Iraqi security forces unprepared to take over

Another day, another Iraq report.

This one is a Congress-commissioned study on the readiness of Iraqi forces, led by retired Marine Gen. James Jones, former Supreme Commander in Europe and former Commandant of the Marine Corps -- both under Bush, so let's not hear criticisms of him as a "Clinton general" or anything like that.

The conclusion: Four years after our invasion, Iraqi security forces remain unready to take over the country's security, and won't be able to any time soon. Structural progress within the military itself has been confounded by political corruption.

Overall, Jones found that Iraqi military forces, particularly the Army, show "clear evidence of developing the baseline infrastructures that lead to the successful formation of a national defense capability." But Baghdad's police force and Ministry of Interior are plagued by "dysfunction."

"In any event, the ISF will be unable to fulfill their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months," the report states.

That bears out what U.S. troops have experienced throughout our time in Iraq, up to and including the surge: American troops can clear an area of insurgents, but Iraqi units are incapable of holding the cleared terrain.

That, in turn, bodes badly for the upcoming progress report on Iraq, because it's an example of political problems stymying military efforts.

The actual Iraqi military gets reasonable marks, though it, too, is plagued by corruption and sectarian rifts. But the report is stinging in its criticism of the police force, which makes up the bulk of Iraqi security forces.

It describes the Iraqi police as fragile, ill-equipped and infiltrated by militia forces. And it is led by the Ministry of Interior, which is "a ministry in name only" that is "widely regarded as being dysfunctional and sectarian, and suffers from ineffective leadership."

In other words, not much has changed in the last nine months. Which does not meet any definition of "progress" that I'm aware of.

Jones testifies before Congress tomorrow. Maybe he'll flesh things out a little then.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Misleading with statistics

The headline on the AP story is breathless. "Army suicides highest in 26 years!"

That basic fact is true; Army suicides are up sharply, just like they spiked during the first Gulf War. The 2006 rate was 17.3 suicides per 100,000, a near doubling of the low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001.

But a closer look at the numbers is in order before we start jumping to conclusions.

The 17.3 rate translates into 99 suicides out of a population of about 500,000 soldiers. So it's hardly an epidemic.

And if you compare it to civilian suicide rates, it's even less of an issue. A pair of pdfs here produce the following table:

2004 CIVILIAN SUICIDE RATES (per 100,000 population)
Overall: 11.1
Ages 15-24: 10.4
Males: 17.7

Wait a second, you say. Other than that "males" category, the military suicide rate is clearly much higher than the civilian rates.

But look what happens when we break down the "age" category even further and combine it with gender:

Males, age 15-19: 12.65
Males, age 20-24: 20.84

You can see where I'm going here. Soldiers are mostly males in their early 20s. So a proper comparison of apples to apples shows that the military suicide rate, despite being at a 26-year high, is still lower than the comparable civilian rate. All that in spite of combat stress, the stress of being part of a "stretched" military, and access to all sorts of military-grade weaponry.

People are right to be concerned. The rate has doubled, after all. It's clearly a symptom of strain and each one is a personal tragedy besides. The military should do what it can to reduce those numbers.

But let's not overreact. The problem is small, and soldiers are still less likely to kill themselves than civilians are. This is more an example of shallow and innumerate reporting than it is a sign of serious problems in the military.

media, suicide, politics, midtopia

Tidbits

Some interesting nonpolitical stories that crossed my path today:

RULE BRITTANIA
Britain has decided to build two new aircraft carriers, each about 65,000 tons. They will be the largest ships ever to serve with the Royal Navy, three times the size of Britain's current carriers: three Invincible-class ships displacing just 20,600 tons. Even so, they pale in comparison to the American Nimitz class carriers, which tip the scales at 102,000 tons.

What makes this particularly interesting is that very few countries are building new carriers. China is trying to base one off the unfinished hull of an old Soviet carrier, the Varyag; France is considering adding a second carrier similar in size to the new British ones; India, Italy and Spain are all either building or thinking of building small carriers in the Invincible range. But that's it. American naval supremacy has really put a damper on the construction of large capital ships.

A FURRY GRIM REAPER
Oscar, a cat that lives in a nursing home in Rhode Island has an uncanny ability to identify patients that are about to die. He curls up next to them shortly before they die. He's apparently so reliable that the nursing home calls family members when he chooses someone, because it usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

It takes more than anecdotal evidence to prove a phenomenon, of course, including strict observation to see how Oscar interacts with healthy patients, what separates a "choosing" from other behaviors, and the like. But the cat apparently does a better job of predicting deaths than the human doctors at the home. And it's easy to at least imagine cues that might guide her behavior -- changes in a patient's smell, for example, or breathing or movement. Spooky, in any case.

cat, Royal Navy, midtopia

Is Bush soft on terrorism?

