if anyone remembers to ask at all. But for three years, one a handful of Iraqi battalions have ever reached that status and the number has actually declined.

What’s more, such groups as MoveOn.org - heavily invested in an American defeat they could blame on Bush, Cheney, and the “neo-cons” - had a well-funded plan, “Iraq Summer,” that was to make it politically untenable for members of Congress to continue to support the Iraq mission.

MoveOn.org doesn't have that kind of clout. Far more powerful was the group called the American voter that threw Republicans out of office. If the American people are savvy, they'll figure out that the only way to end the war--which they have wanted to do in overwhelming numbers--is to keep throwing Republicans out of office AND to elect better Democrats, like Donna Edwards. No question--Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid should pack it in and make way for new blood after just one year of setbacks and failures. But you cannot argue that a heretofore unheard of obstructionist Republican minority has mortgaged its own future by covering the President's ass.

What this perspective failed to take into account: the startlingly rapid progress that Petraeus and his troops would make against al-Qaeda and the Iranian backed militias. That was coupled with a battle of ideas on the home front: Tenacious pro-mission groups - e.g. Vets for Freedom, Families United, the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Move America Forward, Freedom’s Watch - formed a loose but effective coalition that matched MoveOn.org congressional contact for congressional contact, and told the stories most reporters would not.

One can say the invasion of Iraq was unwise. Before committing troops to battle, a president should have a realistic understanding of what can be achieved, in what time frame, and at what cost. One can say the occupation of Iraq was bungled.

Unwise? Try "the worst foreign policy disaster in the history of the United States of America." And that loose but INeffective coalition couldn't for air out of a paper bag. There is no pro-war movement or anti-war movement in this country. There are just a few thousand cranks on one side acting out their childish fantasies, in the face of a liberal anti-war group that organizes online as opposed to the streets of Washington DC.

What one can not say is that regime change in Iraq was unjustified: Not if you know Saddam’s record, his clearly stated intentions, and his ties to international terrorists - including, as a new Pentagon report reveals, a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s second-in-command.

Bullshit. There was no link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Already disproven, move along, nothing to see here. Just another wingnut dementia episode. Thanks for trying.

Nor can one say that the outcome in Iraq - the heart of the Muslim Middle East - will be inconsequential to the outcome of the wider war being waged by militant, supremacist Islamist movements intent on nothing less than the destruction of America and the West.

Really? Talk about a wingnut fantasy of Lord of the Rings proportions. And how are they going to destroy us? By invading America with their ten million man army of tanks and planes? With their non-existent nuclear weapons?

They don't have to try and destroy us. Thanks to wingnuts like Cliff May, our own government has already done more damage to the US than the Islamic militants ever could.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

At least 42 57 people have died today, making Easter Sunday one of the most violent days in Iraq in several months.

The warlike tenor of the day was set early, when Katyusha rockets started raining down on the heavily fortified Green Zone. No one was killed, but still in all, it's a rude awakening on a Sunday morning. A second barrage was volleyed about four hours later. Personnel were warned to "duck and cover" and stay away from windows as mortars and rockets were lobbed toward the international zone throughout the day. At least five people were killed by Katyushas that fell short of the Green Zone.

In the Shiite city of Hillah, an American base was barraged by mortar fire, but American forces did not respond to a request for comment about the attack. Although there was no comment, there were also no reports of injuries or deaths.

Iraqi soldiers in Mosul were not so lucky, and did not escape unscathed. A suicide bomber penetrated the security perimeter of an Iraqi army base in a tanker truck and detonated himself in a courtyard. The blast killed thirteen and injured forty-two more. Iraqi and U.S. forces have been engaged in operations in Mosul to root out what U.S. commanders are calling al Qaeda's last urban stronghold in Iraq.

Elsewhere in the north, a roadside bomb killed five Iraqi soldiers in Kirkuk, which has seen growing unrest and sectarian strife in recent weeks.

Back in Baghdad, at least seven shoppers were killed when gunmen traveling in three cars opened fire on a marketplace in the Zaafariniya neighborhood. At least sixteen more people were wounded. The gunmen fled the scene, they were neither killed nor captured.

Elsewhere, in the Shula district of Baghdad, a suicide bomber killed five people lined up to purchase gasoline.

In Samara, a suicide bomber plowed into the home of a tribal leader and killed three people.

Yet on every single Sunday chat-show, there was some damned republican jackass or another telling us how it was all going swimmingly, the Surge™ has been a spectacular success, and we have victory in our crosshairs.

