Russell's Blog

Tuesday, the New York Times ran the latest in the series of bizarre articles claiming that the troop surge in Iraq is working. The premise of the article rests on perhaps the weakest justification for optimism I have ever read, anywhere.

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

Mein Gott! Days pass without a carbombing! Let us rejoice! The article parrots this sickly good news, which is the best news the chefs at the Pentagon can cook up from the year's putrid harvest. Need I remind you that the New York Times is once again reporting Bush administration numbers as if they were fact. That hasn't worked out so well for the Times in the recent past, but here they are, doing it again.

Much of the fall in violence can probably be explained by successful ethnic cleansing throughout Baghdad.

Why are they buying this pitiful, slightly-less-awful picture? Simple. They can't speak Arabic. Juan Cole offeres a more complete picture of what's going on in the region, a picture he is able to express thanks on an amazing ability called "bilingualism." Actually, Cole is fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and reads some Turkish, according to his CV. Evidently, the New York Times can't be bothered to make itself aware of what is reported elsewhere. What sort of picture does Cole see in the Arabic media? It still looks like a full-blown civil war to me.

This idea has probably been floated before, but it occurs to me that there is a very simple plan for getting us out of Iraq: Hold a national referendum in Iraq on whether or not to continue the occupation. If the Iraqis tell us to get out, then we should get out. Immediately.

The Republican position seems to be that we have to stay in Iraq to protect its "young democracy," as the president described it yesterday. There could hardly be a more democratic way of settling this question. On the other hand, a referendum is almost sure to result in a resounding "Get Out."

If the Democratic Party is looking for a nice, reasonable, uncontroversial plan for getting out of Iraq, I can't see how this one could be attacked. We're ostensibly in Iraq for its own good. If we're not wanted, then we ought to withdraw. No one could call it cutting and running if we are asked to leave.

While I listened to Petraeus and Crocker tiptoe clumsily around perjury, I couldn't help but wonder how many people will take them at their word that the level of violence is declining. I find it difficult to understand how the level of violence is decreasing when the rate of killing has been increasing. I guess it must depend on how you count the bodies. Evidently, ordinary muggers shoot people in the face, and death squads shoot people in the back of the head. Accepting, for a moment, this ridiculous criterion for distinguishing muggings from sectarian killings as reasonable, it seems very weird that we don't count muggings as violence.

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, repeated the assertion that Iran is supplying the insurgency with sophisticated weapons, particularly explosively formed penetrators. If you will direct your attention to the photograph below, from Wikipedia :

This is a sophisticated weapon that exploits some very tricky hydrodynamics. It is also improvised from an ordinary copper pipe. The penetrator (the bowl shaped part) looks like it was turned out on a lathe, and that the machinist was either not very skillful or not very concerned with quality. Note the disk-shaped depression in the center where the lathe spindle was attached. The penetrator appears to be soldered to the pipe with plumbing solder.

I don't think the insurgency needs anyone's help to build these. The hardest part would be obtaining the explosive material. Who is supplying the insurgency with explosives? The simplest explanation is that they helped themselves to the weapons caches we left unguarded at the beginning of the war. How many improvised explosively formed penetrators could you make with 377 tons of high explosives?

Maybe Iran isn't being very helpful when it comes to American interests in Iraq. After all, why should they? I have no doubt that Iran's leadership would be delighted to see things go as badly for America as possible in Iraq and elsewhere. However, it's not as if Iran actually has to do anything to make Iraq a disaster for America. The fact that they don't like us is not in itself a very good reason for them to arm the insurgents. Practically any government in Iraq is likely to be friendly with Iran. Iran actually has a lot of good reasons to want the insurgency to stop.

If I were Mr. Ahmadinejad, I would just sit on my hands. At most, I would give some political support to Iraqis who might be friendly to Iran should they gain or keep power. But weapons? Why bother when the insurgents have already looted all the weapons they could ever want? It would be redundant and unnecessary.

Like most Americans, Mr. Crocker knows that we've either lost or that we're loosing. What sets him apart from the rest of us is that Americans are grown up enough to accept responsibility for the bad outcome of this conflict, and Mr. Crocker would rather blame it on someone else.

Charles Boustany turned up on CNN to peddle the administration's latest outrage -- that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq substantially. So, Wolf Blitzer asks a hard question :

BOUSTANY: We’re clearly seeing some major improvements. Clearly in the Anbar Province, we’ve seen significant improvement. We were able to walk the streets of Fallujah. Sectarian deaths are down.

[...]

BLITZER: And Congressman Boustany, you say that the number of casualties is going down. But we took a closer look — and The Los Angeles Times did as well — citing Iraqi Health Ministry numbers. In June, it was 1,227 civilian deaths in Iraq. In July, it went up to 1,753 civilian deaths in Iraq. And in August, the month that just ended, 1,773 civilian deaths in Iraq. Those numbers are going in the wrong direction.

