Iraq's election result

With 95% reporting:




Read 538 for the numbers behind this, but here's their conclusion:

With results this close, it is likely that the negotiations for the new government will be quite extensive. Reports of multiple high level meetings between various party and coalition leaders have been made, with only a few parties completely incompatible in terms of building a governing coalition. The Sadr faction of the National Iraqi Alliance has ruled out working with an Allawi government, but State of Law, the Kurds and Iraqiya are in close negotiations.

In the near term, these negotiations may be hampered by the accusations of fraud that have flown in all directions. Early on, members of Allawi’s coalition accused the electoral commission and local officials in Baghdad of engaging in fraud to help Maliki’s State of Law Coalition. Similar accusations were made by the Iraqi National Alliance and State of Law at one another in the south. In turn, now that Allawi's returns have improved, State of Law has accused him of fraud and demanded a national recount.

As a result, the electoral and governing situation remains in flux, particularly as the United States endeavors to play an increasingly low profile role in the country. The Obama administration and military officials are looking for a resolved and stable government to emerge from this election, securing the way forward for a phased withdrawal through 2011.

On the other hand, further accusations of fraud, a failure to build a governing coalition or the unhinging of various extreme elements of the Sunni Arab and Shia communities could together prompt much of the progress of the last several years come undone. As such, much rides on this election, based on peaceful negotiation and principled transfer of power.

Ave Imperator! Silenti te salutant!

BAGHDAD — Iraqis on Friday reacted with disbelief, anger and bitter resignation to news that criminal charges in the United States had been dismissed against Blackwater Worldwide security guards who opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.

[..] The attack, at Nisour Square, left 17 Iraqis dead and 27 wounded. Many of the victims were riding inside cars or buses at a busy traffic circle when a Blackwater convoy escorting American diplomats rolled through and began firing machine guns, grenade launchers and a sniper rifle.
The Blackwater guards said they believed they had come under small-arms fire from insurgents. But investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault.

The incident calcified anti-American sentiment in Iraq and elsewhere, raised Iraqi concerns about the extent of its sovereignty because Blackwater guards had immunity from local prosecutors and reopened a debate about American dependence on private security contractors in the Iraq war.

The accused have their own rights, and the court concluded they were violated by government officials offering immunity for testimony.

Here's Spencer Ackerman:

For all I know that was the right legal call. It was stunning to hear that the first U.S. agents to interview the Blackwater guards offered them immunity: not only were they from the State Department, not the Justice Department, but they were from the division of State that oversees the contract Blackwater held. Whether they intended to sabotage a prosecution is unknown, but that’s exactly what they effectively did.

The resulting dismissal is tragic but apparently necessary according to the standard that no one is obligated to testify against themselves.

I hope those State people have been or will be fired and ostracized... but they'll probably just get re-hired by some company like Blackwater/Xe.

War

Someone posted this to reddit, titling it 'The Wages of War'.

Another countered with links to these graphic images.

How's that Iraq surge faring now?

Andrew editorializes.

Time to GTFO. And a pox on everyone who supported the Iraq war and/or surge and still stands by that decision.

"Offensive Cyber War Turned The Insurgency In 2007"

Ambers summarizes:

Now it can be fully revealed: In May of 2007, the National Security Agency launched a massive cyber offensive against insurgent cell and computer networks in Iraq, which officials believe was responsible for breaking the back of the insurgency.  Shane Harris at National Journal takes you inside the Oval Office as the decision was made:

Former officials with knowledge of the computer network attack, all of whom requested anonymity when discussing intelligence techniques, said that the operation helped turn the tide of the war. Even more than the thousands of additional ground troops that Bush ordered to Iraq as part of the 2007 "surge," they credit the cyberattacks with allowing military planners to track and kill some of the most influential insurgents. The cyber-intelligence augmented information coming in from unmanned aerial drones as well as an expanding network of human spies.

When Bob Woodward wrote about unspecified techniques used to turn the tide of the war, this is what he meant.

Morale plummets in Afghanistan, improves in Iraq

WASHINGTON – Morale has fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, where troops are seeing record violence in the 8-year-old war, while those in Iraq show much improved mental health amid much lower violence,

Look for the Right to praise the surge as a success and berate Obama for dithering on Afghanistan.

These are not the bombs you're looking for

Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has deployed paranormal bomb detectors at checkpoints...

[..] the ministry bought 800 of the devices from a company called ATSC (UK) Ltd. for $32 million in 2008, and an unspecified larger quantity for $53 million.

[..] ATSC’s promotional material claims that its device can find guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies and even contraband ivory at distances up to a kilometer, underground, through walls, underwater or even from airplanes three miles high. The device works on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction,” ATSC says.

What'll they think of next?

It's still not too late to greet us as liberators

The Onion strikes again.

Worst nightmares?

From Strategy Page:

In the macho Arab world, an assertive female with an assault rifle is sort of a man's worst nightmare.

Really? They must be awfully afraid of the IDF...haha.

But seriously, go read the whole article on "lioness" teams in Iraq.

Finally, for your hathos pleasure, a certain woman the armed forces could really do without.

