By Larry Johnson
Tired of the drum beat of bad news surrounding TreasonGate and the outing of CIA officer Valerie Wilson. How about some good news from Iraq? Sorry, nothing to report. Before you remind me about the apparent success of the recent election, keep reading.
Biography:
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world. Further bio details. More links below the fold. |
The delusional happiness reflected in Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s remarks this week to Congress about the so-called progress in Iraq ignores hard facts that point to a debacle. The international media appears to be finally catching on that the Washington spin about the purple thumb as a sign of democratic progress is pure nonsense. It is true that more people in Iraq voted in this election than last January. What Rice and other folks out of touch with reality ignore is that the increased number of Sunnis who voted came out to defeat the constitution. Unfortunately, the fix was in. Vote fraud was rampant. U.S. TV crews caught one Shia on tape casting seven yes votes. That’s sort of an old style American politics a la Chicago’s Daley machine–you know, vote early, vote often. And, results are now, once again, being withheld to “investigate” the irregularities.
Here is a bold prediction: The Constitution will pass and Shia politicians will have a lock on the new Government of Iraq. Consequently, the civil war currently underway will escalate. … Continued BELOW:
As the Iraqi Army grows, comprised mostly of Shia and Kurds, attacks against Sunnis will also increase. And that will put the United States in an impossible situation. If we allow the Shia Army and militias to attack Sunni targets we will continue to be the target of Sunni insurgents. If we intervene to try to aid the Sunnis, the Shia’s will turn on us. If you doubt that I would ask you to recall what happened in the Shia enclave, Sadr City, in April of 2004. That battle killed Casey Sheehan and left my cousin’s son with a shattered leg.
Oh, speaking of the war: The road from downtown Baghdad to the International Airport still has not been secured and remains the most dangerous road in the world. Meanwhile, as of 21 October, Americans are dying in Iraq at a rate of almost three per day. This is the highest loss of life since January 2005. So much for Rosy Scenario and the dawn of peace and understanding.
Finally, there is the ham-handed attempt to pass off as legitimate a letter allegedly written by Bin Laden’s number two guy, Ayman Zwahiri, to the Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab Zarqawi. This appears to be a rather crude “Information Operation” designed to sow confusion in the ranks of the jihadists battling U.S. forces in Iraq. While well intentioned (i.e., trying to create confusion among the insurgents) the execution of this op was pitiful. Having the newly christened National Director of Intelligence release this travesty ends up calling into question the professionalism and competence of the organization that was supposed to fix the mess in the intelligence community. Rather reparing damage, Negroponte and his crew seem to be causing more mayhem.
Taken as a whole, a lousy week in Iraq as that country slips to a new level of hell and the competence of US authorities to mange this debacle is called increasingly into question.
Larry C. Johnson
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I find it significant that the major media pretty quickly dropped any coverage of that transparently riduculous letter purportedly from Zawahiri to Zarquawi.
I surmise the MSM owners got the word from on high to lay off once it became apparent to the Bush regime that this stupid “OP”, (as Larry Johnson referred to it as), would quickly be exposed as a forgery if more scrutiny were brought to bear.
Oh well, another week in fantasyland for the Bush regime. These lunatics are beyond hope, beyond redemption. They’ll be lying to us and deluding themselves all the way to their own demise.
Your title is apt. Iraq is indeed slipping away with nary a glance from the Fourth Estate.
The non-coverage of the voting fraud and the investigation of it is astonishing even considering the low standards we’ve come to accept.
Before the vote, the constitutional referendum was trumpeted in the media as a watermark in the progress to a “new Iraq”. Now that the legitimacy of the process is in doubt, the story has absolutely vanished.
I have a successful business type in-law who is Republican in political orientation. However, during a recent visit he talked of a recent flight he was on with a soldier trying to get home from Iraq with a two week leave. The soldier, who was part of the same unit that lost the guys from the Cleveland area in early June, talked to him at length about the realities we face in Iraq. One of his tasks was to help train Iraqi security forces. He talked of the seemingly impossible task of getting Iraqi’s to work/fight together as a unit. Clan/tribe loyalties always won out. Under pressure, they fled. Sound to you like we are making “progress” there?? Sounds to me as though the task we have taken on is impossible.
Support our troops, get them home NOW!
