Like most of you, it burned me to hear Bush and the Republican side complain that Democrats in the drafting and vote for the Iraq Supplemental were "micro-managing" the war on Iraq. It also burned me that the Democrats were being accused of not listening to the generals on the ground.
But I did listen to a returning military advisor, Mr. Bush. His message was here: Four Years Ago I arrived in Iraq. I left Three Years Later, Different After three years in Iraq he now works in the Department of Defense.
If anything, I think the Democrats have been "macro-managing" the war in Iraq, and with good reason -- the military policy of the Bush administration has been fatally myopic. While the Iraq Supplemental is being re-drafted, and while funds for the US military are running out, I thought this a good time to look at my open files from The Office of Iraq War Micro Management:
Item One:
US OPENS MORE IRAQI PRISONS
Sunday, March 18, 2007 - FreeMarketNews.com
The United States decided to expand its major detention centers in Iraq after military officials predicted that the ongoing security crackdown in Baghdad will add hundreds or thousands of prisoners to the 17,000 detainees already in U.S. custody, an army spokesman said. –Uruknet
Item Two:
U.S. troops have moved into Sadr City in Baghdad with some care instead of kicking down doors and humiliating the locals.
Humiliating the locals can be read here as the wanton killing of civilians. Re: Haditha, Fallujah, Ishaqi
But the reason these points of light will not overcome the Iraqi darkness is more profound. All these improvements in American forces' performance are at the tactical level, and that is not where most wars are decided. cite
Send this one up to the Office of Macro Management, where they are still hashing out the difference between a civilian and an insurgent, and what are the limits of the battlefield of the "global war on terror."
During the Vietnam war the CIA conducted Operation Phoenix, an assassination program. The goal was not only to eliminate those Vietnamese who might oppose the U.S. most of the population of Vietnam was against the US, but also to terrorize the entire population of South Vietnam and to suppress opposition to the occupying U.S. forces. Over 20,000 Vietnamese were murdered, often at random. TV2 Denmark
Item Three:
Sadr City Protests
Several thousand people protested last Friday following evening prayers in the first public expression of hostility toward the US military operations now taking place inside the densely-populated Shiite working class district of Sadr City in Baghdad. Demonstrators chanted "No occupation" and "No America" as they marched in opposition to the announcement by American commanders that they were establishing their first permanent base inside Sadr City’s limits, at an Iraqi police station cite
Item Four: Occupation
"What we are doing in Iraq is policing an intractable civil war," Reid said sternly to the press, as Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Biden (D-DE) and others stood beside him.
"We believe that this is wrong, we Democrats believe that," said Reid. "We believe the President should be held accountable," he continued, "for a new direction in Iraq." He panned the Republican plan for Iraq as being just a blank sheet piece of paper.
"We are now an occupying force," Reid said grimly. "The United States an 'occupying force,' it's hard for me to say those words." RawStory
It took four years to be able to say the words "civil war." Now Reid is barely able to say "occupying force." What's so terrifying about that?
Item Four A: The Legal Obligations of An Occupying Power
As the Office of Macro-Management saw the Iraq war in April 2003:
As their soldiers police Baghdad and their engineers grapple with the city's failing water and electrical systems, American military officials in Iraq are acting out of more than simply humanitarian good will - they are required to repair the country under international law.
According to well-established treaties that the United States has long upheld, the invading American forces must restore and maintain order in Iraq. And that is only the beginning of the reparative responsibilities of a foreign occupying power.
There's a strict duty here - the Pentagon had a responsibility to do something about the looting of Baghdad, and it didn't. Basically, we're now responsible for the entire country of Iraq and all of its 25 million residents. Somebody should have given the order to stop the looting and protect those buildings.
If Iraqi citizens need food and medicine, the United States must get it for them. If orphans need an education, the United States must provide it. If anyone in Iraq needs books or supplies to practice their religion, American forces have an obligation to help gather and distribute them.
