US General Says Iraq Violence Down

Some welcome good news on Iraq from the AP. Important to note that while violence has abated, 2007 is still the deadliest year in the war to date.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Violence in Iraq is at its lowest levels since the first year of the American invasion, finally opening a window for reconciliation among rival sects, the second-ranking U.S. general said Sunday as Iraqi forces formally took control of security across half the country.

Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, the man responsible for the ground campaign in Iraq, said that the first six months of 2007 were probably the most violent period since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The past six months, however, had seen some of the lowest levels of violence since the conflict began, Odierno said, attributing the change to an increase in both American troops and better-trained Iraqi forces.



"I feel we are back in '03 and early '04. Frankly I was here then, and the environment is about the same in terms of security in my opinion," he said. "What is different from then is that the Iraqi security forces are significantly more mature."
Violence killed at least 27 Iraqis on Sunday — 16 of them members of a U.S.-backed neighborhood patrol killed in clashes with al-Qaida in a volatile province neighboring Baghdad. Thirty-five al-Qaida fighters also died in that fighting, Iraqi officials said.

Odierno said Anbar province, once plagued by violence, only recorded 12 attacks in the past week, down from an average of 26 per week over the past three months.

"The violence last week was the lowest ever," he said of Anbar.

"So that kind of defines 2007 very simply. A long hard fight and a lot of sacrifice by a lot of soldiers, Marines and airmen to get there," Odierno said.

A planned reduction of troops to about 130,000 at the end of next year from a high of around 165,000 at the height of the "surge" should not derail that effort, but Iraq's government must take advantage of the improved security, Odierno said. There are 154,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now.

So far 3,983 members of the US Armed Forces have been killed in Iraq.

KBR/ Halliburton Rapists in Iraq

In July 2005, on her "fourth night in a Green Zone barracks in Baghdad," former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones says she "accepted a 'special drink' from male KBR employees," after which she doesn't "remember anything at all" until she "woke up naked," "bleeding," and "bruised." "I remember looking down and seeing the bruises between my inner thighs, at that moment my heart sank," Jones told an ABC-affiliate in Houston. According to Jones, "an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped 'both vaginally and anally,'" but somehow "the rape kit" with her examination's results "disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers." After reporting her rape to KBR, Jones says "the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she'd be out of a job." After "at least 24 hours" in the container "without food or water," a "sympathetic guard" allowed her to call her family in Texas, who contacted Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX). Poe then contacted the State Department, "which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad" to free Jones from the container. In the two years since Jones returned from Iraq, "the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter" and Poe says "neither the departments of State nor Justice will give him answers on the status of the Jones investigation." Frustrated by the government's inaction, Jones is now taking her case to the civil court system, but KBR is pushing for it to be heard in "private arbitration," without a "public record or transcript."



KBR'S 'INADEQUATE' DEFENSE
KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root and until 2006, a subsidiary of Halliburton, is "the largest" private "employer of Americans" in Iraq, with "nearly 14,000 U.S. workers." The company is aggressively resisting Jones's claims. In a memo to company employees, KBR CEO Bill Utt "disputes portions of Ms. Jones' version of the facts" and alleges "inaccuracies in the accounts of the incident in questions." In particular, KBR says "one of its human resources employees tended to Jones following the incident, provided her with food, and helped her contact her family." Jamie Armstrong, the human resources employee, confirmed to KBR's version of events to ABC News, but cautioned that "her memory may not be accurate" because "this happened several years ago." In his memo to employees, Utt emphasizes that the company "expressed" its "position in detail to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)," but the Houston Chronicle reports "that the EEOC's Houston office found KBR's investigation into Jones's allegations were 'inadequate and did not effect an adequate remedy.'" According to the Chronicle, KBR told the EEOC that "one of the men accused in the rape" said that Jones "consented to have sex with him." Jones's lawyers responded by to KBR's defense by saying that "attacking the victim is the oldest trick in the book."

CONGRESS STEPS UP
For the past two years, Poe has been championing Jones's case, pushing federal investigators to take action. "I think it is the responsibility of our government, the Justice Department and the State Department," Poe told ABC News. "When crimes occur against American citizens overseas in Iraq, contractors that are paid by the American public, that we pursue the criminal cases as best as we possibly can and that people are prosecuted." After ABC News reported on Jones's case last week, the House Judiciary Committee announced that it would hold a hearing on Jones's allegations next Wednesday. In the past week, multiple members of Congress have written to the Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State urging them to "act immediately to investigate Ms. Jones's claims." In his letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) raised concerns about a second KBR employee alleging sexual assault while working for the company in Iraq. "I am deeply troubled by recent reports that at least two women who worked in Iraq under contractors for the Department of Defense were sexually assaulted by male coworkers," Nelson wrote to Gates.