Funny. Saddam Hussein didn’t have that problem. Had we kept the Iraqi army intact after occupying the country, this would not have been a difficulty. They already had the leadership and structure to make it work.
We are having to reinvent the wheel because of the idiocy of the NeoCons and Bush/Cheney.
Our foreign policy seems to be conducted by and for foreigners either renting or seducing or extorting various branches of our government.
I’m curious about the taboo on even suggesting that the Kurds deserve formal sovereignty.
Why? Turkey cannot permit Kurdish culture to thrive free of minority repression.
(Iran dislikes the idea of sovereign Kurdistan, too, but not so ferociously.)
Forget national interest. Forget even the tenderminded solicitude for human rights.
But if we could stabilize Iraq through partition and cut our expense on caskets and prosthetic devices, what exactly are we getting out of Turkey in return for honoring their genocidal prerogatives?
(Or is all this too for Iran?)
Iraq is not that has happened since is the history that was to come and will come. We had a 60 day window of opportunity at best, and we lost it. There has never been any chance of winning this war since the fourth of july 2003.
It took about 5 months for the Baathists to reorganize. They had planned the resistance before the invasion, but I suspect that even they didn’t predict the violence that the US was able to impose. But they were ready by October. We know this from journalists who were there and had been moving around relatively freely. Just before the resurgence in early November, a number of them were warned not to go out by their Iraqi friends.
None of this is a surprise. The United States will be humiliated in this enterprise beyond anyone’s imagining. As an American I am not happy about this; but the road back to sanity is facing facts.
I agree that Iraq isn’t slipping away-it’s gone period. Any chance of our winning was lost almost from the time we steamrolled into Bagdad and didn’t secure anything along the way nor secure anything in Bagdad after we got there.(and not having enough troops).
And there isn’t any chance in hell that we’ll somehow magically win anything as there has been absolutely no change in stratagy from day one. All we’re doing now it seems is spinning our wheels, getting troops killed, depleting all our stockpiles of equipment around the world and here at home also making us even weaker militarily. I fear something bad is going to happen sooner rather than later due to Rummy’s criminal incompetence and bush delusion in thinking that we’re ‘winning’.
I’ll disagree that there has not been any change in strategy since we got there. It has been done in secrecy, so it is not obvious, but the original strategy was to install Ahmed Chalabi as the President/Dictator of Iraq.
That collapsed within weeks. The Shia wouldn’t buy it, so the next strategy was to turn the government over to the Shia and Kurds in an apparent free election that protected the rights of the Sunnis.
With this last election on the Constitution, that too has failed, and the only backup is to hope that the Shia can pull our chestnuts out of the fire. At this point, hope and control of the Public Relations is the only strategy.
In short, all the strategies have been fantasies. Installing Chalabi was the best one going, and it was an almost instant failure. The Bush administration is a White House that does not do policy, so politics becomes the “strategy.”
Conservatives cannot be trusted with government. They can’t do anything effective.
I agree with that. Maybe I should have said that their ideas of strategy were all failed ideas that I didn’t think would have ever worked..and still aren’t working. Buscho’s agenda/ideas have nothing much to do with the Iraqi people and how they might want their country run.
Same way that they replaced Gardner with Bremmer-he wanted to start having all the cities and towns get busy and have their own elections and run things themselves and he got booted for that…I think that was his name?
Actually I thought Jay Garner was bounced because he didn’t want to disband the Iraqi Army. Instead he wanted to reconstitute it and use it to patrol the borders, something we have never had the troops to do. Also, he didn’t want to disband the police and fire all the civil servants.
Essentially I think all of that was stuff desired by Ahmed Chalabi before he took over as the new President-for-life. It is my suspicion that Chalabi complained that Garner wasn’t cooperating, and the NeoCons bounced him and replaced him with Bremer.
Notice that Bush now has his entire strategy for getting out of Iraq resting on the ability to get an Iraq Army trained and organized to replace the American troops. That’s something Jay Garner had, and Jerry Bremer gave away.
Some publisher needs to offer Jay Garner a small mint to publish his memoir of that period when he was the administrator of Iraq and how he was replaced. Bremer’s would be nice, too, but Garner’s would be priceless. After the idiotic decision to actually invade Iraq with too few troops to occupy the country, the replacement of Garner is the key to the Bush failure in Iraq.