iraq - Robert Maguire on Diigo

11 Nov 09

28 years ago, Israel launched an airstrike
against the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad, terrified by the prospect of
an Iraq with nuclear weapons. 19 year ago, the U.N. imposed comprehensive
economic sanctions
against Iraq, declaring the country's nuclear program needed oversight. Seven years
ago, former president Bush announced
that an Iraq with access to weapons of mass destruction, potentially including
nuclear technology, demanded a U.S. military response.

And six years after that invasion, Iraq is lobbying
to rebuild nuclear reactors. Just one more entry for FP's list
of states looking to go nuclear to lose sleep over.

10 Nov 09

Interview on the Charlie Rose Show

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hillary statedept US politics berlin wall coldwar waronterror afghanistan pakistan iraq clinton history

QUESTION: Is Germany on board with respect to Afghanistan?

SECRETARY CLINTON: I think Germany is committed to the effort in Afghanistan. They’re waiting, like the rest of the world is, the United States, and through President Obama, to announce our intentions and our way forward. But they have a deep understanding of why this is important for NATO, why this is important for the larger international community. And I think that given the right measures of accountability that we need to be seeking from President Karzai and his government, we’re going to see a commitment not just from Germany, but from many of our NATO allies.

Charlie Rose - Home

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Von Hoffmann Award Nominee - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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Rumsfeld: Well, the Office of Management and Budget, has come up
come up with a number that's something under $50 billion for the cost.
How much of that would be the U.S. burden, and how much would be other
countries, is an open question. I think the way to put it into
perspective is that the estimates as to what September 11th cost the
United States of America ranges high up into the hundreds of billions
of dollars. Now, another event in the United States that was like
September 11th, and which cost thousands of lives, but one that
involved a -- for example, a biological weapon, would be -- have a cost
in human life, as well as in billions, hundreds of billions of dollars,
that would be vastly greater," - January 19, 2003.

05 Nov 09

Rick Sanchez - Virginia Foxx - Cost of Healthcare vs. Terror • videosift.com

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virginia foxx waronterror republicans conservatives taxes politics terrorism healthcare rick sanchez iraq afghanistan

02 Nov 09

Rachel Maddow Goes After Liz Cheney • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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cheney liz cheney politics conservatives bias msnbc republicans law valerie plame plame waronterror iraq sept11 lies

28 Oct 09

Washington Post Budget Editorial is So Wrong Because... | Capital Gains and Games

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US politics spending waronterror afghanistan iraq budget washingtonpost statistics reference costs

To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the economy you have rather than the one you would like.
But the fact that you go to war doesn’t mean that you can do what the Post recommends: Ignore the economic effect the additional federal spending and borrowing will have.
5 more annotations...
- The Post tried to say in its editorial that activities in Iraq and Afghanistan are being paid for because the amount that will be spent each of the next few years will be decreasing. The editorial said that the fact that this spending will fall from $180 billion in 2008 to a projected $130 billion in 2010 shows that the higher Iraq and Afghanistan-caused deficit is being offset.
  
  Excuse me?
- Since when does spending $130 billion more enable you to pay for something you previously purchased? I can’t pay for the $150 video game I bought last year by buying another this year for $130. That’s not saving $20; that’s spending $130 more. To offset the $150 I have to reduce spending that I otherwise would have done this year on venti lattes or earn additional income writing freelance columns for outlets other than Roll Call.
- The most obvious is that the military and other activities in these two countries have already been happening for multiple years and so can hardly be considered one-time events. This is especially true of peacekeeping and nation-building activities that occur after the shooting war ends.
- In addition, if history is any indication, Iraq and Afghanistan are not likely to be the last times the United States commits troops somewhere. World War II was quickly followed by Korea, which was followed by Vietnam, etc.
- But the most obvious thing the Post missed is that the additional borrowing the government has done to pay for the higher deficits caused by the Iraq and Afghanistan spending won’t disappear when the war is over. To the contrary, federal interest payments will be higher for decades as a result.

