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CURRENT UPDATES: February 23, 2007 Dear
Friends, Well, we knew it had to happen sometime, right? The British are pulling out of Iraq--not all at once and not tomorrow-- but they are on their way. Denmark has also announced that they will be withdrawing their troops. Once
these two are gone, the coalition of the willing will have dwindled
to a cohort of the will-less (to leave, anyway) which includes South
Korea, Poland, Georgia, Australia, Romania, El Salvador and Bulgaria.
South Korea is the only nation listed with more than 1,000 soldiers
and they are said to be considering a withdrawal as well. In
an interview with ABC News, Vice President Dick Cheney said he saw
the decision as "an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq
where things are going pretty well." Bush called it a "sign
of success," maybe because he hopes that the UK and Denmark
will join in the next invasion on his wish-list-to Iran. Have
a good weekend, Bill Hartung TABLE OF CONTENTS I: WAR WITH IRAN? An Update III.
BLACKWATER: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army V: HAVE A HEART: Senate Works to Ban Cluster Bombs I.
WAR WITH IRAN? An Update The
Bush administration's continuing attempts to demonize Iran - and
to blame it for ongoing violence in Iraq - raise once again the
question of whether they are engaging in saber-rattling or sowing
the seeds for war. Recent
administration assertions bear an eerie similarity to the kinds
of charges and misstatements that paved the path to war with Iraq.
The difference this time around is that the public, the press, and
the Congress are much more skeptical than they were last time aroun The
recent fiasco over the alleged role of the Iranian government in
providing advanced improvised explosive devices (IEDs) - known as
explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) -- to their allies in Iraq
is a case in point. First there was a closed door briefing in which
some weapons were displayed and charges were made that their transfer
to Iraq had been approved at the Òhighest levelsÓ of the Iranian
government. Then, Gen. Peter Pace, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
argued that the presence of the weapons in Iraq was no proof that
they had been sent at the behest of top Iranian leaders. President
Bush topped off the affair by suggesting that it doesn't matter
whether the Iranian leaders approved the transfer of the weapons,
that the point is that "they're there" killing American
troops, and that the U.S. needs to take whatever steps necessary
to protect the troops. USEFUL
RESOURCES ON IRAN: Our colleague Carl Conetta,
from the Project on Defense Alternatives, has compiled a "Confronting
Iran"resource page that offers critical perspectives on the
current crisis, its origins, and implications. Norman Dombey, "Iran
and the Bomb," London Review of Books, January 25, 2007.
They
also point out that Senator Joseph Biden, the head of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee, recently said he would initiate Òa
constitutional confrontationÓ with the Bush Administration if military
action was taken against Iran without Congressional approval. "Talking
Points: Escalating Threats of U.S. Attacks Against Iran"Phyllis
Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies, 14 February 2007 II.
NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR AGREEMENT: Sign of Hope When
even the Bush administration gets down to real diplomacy, it's a
sign of hope. The announcement in mid-February of a deal in which
North Korea will take the first steps towards dismantling its nuclear
program in exchange for large supplies of fuel oil and eventual
political recognition sounds like a Òman bites dogÓ story. What
moved the Bush administration to talk rather than fight? Various
theories have been proposed. One is that Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice convinced President Bush that this could be a major foreign
policy achievement. In contrast to the war in Iraq and the administration's
feeble efforts to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians,
there is no question that the North Korea deal shines brightly as
a real accomplishment -- if it sticks. Other,
more realist factors may have come into play as well. U.S. military
planners have long noted that military force is not a viable option
in the North Korean case. Absent far better intelligence than currently
exists, air strikes to destroy all of Pyongyang's nuclear facilities
would almost surely fail. Nor could they address North Korea's existing
stocks of bomb making materials, which are believed to be enough
to build as many as eight to ten nuclear weapons. A
war to force Òregime changeÓ in North Korea could be won by the
U.S., but it would come at far too high a price - the South Korean
capital of Seoul is close to the North Korean border, and Pyongyang's
non-nuclear arsenal could kill several hundred thousand South Koreans
in such a conflict. Furthermore,
the other parties to the talks - China, Japan, South Korea and Russia
- were all supportive of a diplomatic solution, and helped keep
the talks alive during periods of U.S. opposition to or disinterest
in moving forward. The fact that South Korea, the country arguably
most at risk from a North Korean bomb, was a firm supporter of a
practical diplomatic solution made it harder for the administration
to avoid negotiating. And
it can't be overlooked that Christopher Hill, the U.S. representative
to the talks, did a good job once he was free to negotiate, which
meant in part being allowed to work around hardliners like Vice
President Dick Cheney and the neocons sprinkled throughout the administration's
foreign policy and national security bureaucracies. The
first phase of the agreement calls for North Korea to take concrete
steps within 60 days, including closing down its nuclear reactor
at Yongbyon, getting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy
Agency on the ground, and beginning to reveal the locations of its
other nuclear facilities. In exchange it will receive 50,000 tons
of fuel oil at the end of the 60-day period. Conservatives
inside and outside of the Bush administration have already been
vigorously attacking the deal, not only in its own right but because
they fear, in the words of Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler,
that Òthe administration's willingness to bend on North Korea does
not bode well for hard-line policies toward Iran, Palestinians or
other issues.Ó Let's hope they're right. USEFUL
RESOURCES ON NORTH KOREA:
"U.S. Envoy Christopher Hill Discusses North Korea Nuke Deal,"
Lehrer Newshour, February 15, 2007, transcript: Joseph
Cirincione, "North Korean Pressure Points: New Nuclear Accord
Reflects New Realities,"February 13, 2007, available at: www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/north_korea.html
George
Perkovich, ÒImperfect Progress,Ó Wall Street Journal, February 14,
2007, available at www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=print&id=19025
Leon
V. Sigal, "Tug of War with Shorter Rope: Hard-liners Working
to Trip Up Nuclear Talks,"Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2007,
available at: III.