Ah, the numbers. It is rather alarming how often important news comes without any specific discussion of the numbers upon which it hinges. Someone needs to send Mr. Blitzer a pundit-snack. Good pundit.

But reading a triad of four digit numbers from a teleprompter (or maybe even from memory) is not the best way to communicate about numbers. That might be appropriate for MegaMillions, but we owe these particular numbers more careful examination. We are, after all, talking about the deaths of human beings as a direct result of our collective decisions at the ballot box.

So, I looked up the data on conformed killings of Iraqi civilians. Against the background of men and women and children turning up as abandoned corpses on the street, there are a lot of mass-casualty events. There are also a few rare days when there are no confirmed killings. It's somewhat difficult to see the trend in the raw data. So, I borrowed an analytical tool from the financial world -- the moving average.

That looks like a slight upward trend to me. The GAO agrees. Their data measures the number of attacks, rather than the number of dead, but one would expect attacks and deaths to correlate.

General Patreous is going to make his presentation in a few days, which everyone assumes is going to say that the surge is working. If it doesn't explain these numbers, then the report should be ignored.

From the moment it became clear that the stated reasons were both manifestly ridiculous and demonstrably false, petabytes have been devoted to speculation about the "real" reason why the United States invaded Iraq. They range from "'everyone' believed that there were WMDs..." to simply "the oil." Thus far, I have found no explanation that is particularly compelling, so I've left the question unanswered in my mind.

That is, until The Editors provided one that can turn aside old Occam's Razor. Of course it's speculation. However, since even the best friends of the White House can only speculate on what goes on in there, speculate is all we can do. This administration is a black box. Well, a black box from which leaks a steady drip of incompetence and malfeasance, but a black box nonetheless. I suspect that even with the benefit of historical perspective, the academic study of early 21st Century American History will do no better on this topic than speculating on the circumstantial evidence.

The Editors offer what I consider the first successful sally in this endeavor. If it's anywhere close to true, then I think its profanity is completely justified.

The Republicans are filibustering the amendment to Defense Authorization bill, and Mr. Reid is forcing them to actually stand up and do it. It's been quite fun watching them sleepily fumble through their speeches. The opponents of the filibuster look and sound like they planned well. They've had their naps and their coffee, and have been turning up for their 3 AM speeches ready for a fight.

A lot of people have been calling this political theater, and that real debate doesn't happen during these marathon sessions. The speeches so far, though, have been pretty serious.

Mr. Reid has threatened to instruct the sergeant at arms to round up enough senators to keep the quorum. I'd love to see some senators -- of either party -- dragged half-asleep onto the Senate floor in their pajamas.

A few days ago, a skunk died behind my house. Even a tiny whiff of the sent carries the unmistakable note of death. The smell is caused by two compounds, cadaverine and putricine, which form as a result of protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue.

The testimony of Richard H. Carmona before Congress about his term as Surgeon General is tainted with an all-too-familiar stink. It's like catching the cadaverine-putricine whiff of decaying flesh while walking in the garden. There can be no mistake about what it signifies.

There is a common thread that runs among this sad episode and the US attorney purge, the Katrina disaster, the Libby/Wilson/Plame/Armitage clusterfuck, the missing WMDs, Abu Garib and the generally brain-dead strategy of the Iraq war.

This administration doesn't know what a civil servant is.

As we are reminded ad nausium, US attorneys, the surgeon general, the secretary of defense, and everyone else in the executive branch serves "at the pleasure of the president." This is true, in a general sense. What the administration doesn't understand is that this does not mean that these people serve to please the president.

It is the job of the president to choose the best technocrats he or she can find. Once installed, it is the job of the president to insure that these people can practice their trade. But this administration believes it knows the law better than the US attorneys it hires, military planning better than the War College, foreign intelligence better than its own intelligence analysts, disaster planning and emergency response better than FEMA, operational security better than the CIA, interrogation and detention practices better than the military police, and medicine better than its own surgeon general.

But they don't. No politician could. That's why we have experts.

Four years ago today, George Bush said this :

"There are some who feel like, that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the situation."
-- George W. Bush on Iraq, 2 July 2003

Nowadays, "they," being the insurgency, attacks us "there," being nearly every corner of Iraq, on a daily basis. Nearly every day, in ones and twos and sometimes more, our guys are getting picked off.

The deaths happen with such regularity that the news now that the news has ceased to say very much about these singular, individual and profound losses, but write instead to the general condition of having our soldiers die in Iraq. Thew news from Iraq is reported in the much the same manner as the general condition of the weather. The reporting on casualties has the same tone you might expect to hear "It has been hot this Summer."

Today, George Bush celebrated the anniversary of "Bring them on" by commuting Scooter Libby's prison prison sentence. Scooter Libby, who perjured himself before a federal grand jury in an effort to cover up the deliberate and criminal disclosure of the covert status of a an operating CIA officer causing the endangerment and/or loss of valuable intelligence assets, was effectively pardoned today.

George Bush must be aiming for an approval rating in the 15% range.