U.S. defense bill would pay Taliban to switch sides | International | Reuters

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payment US waronterror taliban insurgence obama iraq counterinsurgency statistics reference

The defense bill President Barack Obama will sign into law on Wednesday contains a new provision that would pay Taliban fighters who renounce the insurgency, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said on Tuesday.
similar to one used in Iraq
2 more annotations...
- Reaching out to moderate Taliban members is part of the Obama administration's plan to turn around the eight-year war in Afghanistan. Levin also has advocated trying to convince Taliban fighters to change sides by luring them with jobs and amnesty for past attacks.
- There is $1.3 billion authorized for the fund in fiscal 2010, which began Oct. 1. The money must still be allocated by defense appropriators, who are working to finish the legislation.

27 Oct 09

Call in the Civilians | Foreign Policy

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US politics reference statistics statedept hillary dod pentagon civilians waronterror counterinsurgency afghanistan iraq military

Amid the roiling controversy over U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan,
one fact often gets lost: The soldiers are only half the picture.
the Army's new counterinsurgency
manual sees as objective No. 1: "foster[ing] development of effective
governance by a legitimate government."
13 more annotations...
- Since the September 11
  attacks, the United States has suffered from a myopia that sees military
  expansion as paramount and civilian support as an afterthought. As a result,
  the State Department's ranks have been depleted and overstretched to the core.
  And the civilian half of warfare has suffered.
- In 2004, the Pentagon brass realized
  that guns alone wouldn't bring security, but there weren't enough civilians at
  the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
  to get the state-building job done.
- The Defense Department has about 2.3
  million uniformed service members and more than 800,000 civilians. The State
  Department and USAID combined have about 8,000 Foreign Service officers. The Defense
  Department had to fill 350 civilian positions in Iraq and is preparing to fill
  300 in Afghanistan.
- Things are so bad that the State Department
  has had to hire 2,300 family members to fill positions overseas.
- even as the military promotes
  stability
  operations -- capabilities like "strengthening governance and the rule
  of law" and "fostering economic stability and development" -- as
  a mission of equal importance to combat operations.
- Trouble is, these really aren't
  tasks for soldiers
- Development
  and diplomacy, like defense, are clearly defined and specialized fields. No one
  would task a USAID agricultural economist with helping develop Afghanistan's or
  Iraq's internal defense strategy. But with the current deficit of Foreign
  Service officers (FSOs) at the State Department and USAID, the government routinely
  tasks U.S. special operations forces with implementing development and public
  diplomacy tasks. One exasperated officer asked me, "How am I, as a
  military professional, supposed to know what's best for the development of this
  country? That's USAID's job." But there is no USAID officer in the area,
  so she soldiers on.
- the State Department and USAID need about 5,000 new FSOs to conduct core and
  public diplomacy,
- State Department has been hiring about 700 new officers a year
- USAID is 75
  percent smaller than it was a generation ago, and despite bringing in 300
  officers a year, it is still not meeting the global demand for development
  specialists.
- U.S. Secretary
  of State Hillary Clinton's two immediate predecessors tried to get funding for
  more FSOs from Congress. Colin Powell, for example, increased the Foreign
  Service by about 1,000 people a year. But most of these newbies went to
  consular and diplomatic security positions, not core and public diplomacy jobs.
  Condoleezza Rice asked Congress for 1,100 more FSOs annually, but she got
  considerably fewer.
- These
  personnel shortages reduce the United States' ability to project what Clinton calls
  "smart power."
- Ron Capps is peacekeeping program manager at Refugees
  International. He served in Afghanistan as a soldier and in Iraq as a Foreign
  Service officer.

24 Oct 09

Think Progress » T. Boone Pickens: U.S. ‘entitled’ to Iraqi oil.

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US politics t. boone pickens oil iraq empire energy waronterror

Yet in remarks to Congress yesterday, Pickens revealed that he is just as interested as ever in tying our national security to oil interests in the Middle East, suggesting that American oil companies are “entitled” to Iraq’s oil because we spent blood and treasure invading the Arab country
the U.S. is a signatory to the Hague Conventions, which specifically bar the confiscation of private property by occupying powers.

