Needlenose

rumors that Colin Powell didn’t buy this either

panic and cash payoutsBecause it sure looks like the cockroaches are starting to scatter.

While most senior Bush administration officials are still sticking with the company line that Iraq is a big country and they need more time to look for those elusive “weapons of mass destruction,” reporters and others are becoming skeptical as that excuse drags into its third month.

Adding to the pressure is a mounting campaign by former spy-agency officials who say that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon bypassed normal procedures to set up a more politically motivated review (and slanting) of intelligence information — a criticism that is apparently being echoed by current CIA and Defense Dept. analysts in official complaints filed internally and anonymous leaks to reporters.

Amid the rising chorus of questions, some folks in the war-hawk crowd are starting to get antsy and improvising on the script. Some optimistic freelancers are pushing the amusingly desperate line that, hey, Saddam Hussein himself counts as a “weapon of mass destruction” (of course, they can’t find him either so far, but that’s another story.) Joshua Marshall says the excuse he’s hearing in private conversations is that WMD really weren’t the intended focus of the war; the argument was only made to keep the State Department happy. This is more or less the claim that Asst. Defense Sect. Paul Wolfowitz began to float publicly last week.

Meanwhile, Bush himself has wandered off the reservation in a different direction, claiming that finding two mobile laboratories which might have been usable for making unconventional weapons is close enough for government work, as the saying goes. Unfortunately, no one around Dubya tested this response for unintentional comedic value, as poor Ari Fleischer found out when he tried it out in a press briefing:

MR. FLEISCHER: The President is indeed satisfied with the intelligence that he received. And I think that’s borne out by the fact that, just as Secretary Powell described at the United Nations, we have found the bio trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons. That’s proof-perfect that the intelligence in that regard was right on target.

Q We go to war for two trucks?

MR. FLEISCHER: I’m sorry?

Q You would go to war from the finding of two trucks?

(The questions were asked by the infamously cantankerous reporter Helen Thomas, who in her 80s has apparently decided that she’s too old to give a damn about propriety . . . bless her!)

It’s not really necessary at this point to quibble over the fact that the “bio truck” evidence is =http://slate.msn.com/id/2083760much flimsier than the White House claims[/url], or gossip about reports that Colin Powell didn’t buy the WMD story he tried to sell to the United Nations.

The point is, these guys are clearly starting to panic. They know they don’t have a good story to tell about Iraq’s supposed weapons programs — and what’s worse for them, they’re realizing they won’t ever have a good story to tell. It should be entertaining to watch this unfold.

A little something to add to the post below… all quotes are courtesy of this Australian wire service story, to which I was led by Jeff of =http://speedkill.blogspot.comSpeedkill[/url]:

“They said, ‘not accounted for’. They didn’t say ‘locked and loaded’. And we repeatedly cited the UN’s words, ‘This is not accounted for’.”

– White House spokesliar Ari Fleischer, in a press briefing today

“We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons – the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”

– President George W. Bush, in a radio address on February 8, 2003

“We know where they [Iraq's chemical weapons] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.”

– Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on ABC’s “This Week,” March 30, 2003

As the regime of Bush the Younger scrambles for an evolving explanation of what happened to their excuse for war against Iraq, they’ve settled on two core rationalizations: (1) “Hey, we didn’t expect to find them right away,” and (2) “It’s a big country, and we’ve just started looking.”

Well, someone forgot to tell Lt. Gen James Conway the company line. In a Reuters wire story today, he wanders off-message by confirming that military commanders were told to expect attacks using artillery shells filled with chemical weapons.

And about the search for those actual weapons, he says:

We’ve been through virtually every ammunition supply site between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad. But they’re simply not there.”

Oooooops!

I’ve touched on this topic in recent blogs, but I thought it would be useful to summarize why this war is unwinnable. Although the original causus belli changed weekly and our win conditions were never really spelled out, we can infer the final objectives based upon White House pronouncements and consider their attainability.

