An Iraqi Double-Nightmare (For Us)

The news from Iraq gets worse and worser. As we sink into a Vietnam-like quagmire, we have U. S. Marines shooting men, women, and children in retaliation for a guerrilla attack that took a Marine's life. ¹The Cobra sinks her fangs into The Rumster and The Dubster for leading us into disaster in Iraq. Then, ²Paul Mulshine, a New Jersey Republican loyalist and newspaper columnist for the Newark fishwrap, exposes the fraud of our nation-building in Iraq. The former Vietnamese collaborators with French colonialism were our great hope for democratizing Vietnam. Now, we are placing our democratic pipedreams in the hands of a known terrorist who masterminded the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut with an innovation known as the suicide car bomb. Our rocket scientists in State and Defense brought Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, the new Iraqi PM, out of exile in Syria to head the newest democratic government in Iraq. We are in a quagmire that is getting deeper and deeper. If this is (fair & balanced) dread, so be it.

¹[x NYTimes]
Don't Become Them
By Maureen Dowd

When I started in newspapers, I shied away from police brutality stories, letting other reporters cover them.

I knew there were cops who had no right to be cops. But I also knew, because my dad was a detective, the sort of blistering pressure men and women in uniform were under as they made snap life-and-death decisions. I'd cringed at the 60's refrain that the military and the police were "pigs."

After my dad killed a robber in self-defense — the man had tried to shoot him point-blank in the face, but that chamber of the gun was empty — he told a police psychologist that he could not swallow or eat because he felt as though he had fish bones in his throat.

So I felt sickened to hear about the marines who allegedly snapped in Haditha, Iraq, and wantonly killed two dozen civilians — including two families full of women and children, among them a 3-year-old girl. Nine-year-old Eman Waleed told Time that she'd watched the marines go in to execute her father as he read the Koran, and then shoot her grandfather and grandmother, still in their nightclothes. Other members of her family, including her mother, were shot dead; she said that she and her younger brother had been wounded but survived because they were shielded by adults who died.

It's a My Lai acid flashback. The force that sacked Saddam to stop him from killing innocents is now accused of killing innocents. Under pressure from the president to restore law, but making little progress, marines from Camp Pendleton, many deployed in Iraq for the third time, reportedly resorted to lawlessness themselves.

The investigation indicates that members of the Third Battalion, First Marines, lost it after one of their men was killed by a roadside bomb, going on a vengeful killing spree over about five hours, shooting five men who had been riding in a taxi and mowing down the residents of two nearby houses.

They blew off the Geneva Conventions, following the lead of the president's lawyer.

It was inevitable. Marines are trained to take the hill and destroy the enemy. It is not their forte to be policemen while battling a ghostly foe, suicide bombers, ever more ingenious explosive devices, insurgents embedded among civilians, and rifle blasts fired from behind closed doors and minarets. They don't know who the enemy is. Is it a pregnant woman? A child? An Iraqi policeman? They don't know how to win, or what a win would entail.

Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, who has flown to Iraq to talk to his troops about "core values" in the wake of Haditha and a second incident being investigated, noted that the effect of this combat "can be numbing."

A new A&E documentary chronicles the searing story of the marines of Lima Company, 184 Ohio reservists who won 59 Purple Hearts, 23 posthumously. Sgt. Guy Zierk recounts kicking in a door after an insurgent attack. Enraged over the death of his pals, he says he nearly killed two women and a 16-year-old boy. "I am so close, so close to shooting, but I don't." he says. "It would make me no better than the people we're trying to fight."

Retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, one of those who called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, told Chris Matthews that blame for Haditha and Abu Ghraib lay with "the incredible strain bad decisions and bad judgment is putting on our incredible military."

While it was nice to hear President Bush admit he had made mistakes, he was talking mostly about mistakes of tone. Saying he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" would have been O.K. if he had acted on it, rather than letting Osama go at Tora Bora and diverting the Army to Iraq.

At his news conference with a tired-looking Tony Blair, Mr. Bush seemed chastened by Iraq, at least. But he continued to have the same hallucination about how to get out: turning things over to the Iraqi security forces after achieving total victory over insurgents and terrorists.

Stories in The Times this week show that Iraqi security forces are so infiltrated by Shiite militias, Sunni militias, death squads and officers with ties to insurgents that the idea of entrusting anything to them is ludicrous.

By ignoring predictions of an insurgency and refusing to do homework before charging into Iraq on trumped-up pretenses, W. left our troops undermanned, inadequately armored and psychologically unprepared.