NOT AN 'ISOLATED CASE?'
In her lawsuit, Jones asserts that "KBR and Halliburton created a 'boys will be boys' atmosphere at the company barracks which put her and other female employees at risk." "I think that the men who are there believe that they live without laws," Jones's lawyer Todd Kelly told ABC News. Another former KBR employee, Linda Lindsey, supports Jones's claims about the "boys will be boys" environment of KBR barracks in Iraq. "I saw rampant sexual harassment and discrimination," said Lindsey in a sworn affidavit for Jones's case. During an appearance on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight last week, Poe said he does not think that Jones's alleged rape "is an isolated case of sexual assault against American citizens in Baghdad by coworkers," and he wants "the other victims to notify" his office immediately. In his letter to Gates, Nelson mentions "a second alleged assault, this time of a woman from Florida who reportedly worked for a KBR subsidiary in Ramadi, Iraq in 2005." Houston's CBS affiliate KHOU says "a North Carolina woman, who also said she was assaulted by a KBR contractor," will testify along with Jones on Wednesday, though the House Judiciary Committee has yet to release an official witness list.

2007 The Deadliest Year in Iraq

The US military leadership announced a steep drop in the rate of American deaths in October. That month, 38 American service members died in Iraq, the lowest monthly tally since March 2006, according to the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (icasualties.org), an independent Web site that tracks military deaths. November’s total, if the current pace continues, would be higher, but still below the war’s average of 69 American military deaths per month.



Despite the decline, American commanders acknowledged that 2007 would be far deadlier than the second-worst year, 2004, when 849 Americans died, many of them in major battles for control of insurgent strongholds like Falluja.

Military officials attribute the increase this year to an expanded troop presence during the so-called surge, which swelled the American force to more than 165,000 troops in Iraq, and sent units out of large bases and into more dangerous communities.

Commanders contend that despite the cost in terms of lives lost, the strategy has improved security in the country and created a “tactical momentum” that could stabilize Iraq permanently.

I truly hope so.

The "Surge" is working?

Firstly, if less of our brave soldiers, sailors and airmen are being killed: Thank God. We hear that the "Surge" in Iraq is "working". But frankly I am not convinced. What does "working" mean exactly?

That the level of violence has dropped from horrific to merely intolerable?

That in the deadliest year of the war to date we have seen a drop in fatalities?



I am glad that President Bush finally started taking the war seriously - not just as a politocal statement (and oil-grab) but as a military campaign. If he and the admiinistration had listened to General Shinseki we would not have gotten in to this situation. (Even better, if the Bush administration had been more diligent in the search for information on WMD's, we might never have invaded). The ultimiate "slacker" President was finally spurred into action.

A few things though - much of the much-vaunted success (in El-Anbar, for example)

It goes without saying that US Forces are doing an amazing job. Let's remember that the job - as Republicans admit - is POLITICAL. We aren't out of the woods yet.

Oh and by the way, the current estimate for the cost of the war is $3,000,000,000,000.

What could we have bought for this?

Blackwater: Friend or Foe?

The National Review recently ran an article by Mario Loyola which recommends that Blackwater and the other PMC should leave Iraq.

The US Army follows strict rules of engagement, with soldiers often fighting against their survival instincts, refusing to return fire when fired upon if they cannot positively “ID” the shooter.

Security contractors like Blackwater are heavily armed, and act for their own protection — not for winning the war. The COIN [counterinsurgency] strategy doesn’t apply to them. This is resulting in a situation where perhaps 25% of the perceived coalition "force" is operating outside the chain of command, and in violation of the stated strategy.

Our soldiers are exercising deadly restraint to win over the population — and all of their work can unravel because of just one shooting incident carried out by private contractors. The resulting effect is an increase in risks for the US Military.

Not all private contractors are negligent - indeed some are very professional outfits - but Blackwater has a particularly bad reputation in the PMC community. Here is a short clip about Blackwater:



You can read an account of the life of a Baghdad PMC in John Geddes' excellent Book "Highway To Hell".