Regime Change/Iraqi Freedom
Bush demanded loudly and repeatedly for the removal of Saddam and the Baath party; in fact, this was his final ultimatum before the invasion. Now that Saddam and his cronies are nowhere to be found, and U.S. troops are occupying his palaces, we’ve won, right?

Well the problem lies in the ‘change’ part of the objective. Dubya promised a rapid handover to a democratically elected Iraqi goverment within 6 months (conveniently timed around the November elections!), with a total occupation of 18 months. Now the White House is grudgingly admitting that setting up an alternative regime might take a bit longer than 6 months, presumably pushing out the 18-month milestone as well.

But questions of timing aside, the real devil lies in the details – what constitutes an acceptable alternative regime? Dubya has promised to “ensure that one brutal dictator is not replaced by another,” a caveat later expanded by Rumsfeld to preclude either a pro-Iranian regime or an Iran-style Islamic Republic. The difficulty is that the overwhelming majority of the country are deeply religious Shiites (who are already consolidating their power without U.S. help) who have made it abundantly clear in huge, angry focus groups (Bush-speak for demonstrations) that they want an Islamic brand of democracy and will reject any goverment supported by the U.S. This sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Territorial Integrity
Last year, Bush committed to preserving Iraq’s territorial integrity, in an attempt to get buy-in from the U.N. and to avoid antagonizing fellow NATO member Turkey. Sure to disrupt Bush’s plans is the fact that the Kurds have other ideas. With little opposition from the few U.S. troops in the region, the heavily armed and organized Kurds have been ethnically cleansing Arabs from Kurdish territory. They will probably content themselves with pay-back reprisals against Arabs and Turks until such time as a new target presents itself in the form of troops from a new, Arab-dominated regime intent on asserting authority in the region. At that point, they’ll stop paying lip-service to ‘regional autonomy’ and will launch a full-blown civil war against Baghdad and any occupation troops that might stand in their way.

Disarming Saddam/Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
The rapid breakup of the Iraqi army has left vast amounts of guerilla war-ready arms and munitions in the hands of the populace, including suspected Baath loyalists. As far as the supposed WMD, what possible motive could Saddam have for destroying them on the eve of a U.S. invasion as Dubya recently asserted (he must think Americans are really dumb)? best case, they never existed outside the delusions of the wrong-wing, worst case, they’re now in the hands of terrorists. Smooth move, Dubya!

Winning the ‘Hearts & Minds’ of the Iraqi people & the ‘Arab Street’
First impressions are hard to shake. How seriously can they take American rhetoric after the abject failure of Jay Garner and the occupation to date? My bet is Humpty Dumpty has already had his great fall, and there’s nothing Viceroy Bremer can do to ‘put him back together again.’

Striking a Blow Against Terrorism
Give me a break!

Conclusion?

I don’t know how this managed to fly under the news radar today, but the Los Angeles Times had a reporter on the scene to witness the first full-blown anti-American riot in Iraq, in a town named Hit in the western part of the country:

Residents here said U.S. troops had provoked anger Tuesday when they searched houses in an outlying neighborhood and arrived shortly after dawn Wednesday to set up a checkpoint at the entrance to the town. They then began searching homes with the help of local police.

When the searches continued despite what residents called a peaceful protest, a second, angrier, protest formed in the late afternoon that quickly turned violent. Both the U.S. troops and the police immediately withdrew from the town once the riot started, residents said.

“They forced women and children to leave their houses!” shouted Esmael Rabee, a construction worker who made his voice heard above the shouts of those who had crowded around the lone foreign reporter on the scene. “They violated the dignity and honor of our women. We won’t accept this violation.

. . . The cooperation of local police with U.S. forces in the searches appeared to further anger residents, who insisted that there had been no change in leadership at all in Hit. The same men who harassed, intimidated and oppressed them under Hussein were at work Wednesday leading U.S. troops to the homes of those suspected of possessing concealed weapons, they said.