Anyone remember "The Path to 9/11", the ABC miniseries about events leading up to the terror attacks that day?

The film was scripted by Cyrus Nowrasteh, a screenwriter with conservative political connections, leading to charges of political bias.

(Tangent: Nowrasteh has an interesting background for a conservative, having been born in Boulder, Colo., and grown up in Madison, Wis., both notable liberal outposts. And it turns out we both graduated from the same high school, though he donned the mortarboard a good 11 years before I did).

A key scene involved the Clinton administration pulling the plug on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden out of fear that kids might get hurt, a scene portrayed in the right-wing media as evidence that the Clintonites -- in this case, Sandy Berger -- didn't have the guts to properly fight terrorism.

Surprise, surprise: it turns out Bush had has own "Path to 9/11" moment in 2005.

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

So does this show Bush was soft on terror? Of course not. And neither did Clinton's decision to call off a similar strike.

In Clnton's case, the problem was that shaky intelligence made a risky endeavor riskier.

In his recently published memoir, George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, said the intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s whereabouts during the Clinton years was similarly sparse. The information was usually only at the “50-60% confidence level,” he wrote, not sufficient to justify American military action.

“As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or the time to evaluate and act on it.”

The 2005 mission was canceled for different reasons, though the principle remains the same. It's hard to argue with Rumsfeld's logic here:

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

Not wanting to cheese of Pakistan has less weight, in my mind, than the complexity of the operation itself. One need only look at what happened to Jimmy Carter's effort to rescue hostages in Iran to understand why special ops missions, while meticulously planned, need to be kept as small and simple as possible.

But the key point here is that military operations always take into account two sets of conditions: political and military. The whole purpose of military action, after all, is to achieve national political goals, and the political situation determines what military actions are acceptable. I'm not talking about partisan political goals, a separate and disreputable beast entirely. But political considerations always and properly set the context within which military action is contemplated.

The story goes on to describe the frustration of some special-ops commanders at the cancellation, just as some were frustrated by the cancellation of the Clinton-era strike. Contrary to what you might expect, though, that's a good thing.

Military commanders are tasked with carrying out whatever missions are required of them, and you don't get to be a special-ops leader without being very motivated and gung-ho to do your job. The best are clear-eyed realists, of course, but their realism tends to be restricted to addressing the military problem at hand.

That is what makes them such superb military tools. But that is also precisely why the final say rests with the civilian leadership. The leadership's job is to bring careful, deliberate consideration to a decision to use force, weighing the political and diplomatic factors that the ground commanders don't. It does not make the civilians weak or wrong if they decide that the mission isn't worth it.

Nor does it automatically make them right. Politicians can be quite risk-averse, especially when the problem is something as amorphous as terrorism, something that doesn't actually threaten our existence. We have a well-developed special operations capacity that is well-suited to fighting terrorists. We should be willing to both develop it further and to use it when necessary.

But now that Bush has his own example of freezing with his hand on the trigger, perhaps we can get past simplistic arguments over who is softer on terror, and acknowledge the complex realities of bringing effective fire to bear on elusive targets in remote areas of the world. And seek to find a workable balance between excessive risk and excessive timidity.

terrorism, politics, midtopia

Tomcats go to the shredder

In a crunching coda to January's F-14 spare parts flap, The Pentagon has decided to scrap the planes entirely rather than risk even relatively innocuous parts finding their way to Iran -- the only remaining operator of F-14s.

This gets my vote for quote of the month:

"One of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits."

The decision means paying several million dollars to destroy them rather than earning millions selling the parts. But that seems a cost well-worth paying.

The only real losers, it seems, are F-14 devotees, who are finding it difficult to obtain them for museums and the like.

F-14, politics, midtopia

Iran in Iraq

The U.S. military says it has more evidence of Iranian involvement in Iraq:

Iranian operatives helped plan a January raid in Karbala in which five American soldiers were killed, an American military spokesman in Iraq said today.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, the military spokesman, also said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has used operatives from the Lebanese militia group Hezbollah as a “proxy” to train and arm Shiite militants in Iraq.

There are three main bits of evidence pointing to Iranian involvement:

1. The sophistication of the attack itself, using English-speaking attackers wearing stolen U.S. uniforms and armed with detailed knowledge of the base's operations. It wasn't the sort of thing you'd normally expect the Shiite militias to pull off by themselves.

2. Militant testimony. Much of the additional proof is based on what the military says captured militants revealed under interrogation. According to them, the militans all report receiving aid from Iran or working on behalf of Iran. Damning stuff, but this is the weakest link in the chain, because there's no independent confirmation of the accounts and there's always the suspicion that "interrogation" actually means "torture" and thus the resulting information is suspect.