Iraq: President Bush asks for extra $46,000,000,000

Yesterday, President Bush requested an additional $46 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If approved, the President's request would bring the yearly budget for the wars there to an all-time high of $196 billion. "Iraq now consumes almost twice as much funding as is allocated for homeland security, diplomacy, and international assistance combined," according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.



The war in Iraq continues to balloon not only in yearly cost, but also in length. Gen. David Petraeus said recently that "historically counterinsurgency operations [like Iraq] have gone nine or 10 years."

With that scenario, the Center for American Progress estimates the total cost of the war in Iraq to be between $1.1 and $1.5 trillion. Including Afghanistan, the cost of U.S. wars waged overseas since Sept. 11, 2001, has already exceeded $806 billion. That total is more than what the United States spent in the Vietnam, Korean, or Gulf Wars.

Currently, only 26 percent of Americans approve of the way President Bush is handling the war in Iraq.

Dirty Sanchez and the Nightmare With No End...

I read yesterday in the New York Times that General Ricardo Sanchez made "a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq. The former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight."



“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.

He is the most senior war commander of a string of retired officers who have harshly criticized the administration’s conduct of the war. While much of the previous condemnation has been focused on the role of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, General Sanchez’s was an unusually broad attack on the overall course of the war.

General Sanchez said he was convinced that the American effort in Iraq was failing the day after he took command, in June 2003. Asked why he waited until nearly a year after his retirement to voice his concerns publicly, he responded that it was not the place of active-duty officers to challenge lawful orders from the civilian authorities.

No End In Sight?

I have been reading a lot about the movie No End In Sight

It bills itself as a "jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the Spring of 2003), Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of the occupation of Iraq through May 2003) as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts".



It claims to "examine the manner in which the principal errors of U.S. policy – the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military – largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions? NO END IN SIGHT dissects the people, issues and facts behind the Bush Administration’s decisions and their consequences on the ground to provide a powerful look into how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war".

I support the US Army (the best Army in the world, by the way) 100%. I am pleased, encouraged and gratified that the surge appears to be working in some quarters. That said I am becoming fairly disgusted with the current administration and their complete inability to prosecute this conflict successfully, specifically their putting our troops un-necessarily in harm's way.

Cheney lists several compelling reasons for not invading Iraq.

Well I am sure most people following events as they unfold in Iraq will have seen or heard of the 1994 video of Dick Cheney spelling out why invading Iraq would be a bad idea. He makes a very good case! The deperessing thing about it is that everything he prerdicts in the video came to pass, pretty much.



Dick Cheney points out:
- Invading would mean a US occupation of Iraq "on its own" without the support of neighboring Arab States
- Toppling Saddam would cause Iraq to fragment in to sectarian violence. (A "quagmire" he calls it).
- It would cause many casualties, more than getting rid of Saddam "would be worth".

Someone has made a video which compares his warning to what has transpired.



It makes it even harder to support the administration when faced with documentary evidence like this.

British "Defeated" in the South?

"The British have basically been defeated in the south," a senior U.S. intelligence official said recently in Baghdad.

There doesn't seem to have been much good news from Basra, but this is a particularly negative spin.



The British, who announced their withdrawal from Iraq in February, are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as "surrounded like cowboys and Indians" by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain's remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.

Britain sent about 40,000 troops to Iraq -- the second-largest contingent, after that of the United States, at the time of the March 2003 invasion -- and focused its efforts on the south. With few problems from outside terrorists or sectarian violence, the British began withdrawing, and by early 2005 only 9,000 troops remained. British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced further drawdowns early this year before leaving office.

The administration has been reluctant to publicly criticize the British withdrawal. But a British defense expert serving as a consultant in Baghdad acknowledged in an e-mail that the United States "has been very concerned for some time now about a) the lawless situation in Basra and b) the political and military impact of the British pullback." The expert added that this "has been expressed at the highest levels" by the U.S. government to British authorities.

One of the major problems with this conflict has been a lack of clarity about what constitutes "success". Deposing Saddam ... military victory ... a free and democratic Iraq ...? Without clearly defined success (or victory) criteria there can be no "victory", and difficult to quantify "defeat".

We might feel good about a good bit of Brit-bashing occasionally, but I have to say I am fairly disappointed that the administration is allowing this scapegoating. The USA has become careless of its allies (what few remain) and vilifying the efforts of the British will do litte except encourage our enemies.