Think this growing animosity, combined with the deteriorating morale of troops forced to stay longer than they expected, sounds bad? Well, throw in a healthy dose of poor maintenance support that has soldiers questioning their superior officers’ wisdom:

Senior leaders and logistics experts in the 3rd Infantry say most of the division is not ready for combat. They complain that they have received almost no spare parts to repair damaged tanks and armored personnel carriers – what the military calls Class IX supplies – since they left Kuwait on March 22.

“He is going to get U.S. soldiers needlessly killed if he expects us to go into battle,” a senior noncommissioned officer in the 3rd Infantry said of McKiernan. He spoke on condition he not be named for fear of retribution.

The 3rd Infantry’s supply line was a constant problem during initial fighting for control of Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, senior officers determined the division would be leaving within weeks – and its vehicles would be taken out of service – so they never filled orders for parts.

One battalion’s operations officer said he has more than 2,600 parts on order and that all the tanks in his unit require extensive repairs. A commander said his Bradley Fighting Vehicles all had two-page lists of parts that were ordered but never delivered.

“None of my Bradleys are fully mission capable,” said Capt. Chris Carter, an infantry company commander.

Add it all up, and it looks like no matter how many assertive, I’m-in-charge-here pronouncements L. Paul Bremer makes, things are getting ready to get worse instead of better for all sides in Iraq.

Update: The New York Times and Washington Post now have follow-up stories on the Hit riot, with the latter containing this excerpt:

Residents blamed the eruption of unrest on the search of a particular house Wednesday morning, the second day of inspections. They said a tank, three armored vehicles and a jeep pulled up to the one-story home of a widow with three daughters and a son. The 14-year-old son was in school, but the soldiers, accompanied by two Iraqi policemen, entered anyway. They stayed for 90 minutes.

. . . Neighbors heard the woman start yelling, apparently frightened. After the Americans left, a friend took the woman and her daughters to a relative’s home. But word of the search raced through the community, and within minutes, the crowd began marching on the station.

The Post also has a story about the U.S. & British ousting the month-old local government in Basra, with no plans to replace it.

Get ready for the long haul, boys and girls, looks like we’ve now officially stepped into the quicksand – the Pentagon has decided that the war isn’t actually over and our 200,000 troops will need to hang around for awhile. Said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan:

“The war has not ended,” McKiernan said. “Decisive combat operations against military formations has ended, but these contacts we’re having right now are in a combat zone, and it is war, and they are members of (Saddam’s) regime that must be removed.”

Holdouts from the Saddam regime? Well it’s certainly true that there are now about 400,000 more unemployed Iraqis with military training hanging around with nothing to do and easy access to weapons, many of whom, when denied backpay, vowed to attack American forces. But this is just another typical, delusional wrong-wing simplification of the situation on the ground, given the growing power of the Shiites, who have opposed U.S. occupation from the beginning. As Abdel-Amir Ahmed, a civilian, non-Baath participating in a recent anti-American protest said:

““This is an occupation, and we don’t accept it,” said Abdel-Amir Ahmed, 49. “After a week, after a month, there will be armed resistance against the Americans. This land is sacred.”

Given this growing resistance, and the evident vulnerability of our soldiers in trying to fulfill their impossible mission, how much longer will it be before we see this Administration asking for more troops?

Not that Americans believe anything those swarthy infidels over in Iraq say anyway, but it’s not just the BBC that’s questioning the Administration’s Wag the Dog-esque Jessica Lynch story – senior staff at Nasiriyah General Hospital not only tried to deliver Jessica to the Americans earlier that evening (although their ambulance was fired upon by U.S. troops), but were perfectly happy to let them into the hospital through the front door to retrieve her.

We’ll probably never know the full and true story, as Jessica conveniently appears to have developed amnesia during her post-rescue hospital ‘lockdown’ and de-briefing – a fact disputed by her father Greg Lynch: “Her memory is as good as it was when she was home,” he said. “She can still remember everything.”.

As to getting any details from the family, they apparently “can’t talk about nothing like that” at the moment. Should we expect a stirring Willie Nelson song about Ms. Lynch to accompany the upcoming movie about her story starring Reese Witherspoon?