3. The fact that one of the captured militants, Ali Mussa DaqDuq, is a senior Hezbollah bombmaker. This is direct evidence of Hezbollah's involvement. However, it is only indirect evidence of Iranian involvement. It's always possible to argue that Hezbollah was acting on its own. On the other hand, several observers note that Hezbollah had little to gain from getting involved in Iraq; angering the United States would not help its efforts in Lebanon, and meddling in Iraq would make it seem more like the Iranian puppet it has long denied being.

So this is very close to a "smoking gun" of Iranian involvement -- and certainly enough to justify some blunt measures aimed at limiting Iranian influence, such as restricting the number and movements of Iranian representatives in Iraq, pressuring Iran diplomatically and economically and stationing significant forces on the Iranian border to stop cross-border smuggling.

All three have drawbacks. The first requires cooperation from the Iraqi government, which sees Iran as more ally than enemy; the second assumes we have any meaningful diplomatic or economic leverage; and the last may be unrealistic for several reasons: A lack of troops, the length and porousness of the border, and the fact that any buildup there will be taken as a sign of possible aggression by Iran.

Which points up a maddening fact about the situation: It may be difficult to mount much meaningful pressure on Iran over this. Hezbollah, likewise, is somewhat protected from retaliation, because an aggressive move against them could cause a further deterioration of the situation in Lebanon, something nobody in the region wants. Such a move would also be opposed by those European countries that have troops in the beefed-up U.N. peacekeeping force there -- troops that would become high-value targets if we turned the Hezbollah-Israel confrontation there into a Hezbollah-versus-the-West battle.

So the situation may simply call for hard-nosed forebearance: aggressively pursuing Iranian operatives in Iraq, accumulating evidence of Iranian involvement and using targeted strikes to take out clearly identified targets supporting the effort -- like, say, a Quds staging area just inside Iran or a Hezbollah training camp in Lebanon. As long as the strikes are carefully tailored and limited -- attacking a Hezbollah location implicated in Iraq operations, for example, not launching a broad attack on Hezbollah in general -- we could send some pointed messages while avoiding a broader conflict.

One other thing is crucial: support from the Iraqi government for moves against Iran. If that's not forthcoming -- and it may not be -- then there's no point in taking many of the other steps. Iraq has to decide if it wants Iran meddling in its affairs. If it doesn't, we can take vigorous steps to combat it. If they don't mind, it's just one more reason why we should pull out sooner rather than later.

Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, politics, midtopia

Good reads

A roundup of links worth clicking on:

1. A New York Times story on an Army platoon dealing with a Baquba neighborhood that is one big booby trap. They get through without a scratch.

2. The former chief judge of the FISA court, Royce C. Lambeth, reveals some details of the court's workings. His anecdotes are interesting, and provide yet another rebuke to the White House's contention that the court functions too slowly to combat modern terrorists.

3. The CIA continues to release once-secret documents detailing their most controversial activities from 1959 to the mid-1970s, including assassination plots and domestic surveillance. They serve as a reminder of why civil liberties and governmental openness are such crucial foundations of democracy. You can dig through the documents themselves at the CIA's Freedom of Information page.

4. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes a somewhat sardonic column about everything Cheney.

5. A few Democrats, going a bridge too far, aren't satisfied with leaving Iraq; they want us out of Afghanistan, too. They're wrong. Afghanistan has its problems, and the conflict is fueled by the Taliban safe haven in Pakistan. But our invasion was justified, the government legitimate, the enemy beatable, and we're not stuck in the middle of an ethnic and regional cauldron. As well, the troop demands and casualty rates are much lower, so our presence there is far more sustainable. And most importantly, Afghanistan is far more likely than Iraq to return to being a terror haven if we withdraw.


FISA, Cheney, CIA, Iraq, Afghanistan, politics, midtopia

Surge update: bad news edition

The surge is still proceeding fairly well, but it's running into a major problem that has implications far beyond the success of the current operation.

The Iraqi forces, which have been sidelined for much of the actual fighting, are still not ready for their most basic task: holding the territory once U.S. troops clear it of insurgents.

Several senior American officers have warned in recent days that Iraqi soldiers and police are still incapable of maintaining security on their own in the most crucial areas, including Baghdad and the recently reclaimed districts around Baqouba to the north.

It's a pattern that has emerged elsewhere: provinces are turned over to the Iraqi military with great fanfare -- and within months U.S. or British troops have to return because the Iraqi troops aren't up to the job or are actively making it worse.

The problem is one that I've discussed before, and it affects both the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police (scroll down a bit to find the relevant part, or go here to read the New York Times story the post is based on).