BLACKWATER: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army Blackwater.
The name crops up regularly, but never in relationship to good news.
Fallujah, New Orleans, House and Senate investigations of bilking,
fraud and abuse, bereft families. Most recently, a helicopter owned
by private security firm Blackwater was downed in Iraq. Investigative
journalist Jeremy Scahill, who won awards as a correspondent for
DemocracyNow and is now a Puffin writing fellow at The Nation magazine,
has pulled all these bad stories together into a terrible and complete
picture of "the world's most powerful mercenary army." Scahill
follows the company's "epic"rise from 1996-- when visionary
Blackwater executives opened a training camp "to fulfill the
anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related
security training"-- to a multi-national corporation that places
a high premium on helping America fight the global war on terrorism.
He builds the case that the story of Blackwater is the "story
about the future of war, democracy and governance"because the
company is "the living embodiment of the changes wrought by
the revolution in military affairs and the privatization agenda
radically expanded by the Bush administration under the guise of
the war on terror." The
book is as compelling as it exhaustive, and it provides critical
context and analysis to the "moving target"of private
military corporations as Democratic members of Congress flex their
muscle with investigative hearings. Representative Henry Waxman
held hearings in the Government Oversight and Reform Subcommittee
on February 7, 2007 to investigate the costs of Blackwater's security
operations and the adequacy of federal oversight of Blackwater and
other security contractors. The
hearings began with testimony from the families of the four Blackwater
employees killed in Fallujah in March 2004. ÒFollowing that horrific
incident on March 31, 2004, we turned to Blackwater for answers.
What we received was appalling. We were told that the information
surrounding the circumstances in which our loved ones were killed
was "confidential."When we insisted on seeing the report
concerning the incident, Blackwater told us that we would have to
sue them to get it,"began the testimony. After
recounting the protections promised the four men, and the facts
that Blackwater did not provide even maps or routes, much less armored
vehicles and rear gunners, the testimony continues: "Lack of
preparation and the strive to make as much money as quickly as possible,
even if not 100% ready, is Blackwater's style of business. This
style was confirmed just last month when Blackwater's president,
Gary Jackson, told the Harvard Business Review: "I constantly
push for the 80% solution that is executable now, over the 100%
solution we might be able to devise in another three weeks.' An
80% solution means that 20% of the operators are dead. Blackwater
actually lost 9 of its 34 operators in just over two months. That
means that only 74% survived-which is pretty close to Blackwater's
goal of 80%." Read
the whole family testimony, Blackwater's response, and the discussion
amongst members of Congress, at http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1165
On
Democracy Now, soon after the hearing Jeremy Scahill concludes that
within the context of the privatization of war, companies like Blackwater
benefit from "a culture of impunity in Iraq. These guys are
killed, and their numbers don't get counted. And they kill people,
and they don't get prosecuted." A
Houston Chronicle article at the end of January cites Labor Department
statistics to determine that 770 civilian contractors have been
killed in Iraq since March 2003. In 2006 alone, 301 were killed
with 124 deaths in the last three months of the year. Another 7,761
contractors were injured as of December 31, 2006 said the Labor
Department, which compiled the statistics at the request of the
newspaper. Learn
more about the book, read articles by Scahill and find ordering
information at http://www.blackwaterbook.com/
The
January 28, 2007 Houston Chronicle article, entitled "Contractor
Deaths in Iraq Nearing 800"would not be found online. Feel
free to email berrigaf@newschool.edu
for a copy of the front-page article. Roaches,
Mouse-Droppings and Mindless Bureaucracy at Walter Reade We
should all be cringing about the state of Walter Reade hospital,
where wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan return to convalesce
and recover. A
ground-breaking investigative article by Washington Post reporters
Anne Hull and Dana Priest found that the facilities where recovering
soldiers live for months and even years smell "like greasy
carryout" and are filled with signs of neglect: "mouse-droppings,
belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses." There
are holes in the walls and black mold creeping through the plaster.