From the earliest days of this humble cyberpulpit, I’ve been talking about the conscious Bush regime strategy for essentially bankrupting the federal government in order to undermine Social Security and other social programs (as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times the other day, it’s now becoming acceptable to state this obvious fact).

Well, thanks to Counterspin, I now know that our government is fully aware of the hole they’re digging, thanks to a report on the subject commissioned by Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill.

Ooops, I mean ex-Treasury secretary O’Neill. The deputy assistant secretary and the consultant who put the report together, uhh, aren’t with the department anymore, either. (Not hard to connect the dots on that one, is it?)

The silver lining is that there’s still hope that this will become Bush’s downfall before it becomes ours.

Beltway HeathersFirst, freelance Washington, D.C. journalist Joshua Marshall on Sid Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars, and the press reaction to it:

Blumenthal’s book is a harsh and incisive critique of Washington’s insider culture and its prestige press corps which is — as a group, if not individually — corrupt, rudderless and often insipid. (I’d say nasty, brutish and short, but many of them tower over me.) The coverage of the Clinton presidency is the ultimate example . . . .

This is difficult for me to say — not least because I live and work and know many of these people, and consider many to be friends — and even more because I’m not nearly established as most and must rely on these folks for my livelihood. But there’s no getting around the truth of it. Blumenthal is disliked by many in DC because he is a critic — and to my mind, a devastating one — of their vapidity, ignorance and willingness to be used.

In a multiple irony, Marshall links to a column he wrote four years ago about the New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd winning a Pulitzer Prize. In it, he quotes the following excerpt from her, about which he says, “Dowd was criticized mercilessly . . . and deservedly so”:

The impure history of modern America — Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra — proves that reporters have a duty to dig for the truth, whatever the public thinks. . . . The danger is that next time, when the cover-up takes place in a less gray area, reporters will look at the numbers and go home early. Next time it may not be about sex and lies. It may be about life and death.

Insert your own punch line here about Dubya and the missing WMD, the never-ending military campaign, the cover-up of the weeks before September 11th, etc. Dowd herself probably didn’t (or still doesn’t) realize she would be so right, so soon.

The credulous may believe that Sharon, the Butcher of Sabra may be serious about peace, but it should be evident that this man isn’t laughing with you (the American taxpayer); he’s laughing at you. One day he reluctantly agrees to Dubya’s ‘Road Map’ for peace, and in the next his government is passing it with ‘reservations‘ unacceptable to the Palestinians (including a deal-stopping provision denying Palestinians the right-of-return). The next day he ‘shocks’ the world by calling the occupied territories, well…occupied. Then he instantly reverses himself and calls them the disputed territories.

Meanwhile, his forces are steadily building ‘facts on the ground’ in the form of a huge, fortified fence around Israeli settlements, effectively carving out a series of discontiguous ‘Bantustans’ within the West Bank and the Gaza, certain to form the ‘basis’ of Israel’s position on the geographic territory of any future Palestinian state. Israelis continue to form new, unauthorized settlements, and settlers in turn step up their harassment of the local Arabs. The Israeli army continues its lopsided occupation of Palestinian territory, civilians has human shields, wantonly destroying peoples homes and businesses and other actions deemed by Amnesty International to be war crimes.

If Sharon were really serious, he would never have climbed up the Temple Mount, an action that shattered the near complete Oslo peace process, launched the current Intifada, and propelled Sharon into power. But why should he care? In one of his first actions after being appointed to office, his benefactor Dubya abandoned the Clinton peace initiative and turned a blind eye to the Palestinian crackdown. He only later reversed himself in 2002 and started working towards peace when it became apparent that Arab allies were having a hard time convincing their people that the proposed U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn’t some sort of Israeli plot. And of course rather than calling Sharon on these shenanigans, the Spineless One (aka Colin Powell) is willing to go along with Israeli mockery of the roadmap.

Sharon doesn’t need to take this seriously now that his buddies in AIPAC have hijacked this Administration and are keeping us from even discussing our crazy aunt in the basement.