Ah well, I guess it's okay on balance, since lying was one of the sins their Jesus died on the cross that they might be forgiven for. Right?

Violence in Iraq is on the Rise

[Iraq: War as a SIM Game]

You know, no one is happy about this. I'm not, Blue Girl isn't. We're not happy that the violence in Iraq is increasing, day by day. This isn't why we get up in the morning and blog like maniacs.

I wish I had been wrong from day one. I wish I was wrong about Iraq, and whether we're winning the war. I wish I was the one who was shamed and humiliated for doubting that we could pull it off. That would mean more people would be alive. That would mean, basically, that despite my belief that this was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, I was wrong about our capabilities.

So I don't "enjoy" being able to post things like this:

(CBS/AP) Violence killed at least 42 people Tuesday, including 16 bus passengers caught in a roadside bombing in southern Iraq, after the deadliest day for U.S. troops in precisely six months.

The U.S. military announced that three American soldiers were killed in a roadside bombing north of Baghdad on Monday, bringing to eight the number of troops who died that day. The last time so many U.S. military personnel were killed in Iraq was Sept. 10, when 10 died.

Bloodshed has increased recently, despite what the military said has been a 60 percent drop in attacks across Iraq since June. Last Thursday, two massive bombs killed 68 people in Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood. On March 3, two car bombings killed 24 people in the capital.

According to an Associated Press count, at the height of unrest from November 2006 to August 2007, on average approximately 65 Iraqis died each day as a result of violence. As conditions improved, the daily death toll steadily declined. It reached its lowest point in more than two years on January 2008, when on average 20 Iraqis died each day.

Wait a minute--didn't Michael O'Hanlon tell us this just yesterday?

But they sometimes fail to fold in the reality of how far Iraq has come in the past 12 months under the new surge-based strategy of Gen. David Petraeus. Most Democrats seem to belittle or even deny the progress, despite a 75% reduction in violence and the beginnings of Iraqi political compromise.

I'm not belittling it, or denying it. I just keep finding credible sources that tell me your numbers are way off the mark.

Those numbers have since jumped. In February, approximately 26 Iraqis died each day as a result of violence, and so far in March, that number is up to 39 daily. These figures reflect the months in which people were found, and not necessarily - in the case of mass graves - the months in which they were killed.

Military spokesman Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said Sunday that recent violence should not be taken as evidence of "an increase or a trend of an increase."

"I think we need to continue to look at historically what has happened over the last year to really put in perspective a one-week or two-weeks' worth of activity inside Baghdad," Smith said.

But Smith, in what has become a military mantra of caution, also noted that "on any given day, al Qaeda and other extremist groups are still very much disposed toward handing out violence indiscriminately to achieve whatever means and ends they hope to achieve with those attacks."

While al Qaeda in Iraq is Sunni, Shiite extremists with alleged ties to Iran are also believed to have carried out attacks.

In an interview with CNN Tuesday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he was in favor of substantive discussions with Iran about what the U.S. claims is Tehran's continued funding and training of extremists in Iraq.

Petraeus said he did not meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit to Iraq last week because he thought it would have been a "relatively meaningless encounter."

Now, the curious aspect of my Pale Rider personality asks, why would Petraeus be talking about Ahmadinejad as an irrelevant adversary on Tuesday? Why would an American military officer publicly belittle someone like that? Did he have the go-ahead to speak like that from the State Department or the DoD? Did he have someone sign off on his expansion of his commentary beyond his lane? Because Iran is not in his lane. It was in Admiral Fallon's lane, until Tuesday. Think the resignation/firing/elimination of his immediate superior Admiral Fallon and the undiplomatic escalation of the rhetoric from Petraeus was a coincidence?

And why do they keep talking about "al Qaeda in Iraq?" Have they suddenly flooded Iraq with tens of thousands of fighters? Or were they never really much of a factor at all?

The essential questions are: How large is the presence of AQI, in terms of manpower and attacks instigated, and what role does the group play in catalyzing further violence? For the first question, the military has produced an estimate. In a background briefing this July in Baghdad, military officials said that during the first half of this year AQI accounted for 15 percent of attacks in Iraq. That figure was also cited in the military intelligence report during final preparations for a National Intelligence Estimate in July.

This is the number on which many military experts inside the Beltway rely. Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution who attended the Baghdad background briefing, explained that he thought the estimate derived from a comprehensive analysis by teams of local intelligence agents who examine the type and location of daily attacks, and their intended targets, and crosscheck that with reports from Iraqi informants and other data, such as intercepted phone calls. "It's a fairly detailed kind of assessment," O'Hanlon said. "Obviously you can't always know who is behind an attack, but there is a fairly systematic way of looking at the attacks where they can begin to make a pretty informed guess."