It was maddening to see the prime minister of Britain — of all places — express surprise at the difficulty of imposing a democracy on a country that has had a complex and ferocious tribal culture since the Gardens of Babylon were still hanging.

Maureen (The Cobra) Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize for reports stemming from the Clinton impeachment trial. She is an equal-opportunity viper who struck The Trickster and now strikes The Dubster. Double-Ouch.


Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

²[x Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)]
Nonstop nonsense from neoconservatives
By Paul Mulshine

In Iraq, the terrorists have won, at least if you accept Washington's definition of "terrorism."

The post of prime minister is now in the hands of the Dawa party, the same group of people that U.S. officials called the "Dawa terrorists" back in 1983. That was when they attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut with what was then an innovation in terrorist warfare, the suicide car bomb.

The new Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, was an active party member back then. He was hiding out in Syria, presumably thinking unkind thoughts about the country that would later bring him to power in his native country.

The intellectual authors of the Iraq war, the so-called "neoconservatives," are fond of talking about the terrorists we're fighting. But they never mention the terrorists we're fighting for, including that party of ex-suicide bombers to whom we've helped hand the most powerful position in the new government.

This is a strange phenomenon. It's as if Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had pursued a long and costly war in the Pacific only to put a kamikaze pilot in charge of Japan. Actually, it's worse. The Dawa party has from its inception had a very specific mission: to restore control of Iraq to an Islamic government. It never could have done this on its own, but thanks to some deep thinkers in Washington, the party is well on its way.

Among those deep thinkers is Max Boot, a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. In a recent column, Boot asserted that, now that the United States has brought democracy to Iraq, we should concentrate efforts on Egypt.

The idea of spreading democracy to the Mideast remains central to the neocon philosophy. That philosophy is not grounded in reality. We've seen two great experiments in democracy in the past couple of years. In Iraq, the Dawa is actually among the most moderate members of the ruling coalition, which is busy replacing a secular government with an Islamic republic. In the Palestinian territories, meanwhile, the homicidal Hamas won a free election.

But don't worry, the neocons tell us. Things will all work out just fine after we spread democracy to all those other countries where the great masses of people seem to prefer Islamic fundamentalism to Western secularism.

Never before has a philosophy of foreign policy been so thoroughly discredited so quickly by events. Yet its proponents seem not to have noticed. Boot is but one among many neocons who got everything wrong about Iraq but still insist everything's going right. Just before the war began in 2003, for example, Boot wrote that "the conquest of Afghanistan definitely denied the terrorists an important base of operations. The ouster of Saddam Hussein will achieve the same purpose."

Oops. Before the war, there were perhaps a few dozen terrorists based in Baghdad. But now, if one accepts the neocons' definition of "terrorist," there are at least 20,000, perhaps more. And that's just on the enemy side. The terrorists now in the Iraqi government have in the past few years killed dozens of times as many Americans as terrorists linked to Saddam ever did.

The forces of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whom we "liberated," have killed hundreds of American troops and wounded thousands. And while other terrorists of all descriptions now have bases all over Iraq, al-Sadr has a base right inside the Green Zone, where his party plays a major role in the new government. The sad fact is, if every al Qaeda sympathizer and ex-Baathist in Iraq were to disappear tomorrow, we'd still need to keep troops around indefinitely just to make sure our new allies didn't go back to their old tricks.

This is as complete a foreign-policy screwup as can be imagined. President Bush certainly deserves blame — but not from the Democrats. They bought into the neocon philosophy from the beginning and have only recently come around to offering tepid criticisms, none of which involves the central error of promoting democracy where it is not in our interest. Only a few far-right critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have questioned whether this exercise in nation-building was a fitting use of American force in the first place.

The problem, near as I can deduce it, derives from Americans' failure to understand that the rest of the world does not share our two-party system. If A is bad, the typical American thinks, then his opponent, B, must by definition be good, or at least better.

But what if, while A is indeed bad, B is awful, C is despicable, D is reprehensible and E is downright monstrous? This is a simple enough concept to grasp, yet it seems to elude even the deepest of our deep thinkers.

Paul Mulshine is a longtime columnist and former editorial writer for The (Newark) Star-Ledger. His years of covering New Jersey provide readers with umatched insight into local politics. Whether he is writing about sport-utility vehicles, Bruce Springsteen or the state of the New Jersey Republican party, Mulshine’s voice is distinctive, informed and very New Jersey.

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