 |
Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Tearing down walls > (No Subject)
| Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 10/15/2003 12:24 PM (GMT -6) |   | | http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/143771_nethercutt14.html | | Back to Top | | |
 |
honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 10/15/2003 7:48 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
|
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 10/16/2003 12:24 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
|
Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/16/2003 12:53 PM (GMT -6) | | WHITEHOUSE "PUBLIC RELATIONS" CAMPAIGN
TIME Magazine
Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2003
IRAQ: GOOD NEWS vs. BAD NEWS
The Bush administration hopes to shift American perceptions of progress in Iraq. But it has to contend with the operation's impact on American lives and well-being
By Tony Karon
.
.
Six months after U.S. forces took control of Baghdad,
President Bush is working hard to convince Americans that things in Iraq are "a lot better than you probably think."
The White House has launched an aggressive PR campaign to promulgate a more positive view. But accounts of emergent local commerce and the introduction of a new currency won't necessarily quiet concerns among ordinary Americans and their elected representatives over the costs of the war. The tally: 170,000 military reserves are currently on active duty, and a further 15,000 were recently mobilized, with soldiers looking at year-long tours of duty with no early end in sight. Based on current trends that show no sign of abating, up to six of the soldiers deployed in Iraq will be killed each week, and around 40 will be wounded. Once Congress approves the $87 billion Iraq supplemental budget requested by the White House, the cost to the American taxpayer of remaking Iraq will have reached $166 billion.
That may be why an increasingly important component of the White House PR effort is talking up the prospects for lightening the military and financial load on the U.S. and of achieving an exit from Iraq while leaving behind a decent outcome. But the administration's message is facing a daily battering from events on the ground. In the past eight days alone, 10 U.S. soldiers have been killed in a number of separate ambushes; mortar shells were fired on Iraq's foreign ministry in Baghdad; a truck bomb killed nine people at an Iraqi police station in the capital; a car bomb killed another nine people at a hotel used by Iraqi Governing Council and coalition officials; a Spanish intelligence official was assassinated outside his residence; and a car bomb was detonated at the Turkish embassy in Baghdad. That attack, of course, may have come in response to one of the most important bits of good news for the coalition forces in months: Turkey has agreed to garrison up to 20,000 troops in the Sunni triangle, potentially relieving an entire U.S. division in the sector that has been the bloodiest for the Americans.
But every silver lining has a cloud.
The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is staunchly opposed to the deployment of the Turks, on the grounds that all of Iraq's neighbors have their own agendas —— indeed, Turkish officials have made no bones about the fact that their decision to send troops, which cuts against the tide of Turkish public opinion, is based primarily on Turkey's desire to have a hand in shaping post-Saddam Iraq. Although U.S. administrator Paul Bremer has sought to assuage the fears of the IGC —— particularly its Kurdish members, who see the Turks as threatening their desired autonomy —— the Council remains opposed and has won the support of the Arab League. Although the Turks are also Sunni Muslims, there's little reason to suspect that the insurgents will refrain from attacking them —— there's no love lost between Iraq's Sunnis and the Turkish military, especially when they're reprising their centuries-old role as occupiers of Iraq. A Turkish deployment will certainly ease the load on the U.S. military, but at a political cost of antagonizing the Kurds and undermining the standing of the IGC.
Inviting in the Turks may be less than ideal, but it's not as if the U.S. has a wide array of choices. The hoped-for divisions from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have not materialized, and South Korea hasn't yet committed. There's less hope now that a new UN Security Council resolution will scare up more troops from reluctant allies. Still, Washington has submitted a third draft resolution in the hope of finding Security Council consensus. The new version accommodates some European concerns by requiring the IGC to establish a timetable for elections and a return to self-rule, although it doesn't address the objections to previous drafts on the role accorded to the UN.
The primary motivation for the new Security Council resolution may be financial.
The IMF and World Bank have calculated that Iraq's reconstruction over the next four years will require $55 billion in aid, and the Bush administration —— having earmarked $20 billion of its latest $87 billion Iraq budget for reconstruction —— has been looking to the Madrid donor conference scheduled to begin on October 23 for substantial pledges of support. So far, however, the picture looks mixed: Japan has pledged $5 billion and Britain almost $1 billion, but Canada and the EU, between them, are good for only half a billion. The administration is hoping that a new UN resolution may help loosen the purse strings, although the constraints on many of the donor nations may be economic as much as political.
The key to the U.S. exit strategy in Iraq —— and the current UN resolution —— is completing Iraq's political transformation by restoring sovereignty to an elected Iraqi government. To achieve that, a new constitution must be adopted, and elections held —— a process for which the U.S. is setting an ambitious timetable. Secretary of State Colin Powell recently suggested that the IGC should finalize a new constitution within six months, but Iraqis were quick to dismiss Powell's timetable as hopelessly optimistic. Some of Iraq's most important leaders —— the moderate Shiite clerics at Najaf —— have insisted that an Iraqi constitution can be drawn up only by an elected body, not by the IGC, which was handpicked by Bremer.
