Recently in Iraq Category

Philip Giraldi observes a sad truth about the US partial withdrawal from Iraq. Excerpt:

Iraq is headed by a strongman who intends to stay in power come what may, not unlike Saddam though representing a different constituency. The country continues to be one of the most corrupt in the world and electricity and water are in short supply, worse even then during Saddam's latter days.

US interests have hardly been served by the six year occupation. Apart from defense contractors and a few oil companies it is hard to imagine that anyone sees any benefits. 4319 Americans and at least 90,000 Iraqis killed violently since 2003. At a cost of maybe as much as $5 trillion when all the bills are paid by our grandchildren. Saddam's secularism has been replaced by a Shi'ite dominated power structure and Iraq's role as an Arab bulwark against Iranian hegemony is just a memory. The Christian minority, protected under Saddam, has more-or-less fled the country. Iran has benefited most from America's takedown of Saddam.

Here's part of George W. Bush's legacy to his nation and the world:

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag -- particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army -- the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.

In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.' "

Mr. Powell's assertion that the Pentagon inflated the number of competent Iraqi security forces is backed up by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of ground troops in Iraq, and L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator until an Iraqi government took over in June 2004.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

Read on, to the part about Rumsfeld, if you want to really get angry. The verdict of the American people on the stewardship of George W. Bush and the Republican Party is just. The problem is, the Democratic establishment is complicit too -- and I would not be surprised if Barack Obama found himself in the same situation as Richard Nixon did taking over from LBJ, trying to follow the same policy goals with different methods.

Anyway, one can sympathize this below, on the video. The poor devil oughtn't to have done it, but I can't say that I don't get where he's coming from:

Noah Millman faces an interesting dilemma:

[O]ne of these days [my young son is] going to deserve a more serious discussion of the war than we've had to-date. Let's say my son was nine years old - old enough to comprehend more than good guys versus bad guys. How, in narrative terms, would you explain the Iraq war? On the assumption that you didn't want to say either that, "Iraq is only one front in World War IV, the global struggle against Islamofascism" or "we went to war so the President could get back at the guy who tried to kill his dad, make money for his buddies in the oil business, and protect Israel."

Suggestions?

That's a great question. I'd like to take a stab at it, and I hope you will too. It's not a theoretical question for me. I have a son who's almost nine, and will be asking more serious questions before too much longer. Here's a stab at how I might explain it to him in terms he can understand, while being as honest as I can in my judgment without being overly ideological:

The Iraq War happened because our country was attacked on September 11 by Arab Muslim terrorists. Everybody realized how much danger we were in by some crazy Muslims, that they could hurt us worse than we thought. Saddam Hussein was the evil dictator of Iraq, and we had fought one war with him already. President Bush and his advisers thought that Muslims in the Arab world were so unhappy because they lived in countries that are unfair, and where they were poor compared to Americans, that they ended up using their religion to hate us. So President Bush thought if we can just get rid of the bad dictators in the Middle East, where the Arab Muslims live, then they people would see they could have a better life by living like we do, and they would want to be just like us. So President Bush and his advisers got everybody to think that Iraq might have been behind the 9/11 attacks, or might come do something like that to us again.

It's not certain whether or not President Bush really believed that, or was using it as an excuse to start a war to destroy the old order in the Middle East, and replace it with an order -- that is, a way of running a country and a society -- that was more like us. The idea is that if the people were more like us, they wouldn't hate us. And the idea was that all people deep down want to be like us.

So we attacked Iraq and destroyed the Iraqi government, and got rid of the evil Saddam Hussein. But then things went wrong. It turned out that not all the people were glad we were there. It turned out that the people of Iraq didn't really want to be like us, not most of them. They wanted to be like themselves, and they hated having a foreign army in their country. A lot of these were really bad people, especially the crazy Muslim ones who used their religion to justify killing our soldiers, Iraqi people who weren't Muslims, and Iraqi people who weren't the right kind of Muslims. but we couldn't just leave, because we screwed their country up by invading it.

However, it should be said that they had screwed it up bad enough on their own. We were dumb to invade, but we really did give them a chance to make a better country for themselves, and they've done a bad job of it for a lot of different reasons. Still, it looks like now that we made it worse for them by invading, though maybe things will get better in the end. Certainly we made it far worse for the Iraqi Christians. They had hard lives anyway, and we pretty much ruined them while not meaning to.

The war cost a lot of money, way more than President Bush said it was going to cost. It's really hurt our army. We don't know when they'll be able to come home. The war did us no real good, and ended up helping our enemy Iran. President Bush and his advisers did a lousy job running the thing. The lessons are that America isn't as powerful as we like to think we are; that not everybody in the world wants to be like us; that you can't force people to do what's best for them; that if you're really scared or mad, you can be tricked into going along with things without fully thinking them through; it's easier for the people of a country to agree to go to war when they don't have to go themselves, or know anybody doing the fighting; and that sometimes a country has no choice but to fight a war, but a country really really really should only go to war as a last resort.

