Troop morale

I have never understood how words spoken here in the USA could have an effect on "troop morale" in the greatest military in the history of the universe (just as I cannot understand how these same words can "embolden the enemy" as if the people attacking American forces in Iraq sit around worrying and feeling bad until someone in the US says something critical of Bush, at which point they jump up and plant an IED or shoot down a helicopter).

This comes from "a troop":

Pundits and politicians seem both greatly concerned and badly informed about troop morale. As a troop myself, I thought I'd start a dialogue of the 10 best and 10 worst things for my morale. I hope others will chime in with their nominations.

Ten worst:

1. Getting blown up
2. Buddies getting blown up
3. Re-securing a town we secured year before last
4. 'Taps'
5. The 'catch and release' detainee program
6. Colostomy bags
7. Civilian young men who won't look me in the eye when I'm in uniform
8. Any scene from any shopping mall anywhere in America
9. Editorials pointing out that casualties are 'light by historical standards'
10. Lies

Ten best:

1. Iraqis willing to fight for their country
2. Good sergeants
3. Clean, dry socks and t-shirts
4. Cigarettes and Chi without body armor
5. The USO at the DFW airport
6. Meeting an Iraqi leader from my last tour who's still alive
7. "Nothing significant to report"
8. Sleep & KBR macadamia nut cookies (tie)
9. Dead generals (this one is hypothetical, at least for the last six years, but Ridgeway said "it's good for the troops' morale to see a dead general every once in a while.")
10. Truth

Conspicuous by its absence is any speech by any politician, except those that fall in category 10. Hope this helps.

"An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare"

from today's WaPo:

An Iraq Interrogator's Nightmare

By Eric Fair
Friday, February 9, 2007; A19

Aman with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I'm afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.

That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I've long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.

The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.

While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I'm ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I'm becoming more ashamed of my silence.

Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler. The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?

We have failed to properly address the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Men like me have refused to tell our stories, and our leaders have refused to own up to the myriad mistakes that have been made. But if we fail to address this problem, there can be no hope of success in Iraq. Regardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons.

I am desperate to get on with my life and erase my memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we're doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq, unpleasant as it may be. The story of Abu Ghraib isn't over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.

The writer served in the Army from 1995 to 2000 as an Arabic linguist and worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in early 2004. His e-mail address iserictfair@comcast.net.

With Trembling Fingers

Periodically, I go back and read this article from early 2004.

The Bill Buckner of political commentary

or is it Scott Norwood?

Greg Sargeant nails Tom Friedman.

Tom Friedman is among the most important interpreters of the Middle East for American audiences. They rely on him to explain and exercise sound judgment on a fraught and confusing part of the world whose affairs have more of an impact on us right now than any other region. That is a position of immense consequence. And the decision to back the invasion of Iraq was -- and will be -- the single most important decision of his career. He blew it, and right now he should feel like Bill Buckner felt after he let the ground ball dribble between his legs -- only infinitely worse, because by dint of his role as one of America's principle interpreters of the Middle East, he helped create a catastrophe that has destroyed thousands of families and will have untold consequences for many decades.

Yet has anyone seen a single sign anywhere that Friedman has ever suffered a moment's anguish or even self-doubt about this catastrophic failing? I haven't. If you've seen any, please send along. Look, there are no easy answers to the question of how -- or whether -- pundits like Friedman should be held accountable for getting it wrong, however disastrously. But how about a little self-imposed accountability? What about a hint of remorse? Friedman's email makes you wonder whether to him all this is anything more than a big fat joke. Who cares if I was wrong about the most important foreign policy decision this country's made in decades? Just get my assets right, please.

I agree that one of the worst things about all the violence unleashed on the world by the Bush Administration is the lack of any sense of remorse or even empathy on the part of the pro-war pundits like Friedman and Zakaria. They just blithely move on. I don't expect it from Bush or someone like David Brooks, but for some reason this lack of understanding of the reality of the impact of war on peoples lives is maybe more unseemly from those who now pretend to oppose Bush.

Propaganda, Fascism and the coming war with Iran

I claim no great prescience or brilliance. I was just paying attention, reading and searching for information, using a little historical knowledge and reasoning ability. Stephen Hadley continues to say that the term "civil war" does not apply; of course not: the word is clusterfuck -- unexpurgated. And those of us who were paying attention predicted this.

