In contrast to Obama’s pronouncements on getting out of Iraq, he has not announced a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The full text of Obama’s remarks on the withdrawal from Iraq is here.)
Apparently a lot of the families of fallen warriors liked the ban. Future such families will be able to keep it in place for their loved ones if they so choose.
But everyone should be clear that the Bush administration did not impose the ban for the sake of the families. It was a cynical move intended to disguise from the American people the cost of the Bush elective war in Iraq. And, despite the administration’s occasional inability to control the visual record, it largely worked.
The American public saw a sanitized Iraq war, certainly compared to what was visible on Arab satellite television. We seldom saw the wounded or dead in Iraq (typically if US televison showed us the aftermath of a market bombing, it would just be the crater and some burning cars; it doesn’t look like that). We almost never see an injured veteran on television, even though nearly 40,000 GIs were wounded badly enough to go to hospital.
The Bush administration set some of the rules, the US corporate media set others. The effect was to mask for many years from the US public the sheer horror of what happened there. Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly stood before the camera and told baldfaced lies. There was no looting. There was no guerrilla war. There was no civil war. Some people read Orwell’s 1984 in high school and take it as a horrific warning of what could happen. Some apparently rather like what they see and take it as their how-to manual. Even to this day, unrealistically low figures are quoted for those Iraqis who died as a direct or indirect result of the 2003 US invasion, and more realistic projections by public health specialists are routinely rejected by the press.
The war dead belong in the first instance to their families, and it is right that their wishes will be respected. But they also do belong to the Republic, and we need to be able both to commemorate their sacrifice for the nation and also to gauge the degree of sacrifice the nation is making for an enterprise. The sleazy liars and propagandists of the previous administration wanted us to remain ignorant of those costs, wanted us to remain child-like and ignorant.
Indeed, the artificial separation of the war costs from the regular budget replicated in the arena of public finance the hiding of the bodies of the dead from the photographers. It even often fooled seasoned journalists, who gave budget deficit figures in the Bush years that ignored the expenditure of treasure on Iraq!
Now the wars will go in the regular budget, as they should have all along, so that the lazy are not so easily fooled. The whole Bush administration was a massive Madoff-like Ponzi scheme, made possible only because no one bothered to audit the books.
The new administration will need to be audited, too, of course. That is what a Republic is. But at least they are signaling that they won’t stand in the way of the audit, and, indeed, will work toward transparency to help the public carry it out. Now that is a revolution.
The Dari Persian Afghan newspaper Chiragh editorialized on February 23, 2009, on the possibility that cooperation against the Taliban might prove grounds for an improvement in Iran-American relations (USG Open Source Translation ):
‘ Over recent days, high ranking authorities in Iran and America have arrived in Kabul one after the other to visit Afghan government authorities. (Passage omitted: visits by Iranian First Vice-President Parviz Davudi, US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi)
Now, the terrorism concern is not only threatening Afghanistan, it has also created joint concerns for the authorities of America and Iran. The three countries are concerned about the Taleban reorganizing and reinforcing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With no doubt, we can say that, despite the confrontation of America and Iran’s interests in the world, both countries have been trying to establish security in Afghanistan over the past seven years and they have indirectly invested in the same project.
However, with the new reshuffles in the US cabinet the confrontation between America and Iran slowly turning into an equation, the current concern, like the Taleban and other terrorist factions reorganizing, is a pretext that has been created as an opportunity for America and Iran to correct their relations using Afghanistan.
Kabul has been regarded as a threat to the regional countries before, but now the political players in Iran and America have selected Afghanistan as a focus of their peace and coordination.
Understanding the value of the time and opportunity will lead the leaders of Afghanistan to follow a practical strategy, to use a chance before it is terminated. ‘
What we now call the “Taliban” are actually 5 distinct groups and movements: 1) The Old Taliban of Mulla Omar, now based in Quetta, Pakistan; 2) the Hizb-i Islami [Islamic Party] of former prime minister and warlord, Gulbadin Hikmatyar; 3) the followers of warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani; 4) the Taliban Movement of Pakistan in that country’s tribal agencies; and 5) disgruntled Pushtun villagers who object to foreign troops on their soil or whose poppy crops were forcibly eradicated, leaving them destitute. Hikmatyar and Haqqani at one time or another were opposed to the Old Taliban, but have now allied with them. According to the Pajhwok News Network, a joint US and Afghan patrol targeted a militant of the Haqqani group near Khost on Thursday, capturing 6 militants and some light arms.
Some speculate that the alleged British negotiations with Hikmatyar may be aimed at detaching the Hizb-i Islami from its current Taliban allies.
While the Hikmatyar talks may prove fruitful if they are as Aljazeera represents them, other negotiations may not work out. Elements of the “Old Taliban” of Mulla Omar based in Quetta seem to be willing to talk with the government of Hamid Karzai, though they insist that the withdrawal of US and NATO troops is the precondition for social peace in that country. They also insist that post-American Afghanistan be ruled by their rigid interpretation of Islamic law and be completely independent of the US. In other words, their demands are so maximal that it is hard to see how they can produce meaningful compromise.
