Peace Pundit

PeacePundit has followed the investigation of an incident in 2007 in which Blackwater security guards protecting U.S. State Department officials allegedly shot without provocation at civilian cars in Nisoor Square (Baghdad) as the U.S. caravan entered the square, killing 17 civilians, including children.

The investigation continues, as described in the first of two recent Blackwater-related reports (excerpted below). Apparently, the FBI is helping prosecute the case against Blackwater, bringing Iraqi witnesses who saw and/or were victims of the shooting.

The second excerpted story (see below) is from Jeremy Scahill, the author of a recent book about Blackwater. According to Scahill, Blackwater is expanding in both size and purview. It plans to build a big training facility in San Diego, CA. It also created a new division, Total Intelligence Solutions, offering CIA-like services to private companies. In doing this, Blackwater seems on track to realize Neal Stephenson’s vision (from his 1992 novel Snow Crash), in which all security and intelligence is provided by private companies rather than government agencies.

Scahill and the California Courage Campaign are hosting a Blackwater briefing (as a conference call) on Thursday, June 12. [Register to Participate]

Let’s hope that the Courage Campaign and the FBI’s investigation can cut Blackwater down a bit.

Blackwater Grand Jury Hears Iraqi Witnesses

Brian Ross, Aadel Faiq, Len Tepper
ABC News, 27 May 2008

The FBI has brought four Iraqi witnesses … to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Blackwater security guards accused of killing 17 innocent civilians last year at a Baghdad traffic square.

The men were brought in … and seen … at the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., where the Blackwater grand jury has been sitting since last November.

In interviews with ABC News before leaving Baghdad, the men all said the Blackwater shootings were unprovoked.

“It was a true massacre, a slaughter,” said Mohammed Abdul Razak, whose son Ali was killed in the shootings. Razak said he saw the guards first fire at one car and then open fire on other cars, including his. When the shooting stopped he saw his son in the back seat. “He looked asleep, but after I opened the door, his brain fell right between my feet,” he said. “I started shouting, ‘They killed my son,’ but who is listening?”

Blackwater guards initially told U.S. investigators they opened fire because they felt they were under attack.

But two traffic policemen assigned to the Nisour square were among the witnesses brought before the grand jury. They told ABC News they will contradict Blackwater’s version of events. … “They just started to shoot; nobody shot at them,” officer Serhan Dhiab told ABC News. …

The father of the dead boy, Razak, said he had been pressured and threatened by Blackwater not to testify and that he has turned down an offer of $20,000 to settle the issue. Blackwater says the money was not a settlement offer but a condolence payment. … Blackwater … denied bringing any pressure on the families.

…

[Read Entire Article]

Bad News About Blackwater

Jeremy Scahill
Courage Campaign
9 June 2008

Last Thursday, after a federal judge cleared the way, Blackwater opened a large training facility in San Diego, just three blocks from the border that separates California and Mexico.

… Blackwater is setting its sights on the so-called “war on drugs” and recently opened its own private CIA, called “Total Intelligence Solutions,” marketing “CIA-type services” to Fortune 500 companies.

Blackwater is aggressively building up a parallel infrastructure to the U.S. national security apparatus as its owner, Erik Prince, promotes Blackwater as the “Federal Express” of the military industrial complex.

… But this battle with Blackwater is not over. Grassroots activists in San Diego … are ramping up their campaign to shut down Blackwater’s base of operations on the border.

This Wednesday, June 11, from 3-5 p.m., these local groups are organizing a major protest outside the Blackwater facility at 7685 Siempre Viva Road in Otay Mesa. …

The Courage Campaign [is hosting] a statewide conference call this at 4 p.m. this Thursday, June 12. On this “Courage Campaign Conversation”, you can talk with me directly about the San Diego situation, Blackwater’s ominous contract renewal in Iraq, and how the outsourcing of our security to these mercenaries threatens our democracy.

Register to participate

…

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellen, in his new book, accuses the Bush Administration of selling the Iraq war to the American people with carefully crafted propaganda, much of it delivered to the press by McClellan himself. This aspect of the book is summarized in a recent Washington Post article (excerpted below).

Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled US on Iraq

Michael D. Shear
Washington Post, 28 May 2008

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”

McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade.

…

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war…. In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

…

[View Entire Article]

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-laureate economist and former World Bank President, has analyzed the cost of the Iraq War. His analysis makes several points that war critics have been making since before the war was launched:

• The war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted.
• The Bush administration continues to grossly underestimate the cost of the war.
• The Bush administration cost-estimates exclude the cost of rehabilitation and health care for veterans injured, who constitute a higher proportion of casualties than in any prior U.S. war.
• The Iraq War is the second most expensive in U.S. history (after WWII) and the second longest (after Vietnam).
• The cost of the war helped cause the sub-prime banking crisis, which threatens the whole world’s economy.
• The war is primarily responsible for a dramatic rise in oil prices since the war began.
• The war will cost another half trillion between 2008 and 2010 if not ended.
• The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world. Just a few days’ funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered.

An article published recently in “The Australian” summarizes Stiglitz’s analysis. A quote from the article:

“When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn’t focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

“(Then Defence Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said ‘baloney’, and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion.

“We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion. Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that.” View Entire Article

Stiglitz’s mind-boggling cost-estimates are put into perspective by a recent video produced by the American Friends Service Committee: “One Day of Iraq War”. It shows the many productive uses to which one day’s Iraq War cost could be put. View video.

Reports in several publications indicate that the British government recommends retiring the term “war on terrorism” on the grounds that it glorifies and encourages terrorists and fosters unproductive militaristic counter-measures. This contrasts sharply with the Bush Administration’s view. Below is an excerpt from a report posted at Military.com. Below that are links to related reports published elsewhere.

Britain Drops ‘War on Terror’ Label

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.

Officials were concerned it could act as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, which is determined to manufacture a battle between Islam and the West.

The term “Islamic terrorist” will also no longer be used. Officials believe it is unhelpful because it appears to directly link the religion to terrorist atrocities.

…

Related Stories

• Christian Science Monitor: Britain Drops Phrase ‘War on Terror’
• International Herald Tribune: Brown Drops ‘War on Terror’, Redefining the Fight

A New York Times news article from 2003 shows that those who planned the Iraq war were either seriously delusional in their assessments of what would happen, or they were lying through their teeth. At this point, it perhaps doesn’t matter which it was; we just must stop this man-made disaster before it causes more damage.

That means scrutinizing General David Petraeus’ arguments with the same skepticism that we now see was warranted with the 2002-2003 arguments of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Bush.

New York Times, 28 February, 2003

Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size

By Eric Schmitt
New York Times

In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon’s second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general’s assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.

Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, “wildly off the mark.” Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war’s duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.

“We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground,” Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. “Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion.” Mr. Wolfowitz’s refusal to be pinned down on the costs of war and peace in Iraq infuriated some committee Democrats, who noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the budget director, had briefed President Bush on just such estimates on Tuesday.

“I think you’re deliberately keeping us in the dark,” said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. “We’re not so naïve as to think that you don’t know more than you’re revealing.” Representative Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, also voiced exasperation with Mr. Wolfowitz: “I think you can do better than that.”

Mr. Wolfowitz, with Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, at his side, tried to mollify the Democratic lawmakers, promising to fill them in eventually on the administration’s internal cost estimates. “There will be an appropriate moment,” he said, when the Pentagon would provide Congress with cost ranges. “We’re not in a position to do that right now.”

At a Pentagon news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld echoed his deputy’s comments. Neither Mr. Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, by name. But both men were clearly irritated at the general’s suggestion that a postwar Iraq might require many more forces than the 100,000 American troops and the tens of thousands of allied forces that are also expected to join a reconstruction effort.

“The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers — are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.” He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.

A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. “He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment,” Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, many nations agreed in advance of hostilities to help pay for a conflict that eventually cost about $61 billion. Mr. Wolfowitz said that this time around the administration was dealing with “countries that are quite frightened of their own shadows” in assembling a coalition to force President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. “I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables. Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. “To assume we’re going to pay for it all is just wrong,” he said.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, “I’ve already decided that. It’s not useful.”