Yet those who have worked on estimates inside the system take a more circumspect view. Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. "It was kind of a running joke in our office," he recalls. "We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda."

To describe AQI's presence, intelligence experts cite a spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such "a big window" exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, indicates that "[those experts] really don't have a very good perception of what is going on."

It's notable that military intelligence reports have opted to cite a figure at the very top of that range. But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement, if you consider some of the government's own statistics.

I don't know what they're paying O'Hanlon, and I don't really care. But if he's making more than five bucks an hour to come up with this stuff, he's grossly overpaid and should be replaced by an out of work boy band guru or maybe even someone who can't keep track of donations for the NRCC. I mean, at what point does someone lose all credibility? At what point does the function of "gatekeeper" switch on and we start to see a helluva lot LESS of this guy in print?

Me, personally, I'm sick of seeing neocon apologists getting published day after day after day. I can't keep up. It's an avalanche of bullshit that never ends.

Would someone please make sure Dick Cheney gets a copy of this report?

The Pentagon ordered an intensive review, in which over 600,000 pages of documents captured after the fall of the Iraqi government were examined, and they prove what most people - and all of the sane ones - have known for years, and what the Senate Intelligence Committee found in September 2006 (before the Democratic majority!)

There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Iraq was not a safe haven, nor did the state supply material or financial support to the terrorist network. The study was produced by a federally-funded think tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract to the Norfolk, Va.-based U.S. Joint Forces Command. The report, entitled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents" was completed last year, but the declassification process has been a rough process, seeing as how it points the finger and screams "J'accuse!!!" at a whole bunch of high-ranking administration officials.

Officials - plural - familiar with the report spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity, because the report will not be delivered to Congress until at least Wednesday. But let's revisit some of the lies, just to refresh our memories, shall we?

• President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

• Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.

• Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

• As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. "The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims," he said.

The issue of al Qaeda and Iraq has already been an issue in the 2008 presidential race, with John McCain mocking Barack Obama with a sneering "I have some news [my friend]. al Qaeda is in Iraq."

Obama wasted no time in firing back that he had a breaking story himself. "There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade." (Actually, the organization that calls itself AQI emerged in 2004, over a year after the invasion.)

In the final analysis, it will probably not amount to a whole hell of a lot - it doesn't, after all, have any bombshells of previously undisclosed information. But still, that won't stop both sides from at least trying to make a little bit of political hay out of it - the report does show that Saddam Hussein's government did support some regional terrorism, such as Palestinian groups that attack Israel. So just let me say this: when these people start crowing, and flapping their yellow wings and setting up quite the barnyard ruckus, they need to be reminded that the United States does the same damned thing by supporting Jundallah, an al Qaeda offshoot that stages terrorist attacks in Iran. Ditto PKK terrorists who find safe haven in Iraqi Kurdistan and slip into Iran to stage raids and terrorist attacks. So call them on the hypocrisy and point to the facts. And ya know, you can call 'em willfully-ignorant, amoral, lying, murderous thugs, too.

And while you're at it, ask them if they have their checkbooks handy, because this unholy clusterfuck is costing our country three thousand dollars a second.

Opium poppies cropping up across Iraq

Well! Here is some good news for the "free markets solve everything!" crowd!

Iraqi farmers, desperate to make ends meet while simultaneously facing escalating fuel and fertilizer costs, as well as cheap imported fruits and vegetables, have taken to growing opium poppies. Poppy cultivation is spreading rapidly all across Iraq, but is especially prevalent in Diyala province, where local police and security forces are so preoccupied with the ethnic conflicts among the residents of the region, as well as a tenacious insurgency that brings the war and it's associated chaos home - suffice it to say that the drug trade is low on their list of priorities.


Put one more hashmark in the "Law of Unintended Consequences" column, I guess.

The shift to opium cultivation by Iraqis is a very recent development. The first fields, underwritten by Afghani smugglers who supplied the lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, were discovered less than a year ago near Diwaniya in the south, but the practice has now spread to the lush orchards of Diyala, north of Baghdad. A local agricultural engineer identified as M S al-Azawi said that the local farmers received no government support, and turned to opium production as an effort to offset high production costs and low sale prices.

Once harvested, the opium is taken to Ramadi in the west for exporting and processing - unlike Afghanistan, Iraq does not seem to have heroin laboratories established, so the raw materials must be moved out of the country for processing. Iraq has never been a major drugs consumer, but it has been an important part of the supply line. Heroin from Afghanistan crosses Iran, enters Iraq and finds it's way to Basra, which serves as the distribution hub for the lucrative playground states of the Gulf. Under Hussein, it is widely assumed that state security officers controlled the smuggling.