‘the Joint IED Defeat Organization, tallied 3,611 incidents of improvised explosives in Afghanistan in 2008, a 50 percent increase from 2007. The number of U.S. and allied deaths from roadside bombs more than doubled, to 176 in 2008 from 75 in 2007. Even more Afghan civilians were killed.
In Iraq, there were more than 9,000 IED attacks last year, but that was far below 2006, when they reached 2,500 a month. Today, insurgents in Iraq are planting fewer IEDs, and only one in nine produces an American casualty.
In Afghanistan, where as many as one in three bombs kills or wounds someone, American officers say they hope a combination of technology, intelligence, armor and training can help them drive down the casualty rate.’
The British are involved in a ‘bizarre mini-civil war’ insofar as some of the guerrillas being fought by the British army are UK citizens who speak with “west Midlands” accents. The British Muslim community is extremely upset about the British military role in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are about a million and a half Muslims in the UK, in a population of about 61 million.
200 US troops and 200 Afghan troops (along with their French trainers) pushed into the Jalrez Valley south of the capital of Kabul on Wednesday, seeking Taliban strongholds. They don’t appear actually to have found anything, and only succeeded in annoying the local population. Locals did say that their view of the US would improve if Washington spent money on civilian development such as roads.
Uzbekistan will allow NATO to ship non-military supplies for its troops in Afghanistan through Uzbek territory. (The supply chain will start at Lithuania and bring goods by train down to near the Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan to Afghanistan). But since the Khyber Pass route in Pakistan is increasingly problematic, I wonder how the US and NATO will ship in the military supplies.
My reaction to the content is that the piece attempts to blame the victims– which is a well known sophist technique. As for the misleading explanations of what seems to be the use of legitimate weapons in inappropriate ways and contexts, my reaction can be summarised as “what absolute bollocks!”
The pictures of airburst phosphorous being used to set areas on fire are conclusive evidence of misuse.
Smokescreens use ground burst. If I had ever wanted a smoke point to cover a flanking movement then I wanted the smoke as a dense cloud on the ground at a height that exceeded the height of my people. Armoured Fighting Vehicle also have small smoke dischargers on the turrets and hulls designed to put a cloud of smoke in front of the vehicle to give time to reverse out of danger or to debus and engage the enemy.
Flechettes are used in claymore mines and so called beehive rounds and are used to counter attacks by massed infantry. I had no expectation that the few hundred Hamas fighting men in Gaza would do a human mass Banzai charge against any Israeli unit. That would have achieved the Israeli objective in a few minutes, in a manner similar to Picketts Charge at Gettysburg.
The only mass of humans I could see were the women children and old men taking shelter in schools and hospitals and UN premises.
I would have used claymores to cover the killing zone in any ambush I was planning particularly in jungle ambushes, as they cut through the undergrowth and foliage and kill indiscriminately anyone and anything in the KZ.
‘Beehive is an anti-personnel round fired from an artillery gun, packed full of metal darts, flechettes, which are ejected from the shell in front of the target by the action of a mechanical time fuze. It is so-called because of the ‘buzzing’ sound the darts make when flying through the air and in the manner of numerous bees around an actual beehive. It is deadly when used against concentrations of enemy troops due to its shotgun effect in similarity to claymore mines. The beehive round can be considered an evolution of shrapnel artillery ammunition.
The first round actually termed “beehive” was first fired in combat in 1966, to great success,[1] and was thereafter used extensively in the Vietnam War, though the later development of the Killer Junior air burst technique eventually usurped beehive’s role. Beehive rounds were extensively used in the Vietnam War, for defence of firebase perimeters against massed enemy attacks, and because it could penetrate the thick canopy of the jungle and “pad”[jargon] it out. The primary beehive round for this purpose was the M546 APERS-T (anti-personnel tracer) shell which projected 8000 flechettes and was direct fired from a near horizontally levelled barrel of a 105mm howitzer[2].’
If this savage assault on the population of Gaza had been planned during the six months of the preceding ceasefire, then whoever selected ammunition loads of flechette weapons must have been planning for a massacre.
The point about Fallujah is misleading. In a manner similar to the evacuation of the women and children from the Alamo, the non combatants in Fallujah were given a week or ten days to leave. Anyone who stayed identified himself as a fighting man.
The unfortunate inhabitants of Gaza had nowhere to escape to because the border crossings were closed. The idea that phone calls warning them to leave buildings was adequate is misleading because it is widely reported by reliable sources that this was used as a weapon of psychological warfare to spread fear and confusion.
I find Amnesty’s report provides enough evidence to convince me that something similar to a Wannsee Protokol may exist somewhere in Tel Aviv and that Senior Israeli officers and politicians have a case to answer at the International Criminal Court. Doubtless I will be accused of anti-semitism for saying it, but I find myself in the company of Sir Gerald Kaufman, Mary Robinson and a glittering array of QCs and eminent jurists in doing so.