Cuomo, governor of New York from 1983 to 1995, now a lawyer in New York, wrote this outstanding and to-the-point op-ed article for the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times, 03 September 2007

What the Constitution Says About Iraq

By Mario M. Cuomo

Congress and the courts must recommit to the legislative branch’s sole authority to declare war.

Most Americans want the war in Iraq ended, but it continues and Americans are killed, mutilated or wounded every day, as the Democratic majorities in Congress struggle to produce legislation that will take our forces out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to insist that as commander in chief, he has the constitutional power to go to war and decide when to end it, unilaterally. At the same time, another possible disaster emerges from the shadows: Bush appears to be considering a military assault on Iran, again apparently without Congress declaring war first.

How did we get to this point and what, if anything, can we do now?

The war happened because when Bush first indicated his intention to go to war against Iraq, Congress refused to insist on enforcement of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, this article has spelled out that Congress — not the president — shall have “the power to declare war.” Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a “declaration” by Congress.

Nor were the feeble, post-factum congressional resolutions of support of the Iraq invasion — in 2001 and 2002 — adequate substitutes for the formal declaration of war demanded by the founding fathers.

What can be done now?

First, Democrats should make clear that it is the president who is keeping the war in Iraq from ending. Even if Congress were able to pass a veto-proof bill with respect to withdrawal, the president would resist enforcement of the bill, insisting that as commander in chief, he is immune from Congress’ decision. That would raise a constitutional issue for the courts.

But judging by the courts’ history concerning constitutional war powers, including decisions involving the Iraq war in the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts, the judiciary would, in all probability, choose not to intervene, claiming that the disagreement between the president and Congress is a political question.

However, the political-question thesis is nowhere referred to in the Constitution, and it denies the people the protection of the Constitution in dealing with perhaps the most serious question the nation has to face: “Should we go to war?” That position should be challenged as an abdication of constitutional duty by the courts, but the sad truth is that the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would probably support our current conservative president. As a practical matter, that means only the president can end this war or change our strategy in Iraq.

Even if it is too late for Congress to remedy its failure to comply with the Constitution with respect to Iraq, at the very least our candidates for president and our congressional leaders should assure us that they will not allow this lapse to result in further unilateral acts of war — against Iran, Pakistan or any other nation — by this president or any other. Our leaders must make it clear that in the future, Congress will insist on compliance with Article I, Section 8 for any military action that is not fairly deemed an unexpected emergency.

It is frightening that our government has permitted this fundamental and costly constitutional transgression to persist for more than four years.

We must do everything we can to end the war in Iraq and avoid a new tragedy abroad by recommitting to strict adherence to the rule of law and to the Constitution by the president, Congress and the courts — especially with respect to war powers.

In 1994, after the Gulf War, some analysts criticized the George HW Bush administration for not invading Iraq, occupying the country, deposing Saddam Hussein, and installing a new, pro-U.S. government. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense in that first Bush administration, explained why that would have failed. His answer was clear and, as it turned out, prophetic:

Dick Cheney in his own words

It makes one wonder why he and Bush junior didn’t listen to Cheney’s own advice.

On 9 Nov 2004, the SF Chronicle printed a story “U.S. Forces Push into Fallujah”. That article is no longer archived online, but a related article is. [see Chronicle story]

In response, I wrote a letter to the editor.

Recently (17 Jun 2007), the Chronicle printed another story about yet another major U.S. offensive (aka “Surge”), validating the point I made in my 2004 letter. It seems the Bush folks don’t learn from history — not even history that they lived through.

War is still on

Letter printed in SF Chronicle, 9 Nov 2004

Editor — Your news story, “U.S. forces push into Fallujah” (Nov. 8), without intending to, clearly shows the total failure of the Bush administration’s campaign to pacify Iraq by force.

Didn’t President Bush declare, in effect, “mission accomplished” more than a year ago?

Didn’t he say that “major combat operations” had ended?

If this assault on Fallujah isn’t a “major combat operation,” then what is it?