Your uncle fought in the war, and like most of our soldiers, was very brave and good and loyal and only wanted to help people. He risked his life to help people who wanted to kill him and other American soldiers. The world is a crazy place. What we have in America is a very special thing, and we shouldn't forget it. It's not way of the world. Thank God.

I need to polish that. What's your version, for your kid? Try to be as truthful to your judgment on the war, whatever it is, without being preachy. It's kind of hard, given how much we argue about it.

The image above appears in the Baton Rouge Advocate today. It shows my brother-in-law, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Leming, as he got off the plane in Baton Rouge yesterday and greeted his family. In the photo is my sister Ruthie, their daughters Hannah (the tall blonde) and Claire. Little Rebekah is not in the photo because she's clinging to her daddy's leg.

Mike is home! Thanks be to God! From the newspaper story:

"Everyone here with me said I could hug Mike first," said Ruthie Leming as she waited with a crowd of family and friends for her husband, Chief Warrant Officer Mike Leming, to arrive.

Part of the group waiting to see Leming were members of the Baton Rouge Fire Department where Leming is a firefighter when not on Guard duty. They brought the seven firetrucks as a way to welcome him home.

"I've been worried about him," Ruthie Leming said of her husband as tears welled up in her eyes. "We've been together since I was 15. He's my best friend. I just want him to come home and I just want to hold him."

Leming's three daughters also waited patiently with the crowds.

"This is sort of surreal," said Hannah Leming, 15. "I've seen my dad on a Webcam for a year and now I'm finally going to really see him. I am just so happy and excited. I'm going to tell him I love him and he's been gone way too long."

For Mike Leming, the deployment was long and stressful at times.

"We had to build a concrete barrier in Sadr City," Leming said. "Those were some of the worst moments for me. It took seven weeks. We worked on it at night because that was the safest time to do the work, but they still shot at us."

Still, Leming said he was happy to have served his country. "But I'm also happy to be at home," he said.

On the drive home to Starhill from the airport, the last two miles of country road were festooned with yellow ribbons members of the community hung from trees and fenceposts. When they reached the driveway, they saw a police car had blocked the road, which was filled with neighborhood children waving "Welcome home" signs. About 150 people from the community -- family and friends -- lined the gravel road to cheer for Mike and welcome him home. The local volunteer firefighters had their two trucks there by the road, and used their water cannon to create an arch for him to drive under, in salute. It was quite a homecoming.

Mike comes home wearing a Bronze Star for meritorious service. He and his engineering battalion did incredible work, under very adverse conditions. Mike also worked with some soldiers from West Virginia, about whom he can't stop talking. Friends for life, him and the Black Diamonds.

Here's a neat story that I can tell now that he's home. A few months ago, my sister Ruthie ran a race in Baton Rouge. The number she was assigned was 709. Weeks later, Mike mailed home for her scrapbook the number he'd been assigned in a race he competed in in Iraq. It too was 709.

What an incredible coincidence, my sister thought. "That means he's going to come home on July 9," said my mother.

Which was rather unlikely, given that Mike and his men weren't scheduled to leave Iraq till August. Still, my mother was sure of it. She believed that was a sign.

Last week, Ruthie got a phone call from Mike. His unit, which had already transferred to Kuwait, had departed unexpectedly early. He was phoning from Maine. He was back in the United States, safe.

Of course, it was July 9.

For all the prayers said for Mike and Ruthie and the girls, for all the candles lit, for all the good wishes from all of you on behalf of my family, I say: Thank you. And above all, thanks be to God for Mike's safe home. May all our soldiers return likewise.

Whatever you think about this war, it must be remembered that it's being fought -- and not always fought (Mike and his men are engineers) -- by men and women who may or may not agree with the war, but who promised to go if their country called, and who are honoring that promise. It's also being fought on the home front by families like my sister and her girls, in their way. That photo above shows what this war on the home front is all about, I think. Again, whatever one's opinion about the war, I think we can all -- I think we all must -- keep in mind the bonds of love that are being tried hard by this conflict, and pray and do whatever we can to strengthen those military families who are being tested in ways that most of us are not.

UPDATE: My sister called just now to say I'd gotten the 709 story slightly wrong. Mike didn't mail his race number home from Iraq; he brought it with him when he came home at Easter for a break, which is when they discovered they'd been given the same number. The Crunchy Con blog regrets the error.

The government of Iraq says it's ready to see American soldiers set a benchmark for returning home. Remember how President Bush said that when the Iraqis stood up for themselves, we'd stand down and go home? Four years ago, Bush said:

Our military will stay as long as the stability of Iraq requires, and only as long as their presence is needed and requested by the Iraqi government.

Well, the Iraqis are finding out that he didn't really mean it, that they're going to have American soldiers occupying their country until America decides it wants to leave. As Mark Shea puts it (sarcastically):

It's our country, not theirs. That's the inevitable meaning of our refusal to honor the Iraqi demand for a timetable. It's our country, not theirs. We will decide what's best for them, not their own government.