23 Oct 09

Under the Banner of the 'War' on Terror

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deranged society's normal processes and purposes with a brilliantly seductive political message: Terror pre-empts everything else.
restart the cold war
9 more annotations...
- Fanatical Muslims replaced Soviet Communists and, like the reds, these enemies could be anywhere, including in our midst (they may not even be Muslims, but kindred agents who likewise "hate" us and oppose our values).
- it runs on fear
- The political commodity of fear has no practical limits
- Long after the Soviet Union was recognized as a failed economic system, US intelligence agencies continued to warn that it was surpassing America's arsenal of defense and so new, much larger weapons must be built.
- Who can say the "intelligence" is wrong? How can citizens even weigh the "facts" when government keeps most of them secret?
- Terrorism is not an enemy; it is a method of using violence to gain political objectives.
- "How do you win a 'war' against a tool that, like war itself, is a method of carrying on politics by other means?" Spiers asked. "A 'war on terrorism' is a war without an end in sight, without an exit strategy, with
- enemies specified not by their aims but by their tactics
- Relying principally on military means is like trying to eliminate a cloud of mosquitoes with a machine gun.... It brings to mind Big Brother's...war in Orwell's 1984. A war on terrorism is a permanent engagement against an always-available tool."

08 Oct 09

Senator Franken Dropkicks Halliburton & KBR • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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halliburton kbr US politics private contractors rape women waronterror law franken iraq arbitration

07 Oct 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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US politics glenn beck bush waronterror iraq afghanistan conservatism

29 Sep 09

A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR

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US politics obama aghanistan waronterror biden history vietnam kennedy LBJ nixon bush iraq

Obama must decide whether to renew America's commitment to the war and boost troop levels by more than 50 percent.
Now that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has told the Pentagon that he needs as many as 40,000 soldiers on top of the 68,000 scheduled to be there by the end of the year, Obama increasingly is being backed into a corner.
4 more annotations...
- "Johnson was concerned that a simple pullout from Vietnam — or, alternately, a major mobilization on the spot — would lead to Congress not acting positively on his Great Society domestic program," says Greenstein. "He kind of played the process along. His administration never did a rigorous assessment of how much it would cost, how long it would take, what the trade-off would be of investing in this, and whether American domestic support would hold up for that period of time."
- Despite campaigning on a pledge to bring peace with honor, Nixon found it difficult to bring U.S. troops home without risking an embarrassing defeat.
- "If John Kennedy's ghost had been consulted, he would say, 'I really wished I had not done the Bay of Pigs.' And I think history would wish he had not, too," Smith says.
  For George W. Bush in Iraq, however, the lessons were different. When he invaded Iraq in 2003, he ignored the advice of many generals and deployed a relatively small force. The conflict quickly became mired in a deadly sectarian civil war.
- Competing leaks have made it clear that many of the president's own advisers are opposed to an escalation. Biden, who was chosen for his foreign policy credentials, is said to be one of the top skeptics.

26 Sep 09

David Brooks: our nation's premier expert warrior - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

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US politics waronterror conservatives republicans iraq afghanistan bush france exceptionalism davidbrooks

19 Sep 09

Dear President Bush, - The Atlantic (October 2009)

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bush waronterror torture law justice bagram guantanamo yoo cheney abu-ghraib accountability iraq andrewsullivan obama