Dept. of things that make you go hmm...

Abu Aardvark:

Iraqis are actually demanding that Kuwait pay compensation for facilitating the 1991 U.S. "invasion" of Iraq.

Factoid of the day: $670 billion so far

TMV:

According to the National Priorities Project, the War in Iraq has now cost American taxpayers $670 billion. That stands in stark contrast to the $100 billion to $200 billion pricetage estimated by President Bush’s chief economic advisor in September 2002 or the $50 billion to $60 billion estimate offered by the White House Office of Management and Budget Director in 2002.

I think $670 is a lowball estimate, as I've seen estimates in the $2-3 trillion range for the final costs of the war, which takes into account costs to individuals that don't appear on the government's war spending budget.

But this is why it's difficult to get worked up about Obama's $787 billion stimulus. Both boondoggles to feed the respective party's interest groups, but I know which I'd prefer.

The Iraq-torture connection

TPM floats what Ben Smith calls a "grand unified Iraq-torture theory":

[..] you have a flurry of claims that a key motive behind the push to torture was to elicit 'confessions' about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and al Qaida, which was of course the key predicate for the invasion of Iraq. That again has to create much more pressure to clarify what happened. The basis of most of the anti-torture push has been the assumption that torture was used for the purpose of eliciting information about future terrorist attacks. Whether it was illegal, wrong-headed, misguided, immoral -- whatever -- most have been willing to at least give the benefit of the doubt that that was the goal. If the driving force was to gin up new bogus intel about the fabled Iraq-al Qaida link, politically it will put the whole story in a very different light. And rightly so.

It's a serious charge, and the publicly available evidence is far from conclusive. But that's exactly why there should be an investigation or truth commission. We need facts, not partisan posturing over scraps of information that may or may not have been released.

Happily, Ambers lists ten reasons why a torture probe is more likely.

Bush first rejected the awakening

Via Andrew, David Rose reports:

The so-called Sunni Awakening, in which American forces formed tactical alliances with local sheikhs, has been credited with dampening the insurgency in much of Iraq. But new evidence suggests that the Sunnis were offering the same deal as early as 2004—one that was eagerly embraced by commanders on the ground, but rejected out of hand at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

[..]The Sunni Awakening, when it did finally come, provided welcome relief, says Jerry Jones. But the cost of delay is quantifiable. “From July ’04 to mid-’07,” he points out, “you can directly attribute almost all those K.I.A. [killed in action] in the Sunni regions of Iraq to this fatal error, and if we hadn’t been fighting the Sunni, we’d have had a lot more resources for dealing with Shia militia leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr in places such as Baghdad. It didn’t have to happen. Those lives did not have to be lost.” To put the matter concretely: if the compromises accepted later by the Bush administration had been accepted when a rapprochement was first broached by the Sunnis, in 2004, some 2,000 Americans and thousands more Iraqis might not have died.

But it's ok—because by the time the administration was realistic enough to do this, the surge worked!

Take the Dick Cheney quiz

The defense black hole

Ordinary Freddie:

We’ve all seen the numbers; to say that the military of the United States dwarfs that of any other nation would be an extreme understatement. That advantage is not just paper power but translates into an enormous real-world advantage in fighting conventional wars. What’s more, in the most strategically important fields of conventional military conflict that face us, naval and air power, we are not only unmatched, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which our dominance could fade in the next three or four or five decades. Our advantage is just that big. You see this portrayed in various thought experiments of dubious worth– we could defeat any other air force even if we restricted ourselves to using ten year old technology, we could defeat any individual navy in the world using only our submarines, our navy could defeat the combined naval forces of every other nation on earth, etc. Dubious or not, the point is clear; we enjoy in the United States an advantage in military technology that is so vast, we could reasonably cut our military budget by 3% or 4% or 5%, save billions of dollars, and still remain effectively untouchable both in carrying out our own defense and the defense of our allies.

We’ve also all seen, in recent years, what looks like previously unheard of (post-Vietnam, anyway) vulnerabilities for our military apparatus, in the our continuing struggles within Iraq and Afghanistan. But while the setbacks have been real, they have also been of a particular kind, the failure to easily or effectively implement counterinsurgency. This quite likely has a lot less to do with the nature of the United States and its military than it has to do with the nature of counterinsurgency. As you’ve read before, counterinsurgency is hard. It has little to do with a given country’s military power and can’t be fixed by the application of more dollars or more technology.

I believe we could shoot for more than a 10% cut and still be nigh as untouchable.

Throwing more money at counterinsurgency is like throwing more money at education. We're well past the point of diminishing returns; the solution is to change the rules of the game: Avoid nation-building hellholes like Iraq and Af-Pak: just neutralize actual threats then GTFO. If anything, invest in better intelligence-gathering.

Yet the right fearmongers ever on. Absent the threat of the Soviet Union, it's still all they know.

Quote of the day

"War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders.'" —President George W. Bush, March 13, 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War.

(ht LG)

Torture intelligence in action

From a declassified Senate report, more nauseating news:

The Bush administration’s motives for employing the harsh techniques are also called into question by the report. The Bush administration has argued publicly that it got tough on detainees to prevent another al-Qaida attack. The Senate report describes another possible motive, and a sobering example of how torture can produce bad intelligence.