Now the long-planned hit on Iran is coming. Maybe I will be wrong. There is always a possibility of the Democrats or military leaders stopping the Bush administration. There is even the possibility that they have not been planning on attacking Iran next all along.

The coming months will also put a couple of terms to the test -- for me. I tend to try to avoid using the words propaganda and fascism because I think people have trouble taking them seriously. But the value of words is when they describe reality. So, leaving aside the question of whether it has already been proven that Fox News, for example, is a propaganda outfit and the Bush administration is moving toward (or has embraced) fascism -- using the rigorous definitions of the terms -- I would like to watch (at a distance) the performance of Fox News and the Bush Administration to see how they conform to predictions arising from the strict social scientific and political definitions of propaganda and fascism.

One of the things about history is that we historians don't deal with the future. Unlike true social scientists, our models cannot be tested for their predictive value -- except retroactively, which has its value but .... But we can use analytical terms that have arisen to describe social and historical reality and note tendencies, deriving "lessons learned." That it why I find it useful to compare the Iraq situation to past experiences. The trick is figuring out which stories give us lessons and why. You gotta be flexible, not doctrinaire.

I am not actually trying to do that here; I am not trying to ascertain, for example, whether we are "repeating" the experience of Germany in the 1930s. I am simply laying out my prediction that we will see a textbook propaganda campaign -- but not necessarily one that has made it into the textbooks; expect something different than the run-up to the Iraq War; there will be no presentation to the UN, no attempt to get them to sign on, no attempt really to persuade the American public; an event will transpire that will provide the pretext for action and the President will present it to us as a fait accompli. "We have always been at war with Iran." Of course, this has already begun, and it is not only Fox and their accomplices. As Bob Somerby, Media Matters, Greg Sargeant (google 'em; I'm too lazy to link) and others demonstrate daily, they have plenty of help from the rest of the press playing their roles perfectly.

Similarly, with "creeping fascism." I have a great deal of hope that the Democrats will fight the worst of it. But clearly the party has not caught up to the rest of the American people. I am kinda with Steve Gilliard, who predicts a sudden and early departure for both Bush and Cheney. I would not lay money on it, but I do think something will come out in the trials and investigations that will very quickly tip the scales; Cheney will go, replaced by (no prediction); Bush not long after when the next revelation reveals itself.

This makes the need for more war soon all the more urgent for Bush and Cheney.

Interview with Tyler Drumheller

I can't say he tells us anything that hasn't been out there already, but the former CIA station chief in Europe confirms the Downing Street minutes, in strikingly similar language:

SPIEGEL: So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

Drumheller: The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don`t know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

Read the whole thing here.

The Moustache of Understanding strikes again

I find Tom Friedman to be among the most pernicious and odious of the basking sycophants in our nation's press corps. He has been wrong about everything (e.g. the world is not flat, no matter what the taxi drivers of Bangalore tell you) and has aided the Bush administration in perpetrating their crimes against humanity by layering a liberal gloss on the efforts to kill brown people. At least people like Bill Kristol admit they want to kill more brown people (well, not they, themselves, actually -- they want our hired guns to do so).

Friedman's latest effort is a call for a Muslim Martin Luther King, Jr.

Now, MLK. Jr. is one of those names we invoke when we want to feel good about ourselves. In death and mythology we all love MLK, Jr. I wish they would make a MLK, Jr. teddy bear that would intone his dulcet cadences soothingly as we drift off to sleep.

But if you have ever read him -- or even anything in depth about him -- you will know that he was a brave and fierce warrior for the cause of justice. He put himself on the line time after time, and ultimately gave his life for the cause. King pissed people off, and not just white supremacist extremists. Read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail for a taste of his uncompromising spirit.

Even better, read his speech from April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence where King finally, belatedly comes out against the Vietnam War.

I tried to read through for easily digestible excerpts to post here, but I really cannot do that in fairness to the speech or to the reader.

As I read my rage, my sadness, and my hopefulness rise and fall with the waves of his words. At the end I am left with one conclusion:

What this country needs right now is an American Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Because I told them it had to."

From Think Progress:

“He’s tried this two times — it’s failed twice,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says of President Bush’s escalation plan.

“I asked him at the White House, ‘Mr. President, why do you think this time it’s going to work?’

And he said, ‘Because I told them it had to.‘”

Pelosi reportedly then asked, “Why didn’t you tell them that the other two times?“