The proliferation of the crop across the country will be nearly impossible to stop, with so much of the country controlled by militias and criminal gangs. Much of the so-called "success" the Bush administration keeps desperately pointing to is due to a 70,000-member Sunni Arab militia - comprised of a large number of former insurgents with links to protection rackets and organized crime - that has been encouraged, armed and financed by the tax dollars of Americans.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the powerful Shia militia Jaish al Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army, claims that such criminal elements have infiltrated its ranks.

Local warlords, both Sunni and Shia, taking up opium cultivation is a menacing development in a country where local political leaders are frequently allied with gangsters.

Of course, there is one workable, win-win strategy that would provide a market to the farmers, cut the drug gangs (who are the only ones getting rich) out of the profit loop, and solve a medical need for the west while keeping dangerous drugs off the streets of western cities - but the current administration will never even consider the idea. But I'm going to tell you anyway...

Encourage the cultivation of Papaver somniferum by Iraqi farmers, and buy the crop for use in pharmaceuticals. It is, after all the base ingredient in all opiate pain killers such as morphine. The farmers would have a legitimate market, and pharmaceutical companies would have access to raw materials that are currently in short supply.

It makes perfect sense except for one little thing....we aren't just at war with Iraq - we're at war with drugs, too.

Apparently, we can safely add common sense to that list as well.

Iraq appeals to Iran for help defusing the Kurdish crisis

As tensions ratchet up between Turkey and Iraq over PKK terrorists who find safe haven in Iraq from which to stage cross-border raids and kill Turkish soldiers, and the United States stands by helplessly, unable to even comprehend the scope of the clusterfuck created by the hubris of George Bush, Iraq is reaching out to Iran for help.

That's gonna go over like a pregnant pole vaulter.

On Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki met with Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki and asked him to help present Iraq's positions at a regional summit meeting in Istanbul scheduled for Thursday. “The prime minister asked the Islamic Republic to present their full support to Iraq during the Istanbul meeting and also to participate in solving the border crisis between Turkey and the P.K.K.,” a statement from Mr. Maliki’s office said. The summit will be attended by representatives from countries in the region, including Syria, Iran, Iraq andTurkey. The United States will be represented by Condoleeza Rice, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and a number of other foreign ministers are also expected to attend.

P.K.K. terrorists have killed over 35,000 Turks since launching their most recent separatist terror campaign in the 80's. For perspective, consider that in 2 decades, the P.K.K. has killed ten times the number of Turks that America lost on September 11.

Turkey, tired of the terrorists who attack them finding safe haven in Iraq, hiding beneath the petticoats of Turkey's NATO ally the United States in the Kurdish north of Iraq, has massed troops on the border and announced that they will pursue Peshmerga and P.K.K. fighters across the border, engage them and kill them.

Iran has been sympathetic to the Turkish position, because the P.K.K. launches terrorist raids into Iran as well. But the situation is not that simple. Iran and Iraq are both Shi'ite majority countries, and the Iraqi government is Shi'ite majority (al Maliki spent many of his years in exile in Tehran).

From the New York Times:

Iraqi diplomats said they were worried that after the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, met with President Bush on Nov. 5, Turkey may take action against the Kurdish guerrillas, a step that could further antagonize Iraq’s Kurds.

“They are under a lot of pressure from the public, so we think they will do something,” said a senior Iraqi official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. “We hope they will not.”

Mr. Erdogan has asked the United States to help the Turks take “concrete steps” to reduce the P.K.K. threat.

In Washington, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon spokesman, confirmed that the United States military was giving “lots of intelligence” to Turkey in its effort to halt the rebel attacks.

As if the situation were not complicated enough, the American forces are still holding five Iranians that were taken into custody in January. Iran says they are diplomats, the United States insists they are members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. “The arresting of Iranian consular officials is a very big strategic mistake,” said Mr. Mottaki. Mr. Mottaki also expressed his displeasure at a comment made by General Petraeus that the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad was a member of the Quds Force, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard.

And I would like to point out, again, that Petraeus really hasn't done much, if anything, right. Last summer, he managed to piss Maliki off to the point that Maliki threatened to have the General recalled. Generals have to be politicians, that's how they get past the rank of Captain. But this is 4G warfare. They need to be diplomats. And lets differentiate right now: diplomacy and ass kissing are two completely different things. Petraeus has a handle on the latter, there's no doubt. But the former? Not so much.