the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora; the intelligence fiasco of Saddam’s nonexistent stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction; the failure to prepare for an insurgency in Iraq; the reckless disbandment of the Iraqi army; the painful slowness in adapting to drastically worsening conditions there in 2004–06; the negligence toward Afghanistan.
But because of the way you chose to treat prisoners in American custody in wartime—a policy that degraded human beings with techniques typically deployed by brutal dictatorships—we lost this moral distinction early
28 more annotations...
- I have come to accept that it would be too damaging and polarizing to the American polity to launch legal prosecutions against you, and deeply unfair to solely prosecute those acting on your orders or in your name
- But my biggest fear is this: in the event of a future attack on the United States, another president will feel tempted, or even politically compelled, to resort to the same brutalizing policy, with the same polarizing, demoralizing, war-crippling results. I am writing you now because it is within your power—and only within your power—to prevent that from happening.
- As long as these lapses are investigated and punished, the integrity of a just war can be sustained.
- But this war is different. It began with a memo from your office stating that—for the first time—American service members and CIA officers need not adhere to the laws of warfare that have governed Western and American war-making since before this country’s founding.
- declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply
- treated humanely unless “military necessity” required otherwise
- formally opposed in a memo by the member of your Cabinet with the most military experience, Secretary of State Colin Powell
- Your successor remains profoundly constrained even now by this legacy—compelled to prevent the release of more photographic evidence of war crimes under your command because of the damage it could still do to American soldiers in the field.
- This is what Geneva’s Article 3 says: whatever the nature of the combatant, in or out of uniform, and whatever his own moral rules (or lack of them), he deserves basic respect as a human being with human rights.
- whatever your intentions, you undermined this fundamental American principle. You may not have intended that to occur. But you were the commander in chief and president, and these were presidential-level decisions.
- This was never about “bad apples.”
- The International Committee of the Red Cross, the Senate Armed Services Committee, dozens of reputable well-sourced news stories and well-documented books, and the many official reports on the subject have revealed a systematic pattern of prisoner mistreatment in every theater of combat, by almost all branches of the armed services, and in every major detention facility in Iraq where interrogation took place.
- The Senate’s own unanimous bipartisan report, signed by your party’s 2008 nominee, John McCain, proves exhaustively that the abuse and torture documented in U.S. prisons were the results of policies you chose. The International Red Cross found your administration guilty of treating prisoners in a manner that constituted torture, a war crime.
- very careful distinctions between the disparate acts of torture or abuse that take place in all wars and a bureaucratized top-down policy, whereby identical techniques are replicated across the globe in different services and under different commands
- they are coolly modern tortures, designed to leave no physical marks that could be proffered as evidence against the regimes that use them
- As the slogan in Iraq’s Camp Nama put it, “No blood, no foul.”
- Torture is defined by the imposition of “severe mental or physical pain or suffering”
- I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.
- You were opposed to it in “all its forms.”
- I expect them to be treated, the POWs, I expect to be treated humanely, just like we’re treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.
- “This is not America. America is a country of justice and law and freedom and treating people with respect.”
- “The people of Iraq must understand that I view those practices as abhorrent.”
- And yet you responded to Abu Ghraib by extending the techniques revealed there and codifying them in law, in the Military Commissions Act, for use by the CIA. Your administration ordered up memos in your second term to perpetuate these abuses.
- you directly authorized and commanded: using dogs to terrorize prisoners; stripping detainees naked and hooding them; isolating people in windowless cells for weeks and even months on end; freezing prisoners to near-death and reviving them and repeating the hypothermia; contorting prisoners into stress positions that create unbearable pain in the muscles and joints; cramming prisoners into upright coffins in painful positions with minimal air; near-drowning, on a waterboard, of human beings—in one case 183 times—even after they have cooperated with interrogators. Those Abu Ghraib prisoners standing on boxes, bent over with their cuffed hands tied behind them to prison bars? You authorized that. The prisoner being led around by Lynndie England on a leash, like a dog? You authorized that, too, and enforced it in at least one case, that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, in Guantánamo Bay.
- But one of the key lawyers who provided your legal defense, John Yoo, is on record as saying that your inherent executive power allowed you to order the legal crushing of an innocent child’s testicles if you believed that it could get intelligence out of his father.
- Yoo also favored a definition of torture that allowed literally anything to be done to a helpless prisoner short of causing death or the permanent loss of a major organ.
- Camp Cropper, Camp Nama
- You once said, “I’m worried about a culture that says … ‘If you’ve got a problem blame somebody else.’”

14 Sep 09

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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11 Sep 09

Captured Photo Collection » Ian Fisher : American Soldier Photos

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07 Sep 09

| Talking Points Memo

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Robert Maguire's Library tagged iraq → View Popular

Iraq looks to go nuclear | FP Passport

Interview on the Charlie Rose Show

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Von Hoffmann Award Nominee - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

Rick Sanchez - Virginia Foxx - Cost of Healthcare vs. Terror • videosift.com

Rachel Maddow Goes After Liz Cheney • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

Washington Post Budget Editorial is So Wrong Because... | Capital Gains and Games

U.S. defense bill would pay Taliban to switch sides | International | Reuters

Call in the Civilians | Foreign Policy

Think Progress » T. Boone Pickens: U.S. ‘entitled’ to Iraqi oil.

More shocking problems at the Baghdad embassy | The Cable

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A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR

David Brooks: our nation's premier expert warrior - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Dear President Bush, - The Atlantic (October 2009)

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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| Talking Points Memo

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