Blanked Out

Can be found over at The Uptake.

I asked Rep. Ellison about what he hopes will be accomplished by anti-war protests, what responsibility the U.S. has in the aftermath of an Iraq pull-out and whether or not he regrets his vote earlier this year authorizing funds for the Iraq War.

This interview is a short clip of a longer piece on the protest where I interview several participants of both the protest and counter-protest. Clips of Norm Coleman and some of the counter-protesters are also up. Stay tuned for more.

Thanks to Chuck Olsen, Oliver Dykstra, Jason Barnett, Ken Avidor and the team at The Uptake for their great coverage.

The only thing that matters on Election Day are the people who actually make it to the polls. Pollsters use modifications to their selection methods to obtain a population that is likely to vote. In 2004, these methods were far from perfect.

It was my experience two years ago that gave me a permanent cynicism toward any prognostications based on polls, whether they be positive or negative. Simply put, Democrats were unable to close.

Here are quick closers to use:

• CD1: Gutknecht admitted he didn’t know how bad Iraq had gotten. Gutknecht abdicated his oversight responsibility and does not deserve re-election.
• CD2: When Murtha said we should increase troop levels in Iraq or get out, Kline blasted him for telling the truth. Kline has an excellent military record but has forgotten the first rule of war: go hard or go home. Kline supported an unrealistic war plan and now it’s time for him to go home.
• CD6: Bachmann has showed disdain for the entire concept of rational thought. On Iraq, when WCCO asked Bachmann what the strategy should be she gave a meaningless sound-bite as an answer. Our troops deserve more and Bachmann’s lack of strategy would endanger lives.
• Gov: While the Governor cannot directly change the Iraq policy, Pawlenty has said he would still support Bush even if his approval rating fell to 2%. That betrays a dangerous fanaticism and ignorance of reality.

Iraq has supplanted terrorism as the main issue driving the election. Believe it or not, but the most common reason given by moderates and independents for voting Republican was “we need to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them at home.” That patently false propoganda has fallen apart.

In every competitive race, the Minnesotan Republican candidates have proven themselves unsuitable for public office due to their support for the administration’s Iraq policy. As you urge your family, friends or perfect strangers to vote tomorrow, remind them of these closers.

Unbelievable:

A series of secret U.S. war games in 1999 showed that an invasion and post-war administration of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, nearly three times the number there now.

And even then, the games showed, the country still had a chance of dissolving into chaos.

I would repeat the clarion call to fire Rumsfeld, but what’s the point?  Bush has made it patently clear he wants the amateur hour to continue at whatever cost.  Other prescient predictions by the Desert Crossing war game:

• “A number of factors including aggressive neighbors, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect regional stability.”  And yet no one “saw the insurgency coming”.
• The new regime will be “problematic” if perceived as a “weak, a puppet or out of step”.  Isn’t it fair to say that problematic turns to critical if all three are true?
• Going to war might cause problems with our coalition partners.

The right will dismiss this out of hand as pre-9/11 nonsense.  Don’t let them do it - circulate this story and spread the word. It might get buried under the Hussein verdict news.

The administration cannot pretend they were ignorant of the unique challenges of post-war Iraq.  Anyone who still backs the administration should start asking the hard questions soon or prepare to be thrown out of power on Tuesday.

The calls for Bush to fire Rumsfeld have never stopped after Abu Ghraib.  They just keep intensifying:

An editorial to be published Monday in independent publications that serve the four main branches of the U.S. military will call for President Bush to replace Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Basically, the editorial says, it’s clear now, from some of the public statements that military leaders are making, that he’s lost the support and respect of the military leadership,” said Robert Hodierne, senior managing editor for the publications’ parent company Army Times Publications.

This is a bipartisan issue: anyone who thinks Rumsfeld has done a satisfactory job doesn’t deserve to be re-elected to anything.

Note: My computer is recovering but not at 100% yet.

The Washington Post has published a trio of damning articles on the state of affairs in Iraq. Baghdad itself has become a large graveyard: 110 bodies were found last week while sectarian violence continues unabated.

Meanwhile, a new study funded by MIT and performed by Johns Hopkins puts the estimated number of excess deaths as a result of the war at a heart stopping 655,000. (The exact number is anywhere between 392,979 and 942,636). Even the low number exceeds the number killed by the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.

Bush immediately said that the methodology used has been “pretty well discredited”. No one went on the record discrediting the methodology. The closest they came was a quote from Michael E. O’Hanlon from the Brookings Institute. O’Hanlon’s impressive analyst credentials and connection to the Project for the New American Century notwithstanding, he is not a biostatistician.

If you disagree with using samples to extrapolate general statistics you better start rejecting all health statistics about the U.S. If you disagree with the particular method (cluster surveys) then you should also reject statistics coming from “discredited” sources such as the U.S. government. Interview with Les Roberts, co-author of the study: (some emphasis added)

LES ROBERTS: You know, I don’t want to sort of stoop to that level and start saying general slurs, but I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do.

When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.

In context, these shocking statistics come almost simultaneously with the decision allowing Iraq to create autonomous regions of control. In U.S. history, the compromise between state and federal power was brokered to stabilize the fledgling country. Although the U.S. compromise eventually broke down and led to civil war, there was not an open conflict already between the two sides. Meanwhile, in Iraq: (emphasis added)

Parliament on Wednesday approved a controversial law that will allow Iraq to be carved into a federation of autonomous regions, after Sunni Arabs and some Shiite Muslims stormed out of the session in protest.