Saturday Night Recap

There were three significant stories that I fully intended to blog about today, but I never got much blogging done Saturday...and here it is Sunday morning, and the Sunday editions are out, so lets consider this a mini-roundup of stuff that shouldn't get past your attention

*****

The New York Times reported that that Iraqi government, dominated as it is by al-Maliki and the Shiites factions, are balking at the American reliance on arming and fortifying Sunni tribesmen as security forces.

Who would have thought that the Iraqis would be sketchy about that plan? It isn't like Saddam Hussein, the brutal thug that oppressed the Shiites for two decades and change was a Sunni tribesman, or anything like that...

Oh...Wait...

*****

From McClatchy we learned that the State Department is (finally!) taking a closer look at First Kuwaiti and their future at the lucrative embassy-construction trough is in doubt. I am glad to see the State Department at least pretending to take this issue as seriously as I have been for ages. (See here, here, here, & here).

*****

The Washington Post ran a gut-check feature that should make even the most cold-blooded war supporter at least feel a moments hesitation about continuing this clusterfuck.

"When we first got here, all the shops were open. There were women and children walking out on the street," Alarcon said this week. "The women were in Western clothing. It was our favorite street to go down because of all the hot chicks."

That was 14 long months ago, when the soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, arrived in southwestern Baghdad. It was before their partners in the Iraqi National Police became their enemies and before Shiite militiamen, aligned with the police, attempted to exterminate a neighborhood of middle-class Sunni families.

Next month, the U.S. soldiers will complete their tour in Iraq. Their experience in Sadiyah has left many of them deeply discouraged, by both the unabated hatred between rival sectarian fighters and the questionable will of the Iraqi government to work toward peaceful solutions.

Asked if the American endeavor here was worth their sacrifice -- 20 soldiers from the battalion have been killed in Baghdad -- Alarcon said no: "I don't think this place is worth another soldier's life."

Read the whole thing. Just be warned, it's tough reading and may take you a while to get through. I have to wonder tho - will Rush Limbaugh weigh in and condemn them as "phony soldiers" because they see the futility of this fiasco?

Washington Post: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq Reported Crippled"

Well, the frothing fuckwits will have a field day with that WaPo headline. I can hear the chest thumping and chickenhawk bravado from here. They are already lighting bonfires around which to dance naked while chanting “Boo-Ya, Bitches! We Win! U!S!A! U!S!A!”

They are so predictable.

They will read the first sentence:

The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

Then conveniently overlook the inconvenient parts…

But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States. Such a declaration could fuel criticism that the Iraq conflict has become a civil war in which U.S. combat forces should not be involved. At the same time, the intelligence community, and some in the military itself, worry about underestimating an enemy that has shown great resilience in the past.

"I think it would be premature at this point," a senior intelligence official said of a victory declaration over AQI, as the group is known. Despite recent U.S. gains, he said, AQI retains "the ability for surprise and for catastrophic attacks." Earlier periods of optimism, such as immediately following the June 2006 death of AQI founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in a U.S. air raid, not only proved unfounded but were followed by expanded operations by the militant organization.

I hate that these jokers make me a conspiracy theorist, but what the hell? I’m just a crackpot blogger anyway, so here goes…is the WaPo article just a piece of a larger PR campaign?

Let’s take stock…last spring more astute observers started noticing that suddenly every single thing that happened in Iraq was the work of al Qaeda in Iraq. If a swarthy man sneezed, it was the work of al Qaeda. By last summer, virtually every report out of Iraq was citing violence by “al Qaeda” – but in reality, al Qaeda in Iraq has never really been more than a bogey-man, even the most generous assessments put their numbers at 10% of the insurgency, and likely only about 4%. (It has been long acknowledged that Shi’ite militias have represented a far greater threat than Sunni insurgents and jihadist fighters professing membership in AQI.)

Then the references slowed down.

And now, the WaPo prints a specious headline (Fred Hiatt is a perennial contender for the Wurlitzer Prize) and yellow feathers fill the air as the self-congratulating cowards and chickenhawks bust out the beer-bongs, launch at one another in belly-bumps and exchange high-fives and Hulk poses. “We’re kickin’ ass!!!”

Of a piece? That’s possible I suppose.

It’s always good news when groups attacking Americans are on the wane. But only if there is some “there” there, and this cast of characters has a lousy track record where honesty is concerned - having lied to get us into the war in the first damned place - so you'll just have to pardon me if I don't come running when the little boy cries "wolf!"