But the neglect does not stop at the physical structure-soldiers
and their families told of endless bureaucracy, lost paper-work,
no follow-up and no support. Soldiers
on dozens of medications don't see psychiatrists, Purple Heart awardees
are told they never served in Iraq, and databases don't communicate
with each other, meaning that paperwork must be filed in ten different
places. There is little support for family members who come to help
their sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Evis Morales spent
two weeks sleeping in the lobby of the hospital where her son was
receiving treatment because no one told her there was a free shuttle
back to her government paid hotel room, and she only spoke Spanish.
"They can have Spanish speaking recruits to convince my son
to go into the Army," she told the Washington Post,"Why
can't they have Spanish-speaking translators when he's injured?" Marine
Sergeant Ryan Grover spent 16 months at Walter Reed recovering from
amputation. He told the Washington Post, "We don't know what
to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers.
It's a nonstop process of stalling. We've done our duty. We fought
the war. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to
give us the easy transition should be doing it." President
Bush visited Walter Reade right before Christmas as said, "We
owe [the soldiers] all we can give then. Not only for when they're
in harm's way, but when they come to help them adjust if they have
wounds or help them adjust after their time in the service." With
his new request for war spending, the price tag on the war in Iraq
creeps toward $800 billion ($507 billion to date, with $230 billion
in 2007 funding and new requirements). The Office of Management
and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office disagree over the
costs of the surge, with OMB estimating an addition $5.6 billion
to send 21,500 more troops into Iraq. The CBO says that is way too
low, and puts the figure at closer to $9 to $13 billion for a four-month
escalation, or $20 to $27 billion for a sustained escalation over
the next year. Just
to throw another figure into the mix, the President's overall request
for the Pentagon is $481.4 billion. None
of the billions going to fund the war, the surge, or the Pentagon
are going to going to be seen and felt in the lives of the men and
women caught in the hell -- "the holding ground for physically
and psychologically damaged outpatients"-that Walter Reade
has become and that Hull and Priest describe in such heart-breaking
and frustrated detail in their article. The
next time you hear Tony Snow or George Bush invoke "soldiers
in harms way" as a reason to do something (like invade Iran,
for example) think about Staff Sergeant John Daniel Shannon, a 43-year-old
who came to Walter Reade with a shattered eye and skull. When he
was transferred to the outpatient wards he was handed a map and
sent on his way. Barely able to walk and completely disoriented,
he stumbled around the 113-acre institution for hours asking directions
to his "new home." Once he found his room, he sat there
for weeks before his case manager found him. Priest
and Hull's series has provoked outrage and calls for investigations,
and on February 22nd, the Washington Post reported that Gen. Richard
A. Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, announced he is personally
committed to upgrading the facility. Teams have already moved in
to remove moldy carpets, fix broken elevators and make other needed
repairs. But the bureaucratic lethargy and disorganization will
be a bigger task to tackle. Representative
Thomas M. Davis III (R-VA), the top Republican on the House Committee
on Oversight and Government Reform, was quoted in the February 22
article saying, "You could put all of the wounded soldiers
in the Ritz-Carlton and it wouldn't fix the personnel, management
and recordkeeping problems that keep them languishing in outpatient
limbo out there for months while paperwork from 11 disjointed systems
gets shuffled and lost.Ó To
read the whole series of articles, visit http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2007/02/21/LI2007022100671.html
To
hear Veterans respond, and learn more, visit: http://www.optruth.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7&Itemid=34
Iraq
Veterans Against the War: Military
Families Speak Out: http://www.mfso.org/article.php?list=type&type=6
V.
HAVE A HEART: Senate Works to Ban Cluster Bombs On
Valentine's Day, Senator Feinstein took the Senate podium to argue
for the "Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Action"
which she introduced with Leahy, Mikulski and Sanders. If
passed, the legislation would ban the United States from using cluster
bombs in civilian areas and would prohibit the U.S. from exporting
cluster bombs to any other country that would use these weapons
on civilians. The legislation would also ban U.S. funding for the
use, sale or transfer of cluster munitions that might drop explosive
duds that later explode, killing innocent civilians. Winding
down a speech full of facts about cluster weapons, Feinstein argued
that "each death that results from an unexploded American bomblets
weakens American diplomacy and American valuesÉ unexploded cluster
bombs fuel anger and resentment and make security, stabilization
and reconstruction efforts that much harder. In
Oslo, Norway, more than 40 nations met February 20-23 to discuss
an international treaty to ban cluster munitions. The United States
did not attend. But the participating nations came up with a strong
declaration and a plan of action by the end of their meeting. As
Steve Goose, Co-Chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition commented,
"The momentum has to continue and those states still outside
this process need to get onboard if they are serious about protecting
civilians from the effects of armed conflict." Read
the legislation, which is now before the Foreign Relations Committee,
Info on the Oslo Meeting,
and Human Rights Watch's work on cluster bombs, visit
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