Shiite religious and communal leaders are often violently divided over their attitudes to working with the Americans and over what role their religion should play in government, but there's broad agreement among them that a new order in Iraq should reflect their demographic dominance: Shiites comprise upward of 60 percent of the population, but they have historically been dominated by the Sunni minority comprising around 15 percent. The concern to ensure their dominance may explain the insistence by even moderate Shiites that the new order be shaped by a democratically elected body. And, of course, many Sunnis are unhappy about the prospect of losing their relatively privileged status in a democratic order —— a factor that certainly contributes to a measure of support, or at least tolerance for the anti-American insurgency in the Sunni Triangle.
The most troubling recent development is the emergence of a Shiite challenge to the U.S. The firebrand young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose followers are particularly powerful in the slums of eastern Baghdad, is increasingly basing his own bid for power and influence among the Shiites on a strategy of confrontation with the U.S. Last Friday he declared his intention to form his own government, and he has called for the formation of a religious army —— his forces clashed violently with U.S. soldiers in Baghdad last weekend, after which his supporters warned the U.S. to keep its troops out of the eastern Baghdad slum known as Sadr City. U.S. commanders have been reluctant to move directly against Moqtada al-Sadr, fearing that this would stir up a confrontation with his supporters. But the radicals are clearly staking out their turf as the political day of reckoning approaches, and were involved in violent clashes with supporters of the moderate clerics at Najaf on Tuesday. A series of roadside bomb attack on British forces in Basra in recent days also suggests an emerging Shiite militancy.
There's no question that an overwhelming majority of Iraqis are pleased to be rid of Saddam Hussein. A Gallup Poll published Tuesday suggests that 71 percent of Baghdad residents don't want the U.S. forces to leave in a hurry (although, curiously enough, 36 percent of respondents in the same poll believed that attacks on those forces were justified in some instances). And although only 42 percent of Americans polled in the latest CNN/Gallup survey agree with the President's assessment that things are going at least moderately well in Iraq, his overall job approval ratings are slowly climbing again. But in the pursuit of the security, political and economic conditions that allow for a U.S. exit, many dark days may still lie ahead.
[end]
| | Back to Top | | |
|
Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/16/2003 5:37 PM (GMT -6) | | 
October 2003
Dick Cheney, Hard-Liner In Chief
By JOE KLEIN
George W. Bush gave yet another speech last week defending his Administration's war in Iraq. Actually, it was the same old speech —— the same Western aw-shucks-isms ("We're on the hunt"), the same complexities avoided. The President is beginning to sound pretty defensive —— with good reason: he's been playing defense since July. As he said last week, "Wars are won on the offensive." So are second terms.
The President's rut reflects a gathering dysfunction in his Administration.
The White House seems paralyzed, unable to stanch the political, diplomatic and actual bleeding over Iraq. There are turf wars everywhere. The CIA is at war with the White House; the Pentagon is at war with the State Department and the National Security Council (NSC); some elements of the uniformed military are furious with the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, partly for launching the attack against Iraq in the first place without enough allied support. The fault lines are largely between moderate diplomatic and military traditionalists and more aggressive neoconservatives and nationalists.
The Administration's exposure of a covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame, was unprecedented, but at last week's Cabinet meeting, the President shrugged and said he didn't think the leaker would be caught. His apparent nonchalance is outrageous. Plame was integral to the CIA's effort to suss out the movement of weapons of mass destruction —— ground zero in the war on terror.
As for the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld —— who is beginning to resemble Humphrey Bogart's unhinged Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny —— lost his temper last week at the news that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was, finally, trying to coordinate the government's reconstruction efforts in Iraq. He said he hadn't been consulted in advance. He implied that Rice's effort wasn't very important, anyway. Rumors of a Pentagon boycott of the process began to bubble when the political, economic and counterterrorism group meetings were either canceled or held without civilian Pentagon participation. An NSC source offered the plausible argument that these were just logistical problems with a new process. But the instantaneous rumors were typical of the Administration's foreign-policy mess.
Republicans turf-wrestling like infants, playing fast and loose with national-security secrets, tripping over themselves in the rebuilding of Iraq? Weren't these guys supposed to be the grownups? Isn't the President supposed to have a bureaucratic neatness fetish? Given his famous impatience —— and his very quick temper —— why hasn't Bush taken control? I asked members of the first Bush and Reagan administrations about this. At first, they professed mystification, but then, after some consideration, they pointed fingers at one man: Dick Cheney.
Cheney is, of course, the hardest of the hard-liners —— and his intransigence is responsible for both the CIA's fury and the Pentagon leadership's arrogance. Cheney and his low-profile neoconservative chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, have been stalking the CIA for years. They have disputed the agency's negative findings on an Iraq attempt to buy African uranium and an Iraq involvement in 9/11. The failures of American intelligence have been a Cheney obsession —— which is why Republican Senator Chuck Hagel recently suggested that if the President really wants to know who the White House leakers are, he should "sit down" with his Vice President. Cheney's alliance with Rumsfeld has been at the heart of this Administration's hawkish, unilateral foreign-policy fantasies.