A Shiite politician from the Moqtada Al-Sadr block has it right:

Nasaar al-Rubaie, a lawmaker from the Sadr bloc, said: “The present conditions are not conducive to establishing regions, because we lack a strong central government that can overrule the regions.” In fact, he added, “the central authority is actually weakening instead of being solidified and strengthened.”

Even though the Shiites would be the biggest beneficiary of such regions (the Kurds having already created their de facto autonomous region) the Sadr aligned Shiites correctly realize that absent any meaningful central authority, a confederation of states is no different than a group of sovereign nation-states. Given the current political situation the passing of this legislation will do nothing but to increase the level of violence in Iraq.

Both in our minds… (emphasis added)

Most Americans, according to the poll, seem to have separate opinions about the war in Iraq and terrorism, with more than half (52 percent) saying the war in Iraq is a distraction from the U.S. efforts against terrorists who want to attack targets inside the United States. - CNN

And on the ground:

President Bush has authorized the U.S. Marine Corps to recall 2,500 troops to active duty because there are not enough volunteers returning for duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Marine commanders announced Tuesday.

(…)

“Since this is going to be a long war, we thought it was judicious and prudent at this time to be able to use a relatively small portion of those Marines to help us augment our units,” Stratton said, according to the AP. - CNN

That’s an egregious blank-out and pure spin. There have never been enough troops in Iraq and we knew that from the beginning. Gen. Shinseki did not pull any punches when in 2003 he told the government point blank that in order to secure Iraq:

…several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.

And so it takes a significant ground- force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.

The response? Two civilians decided they knew better:

“The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” Mr. Rumsfeld said.

(…)

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force.

Well, he got it half right. I’m still puzzled why the gassing of the Kurds or the campaign against the Shia after the Gulf War never counted as “ethnic strife”.

Always remember that even after the Iraq War became inevitable, it did not have to be this way.

Via Raw Story - Ambassador Peter Galbraith claims that Bush didn’t know that there were two sects of Islam, Sunni and Shiite. This implies Bush was also ignorant of the history of Iraq underneath the British and Ottoman empires and the forces that would be unleashed once the war was over.

Some of us realized this early on - others are just now starting to appreciate the complexity of Iraq and the forces that are driving it toward civil war. A quote from a McClatchy article released yesterday: (emphasis added)

“It’s to the point of being irreconcilable; you know, we’ve found a lot of bodies, entire villages have been cleared out, we get reports of entire markets being gunned down - and if that’s not a marker of a civil war, I don’t know what is,” said Ramon, 33, of San Antonio, Texas.

Driving back to his base, Johnson watched a long line of trucks and cars go by, packed with families fleeing their homes with everything they could carry: mattresses, clothes, furniture, and, in the back of some trucks, bricks to build another home.

“Every morning that we head back to the patrol base, this is all we see,” Johnson said. “These are probably people who got threatened last night.”

In Taji, an area north of Baghdad, where the roads between Sunni and Shiite villages have become killing fields, many soldiers said they saw little chance that things would get better.

“I don’t think there’s any winning here. Victory for us is withdrawing,” said Sgt. James Ellis, 25, of Chicago. “In this part of the world they have been fighting for 3,000 years, and we’re not going to fix it in three.

We cannot begin to solve this problem unless we have wide recognition of what is going on in Iraq. If the Administration fails to recognize reality, Southern Iraq will become a proxy of Iran and Central Iraq willdissolvee into an anarchy similar to Somalia.

Meanwhile, I’m told “The Other Iraq” aka Kurdistan is “spectacular and peaceful” in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom and their own civil war.

Mark Kennedy in his speech to the RNC meeting in Bloomington had this Klobuchar’s position on the war:

“They want somebody who has a firm point of view. Whatever point of view you have, my opponent has said it in one form of another,” said Kennedy. “In one form she’ll try to sound like she’s being prudent. In another form she’ll say Iraq is a fiasco and we got to get out troops out of there now.”

Whatever your own position, Klobuchar has remained absolutely consistent on her position that she is against an immediate withdrawal from Klobuchar’s website:

Since April, I have been asking the President to give the nation a clear plan to bring our troops home safely. As with any effective plan, there should be a realistic time-frame based on specific milestones and benchmarks, with honest and current information from the administration about the status of our efforts…

If the president is unwilling to provide a plan, Congress should call upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do so.
(…)

I also believe we have to manage our exit from Iraq in a responsible way. I do not support immediate withdrawal of our troops, as has been suggested by some, because the situation is just too precarious.

Going back to Kennedy’s remarks, let’s substitute Kennedy’s lie with the truth: “Iraq is a fiasco and we have to draw down our troops based on a realistic time frame.”

I will leave it to the reader to decide whether or not the above statement is prudent or not.

Reading the Chairman’s address made me realize something: Republican’s do have good ideas.

Winning the war on terrorism? Who wouldn’t want that? Check.
Promote job growth in the US? Check
Alternative energy? (Yes, that’s in there too). Check.

Barring Mehlman’s position on abortion, I agree with the ideas in there. Those are all goals we should shoot for - the problem is that Republicans have no plan to get us there.

Mehlman advocates for the same solutions that have not been working: more war, less taxes and more drilling for oil. Mehlman goes beyond his issue framing ’shell game” to play hard and loose with facts and figures.

More under the fold.

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