How many more times will U.S. troops have to “push into Fallujah” over the next decade to recapture it from insurgents? When will we acknowledge that our attempt to control Iraq is doomed to the same fate as the Soviet Union’s attempt to control Afghanistan?

What will it take for the American people to realize that they have been led into an endless quagmire by an incompetent group of ideologues who have no clue what to do?

JEFF JOHNSON

Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.

Pundits, politicians, and members of the U.S. populace generally support the continued occupation of Iraq even if they didn’t support launching the war. Many who disagreed with invading argue that the U.S.-led coalition cannot just pull out, but rather must stay until Iraq is made “stable” under the new U.S.-installed Iraqi government. I call these people “optimists”.

A few lonely pessimists argue that Iraq will never be stable under Western occupation, and that to remain there is to ensnare ourselves in an immensely-costly, endless, Vietnam-like quagmire. The optimists reject the analogy with Vietnam.

OK, let’s not go back to Vietnam – let’s just go back to Afghanistan… in 1979. The Soviet Union invaded that country for strategic reasons and installed a sympathetic government. U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, in briefing President Jimmy Carter on the invasion, wrote that Afghanistan could become a “Soviet Vietnam”.

The Soviets assumed that with their vastly larger and better-equipped military, they could quickly squash the Islamic resistance. Shortly after invading, the Soviets declared victory. Instead of admitting defeat, the resistance melted into the countryside and began a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Soviet military and their Afghan collaborators.

Militant Muslims — including Osama bin Laden — came from elsewhere to help their local peers defeat the “infidel” invaders. They were aided by the U.S. CIA, which provided training, funding, and weapons as part of its strategy of containing Soviet expansion. President Ronald Reagan called the resistors “freedom fighters”, remember?

The resistors inflicted continuous casualties and damage, keeping Afghanistan terrorized, destabilized, and demoralized. The Soviets responded with heavy bombs and heavy-handed repression. Forces on both sides committed atrocities. Countless civilians were killed. What little infrastructure Afghanistan had was wrecked. The demoralization and destabilization spread to the Soviet Union as soldiers returned dead or maimed, resulting in anti-war demonstrations and refusals to serve in the military. And the death-toll showed no signs of abating.

By then, officials of the Reagan administration apparently decided that Brzezinski’s prediction had come true, because the U.S. State Department office for Afghan affairs had a sign posted above its entrance that read “Soviet Vietnam”. Sometimes, they answered their phone that way. That’s right: officials of the U.S. government recognized then that Afghanistan had become the Soviet version of our Vietnam-quagmire, and even called it that.

Fast-forward: We invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq to depose despotic regimes and install sympathetic governments. With our vastly superior military, we expected to defeat the resistance quickly and easily. Shortly after each invasion, President Bush declared victory.

In both countries, the enemy seemed soundly defeated, but in fact mainly melted away (into the mountains in Afghanistan; into the towns in Iraq) and began waging guerrilla warfare against our forces. Militant Muslims came from elsewhere to help their local peers defeat the “infidel” invaders, aided by Al Qaeda, which provides training, funding, and weapons. Furthermore, they still have some of the weapons we gave them to fight the Soviets. Of course, now the resistors are fighting the infidel capitalists instead of the infidel communists, so we call them “terrorists” instead of “freedom fighters”.

The resistors inflict continuous casualties and damage, keeping Afghanistan and Iraq terrorized, destabilized, and demoralized. The U.S. responds with heavy bombs and heavy-handed repression. Forces on both sides commit atrocities. Countless civilians have been killed (see Civilian Casualties category in PeacePundit). What little infrastructure each country had is wrecked. The demoralization and destabilization are spreading to the U.S. as soldiers return dead or maimed, resulting in anti-war demonstrations and refusals to serve in the military. And the death-toll shows no signs of abating.

Is anyone else feeling deja vu? If Afghanistan in the 1980s was the “Soviet Vietnam”, what does that make Afghanistan and Iraq now? I wonder how the Iraq and Afghanistan desks at the Russian Foreign Ministry answer their phones these days.