The Guardian used to be a newspaper that could be relied on to present a point of view that was an antidote to the authoritarian and right wing point of view expressed in newspapers like Daily Telegraph, Times, Jerusalem Post. It is unsettling to find them giving a platform to someone who Professor Avi Schlaim denounces as a propagandist.
If the Independent, whose editorial independence is vouched for by the integrity of Robert Fisk as a correspondent, were to succumb to its financial problems, along with Channel 4 TV– and The Guardian were to have been subverted we would be left with a biased set of mass media that channel to us Israeli propaganda.
Perhaps the Editor of the Guardian might need to examine his conscience.
President Obama included this sentence in his State of the Union Address , “I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war.”
The LAT explains this cryptic reference, based on leaks that suggest that President Obama will announce next week a 19-month timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. He had campaigned on a pledge of getting out within 16 months of his inauguration, but his military commanders had pressed for 23 months. The withdrawal timetable affects two-thirds of US troops now in Iraq, but it is expected that even after 2010 some 50,000 will remain. The Iraqi military continues to need training, and it cannot always handle difficult situations, needing US teams to come in to their aid. Iraq has no air force to speak of. Its newly ordered aircraft will not arrive until 2013 and it will take years to train the pilots. Iraq’s military will therefore need US-supplied close air support for years to come, and all the support staff required. The new Iraqi military also does occasionally get into fights it cannot finish, and so rapid response teams remain important.
Although the US military hopes that the Iraqi government won’t press the issue, the Status of Forces agreement specifies that all US troops must be out by the end of 2011. The nationalist forces in parliament seem likely to be strengthened in the next election, and I don’t expect Iraq to be eager to extend the US mandate. (The Shiite party most explicitly willing to keep US troops in Iraq is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which lost badly in the recent provincial elections.)
With the exception of the air force support personnel, the US will likely be asked to get its other troops out in 2011.
There is a lot of speculation out there as to how the US public will react if Obama modifies his campaign pledge of 16 months. Personally, I don’t think there is a lot passion out there right now for foreign affairs. People have discounted Iraq as a national project and don’t seem invested in it any more, for the most part. They think it was a bad idea. They want out. But I don’t think most of them care about the exact timetable for withdrawal, and certainly not whether it is 16 or 19 months. Whether they mind 50,000 troops staying in Iraq in 2011 will surely depend on things like the casualty rate. How unpredictable that is is obvious from the last two days’ news (see below).
The security situation remains fragile in Iraq. VOA reports, “The U.S. military says four American soldiers were wounded and an interpreter was killed when gunmen attacked a police station in northern Iraq.” VOA adds, “On Monday, the U.S. military said that three American soldiers and an interpreter were killed during combat operations in Iraq’s Diyala province north of Baghdad.”
Eight people were injured including two national police members when two roadside bombs detonated targeting a patrol of the national police in Palestine Street in east Baghdad.
Nineveh
Three policemen were injured by a roadside bomb that targeted their patrol in Mansour neighborhood in south Mosul on Monday morning.
T[wo] civilians when gunmen threw a grenade targeting the office of the PUK Party in downtown Mosul city
An Iraqi interpreter was killed and other people were injured including US soldiers when two policemen attacked a police station in West Mosul on Tuesday afternoon. US military confirmed the incident.
Kirkuk
Gunmen kidnapped a civilian near a church in downtown Kirkuk city on Monday evening.
A gunman was injured seriously while he was trying to plant a roadside bomb in Hawija town west of Kirkuk city on Monday evening.
Diyala
Three insurgents were killed when clashes broke out between a joint American and Iraqi forces and insurgents in one of the villages of Mandili town east of Baquba early morning.’
It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States’s name is mud in much of the Muslim world because Washington supported to the hilt Ehud Olmert’s brutal assault on the people and civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Gaza was already a blockaded and abused slum before the war, where 15% of the children were undernourished. Bush urged Olmert on, and Obama has been silent.
So at least the US can spend some money to restore to the Gazans the basic prerequisites for a decent life.
Moreover, the US has increasing competition for influence in the area. The Gulf oil states are planning out the rebuilding of Gaza, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar have already pledged $1.25 billion. Qatar stole thunder in Lebanon last spring when it negotiated a peace deal between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government that brought Hizbullah into the government. The Saudis have been trying to bring Fatah and Hamas together. The US has been irrelevant, because under Bush Washington was just a ventriloquist dummy for the Israeli Rightwing. You can only have leverage as a good faith broker if you aren’t completely identified with one side of a dispute.
So people are asking where the US government is going to get a billion dollars to give to the Gazans. That’s easy. The US should take it out of the over $3 billion a year it gives to Israel. Israel aggressively launched that war, which it planned out for six months beforehand, even while Olmert was ostensibly indirectly negotiating a truce with Hamas. The war was fruitless and accomplished none of its goals. There is no reason for the US government to be giving the Israelis, who have a per capita income of $17,000 a year, money in the first place. But it certainly makes no sense to reward them for bad behavior, especially given that we are living through the great crash and incipient depression of 2009.
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