The laws of occupation are so demanding that some legal scholars think they are a disincentive for American officials to declare a formal end to the war. Once the United States' status as an occupier is established it not only inherits Iraq's humanitarian and peacekeeping needs but also faces new obstacles in its effort to find or kill Saddam Hussein. He is a military target as long as the war continues, but becomes a "protected person" during a military occupation, subject to criminal prosecution but not to assaults by Special Forces or 2,000-pound bombs
Common Dreams
Robert Little
Published on Friday, April 18, 2003
when it could have made a difference
Item Five: The Failure of the US as Occupying Force
Iraqi Civilians Pay For U.S. Government/Corporate Healthcare Corruption
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
instead of being delivered to 150 brand-new Primary Health Care centers (PHCs) as originally planned, the Eagle Global Logistics vehicles were directed to drop them off at a storage warehouse in Abu Ghraib. Not only did some of the equipment arrive damaged at the warehouse owned by PWC of Kuwait, one in 14 crates was missing, according to the delivery documents. The shipment was fairly typical: Military auditors would later calculate that roughly 46 percent of some $70 million in medical equipment deliveries made to the Abu Ghraib warehouse last spring had missing or damaged crates or contained boxes that were mislabeled or not labeled at all.
Not that it really mattered. Just over three weeks before the April 27th delivery, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had canceled the construction of 130 of the 150 PHCs for which the materiel was intended. As a result, the equipment that could help diagnose and treat Iraqi illness (and escalating bomb or gun injuries) now sits idle waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it.
Dust in My Eyes
Item Six: The Failure of the US as an Occupying Force
Four years later, Iraqi suffering deepens
Today marks four years since the U.S. began bombing Iraq in this latest war. While there's been a great deal of discussion in the U.S. media about the considerable toll the war has taken on American and other coalition soldiers, let us take time today to contemplate the death and suffering the violence has caused for Iraqi civilians:
- An estimated 59,000 to 65,000 civilians -- Iraqi men, women and children -- have been reported killed by the U.S. military intervention and occupation, according to Iraq Body Count.
- Other estimates of the war's toll on Iraqi civilians have been even higher. A study by researchers with Johns Hopkins University and Al Mustansiriya University published in the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006 estimated that there have been 655,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq since March 2003.
- The U.N. High Commission on Refugees estimates that as many as 2 million Iraqis have been forced to flee to other countries -- about 16 percent of the total Iraqi population. To put that in perspective, 16 percent of the population of the United States would be more than 48 million people.
- UNHCR estimates that there are as many as 1.7 million internally displaced people in Iraq -- civilians who've been forced from their homes as a result of violence or threats, and who are unable or unwilling to leave the country. UNHCR predicts that this number may rise above 2.3 million by the end of this year.
- Mental health professionals in Iraq say they are seeing a disturbing spike in mental health disorders, and the problem is compounded by the country's lack of facilities and services, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle.
- Iraqi women are suffering an explosion in gender-based violence since the war began. According to a study released earlier this month by the human rights group MADRE, "Under US occupation, Iraqi women have endured a wave of gender-based violence, including widespread abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, 'honor killings,' domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings, and public hangings. Much of this violence is systematic -- directed by the Islamist militias that mushroomed across Iraq after the US toppled the mostly secular Ba'ath regime."
- The use of depleted uranium weapons by the United States is taking a toll on Iraqis' long-term health. In the wake of the first Gulf War, where DU munitions were also used, cases of lymphoblastic leukemia in Iraq more than quadrupled, according to a study that appeared in The Lancet in February 1998. Other radiation-related cancers also increased at an alarming rate, along with birth defects and diseases of the immune system.
reprinted with permission by Sue Sturgis
Institute for Southern Studies
Item Seven: The Failure of the US as an Occupying Force
Six Thousand Days
That is over 6,000 days since the barbaric embargo and the occupation...
Over 6,000 days of savagery, brutality, violence, destruction, rape, torture, imprisonments, starvation, neglect, abandonment...
Over 6,000 days of living in the obscurity, to the blind eyes and deaf ears of the rest of the world...
Over 6'000 days of being left on the margins of the international community, marginalized into shadows, into ghosts with no names, into a subhuman category, into a void of total despair, left to fend for ourselves...
