My head hurts.  Today's NY Times Week in Review has a distinguished symposium titled How to See This Mission Accomplished.

Wow, I thought naively.  A diverse group of opinions on what to do about Iraq on the fifth anniversary of the most shameful, bitterly ironic "celebration" in US military history.

Then I looked at the distinguished conspirators [oh, I mean contributors]: Fred Kagan, Daniel Perle, Danielle Pletka, Ken Pollack, Paul fucking Bremer, for chrissake!  Yes, NY Times.  The Mission will finally be "accomplished" by taking the advice of the rogues and criminals who engineered the initial "Mission Accomplished."

Not a single "dirty fucking hippie" [n. phrase: someone who had the sense to oppose the war before it started] (unless you consider Nathaniel Fick, a Marine infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to perhaps be a dirty fucking hippie).

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George W. Bush is suffering from another severe case of premature Iraq elation.  That's the inescapable diagnosis after a week which featured sunny statements from the President even as Baghdad and Basra descended into chaos.

I always read the Sunday NY Times Week in Review, in particular the Op-Ed page (now expanded to four pages!).  This week, there were two egregious features on Iraq:  An amazingly patronizing and blame-shifting piece by reporter John Burns and a purported symposium of views on Iraq on the occasion of the invasion's fifth anniversary. Anticipating the latter, I looked forward to a diversity of views reflecting on the past five years. Instead, there was an array of apologies, recriminations, excuses, and half-truths by neo-cons like Richard Perle, Danielle Pletka and Fred Kagan, a bizarre piece by Paul Bremer, a sorta mea culpa, but stay-the-course piece by Kenneth Pollack.

This presentation is brilliantly eviscerated by David Bromwich in a must-read entry in the current Huffington Post:  

I few months back I set out to illustrate prominent Chickenhawks. At the time I was offering to do images on request. DailyKos diarist 8ackgr0und N015e took me up on the offer and requested a series depicting "Fledgling Chickenhawks" as named in his diary.

The Chickenhawk frame had interested me for a while. I was particularly offended by these wingnuts who passionately argue for and defend the use of force in Iraq and the so called Global War on Terror, yet fail to heed their own call to take up arms. You can enlist up to the age of 42. The Chickenhawks I have chosen to illustrate are all under 42. I now call this group of under 42 year olds "The 43^rd Chairborne Chickenhawks, The George W. Bush Brigade". The 43 is meant to honor our 43^rd President of the United States. I started with 8ackgr0und N015e's list and expanded it a little.

This is not good. So not good.

The man who devised the Bush administration's Iraq troop surge has urged the US to consider sending elite troops to Pakistan to seize its nuclear weapons if the country descends into chaos.

In a series of scenarios drawn up for Pakistan, Frederick Kagan, a former West Point military historian, has called for the White House to consider various options for an unstable Pakistan.

These include: sending elite British or US troops to secure nuclear weapons capable of being transported out of the country and take them to a secret storage depot in New Mexico or a "remote redoubt" inside Pakistan; sending US troops to Pakistan's north-western border to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida; and a US military occupation of the capital Islamabad, and the provinces of Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan if asked for assistance by a fractured Pakistan military, so that the US could shore up President Pervez Musharraf and General Ashfaq Kayani, who became army chief this week.

The evidence, as a November 18 Washington Post editorial intones, is “overwhelming.” The evidence that the editorial adduces includes signs of diminishing violence throughout Iraq, the rout of al Qaeda from its strongholds, and a renewal of normal activity in the markets of Baghdad. On the basis of such evidence the indisputable verdict can now be delivered: “the ‘surge’ of U.S. military forces in Iraq this year has been, in purely military terms, a remarkable success.”

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

Over the weekend we sent John Negroponte over to Pakistan to do the old lean on Pervez Musharraf.  This was the beginnings of the "surge of diplomacy" that people are calling for in Iraq.  The problem, as it would be in Iraq, is that it's too late and the Bush Administration is too discredited for any of it to matter.

A special US mission to the embattled Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf ended in failure yesterday, and the Bush administration is inceasingly alarmed about the possible collapse of the government. There are also fears that its nuclear weapons could end up in the hands of Islamist extremists.

John Negroponte, the US deputy secretary of state, flew out of Islamabad after Musharraf, a close ally of the US, rejected his call to end emergency rule, to free political prisoners, resign from his post as army commander and hold free and fair elections in January.

“It would take the will of men, not nature, to bring down this horrific human invention.” So says Robert Kagan in his most recent column for The Washington Post. The “horrific human invention” to which he is referring is American slavery. Prior to the Civil War, Kagan tells us, there were those in America who, rather than confronting this shameful system with strength and will, preferred to let “nature take its course,” that is, to let the predetermined course of history step by step dismantle the institution of slavery. No direct governmental intervention, political or military, would be necessary to expunge the blight. The progress of civilization itself would do the job.

Crossposted at Progressive Historians

The last week has seen a number of bizarre comments come from Republicans that express not simply a disregard for the troops but, in a surprising breach of the Republican rhetorical style, a genuine disdain for America's Armed Forces. Sure, they love Petraeus, but he's like them: a career REMF that rose through the ranks through politicking and expressions of ideological loyalty, a man who had never really gotten his hands dirty on an actual field of battle, an academic who fought the Vietnam War after the fact in the quiet confines of Princeton's libraries, pursuing dreams of victory in a world premised on right-wing fantasies. Along these lines, Petraeus represents 'the big picture', the validity of decades of neoconservative musings. He is the face of their Grand Theory, and as such, he is beyond reproach. The troops, on the other hand, are only pawns in "the Great Conflict of Our Time".

