We Are All Responsible, Now

Glenn Greenwald says we are all responsible now for the murder of a Reuters journalist, his driver, and several others, and the serious maiming of two children, who were shot by U.S. troops in 2007. Our military falsely claimed that the victims were taking hostile action and then refused to release any supporting evidence. Now, we know why: the only evidence was damning of the military itself.

Wikileaks today released a leaked videotape of the crime. The video was taken by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Judge for yourself, as in a democracy we must, whether the murders, the lies, and the cover-up by our own military are corrosive to our morality and freedom.

Calling Home

Making Iraq Safe for China

This is why we sacrificed our blood and treasure?

"China, Iraq Reach $ 3 Billion Oil Service Deal."

China and Iraq have signed a $3 billion deal revising an earlier agreement for China's biggest oil company to help develop the Ahdab oil field, an official at the Iraq's Oil Ministry said Thursday.

The deal, restoring a project canceled after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, was signed late Wednesday by Chinese officials and Iraqi Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani.

Obama on Iraq in His Own Words

Today's NY Times carries an op-ed editorial by Barack Obama, himself, titled, "My Plan for Iraq." It's precisely stated and clearly reasoned.

Agree or disagree, when it comes to "straight talk" this is the real deal:

In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.

But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.

The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.

Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.

But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.

Read the rest here.

Generation Kill

We don't recommend television as a rule, but if we did the only thing in that vast desert we would recommend watching at the moment is Generation Kill, which debuts on HBO tonight.

It's written and produced by Ed Burns and David Simon, the creative geniuses who wrote the superlative 'visual novel' titled The Wire. The new mini-series is based on a book with the same title, written by Evan Wright.

The NY Times recently ran a preview:

Generation Kill,” an HBO seven-part mini-series about the invasion of Iraq that begins on Sunday, is bold, uncompromising and oddly diffident. It maintains impeccable dignity even as it tracks a group of shamelessly and engagingly profane, coarse and irreverent marines, members of an elite reconnaissance battalion that spearheaded the invasion. The odyssey of these men from training tents in Kuwait to occupied Baghdad is laid out with brutal candor and without the aid of maudlin cinematography or emotive music. The closest thing to a thematic score is the starched, staticky clatter of radio traffic: “Roger that” and “This is Hit Man II, over.”

It is a true story of combat and male bonding, but it is told disjointedly and atonally, perhaps because it pursues clashing goals. “Generation Kill” tries to honor the ordeal — and the humanity — of its heroes while exposing the futility of their quest. It was written by David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind “The Wire,” and was adapted from the prizewinning book by Evan Wright, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who was embedded with Bravo Company for the duration of the assault.

The script is faithful to Mr. Wright’s account, respectful of the soldiers he befriended and as opaque and ascetic as “The Wire,” an opus that forced viewers to parse multiple plots and a huge cast of characters without directions or subtitles.

Two cautions: First, if you're going to watch it at all, start with the first episode and proceed chronologically from there. Given the writers' style, this is not likely to be the usual TV schlock you can follow while in a torpid state of low alpha wave activity.

Second, as several critics such as Maureen Ryan are warning, as with any great novel it will take a chapter -- or episode -- or two "to truly get into the action."

We're in the Soup, Now!

The seeds of raging inflation sewn by the Bush administration's exorbitant Iraq War spending ... "morally obscene military spending" ... imprudent tax cuts for the super-rich ... dollar indifference ... and record setting federal discretionary spending are beginning to flower everywhere.

Gas over $4 a gallon; bread topping $3.50 a loaf; and Cap'tn Crunch "costing close to $6 these days." Etc. etc.

Even (or especially) the U.S. Senate can't live within its means. Do you suppose this news means that Pensacola's own McGuire's Irish Pub will soon have to stop selling Senate Bean Soup for 18 cents a bowl?

Bush's Catch-22

"Bush announced today that he would shorten Army tour lengths." That so? No, it's not:

Make no mistake about it: With an effective date of August 1st, this means that not one troop will benefit from this deployment reduction until August 2009--seven months into the next Presidential administration. This means that even if you're not scheduled to deploy for another three months from now, you'll still be conducting a 15-month-long tour in Iraq. And of course, it certainly doesn't affect anyone there now.

If Bush's PR stunt sounds familiar, that's because it is. Once again, life in the Bush administration imitates art. Without a doubt, Bush borrowed the idea from Colonel Cathcart , who lives within the pages of Catch-22.

If you haven't read the book, you should. Here's a short summary. Here's a longer one.