Although some Iraqi units appear competent, U.S. officials privately complain that many others still lack ammunition, weapons and an adequate supply network to operate on their own. Leadership in many units is weak, and the force has yet to develop the professional spirit to cope with adversity.... [There are] high rates of absenteeism in the Iraqi military — including desertions, vacations and AWOLS — which Dempsey said average about 25 percent among Iraqi units at any given time.

Iraqi troops manning checkpoints often wave through cars carrying women or children without proper searches, U.S. troops complain. Some residents of a contested area south of Baghdad say Iraqi police and soldiers turn a blind eye to insurgents as long as they don't attack their checkpoints.

It's an open question whether the mostly Shiite military will ever be able to maintain order in Sunni areas. The obvious solution -- patrol those areas with Sunni units -- has its own risks, notably what happens when those units are shot through with insurgent sympathizers.

If this problem doesn't get straightened out soon, it won't matter how well our part of the surge goes. In the end, the performance of Iraqi forces will decide the fate of our misadventure in Iraq.

Which is why more and more Republicans are coming out in opposition to the war -- a harbinger of things to come this fall, when the next funding bill comes up for debate. Today it was two GOP Senators -- Richard Lugar and George Voinovich -- that jumped ship.

"We must not abandon our mission, but we must begin a transition where the Iraqi government and its neighbors play a larger role in stabilizing Iraq," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Bush....

"The longer we delay the planning for a redeployment, the less likely it is to be successful," said Lugar, who plans to meet later this week with Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser.

It remains to be seen whether either would actually vote to end the war if it came to that. But the trend line is clear. If America decides to bring the troops home, it will be a bipartisan effort.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Separate but unequal justice

Raise your hand if you're surprised by this. Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?

An Army officer who played a key role in the "enemy combatant" hearings at Guantanamo Bay says tribunal members relied on vague and incomplete intelligence while being pressured to rule against detainees, often without any specific evidence.

His affidavit, submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and released Friday, is the first criticism by a member of the military panels that determine whether detainees will continue to be held.

Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a 26-year veteran of military intelligence who is an Army reserve officer and a California lawyer, said military prosecutors were provided with only "generic" material that didn't hold up to the most basic legal challenges.

As generally suspected, the panels were a crock. But that's not the best part.

Abraham was asked to serve on one of the panels, and he said its members felt strong pressure to find against the detainee, saying there was "intensive scrutiny" when they declared a prisoner not to be an enemy combatant. When his panel decided the detainee wasn't an "enemy combatant," they were ordered to reconvene to hear more evidence, he said.

When the panel didn't reach the "correct" conclusion, they were ordered to try again. But that's not the best part.

Ultimately, his panel held its ground, and he was never asked to participate in another tribunal, he said.

If you're a panel member and you still insist on delivering the wrong answer, you aren't invited back!

Employ such a filtering technique two or three times, and you could end up with panels that would reach the "right" conclusion nearly every time.

To be fair, this is one man's testimony. We don't know if what happened to him was typical, or whether the decision not to let him sit on any more panels was related to the verdict rendered. More data is needed before firm conclusions can be drawn.

But this is yet another example of why legal shortcuts are a bad idea that almost guarantee miscarriages of justice.

, Guantanamo, Gitmo, terrorism, politics, midtopia

More Iraqi tribes agree to help U.S.

Even if the "surge" seems plagued with difficulties, we appear to be having one clear success in Iraq: enlisting Sunni tribes to help battle Al-Qaeda jihadis.

More than 10 Iraqi tribes in the Baghdad area have reached agreements with U.S. and Iraqi forces for the first time to oppose al-Qaeda, raising the U.S. military's hopes that a trend started in western Iraq is spreading here.

Some of the groups, which have members who fought alongside al-Qaeda in the past, have been providing useful intelligence to U.S. forces about their former allies, according to the U.S. military....

This is the same tactic that has borne fruit in Anbar province, with attacks there down 60 percent in the last year.

Before getting too excited, though, there are the caveats.

Ten tribes have agreed to cooperate; but there are 100 tribes in the Baghdad area, and tribal power isn't as strong in the city as it is in more remote areas. This is a small first step in an endeavor that is, at best, part of a solution.

In addition, the Iraqi government opposes the idea of arming and supporting Sunni tribal forces, fearing it will lead to more private militias that will one day turn their weaponry on the central government. I'm not sure what's more worrisome: that the Iraqi government wants to curtail the one program that appears to be bearing fruit, or that their fears are probably justified.

To quote from a previous post:

It remains to be seen whether that situation will hold, it doesn't address the problem with native Iraqi insurgents, and it's unclear whether it holds relevance for the Sunni/Shiite sectarian violence that has been the prime driver of violence of late. If you believe that AQ is largely responsible for that violence, great; if you believe the violence is more broadly rooted than that, trouble.

But frankly, at this point, what do we have to lose?

