National Security Estimate
Key findings of the Iraq National Security Estimate have been posted (pdf) at the Director of National Intelligence web site.
Josh Marshall and colleagues have links to early comment and reaction.
Important points from TPM commenters:
*It is a civil war but in some ways it is worse than just civil war, since other kinds of violent conflict are also going on.
*Iraq's neighbors, such as Iran, are not significant drivers of the violence, which is internally generated.
In other words, Negroponte's shop has shot down everything Tony Snow was sent out by Karl Rove to say for the past year.
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/02/2007 07:09:00 AM
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7 Comments:
So what does this mean? Is the old guard calling in this hit to keep the whole Republican08 ship from going down with Bush Jr.?
If it's Negroponte's shop, didn't he engineer the shiite death squads, ala honduras, to escalate the conflict?
Perhaps Negroponte is assured by history that his role in such affairs will be overlooked.
Here is a quote from the recently released Nat. Intelligence Estimate regarding the situation in iraq...
"The Intelligence Community judges that the term “civil war” does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qa’ida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term “civil war” accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements."
How can the term "civil war" accurately describe 'key elements' of the conflict, yet NOT adequately capture the complexity of the conflict.
This continual hand-wavery makes me sick.
It's hard to think of a word for what is worse than civil war, let alone what it could be.
When a man takes his severed arm to use as a club to kill people with, is that is worse than civil war?
In any case, that is a picture of what Iraq has become
I think at this point the Bushiites have given up trying to convince the masses... Now they are just hoping to confuse the 66% of the people, while they continue to con 33% of the people all the time.
Wasn't the reality based community saying this as far back as January 2002?
Professor Cole,
Last week, Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told Condoleezza Rice during a hearing on Iraq, "I believe the present authorization granted the president to use force in Iraq does not cover that, and he does need congressional authority to do that."
Rice did not rule out entering Iran or give a position on whether the Bush administration would need congressional approval.
If I remember correctly Rice promised Biden a written answer. Does anybody know what became of the promised letter?
Omar Khadr. Canadian teenager, Guantanamo prisoner #766 since 2002.
Excerpt from disturbing August 2006 Rolling Stone article "The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr":
"By the time Omar's lawyers took his case, it was clear that the torture methods used at Guantanamo had been directly authorized by President Bush. In January 2002, the president's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, working for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised the president that nearly all forms of torture were legal. Physical abuse was not torture unless it generated the intensity of pain associated with 'organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death...' During the course of their research, the attorneys were struck by the overwhelming evidence that most of the detainees at Guantanamo are innocent... After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration effectively kidnapped hundreds of innocent people because they looked like Arabs and shipped them to a detention facility designed to torture them nonstop and in perpetuity. If the president were tried in the Hague, the prosecution would have an easy case."
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