And here's an excerpt from chapter nine that nearly perfectly describes Bush's latest Iraq troop deployment plan, written some 58 years ago:

Major Major lowered his gaze sheepishly and fiddled with his fingers. "What do you want me to tell you?"
"That I've flown enough missions and can go home."
"How many have you flown?"
"Fifty-one."
"You've only got four more to fly."
"He'll raised them. Every time I get close he raises them."
"Perhaps he won't this time."
"He never sends anyone home, anyway. He just keeps them around waiting for rotation orders until he doesn't have enough men left for the crews, and then raises the number of missions and throws them all back on combat status. He's been doing that ever since he got here."

Why does the Pentagon, or for that matter Congress and the American people, put up with this? Again, Joseph Heller had the answer:

What could you possibly say to him? Major Major wondered forlornly. One thing he could not say was that there was nothing he could do. To say there was nothing he could do would suggest he would do something if he could and imply the existence of an error or injustice in Colonel Korn's policy. Colonel Korn had been most explicit about that. He must never say there was nothing he could do.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But there is nothing I can do."

The C Student

Tristero at Hullabaloo, absorbing Prof. Juan Cole's explanation for the confusing on-again -off-again- on-again Shiite vs. Shiite civil war in Iraq: This "is why you should never, ever, elect a president with a C+ average."

Or, he adds, "a president who has "senior moments" and scrambles the differences between Shiite and Sunni."

In Iraq 'Indefinitely'

WaPo's Karen DeYoung today covers the important and revealing constitutional crisis brewing between the White House and Congress over incipient "security" treaties being discussed by the U.S. and Nouri al-Maliki's Iraq. The treaties, so the White House contends, are needed because the mandate for having foreign troops in Iraq will expire at year's end.

The article appears in the 'Reality Section' of the Post, which is to say deep in the interior between pages A-14 and A-19, where the truth usually is buried.

The Bush administration yesterday advanced a new argument for why it does not require congressional approval to strike a long-term security agreement with Iraq, stating that Congress had already endorsed such an initiative through its 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

The 2002 measure, along with the congressional resolution passed one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks authorizing military action "to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," permits indefinite combat operations in Iraq, according to a statement by the State Department's Bureau of Legislative Affairs.

The statement came in response to lawmakers' demands that the administration submit to Congress for approval any agreement with Iraq. U.S. officials are traveling to Baghdad this week with drafts of two documents -- a status-of-forces agreement and a separate "strategic framework" -- that they expect to sign with the Iraqi government by the end of July. It is to go into effect when the current U.N. mandate expires Dec. 31.

The Bush administration says Congress shouldn't worry. Mr. Bush really isn't "trying to lock in a U.S. military presence in Iraq before the next president takes office." He just wants "combat operations" to continue 'indefinitely.'

The Surge Continues

Via Intel Dump, Iraqi Army Training:

Then and Now, Them and Us

(CLICK ABOVE PICTURE TO READ)
U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects Apart
-- New York Times, April 21, 2007

UPDATE

Apr. 23, 2007

Juan Cole reports that Iraq's "Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked Sunday that the US military halt its construction of a security wall around the Sunni Arab district of Adhamiya."

The mainstream US media will sidestep this point, but al-Maliki pretty explicitly said that the reason he called off the wall building is that he doesn't want his government compared to that of Israel.

On the other hand:

Nassar al-Rubaie, a Sadrist member of the Iraqi parliament, did warn that the US is building a series of Berlin Walls in Baghdad.

John McCain in Neverland

This would be too funny -- if it weren't so depressing to see how far out of touch with reality some of our leading national politicians are.

It seems that presidential aspirant and U.S. Senator John McCain, speaking from the comfort of the Senate cloakroom, went on television this afternoon and told Wolf Blitzer the surge is working so well "I know for a fact of much of the success we're experiencing, including the ability of Americans in many parts ... to go into some neighborhoods in Baghdad in a secure fashion."

Blitzer then had the rare good sense to turn to CNN war correspondent Michael Ware, who is on the scene in Baghdad, to ask him for confirmation. Ware was abashed:

[I]f I have any difficulty hearing you right now, Wolf, that's because of the helicopter circling overhead and the gun battle that is blazing just a few blocks down the road.

Is Baghdad any safer?

Sectarian violence -- one particular type of violence -- is down. But none of the American generals here on the ground have anything like Senator McCain's confidence.

I mean, Senator McCain's credibility now on Iraq, which has been so solid to this point, has now been left out hanging to dry.

To suggest that there's any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I'd love Senator McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll.

No. No way on earth can a westerner, particularly an American, stroll any street of this capital of more than five million people.

I mean, if al Qaeda doesn't get wind of you, or if one of the Sunni insurgent groups don't descend upon you, or if someone doesn't tip off a Shia militia, then the nearest criminal gang is just going to see dollar signs and scoop you up. Honestly, Wolf, you'd barely last 20 minutes out there.

I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad.

Crooks and Liars has the videotape. CNN has a transcript of the whole program. Digby has edited it to highlight the McCain segment.