Meanwhile, with the surge reinforcements all in place, the offensive in Diyala province is proceeding apace, and we appear to finally be relearning some old lessons:

In the first hours of the American military assault, after midnight early Monday, helicopters flew two teams of American troops and a platoon of Iraqi scouts so they could block the southern escape routes from the city. Stryker armored vehicles moved along the western outskirts of Baquba and then down a main north-south route that cuts through the center of the city.

By the time dawn broke on Tuesday, the insurgent sanctuary in western Baquba had been cordoned off. Then, the American forces established footholds on the periphery of the section and slowly pressed in. “Rather than let the problem export to some other place and then have to fight them again, my goal is to isolate this thing and cordon it off,” said Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division.

Translated, that means "no more whack-a-mole." It's classic tactics: find the enemy, fix him, and destroy him.

There are also rather eery echoes of Vietnam in the operation, from the heliborne assault tactics used to set up the cordon to the resurrection of Kit Carson scouts. One would think the military would go out of its way to avoid Vietnam associations, but the Kit Carson program was actually pretty successful and the mobility of heliborne troops has always been a valuable tool in the American arsenal. Much of what the American military knows about counterinsurgency operations comes from Vietnam, so it's natural to reuse tactics -- and, apparently, names.

Fun as this all is, it's useless if afterwards we leave and let the insurgents filter back in. I assume that "clear and hold" is part of the plan for Diyala, but I'm not sure where those troops will come from, considering that the surge was supposed to focus on Baghdad and its immediate environs, with the extra troops earmarked for that purpose. I'm not sure Baquba, 35 miles away, was part of the original scope.

But let's hope the operation works, we have enough troops for the job, and Sunni groups continue to switch sides. And let's hope that in our zeal to destroy AQ in Iraq, we aren't laying the groundwork for an even bloodier Sunni-Shiite faceoff among Iraqis.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

"Surge" is complete

The full contingent of U.S. reinforcements for the "surge" in Iraq arrived today.

Now the surge -- and assessments of its effectiveness -- will begin in earnest.

Two reasons for pessimism:

the additional troops bring the total U.S. forces here to about 165,000, the most ever. But when put in the context of all U.S. and foreign coalition forces in Iraq, the extra troops bring the number roughly to where is was for most of 2004 and 2005, when the coalition fluctuated between 161,000 and 183,000 troops.

So while everyone agrees we need more troops, this isn't a meaningful increase.

Now, that ignores the continued build up of Iraqi forces. But that's the other reason for pessimism:

U.S. military officials have complained that the surge got off to a slow start because Iraqi police and army units performed poorly and Iraqi officials did not provided all the units they had promised. Many of the units also are considered infiltrated by Shiite militias.

The surge simply cannot work with U.S. troops alone.

And, of course, there's the political dimension -- a third reason for pessimism:

In addition, the Iraqi government and parliament have not delivered on what U.S. officials believe are the most important elements of the new strategy -- the political reconciliation measures. There has been little or no apparent progress on key issues such as dividing the country's oil revenues, reforming the constitution, readmitting more members of Saddam Hussein's banned Baath political party to public jobs and scheduling provincial elections.

Stuff like this is why I remain in the "hope it works, while suspecting it won't" camp.

Expect a bloody summer and a politically explosive fall.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

A gay linguist speaks out

Stephen Benjamin, one of the gay Arabic translators kicked out of the military under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy -- despite a crippling shortage of Arabic speakers in uniform -- has written an essay for the New York Times.

His description of what happened:

My story begins almost a year ago when my roommate, who is also gay, was deployed to Falluja. We communicated the only way we could: using the military’s instant-messaging system on monitored government computers. These electronic conversations are lifelines, keeping soldiers sane while mortars land meters away.

Then, last October the annual inspection of my base, Fort Gordon, Ga., included a perusal of the government computer chat system; inspectors identified 70 service members whose use violated policy. The range of violations was broad: people were flagged for everything from profanity to outright discussions of explicit sexual activity. Among those charged were my former roommate and me. Our messages had included references to our social lives — comments that were otherwise unremarkable, except that they indicated we were both gay.

I could have written a statement denying that I was homosexual, but lying did not seem like the right thing to do. My roommate made the same decision, though he was allowed to remain in Iraq until the scheduled end of his tour.

The result was the termination of our careers, and the loss to the military of two more Arabic translators. The 68 other — heterosexual — service members remained on active duty, despite many having committed violations far more egregious than ours; the Pentagon apparently doesn’t consider hate speech, derogatory comments about women or sexual misconduct grounds for dismissal.

Also, consider this:

My supervisors did not want to lose me. Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it.

Everyone in Benjamin's unit knew he was gay and didn't care. Which would seem to destroy the whole "bad for morale" argument against gay soldiers, at least in noncombat units.