Bush's trip to Anbar was not just a photo-op start to the September PR blitz in support of the surge. According to Fred Kagan, proud author of the surge, it was somehow akin to Lincoln at Gettysburg. Even if he has to say so himself.

The Gettysburg Of This War: The Bush Visit Could Well Mark A Key Turning Point In The War In Iraq And The War On Terror.

The wingnuts are loving it. So forget comparing this to Vietnam. It has nothing to do with a major power bogged down in the quagmire of an insurgency. It's like Normandy. No. It's like the Battle Of The Bulge. No. It's like fucking Gettysburg. And we can compare Bush's visit to the Sermon On The Mount. No. We can make it seem reminiscent of the Gettysburg Address. After 4 1/2 years of "Mission Accomplished" and "The Last Throes" there is little that can be done to resell this war to the vast majority. So they are going to go completely over the top in trying to sell it.

Fred Kagan wants you to have faith in the Iraq "surge" strategy.  You might expect that he would.  Kagan is, after all, the strategy's chief architect.  A darling of the neoconservative elite, Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and was associated with the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) which his brother Robert co-founded with Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit Bill Kristol.  

Amid talk that the so-called surge has failed, Kagan went before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in late June to defend the strategy.  Kagan's prepared remarks not only make one cringe at the knowledge that the Great Decider not only listens to his advice, he follows it.  

Here's an interesting take on the psychology at work behind the Iraq war:

"The Republicans who were most in support of the war continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found and al-Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots. They reduce their dissonance by rejecting evidence they were wrong."

They're still reducing their dissonance. For example, see escalation architect Fred Kagan at Think Progress:

The worst that can be said of [the escalation] at this point is that the results have been mixed. I frankly think the results are less mixed...We can argue about statistics, but at the end of the day, that argument is not going to get us anywhere right now. ... Whatever you can say about the current strategy, it has not failed.

No, the worst you can say about the escalation is that it brought the highest quarterly death toll on American soldiers since the beginning of the war. Not recognizing that isn't just cognitive dissonance, it's pathological delusion.

According to Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol, in the Salah-ad-Din province just north of Baghdad, al Qaeda has been having a tough time of late. Native Sunni tribes have turned against these foreign intruders and their fundamentalist decrees and have begun cooperating with the American Surge to seek the intruders out and eliminate them. Al Qaeda terrorists have responded by mounting a series of dramatic attacks, such as detonating explosives in the minarets of the Askariya shrine in Samarra.

According to Kagan and Kristol, this tactic

is clearly taking a page from the Viet Cong's book. The terrorists have been mounting a slow-motion Tet offensive of spectacular attacks on markets, bridges, and mosques, knowing that the media report each such attack as an American defeat.

Crossposted at ProgressiveHistorians

I'm writing this here because Cliff doesn't want us to get too overwrought with the fucks, but there is no other way to put it.

Surge Architect: More Time Needed

Fred Kagan, the man widely seen as the "architect" of the military surge in Iraq, sees signs of progress but warns that September is too early to make a final decision about how well it has achieved its goals.

Instead, in an interview with Time.com, Kagan recommended waiting until the end of the year before judging the operation's success. Even then, he added, it might be some months before Iraqis make the political compromises necessary to bring lasting stability to the country.

Fuck you Fred Kagan, and all the other little Kaganites that populate your little fucking echo chamber.

In a May 6 New York Times article, noted neoconservative and chief architect of the Iraq escalation strategy Fred Kagan said that lack of a "Plan B" is no reason to criticize the surge.  He argues that, in fact, "there is no Plan B because there cannot be one."  There can be no Plan B, he further states, because "The strategy now underway in Iraq… will change the situation in Iraq significantly, whether or not it succeeds in its aims."        

The Media Line reports that Iran claims it has shot down a U.S. drone aircraft that crossed into Iranian airspace .  (Hat tip to Raw Story for the link.)  The drone was probably conducting a reconnaissance/intelligence gathering mission, but what it was doing doesn't matter so much as where it was doing it.  

When President Bush announces his stay-the-course-plus plan for an escalation of the Iraq War tonight, he will be putting the final nail in the coffin of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, or, officially, the Iraq Study Group (ISG).

The ISG was set in motion last spring with great ballyhoo, and it was constantly referenced by Bush and his enablers throughout the summer and fall, and the run up to the November midterm elections. Back then, when the Republicans thought they could use it as a bulwark against surging antiwar voter sentiment, Bush insisted that we all wait for the Baker Commission report before considering a “course correction” in Iraq. Some of the quasi realists on the right side of the aisle thought the ISG report would give Bush political cover to cut his losses by reorienting his disastrous Gulf region policies.

UPDATE: Several people have asked for a map showing various areas and locations around Baghdad. I have posted it at the end of the diary. Due to the width limit on images, it is a bit crowded. I will try to make a cleaner, updated version and post it from time-to-time to track the situation in the city. Thanks to everyone for the helpful information and kind words.

Tonight, the Fabulous Leader will present his new plan for escalating us to "victory" in Iraq. His recommendations, two months in the making, are likely to be based largely on the work of Fred Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute. Kagan's report, called "Choosing Victory," is, in fact, a 56-page PowerPoint presentation in which critical thinking is replaced by bullet points.

I will try to get to expose some of the logical flaws later. But right now I want to direct your attention to maps used to show critical sectarian divides in the city.