In September, the Army dispatched a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to Fort Bragg, N.C., to learn how to reverse-engineer the so-called SERE tactics for interrogations on real detainees at Guantánamo. One member of the team sent to Fort Bragg described a specific reason for the pressure from above to get tough on detainees at Guantánamo: Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Army psychiatrist Maj. Paul Burney is quoted in the Senate report as saying about Guantánamo. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

Apparently, one of the individuals applying pressure for results was then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a major advocate of the Iraq invasion. Wolfowitz called the man in charge of Guantánamo at the time, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey.

Wolfowitz called “to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production” at Guantánamo, the report says. Wolfowitz suggested the use of more aggressive interrogation techniques. The report cites the Guantánamo interrogation chief at that time, David Becker, as the source of this information about Wolfowitz. Dunlavey, however, told the Senate investigators he could not recall the Wolfowitz call.

Radley concludes the obvious:

So they tortured Gitmo detainees to get information, which turned out to be false, to build support for a war they had already made up their mind they would wage.

And keep in mind, these decisions were made by political appointees. Not JAGs, not military generals, not even veteran CIA agents (most people in all three positions actually opposed these policies). They were made by neocon warmongers with little to no actual military or interrogation experience who hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

These people belong in a prison cell. To excuse them is to say that no abuse of power should be punishable so long as you can come up with some tortured justification about how you were only trying to protect the country.

Link blag

Steve Benen: The confirmation wars never end...

Wendy Long, head of the Judicial Confirmation Network, which ironically no longer wants to see judicial conformations, is one of the leading far-right activists on nomination fights. She said yesterday that Republicans should approach nominees with "a presumption that they're not going to be able to uphold their oath."
Got that? Republican senators, who argued during Bush's presidency that failing to confirm judicial nominees tears at the fabric of our democracy, should now reflexively assume that every Obama nominee, including those who haven't even been named, is incapable of serving on the federal bench.

Forbes protests the postal service's mail monopoly. In-depth analysis here.

FactCheck.org: President Obama says 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns come the U.S. Not true.

There were procedural roadblocks to McCain-Lieberman.

KSM was waterboarded 183 times in one month.

NYT: Good news from Iraq... Baghdad is getting back to its old secular self.

NRO: Mark Steyn makes an unusually sane post about micro-regulation.

Mike Halperin: Sixteen reasons why Obama is exceptionally good at his job.

Mental (un)health break: Deutsche Häschenparty! .... (UK version not as amusing)

Link blag

Daily Beast: What's in the torture memos?

Cato: Obama and The Interrogation Memos: The Right Decision...

Critics, such as the one featured in this Politico article, fail to comprehend terrorism as a strategy. Thus, they are locked into counterproductive policies like secrecy and torture.

Let’s start with the strategic logic of terrorism: By goading strong powers into overreaction and error, terrorism weakens those powers and strengthens itself. Among other things, overreaction and misdirection on the part of the strong power draw sympathy and support to terrorists as it confirms the terrorist narrative that they are in a struggle against evil powers.

(more)

Yglesias and Frum marvel at conservative paranoia.

Raising the drinking age to 21 didn't save lives.

Ordinary E.D. Kain examines what the Iraq war is and isn't.

Politico: Sarah Palin offers bipartisan fundraising appeal.

Yglesias: D.C. should allow taller buildings

2006 NYT: North Korean Defectors Take a Crash Course in Coping

Radley wonders why lefties don't volunteer to pay more taxes

David Friedman has a very simple idea for getting smaller government in the U.S.

Reason: Government is to blame for the housing crisis.

Daily Beast: After gay marriage... comes gay divorce. The humanity of the story is comforting, in a way. But it's also a reminder that we need to repeal DOMA for this to work.

Link blag

Sen Burr (R-NC) Foolishly encourages bank runs. I keep asking myself, when did the GOP transition from fiscally responsible to financially insane? Is the FDIC too complicated a government agency for some of them to understand the value of? The United States Constitution requires Senators to be of age at least 30. Perhaps we should change that to IQ at least 130?

Recession silver lining? Misguided social conservatives aren't having much luck with their legislation, as moderates focus on real problems:

school prayer and discouraging teaching evolution has been declared dead. Prospects don't look good for a proposal to require ultrasounds for first-trimester abortions. Same goes for a bill to make marriage licenses more expensive for couples who don't take a premarriage education course.

WSJ: Fight piracy with convoys?

DoD Buzz explains the SEAL techniques likely used against pirates.

James Fallows gets an anecdotal take on the state of Iraq.

WSJ: Oregon plans to hike beer tax by 1900%

Politico: Obama will simplify the tax code? More from AP.

Texas governor thinks the state could leave the union. Didn't we have a war to settle that? HotAir calls him down.

David Frum shares my anger at Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and public school teachers' unions.

Megan: Why does Canada have cost-effective healthcare? Location, location, location.

Yglesias: Merely seeing salad on a menu makes you more likely to order junk food.

Radley listens to more left-wing radio.