He also notes the lengths the military is going to to entice new recruits, including lowering recruiting standards and paying higher bonuses and other benefits. He then notes that simply repealing "don't ask, don't tell" could add 41,000 soldiers to the roster. Which approach makes more sense?

(The 41,000 figure, by the way, comes from a 2005 analysis by UCLA law professor Gary Gates).

Benjamin's final paragraph:

As the friends I once served with head off to 15-month deployments, I regret I’m not there to lessen their burden and to serve my country. I’m trained to fight, I speak Arabic and I’m willing to serve. No recruiter needs to make a persuasive argument to sign me up. I’m ready, and I’m waiting.

As I said in my previous post on this, the military's policy on gays has always been asinine. But in this time of war and manpower shortages, it's gone from asinine to indefensible. Pass the Military Readiness Enhancement Act, now.

gay rights, military, politics, midtopia

War bill passed Congress

Congress yesterday passed its deadline-free war bill, and Bush says he'll sign it.

But in a sign of things to come, the vote in the house was 280-142, with only two Republicans voting against -- meaning well more than half the Democratic caucus opposed it. The vote in the Senate was more lopsided, 80-14.

In September, if the surge isn't going well and the Iraqi government is missing benchmarks, look for a sizable number of Republicans to join the bloc opposing additional funding.

But even if they don't, don't expect Bush to get his way the second time around like he did here. If the evidence shows his plan isn't working, Congress will refuse to fund more. They'll do this in one of two ways:

1. Passing a bill with firm deadlines and overriding a Bush veto. They'll do this if they think they have the votes to do so, and will probably try this route first.

2. Simply refusing to take up a bill on additional funding. Bush can't veto a bill that isn't passed, and can't spend money that isn't authorized. In conjunction with such a refusal, Congress could pass a separate bill expressly funding a winddown of the war. This is the ultimate power Democrats have by virtue of their control of Congress, using the gridlocked nature of split government to their advantage.

Of course, a likely scenario is that in September the verdict on Iraq will be muddy, with some signs of progress but nothing decisive and perhaps not commensurate to the effort expended. At which point the debate will rage around whether there has been enough progress of the sustainable kind, that indicates a path upward to stability. A question to which many in Congress and the White House will have preconceived answers. So expect even more fireworks as they vie to frame the issue advantageously to their position.

For now, though, Congress did the right thing.

BTW, Hillary Clinton -- in a transparent bid to court the antiwar vote -- voted against the measure. I have no problem with people opposing the bill on principle, as Barack Obama and John Edwards do, for example. But Clinton has argued against an immediate withdrawal, so the centrist, responsible thing to do would have been to support this bill and renew the argument in September. Instead, she was essentially voting to defund the troops in order to set up a political confrontation with Bush. That's just not cool.

There's also this unflattering admission by the Dems:

After weeks of insisting that the Pentagon could fund the war into July, Democrats abruptly changed their tune yesterday. Murtha said Congress had no choice but to act this week, because the war would run out of funds on Monday. The Defense Department could shift funds around, he said, but such accounting tricks would be a "disaster," Murtha said.

I understand why they made that claim -- to prevent Bush from using the pressing deadline as a negotiating tool while they squabbled over funding, and to strengthen their own hand by making it seem as if they were willing to take more time than Bush to pass a funding measure. But while it might make sense tactically, it's simply dishonest. Politics ain't beanball, but it shouldn't include outright lying.

Of course, the president did do some scaremongering of his own (see bottom of linked post) when he claimed that the funding bill had to be passed in April or the troops would run out of money. But that didn't justify the Democrats making up a lie of their own.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Strategically stupid

The irrational pursuit of gays in the military continues to lead to the dismissal of some of our most valuable assets in the war on terror.

Lawmakers who say the military has kicked out 58 Arabic linguists because they were gay want the Pentagon to explain how it can afford to let the valuable language specialists go.

Seizing on the latest discharges, involving three specialists, members of the House of Representatives wrote the House Armed Services Committee chairman that the continued loss of such "capable, highly skilled Arabic linguists continues to compromise our national security during time of war."

One sailor discharged in the latest incident, former Petty Officer 2nd Class Stephen Benjamin, said his supervisor tried to keep him on the job, urging him to sign a statement denying that he was gay. He said his lawyer advised him not to sign it, because it could be used against him later if other evidence ever surfaced.

There are some inconsistencies in Benjamin's story. First he says he was "always out" since the day he started working there, and it didn't cause problems. Then later he says he was "discreet" and was surprised when the military investigated him. But that could simply be the difference between not hiding his sexual orientation and openly telling the military he was gay (the "tell" portion of "don't ask, don't tell").

But that's pretty much beside the point. This sort of thing is just plain stupid. The need for trained Arabic speakers vastly outweighs the outdated "morals" concerns about gay soldiers. It is pure bureaucratic bloodymindedness to actively hunt these guys down and discharge them.

Stuff like this only further illustrates the asinine nature of the antigay policy. End it now, before we let it further damage our national security.

gay rights, politics, midtopia

Busy day tomorrow

Wednesday should have a lot of fireworks, thanks to several big items all landing at the same time:

Looking for Ms. Goodling
An immunized Monica Goodling testifies before the Senate about the prosecutor firings. Source have indicated her testimony won't implicate Alberto Gonzales, but then that's what they said about Kyle Sampson -- and his testimony turned out to be another body blow for the embattled AG.

The problem is that, based on what we already know, Gonzales is either mendacious or incompetent. Goodling's testimony can only show one of three things: that Gonzales was more involved than he has admitted, which means he lied to Congress; that Gonzales was totally uninvolved, which indicts his management ability; and/or that the firings were indeed heavily political, which discredits both his judgement and his truthfulness.

War funding
The newest version of the war-funding bill could hit the floor of Congress, with the possibility that the most antiwar Democrats ultimately will vote against it now that the timetables have been stripped out. There still should be enough votes to pass it (with Republican support), but it raises all sorts of tantalizing possibilities.

One is merely theoretical: contemplate what would happen if the war funding didn't have enough Democratic votes to pass without timetables, and didn't have enough Republican votes to pass with them. What would happen?

The other is more concrete: in order to govern, will Pelosi and Reid find themselves increasingly making common cause with Republicans against the more extreme elements of their own party? And will that work, or simply lead to a fracture in the Democratic ranks?

And consider what a Democratic fracture might mean. With the Republicans themselves fractured (united only by the need to stay relevant by thwarting Democratic moves), Congress could find itself in an unstable situation, where each party's leadership is less relevant and instead ad hoc groups of legislators coalesce around individual issues.

That's not going to happen, of course, at least not to a large degree. Party connections are too ingrained, too convenient, too powerful. And the leadership controls the movement of legislation, so they'll never get too irrelevant (though there was a time when committee chairmen were highly independent and arguably more powerful than the Speaker and her deputies). Still, if two fractured parties mean more individual initiative by Congress members, that would be all to the good in my book.

Anyway, tomorrow should be a fascinating day.

Iraq, Goodling, politics, midtopia

Dems go with common sense on war funding

On Friday, I laid out what sort of war-funding bill Congress had to assemble.

Now it looks like they're doing exactly that.

In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday.

The legislation would include the first federal minimum wage increase in more than a decade, a top priority for the Democrats who took control of Congress in January, the officials added.

While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising veto fight between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Good. Get it done, and start preparing for the next round, in September.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Generals say "no" to torture

If you haven't read this yet, you should. It's written by a pair of retired generals: Charles Krulak (former Marine Corps commandant) and Joseph Hoar (former head of U.S. Central Command).

Fear can be a strong motivator. It led Franklin Roosevelt to intern tens of thousands of innocent U.S. citizens during World War II; it led to Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt, which ruined the lives of hundreds of Americans. And it led the United States to adopt a policy at the highest levels that condoned and even authorized torture of prisoners in our custody.

The observed effect on military morals:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone -- the rare exception fast becoming the rule.

To understand the impact this has had on the ground, look at the military's mental health assessment report released earlier this month. The study shows a disturbing level of tolerance for abuse of prisoners in some situations. This underscores what we know as military professionals: Complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality.

But even if the use of torture could be strictly controlled, it would hurt our cause:

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

It also hurts our soldiers.

This is not just a lesson for history. Right now, White House lawyers are working up new rules that will govern what CIA interrogators can do to prisoners in secret. Those rules will set the standard not only for the CIA but also for what kind of treatment captured American soldiers can expect from their captors, now and in future wars. Before the president once again approves a policy of official cruelty, he should reflect on that.

These are not new sentiments. But they are increasingly being expressed by people such as Krulak and Hoar, military professionals who understand the repercussions of such policies. Let us hope that at last the message gets through.

torture, politics, midtopia

Bush, Congress hit impasse on war funding

This is getting a bit silly.

The White House and Congress failed to strike a deal Friday after exchanging competing offers on an Iraq war spending bill that Democrats said should set a date for U.S. troops to leave....

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said they offered to grant Bush the authority to waive the deadlines. They said they also suggested they would drop billions of dollars in proposed domestic spending that Bush opposed, in exchange for his acceptance of identifying a withdrawal date.

That, by the way, is the Democrats making the obvious concession that they denied they were making a week or so ago.

Bush, for his part, flat refused anything that had deadlines for withdrawal, even if he could waive them. He also indicated he would consider benchmarks for the Iraqi government that would include negative consequences if the Iraqis failed to meet them -- although the details on that score were very vague.

In general, I'm with Bush on this one. The timetables need to be dropped for the time being to give the surge time to work. And the domestic funding has no business being used as a bargaining chip: it shouldn't have been in the bill in the first place.

It's May 18, people; time to stop playing games. The Democrats need to pass (and Bush needs to sign) a bill that does the following:

1. Contains no timetables;

2. Funds the war only through September, at which time the state of the surge and Iraqi political compliance can be assessed;

3. Contains hard benchmarks for the Iraqi government to hit, with generous support if they hit them and negative consequences if they don't.

Reopen this fight when there's meaningful data to fight about.

Iraq, politics, midtopia

Things of note

Items that caught my eye today:

Prince Harry won't be going to Iraq; the British army decided that doing so posed too much danger not just to Cornet Wales but also to those around him, figuring insurgents would move heaven and earth to get their hands on him. I can't fault their reasoning, but it does raise the question of what sort of conflict the military will let him fight in. And if the answer is "none", one wonders what he's doing in the military.

A team of scientists working with the Hubble space telescope think they have directly sighted dark matter. Using gravitational lensing they mapped out the density of a couple of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away -- and found that the centers of mass didn't correspond to visible objects (you can see the ring of dark matter in the photo). The evidence in favor of dark matter is firming up. All that's left is the pesky matter of explaining what the heck it is.

Paul Wolfowitz is negotiating a deal for his resignation as head of the World Bank. I'm still more interested in the junkets he arranged for his girlfriend when he was with the Pentagon. But while I think he did some good at the World Bank and the calls for his head have more than a little corrupt politicking behind them, it's hard to feel sorry for a figure so central to our misadventure in Iraq. Buh-bye.

dark matter, Hubble, Prince Harry, Wolfowitz, politics, midtopia

Meet the new war czar

After a month of searching, a "war czar" has been found.

President Bush on Tuesday chose Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the
Pentagon's director of operations and a former leader of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, to oversee the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as a war czar.

Lute seems like a fine soldier, but he's way down the administration's wish list for the position. The authority and doability of the job aside, it's unclear whether such a relative unknown will have the personal force and charisma necessary to break logjams and keep everybody moving in the same direction.

There's also the question of whether we should put much trust in anyone who helped oversee combat in Iraq between 2004 and 2006, years in which the situation there spiraled out of control. There's always the question of whether to blame the generals or their political overseers, and Lute wasn't the overall commander in the theater. But at first blush it's not a great recommendation.

Here's what some military folks think of the pick. They think Lute's a fine officer, but wonder how a three-star general is going to order around four-star generals and Cabinet members.

And here's an interview (pdf) Lute did with Charlie Rose in January 2006, when he was director of operations for Centcom.

In it he says Al-Qaeda is weakening and losing support as a result of the war. But the example he gives has nothing to do with Iraq; he cites the bombing of a wedding in Amman, Jordan, and the collapse in AQ support afterward. Is anyone surprised that when AQ attacks Muslim targets, those Muslims don't like it?

He also discusses -- in a sort of premonition of his new job -- the need to fight networks of terrorists with networks of agencies and governments:

The other thing I would point to, Charlie, is the importance of taking this on, not simply as a military fight, but as a multi-agency fight where different arms of the government, the intelligence arm, the military arm for sure, the State Department, diplomatic arm, economic arm, those who bring law and order systems into a post-conflict scenario, that all these arms come together in an integrated networked way.

That's what he's been hired to do. Let's hope he is able -- and allowed -- to do a good job.

Update: Here's the video of part II of Charlie Rose's interview of Lute, conducted a few days after the interview I link to above. The segment with Lute starts around the 38-minute mark.

This time he discusses the strain on the military from our deployment in Iraq, in which he argues that while the soldiers' private lives are strained, most of them want to return to Iraq and, as a long-term upside, we're developing a large core of combat veterans. The first argument is a little bit of "happy talk." Our troops tend to be motivated, but dedication to the mission starts to wane after the third or fourth tour. The second part, while true as far as it goes, assumes those veterans stay in the service.

He also talks up the Iraqi army, a confidence that was proven to be a bit misplaced in the year that followed. He heaped praise on Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad -- a charter member of the neocon club who departed a year later (amid mounting chaos) to become our ambassador to the United Nations, a post about as important to this administration as the embassy in Liechtenstein (which is actually handled by the ambassador to Switzerland). He also discusses the military and political changes needed to succeed in Iraq.

He comes across as smart, but his role as spokesman and obvious cheerleader damages his credibility and doesn't give a true sense of the man.

Iraq, politics, midtopia