Leave of absence

Due to a grave family illness, Torrid will be away from his world until about July 1st. Be safe, and remind your loved ones that they are indeed loved.

--TJ

Clear Fog of War

Caught this on DVD last night--a feature-length interview with Robert McNamara, the former president of Ford and Secy of Defense for both Kennedy and Johnson. Fascinating guy, fascinating life, very impressive set of views. He doesn't ever say anything about current policies, but his admonitions are clearly relevant. He said Kennedy believed that the most important job for a President was to keep the country out of war if at all possible. He seems to idolize Wilson (having written a book about him, that's not really a surprise); he notes that war is too blunt an instrument of policy, and economic measures don't seem to work--which only leaves an international body of conflict resolution as a solid option. He also had some very interesting things to say about the nature of human fallability and the extreme danger that nuclear weapons pose in that sense--that putting the ability to annihilate nations in the hands of one person is an extraordinarily risky prospect. He said that while he was Secy, the world came THIS close to nuclear war on three separate occasions.

Very thoughtful person, and the images and music, by Phillip Glass, that accompany the interview are compelling. The footage of Japanese cities firebombed by night in 1945 are particularly chilling. The film is highly recommended. How many US movies come with a lesson plan and teaching guide (located at the homepage, above)?

Scooter backed into a corner

Forced by Rep Waxman's letter to Dick Cheney over the weekend, VP Chief of Staff "Scooter" Libby's spokesman (along with a DoD witness) confirmed today that Libby attended meetings in which Halliburton's contract was being secretly negotiated. Of course, emphasized more than his own presence, was the insistence that Cheney himself was kept out of the loop on the process. In so doing, Libby attempts to validate Cheney's claim that he had no influence, no input, no knowledge of the decision.

Now, as long as Reagan is fresh in our minds, let's consider Oliver North and the Iran-Contra process. Was it believable (in some desperate way) that Reagan himself had no knowledge of the scheme? Sure, so pinning any real blame on him was ultimately too difficult to accomplish. Now, imagine if James Baker (or Donald Regan) had undertaken what North did. Would it have worked for Baker to say, "Well, the President had no idea I was selling arms to Iran and funneling profits to Nicaragua...but as his right hand man I took care of all that myself?"

Did Libby engineer the contract, secretly and on his own? No; Halliburton's oil subsidiary is one of the most experienced campanies in that field, and as was made clear, DoD personnel largely ran the numbers and created the (bloated) contract. Is the engineering of the contract on par with negotiating with terror? Of course not. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? Why bother lying about something so stupid? Because it's unheard of for the Vice President's office to help negotiate DoD contracts? OK, maybe it's worth lying about a little bit. But it's as if no one in the White House is aware that people are writing down and recording what is being said, and people are hanging on to those words. And it rings ridiculously hollow for Cheney to say he had nothing to do with it...his #2 did. Then again, when Cheney gets a hold of really good information that is now consensually regarded as mostly false, why let the falsehood get in the way? It sounded so good when no one knew it was BS; what a waste to have to stop saying it now.

Today's revelation: general beatings

NYT is coming almost daily with another piece of info on the abuse scandal, and it seems like the old investigative rivalry with WaPo has been rekindled from Watergate days. Both papers are hot on the trail and producing documents, interviews and new leads on the story. Today's news reports previously undisclosed incidents where bound and blindfolded former Iraqi generals were brought together a day after a prison riot, and beaten senseless. The description:

According to their accounts, here is what happened: One evening after fierce riots had erupted at the prison in late November, a group of soldiers rounded up the five former Iraqi generals, who were suspected of instigating the revolt. On their way to the prison's isolation unit, the soldiers stopped the captives, who were handcuffed and blindfolded, and arranged them in a line. Then the guards attacked the prisoners with a barrage of punches, beating them until they were covered in blood.

The military intelligence analyst alerted his sergeant, but the sergeant said the prisoners "probably deserved it," a person with first-hand knowledge of the investigation said. The sergeant, in a telephone interview from his home in Texas, denied making the comment but said he was questioned about the case by military criminal investigators after January, when they began their inquiry into other Abu Ghraib abuses.

Oh yeah, that's not even the main story. The main story is that intelligence staff at Abu Ghraib began reporting incidents such as this in November, in reports that routinely went to Gen Karpinski and Gen Fast, the head of intelligence in Iraq. That others were not made aware up the chain seems somewhat implausible, and that would of course contradict their testimony of shock when confronted with the pictures in late April.

This is shaping up to be a week where pre-handover violence and details of the scandal will take press-edence. That was a short breather for Bush; the maelstrom begins anew.

Darker skies in Fallujah

Today's USAT gives an official viewpoint to go with the news that has been trickling out of Fallujah lately--it's a city in chaos, run by Islamofascist insurgents and largely unpoliced by the US-created "Fallujah Brigade." Whether they are scared or indifferent, the people put into place as a way of ratcheting down tensions have helped ratchet them, to a point. If you're a Marine, tensions are a lot lower. Everybody else--well, not so much, and the US recognizes things aren't coming up triple camels:

"This was a noble experiment that may not work out," Col. Larry Brown, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force's operations officer, said this weekend. "The brigade has not performed as well as we had hoped."

"Our patience only extends so far. It's been over a month now and to be frank, the progress hasn't been what we wanted it to be," Brown said.

The turn of events is all the more unfortunate because this appeared to be the last best solution to the crackdown on Fallujah that took hundreds of Iraqi lives and killed at least 10 Marines. The offensive had run out of both logistical and political steam, and we had already seen what a hands-off approach had yielded. Although the "spokesmen" for the insurgency seemed to come from out of nowhere, and their ability to control the insurgents was shown to be about nil based on the paucity of larger weapons turned over, what choice did we have? It was a political out, and one that seemed to exemplify the most plausible approach: letting Iraqis with police and military training attempt to regain control of their own city.

As the WaPo article indicates in vivid detail, and the USAT article confirms in military spokesspeak, the Brigade has not held up their end. Certainly that does not bode well for the similar strategies implemented to a degree in Kerbala, Kufa and Najaf. In all cases, US demands were essentially dropped in order to stem the violence--again, probably the best of bad options in the short term, but one that could easily lead to the outcomes we've arrived at: US military safety in exchange for Iraqi safety. The burden of security for Iraq is rapidly falling to Iraqis, and if these particular examples are at all emblematic of their ability on July 1, it will quickly overwhelm the nascent government (however many of them there will be left).

Finally

For the first time in over a week, there is not one story about Ronald Wilson Reagan in any of the top story listings for AP, Reuters, NYT, CBS, MSNBC, or USAT. As of this hour, however, there's still one at the bottom over at Fox. Fox News--your American trailing indicator.

(by the way, this post makes a handy link to each of the top news pages at MyWay.)