Indeed, Cheney has assumed the role that powerful National Security Advisers like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski played in the past. He has been the President's closest foreign-policy confidant. He has not merely coordinated policy, he has conceptualized it. Rumsfeld's outburst obscured the most important question raised by the President's apparent decision to give Condoleezza Rice a more prominent role in Iraq policy: Does this mean that the President is finally turning away from the Vice President?
If so, it certainly is about time. Bush's speech last week was part of an aggressive public relations effort to spread the news that things aren't so bad in Iraq —— a sure sign that things aren't so good. The American military has done wonders in restoring order and building civil society in the north and south of the country. But the Sunni triangle festers, and we are one strategically placed truck bomb —— or coordinated sequence of bombs —— away from disaster. This sort of uncertainty should be a revelation to the Vice President. His worldview is a simple one, bereft of even the neoconservative romance with exporting democracy. He believes that America has the power to create the world it wants —— whether that means going it alone in Iraq, putting Ahmed Chalabi in power there or pretending that Yasser Arafat is not the Palestinian leader. These miscalculations have diminished America's military strength, its position in the world and perhaps its national security.
Cheney has all the qualities this President admires. Cheney is tough, discreet, secure in his judgments —— but he has been wrong too often, and now George W. Bush must decide what he wants to do about that.
[end] | | Back to Top | | |
|
Laika
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2003
Total Posts : 2433
| Posted 10/17/2003 1:53 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
|
Mayflower
Registered Member
Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 445
| Posted 10/23/2003 8:02 AM (GMT -6) | | PIONEER PRESS, St. Paul (Minnesota)
Published October 23, 2003
RUMSFELD: IT'S HARD TO TELL IF UNITED STATES IS
"WINNING OR LOSING" WAR ON TERROR
By Jonathan S. Landay BY
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is questioning whether the United States is winning its war against international terrorism.
In a private memo sent last week to his closest Pentagon associates, he asked:
"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than (are) deploying against us?"
The remarks are a far more somber assessment of the U.S.-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and against Islamic terrorists than the public assertions of Rumsfeld, President Bush and his other top aides and the administration's campaign to publicize good news from Iraq.
"Today, we lack the metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," wrote Rumsfeld, one of the main architects of the campaign, in a confidential Oct. 16 memo to his top civilian and military advisers.
Rumsfeld later declared in the memo, "It's pretty clear that the (U.S.-led) coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."
Rumsfeld, speaking Wednesday on Capitol Hill, defended the memo as an exhortation to think more broadly about how to wage a long-term fight on terrorism.
Bush, traveling in Australia, chimed in with support, saying he agreed that the "war is going to be tough work and it's going to take awhile."
Bush told reporters he had not seen the secretary's memo but said that as for the idea of doing more to prepare, "I cannot agree more."
But Democrats seized on the document as an acknowledgment that the U.S. efforts to subdue anti-U.S. attacks in Iraq, bolster the Afghan government against a resurgent Taliban and defeat al-Qaida and its allies have stalled.
"Secretary Rumsfeld's comments are an illustration of the concern that they have about the failure of their policies in Iraq so far. There can be no other description of those words than that," said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
In his memo, Rumsfeld said operations against al-Qaida since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have produced "mixed results," and that while members of the terrorist network are under pressure, "a great many remain at large."
He said U.S.-led forces in Iraq have made "reasonable pro-gress" in capturing or killing the top 55 fugitives from the regime of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, but there was "slower progress" in tracking down leaders of Afghanistan's former ruling Taliban movement.
Rumsfeld also acknowledged that a U.S.-led offensive in March to crush Ansar al Islam, a group of Iraqi Kurds linked to al-Qaida, failed to eliminate it, which U.S. generals in Iraq blame for some of the increasing attacks on Americans and their allies.
While the United States is doing a lot to fight terrorism, Rumsfeld contended, it's doing little to dissuade a new generation of Muslim extremists from being recruited.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. military isn't properly structured for fighting a lengthy global war on terrorism, and he wondered if a "new institution" that combines the capabilities of the armed services and other U.S. agencies should be created.
"My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?" Rumsfeld asked.
Rumsfeld sent the memo to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers; and the vice chairman, Marine Gen. Peter Pace.
White House and Pentagon officials denied that the memo represented an admission that the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and against al-Qaida are not going well.
Instead, they portrayed it as a classic Rumsfeld effort to challenge senior civilian and military officials to find more resourceful, imaginative ways to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan and to prevail against global terrorists.
The memo urged top civilian and uniformed defense officials "to look beyond the treetops because the things that we really need to think about that are going to extend well beyond our tenure is: Are we organized the right way?" Pentagon spokes-man Lawrence DiRita said.
But in a reflection of administration infighting over the wisdom of attacking Iraq, senior U.S. officials said leaking the memo appeared to be an effort to divert attention from the Pentagon's role in creating some of the problems in Iraq, Afghani-stan and the hunt for al-Qaida.
[end]
| | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 5:55 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|