First, during the 13 years of the most brutal sanctions that history has ever witnessed followed by another 4 years of the most savage occupation known to any living human...
And so we are dumped collectively with our ruins, debris, sickness, garbage, poverty into a convenient forgetfulness...rotting away...on the fringes...in our homes, in our streets, in prisons you have constructed specially for the occasion...for people like Omar who is not 18 yet and for Kamel who is 56.
Rendering the whole of Iraq a huge detention camp that people try to flee and escape from, only to find themselves prisoners of lack, poverty and rejection in other countries.
LAYLA ANWAR
Arab Woman Blues
March 22, 2007
Item Eight: The Failure of the US as an Occupying Force
The most recent Lancet study, which puts Iraqi civilian deaths at upwards of 250,000, like the previous 2004 study excludes Fallujah.
If they included clusters from Fallujah the study would have been skewed off the register.
When going door to door the study could not include civilian deaths> from entire families that have been wiped out.
The United Nations Development Program also acknowledge that their numbers are derived from a question — posed to household members concerning dead and missing relatives — that "underestimates deaths, because households in which all members were lost are> omitted."
>> In Iraq in 2001 the average life expectancy at birth was 74 years
>> In Iraq in 2006 the life expectancy at birth was 59 years (UNICEF)
>> Infant mortality has tripled in Iraq over the last 3 years.
>> Child mortality has more than doubled over the last 3 years.
>> Infant and child malnutrition has doubled in the last four years.
>> Refugees 2 million, internally displaced persons 1.5 million.
No potable water. Malnutrition rates for children under 6 doubled what they were during the time of Saddam. Electricity now down to an average of just one hour a day. Civilian death toll in the hundred of thousands. Contracts for rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq still not awarded to the Iraqi people. And now, in the Iraq Supplemental a deal struck so that Iraqi oil will be managed by foreign, not Iraqi conglomerates.
(Facts checked with Dahr Jamail)
Item Nine: US MicroManagement of Iraq Civil War
If we consider the operational and strategic situations in Iraq, we can easily see why no amount of tactical success can save us. Strategically, we are fighting to support a Shiite regime closely aligned with Iran, our most potent local opponent. Every tactical success merely moves us closer to giving Iran a new ally in the form of a restored Iraqi state under Shiite domination. The more tactical successes we win, the worse our strategic situation gets. This flows not from any tactical failure (though there have been plenty of those), but from botching the strategic level from the outset. Saddam's Iraq was the main regional counterweight to Iran, which means we should not have attacked it.
Operationally, we have been maneuvered by Iraq's Shiites into fighting their civil war for them, focusing our efforts against the Sunnis. As I have observed before, we are in effect the Shiites 'unpaid Hessians. That is why Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his Mahdi Army not to fight us in Sadr City. It is not that he is afraid of us; he is simply making a rational operational decision.
Our only other apparent option is to take a more even hand and fight the Shiite militias as well as the Sunnis, which is what some in Washington want our forces to do. But that would make our operational situation even worse, because the Shiites lie across our lines of communication. If we get into a fight with them, they can cut off our supplies, leaving us effectively encircled -- the essence of operational defeat.
Iraq, Flicker of Hope
UPI; March 23, 2007
Conclusion:
If you want to end the war in Iraq, as we all do, it's time to face the issue as has Senator Reid. The success or failure of the mission in Iraq can be measured by how the US lives up to its obligations as an OCCUPYING POWER.
"What we are doing in Iraq is policing an intractable civil war," Reid said sternly to the press, as Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Joe Biden (D-DE) and others stood beside him.
"We believe that this is wrong, we Democrats believe that," said Reid. "We believe the President should be held accountable," he continued, "for a new direction in Iraq." He panned the Republican plan for Iraq as being just a blank sheet piece of paper.
"We are now an occupying force," Reid said grimly. "The United States an 'occupying force,' it's hard for me to say those words."
"After four years of failure in Iraq, the president's only answer is to do more of the same," said Sen. Harry Reid. Democrats must not support a Supplemental Bill that funds eighteen months more of "more of the same."
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files still open: