How Condoleezza Rice became the most powerful woman in the world
As Condoleezza Rice prepares to take over the US State Department from Colin Powell, Paul Harris investigates the girl from Alabama who has risen to become the Bush family's ultimate insiderPaul HarrisSunday January 16, 2005
ObserverCondoleeza Rics puts a high price on loyalty, but the most valuable is certainly her own. Her unwavering devotion to President George W Bush will reap its most glittering reward this week when she takes over the State Department, becoming the most powerful black American woman in history and the world's best-known diplomat.
Her rise to the top is a remarkable story of superhuman tenacity and single-mindedness. At its heart lies an unshakeable belief in her own ability to succeed and a ruthless dedication to advancing herself. It is a story of a life that began in the Deep South of a segregated America and has now reached the innermost sanctums of White House politics.
But it is a story that is only just beginning. For Rice's latest assignment is fraught with danger. She is tasked with bringing the State Department firmly in hand, stifling the barely concealed dissent that marked the tenure of Colin Powell. It will not be easy and is likely to spark the most fierce bout of Washington infighting in years. But for Bush the job is vital. The State Department must be brought to heel. It is Rice's job to win that battle for her boss.
'Can Rice transform the State Department into an obedient tool of the administration? That is the only question in town,' said Larry Haas, a Washington commentator and former official in the Bill Clinton White House. If she does, the Bush administration will at last be a united and monolithic bloc. The last whiff of internal dissent will have been snuffed out. Rice is in the fight of her life.
At the same time, Rice is inheriting a complex brief that spans a troubled world. The meat grinder of the Iraq war is an ever-present factor. Within days of her taking over the job, Iraqis will go the polls in what will either be a vindication of America's decision to invade or a blood-soaked disaster. The threat of Iran and North Korea looms. Relations with the United Nations and 'Old Europe' are tattered and torn.
Not that Rice is nervous. She has been keeping two offices in recent weeks. One is deep in the heart of the White House, the other a 'transition office' on the first floor of the State Department a short stroll away on Washington's C Street. But, starting this week, she will be in 'transition' no more. Friends who met her last week say she is relaxed and affable. Her familiar calm demeanour is unruffled by troubles ahead. 'She was excited, but was the same old person. She was relaxed and happy and had a lot of time to chat,' one friend said.
That is the Condoleezza Rice way. She is like a swan on a lake. All poise and grace on the surface, but beneath the water Rice paddles furiously, ruthlessly carving out a place at Bush's right hand.
But who is Condoleezza Rice? When she sits down this week before the Senate for the confirmation hearings that will clear her for the job, the panel of aged politicians will see an enigma. She has risen to the highest ranks of Washington by being the ultimate insider who has the ear of Bush like no other power player in the capital. Yet Rice has remained firmly outside the whirl of Washington life. She lives alone and rarely, if ever, socialises on the 'circuit'.
She comes from a tradition of academic study rooted in Ivy League universities, yet is a key part of an administration which has openly disdained such elites. She is central to one of the most radical Republican governments in recent American history, yet many liberals like her.
'I am a flaming liberal,' laughed one of her friends, 'but she is so bright and intelligent. I just think her views are not really represented in this administration.' That is debatable to say the least. Rice is undoubtedly deeply conservative, but part of her genius is in persuading many liberals that she secretly might be one of them.
Rice is also a black American, yet race is rarely if ever mentioned when discussing her rise to power. In a race-obsessed society, that is an enigma. Perhaps the secret lies in her childhood in the segregated Deep South of Alabama when her home town of Birmingham was marred by racial violence and dubbed 'Bombingham'. For Rice's family did not embrace the civil rights movement in the way many other Southern blacks did. They came from a different tradition which held that simple hard work, discipline and education would bring the American Dream to black America. Her family was solidly middle class, with a father who worked as a school guidance counsellor and part-time minister and a mother who was a teacher.
She was raised intensely as an only child of a couple who came to parenthood late. A young Rice performed in church, took piano lessons, learnt to play the flute, spoke fluent French and skipped two grades in school. Her parents stressed advancement through achievement, not through fighting any racial injustice.
Despite everything, it would be wrong to say that Rice has little awareness of racial politics. 'She has no time for black people who are constantly talking about race, but that does not mean she has removed all consciousness of her race,' said Nicholas Lemann, a writer who has interviewed Rice several times.
Several anecdotes exemplify Rice's attitude to her race and also her ferocity when attacked. She famously told one interviewer: 'Let me explain to you: I speak French, I play Bach, I'm better in your culture than you are.'
On another occasion, when Rice was an academic at Stanford, she was shopping for expensive jewellery with a friend when a white clerk made some hostile comments. 'Let's get one thing straight,' Rice reportedly told him. 'You're behind the counter because you have to work for six dollars an hour. I'm on this side asking to see the good jewellery because I make considerably more.'
Rice was a stellar performer at high school, helped by iron discipline that saw her ignore any idea of rebellion or slacking off. 'If she had children, they would call her ma'am and salute. She has a quasi-military approach,' Lemann said.
She was certainly a young woman in a hurry to achieve. Her family moved to Denver when she was a teenager and she enrolled at the local university at 15. It was there she gave up dreams of becoming a concert pianist and discovered a new passion: international relations. That in turn led to an academic career, specialising in the Soviet Union, that eventually brought her into contact with politics and the Bush family. When Bush appointed her as his National Security Adviser she was already familiar to him from stays at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine.
From there it has been her incredibly close relationship to Bush that has defined her continued rise. She is the paragon of discretion and quiet service to her President. 'There is little daylight between Rice and Bush. It is hard to think of anyone closer to him,' said Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the Riverside Campus of the University of California.
Like Bush, Rice was all transformed by the experience of 11 September, 2001. That day wiped out any remnant of the 'Old School' Rice who had spent years steeped in academia and the Cold War. 'Before 9/11 Rice probably would have been many diplomats' dream of a Secretary of State,' said Lemann. 'After 9/11 she was transformed into someone tackling a very new world.'
Loyalty is now probably what best describes the secret of Rice's success. Not for her the almost public spats with Donald Rumsfeld that marred Powell's term of office. Not for her the secret briefings to the press or the thinly veiled attacks on her colleagues. But also not for her the terrible isolation that Powell suffered. When it comes to the real decisions over the next four years, Rice will be at the heart of it all. She will bring the ideology of the White House right into the State Department. That is why she was appointed. 'Appointing Rice is bringing the White House into State, not bringing State into the White House,' said Bowler.
That will antagonise many of the Powellite 'Old Guard' in the State Department, who long for a world before the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq and the dawn of the neocons. It is up to Rice to steamroller that opposition and make her department an effective tool of pushing the Bush doctrine around the world. 'She has a huge job ahead of her,' said Haas. 'State usually has a severe reluctance to ruffle feathers across the globe - but this is clearly a feather-ruffling administration.'
So far, however, Rice's first moves have struck a note of caution. Her appointment of the pragmatic Robert Zoellick as her deputy is a traditional move, especially as it passed over the ambitions of the hawkish John Bolton, who would have been the favourite choice of the neocons.
Surprisingly, Rice has few critics in the American political spectrum. Possibly that is because of her achievements, but also perhaps because few people want to be seen to be attacking such a high-profile black woman. One critic, however, is Mel Goodman, a former top CIA analyst and author of the book Bush League Diplomacy, which attacks neoconservative foreign policy. Goodman said Rice had been a failure at the National Security Council because she was taken by surprise by 11 September. 'She failed in her job at the NSC. It is the story that people refuse to tell,' he said.
In a sign that Rice may be headed for troubled waters, Washington insiders are waiting with bated breath for a book by former CIA director George Tenet, who resigned last year as the agency imploded over the scandal of pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Goodman said that an initial synopsis of the book indicated who would be firmly in its sights: 'Tenet's going to go after Condie Rice.'
One thing is certain. Through all the troubled times ahead, Rice will always appear calm. She has good reason to feel safe and secure for she has the unquestioned support of the only man who matters: Bush. When last year she referred to Bush as 'my husband' it was a Freudian slip that reflected how close Rice and the Bush clan have become. When it comes to Rice, the little girl from Birmingham who now bestrides the world stage, she really is part of the family.
In Condie's own words
On sport I find football so interesting strategically. It's the closest thing to war. What you are doing is taking and yielding territory and have certain strategies and tactics. On ambition My parents had me absolutely convinced that you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth's, but you can be President of the United States.On foreign policy There cannot be an absence of moral content in American foreign policy. Europeans giggle at this and say we are naive, but we are not European, we are American and we have different principles. On race You were told in segregated Birmingham that if you ran twice as hard, you might get half as far. And there were also people willing to run four times as hard so they could stay abreast. And once in a while, somebody was willing to run eight times as hard so they could get ahead.

FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
This is from an interiew with Eric Haney, a retired command sergeant major of the U.S. Army, and founding member of Delta Force, the U.S.'s crack counter-terrorist unit. I don't agree with everything he says, but I was struck by this exchange:
"Q: What do you make of the torture debate? Cheney ...
A: (Interrupting) That's Cheney's pursuit. The only reason anyone tortures is because they like to do it. It's about vengeance, it's about revenge, or it's about cover-up. You don't gain intelligence that way. Everyone in the world knows that. It's worse than small-minded, and look what it does.
I've argued this on Bill O'Reilly and other Fox News shows. I ask, who would you want to pay to be a torturer? Do you want someone that the American public pays to torture? He's an employee of yours. It's worse than ridiculous. It's criminal; it's utterly criminal. This administration has been masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly. Debating what constitutes torture: Mistreatment of helpless people in your power is torture, period. And (I'm saying this as) a man who has been involved in the most pointed of our activities. I know it, and all of my mates know it. You don't do it. It's an act of cowardice. I hear apologists for torture say, "Well, they do it to us." Which is a ludicrous argument. ... The Saddam Husseins of the world are not our teachers. Christ almighty, we wrote a Constitution saying what's legal and what we believed in. Now we're going to throw it away.
Q: As someone who repeatedly put your life on the line, did some of the most hair-raising things to protect your country, and to see your country behave this way, that must be ...
A: It's pretty galling. But ultimately I believe in the good and the decency of the American people, and they're starting to see what's happening and the lies that have been told. We're seeing this current house of cards start to flutter away. The American people come around. They always do."
As Churchill noted, that's true - eventually.

Afghan judge says Christian convert case is flawed
26 Mar 2006 15:04:22 GMTSource: Reuters
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL, March 26 (Reuters) - The judge presiding over the case of an Afghan man who could face the death penalty for converting to Christianity said on Sunday the case was flawed and would be sent back to prosecutors.
The row over the man, Abdur Rahman, 40, jailed this month for abandoning Islam, threatens to create a rift between Afghanistan and the United States and other Western backers who have been calling for the man's release.
"The case, because of some technical as well as legal flaws and shortcomings, has been referred back to the prosecutor's office," the judge, Ansarullah Mawlavizada, told Reuters.
He declined to elaborate or say if the review would delay the trial, which had been due to begin in coming days.
A prosecutor said Rahman's mental state would be examined on Monday following suggestions that he may be mentally unstable.
Rahman, detained this month for converting to Christianity, told an Italian newspaper from his Kabul jail cell that he was ready to die for his new faith.
CIVIL AND ISLAMIC LAW
Death is the punishment stipulated by sharia, or Islamic law, for apostasy -- abandoning the faith. The Afghan legal system is based on a mixture of civil and sharia law.
The government is trying to satisfy Western demands for the man's release, while not angering powerful conservatives at home who have demanded a trial and death sentence under Islamic law.
Officials in President Hamid Karzai's government declined to comment. "I'm hopeful something will be worked out," said one.
Officials and analysts say they do not expect Rahman to be executed. The outcome could hinge on his mental state.
A spokesman for the Supreme Court said the mental examination had been ordered after Rahman's relatives said he suffered from mental problems -- something he denies.
Checks also had to be made to see if Rahman had a second nationality, the spokesman said, without elaborating.
Rahman told a preliminary hearing 10 days ago that he had become a Christian while working for an aid group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan 15 years ago. He later lived in Germany before returning to Afghanistan.
He was detained after his family told authorities he had converted, apparently following a dispute involving two daughters, a judicial official said.
"I DON'T WANT TO DIE"
U.S. President George W. Bush has urged Afghanistan to show it respects religious freedom and resolve the case quickly.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked on NBC's Meet the Press about a report that the case had been dismissed.
"The Afghans are working on it," she said. "America has stood solidly for religious freedom as a bedrock, the bedrock of democracy, and we'll see, but I can't confirm that story."
Several other countries with troops in Afghanistan, including Canada, Italy, Germany and Australia, have voiced concern. Some foreign critics have urged that their troops be withdrawn.
But the foreign pressure has only been met in Afghanistan by threats of rebellion if the government frees Rahman.
"I don't want to die. But if God decides, I am ready to face up to my choices, all the way," Rahman was quoted as saying in Sunday's La Repubblica newspaper.
The Italian newspaper conducted the interview by sending Rahman written questions via a human rights worker who visited him in jail outside Kabul.
Defying the conservative clamour, one newspaper -- Outlook -- made the first public call in Afghanistan for Rahman's release, saying the country could not ignore international opinion when it needed support to fight terrorism and rebuild.

Think it over
"[I]ndifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be doubt about the most enormous events ... The calamities that are constantly being reported - battles, massacres, famines, revolutions - tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. Probably the truth is undiscoverable but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or for failing to form an opinion ..." - George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism," 1945.

Abu Ghraib dog handler unrepentent about prisoner abuses

By DAVID DISHNEAU

Associated Press FORT MEADE, Md. - An Army dog handler convicted of tormenting Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison with his snarling animal was unrepentant, telling a court-martial jury that soldiers aren't supposed to be "soft and cuddly."
Sgt. Michael J. Smith, 24, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was found guilty Tuesday of six of 13 counts. A judge later dismissed one count, and Smith could face up to 8 1/2 years in prison. His sentencing hearing was set to continue Wednesday.
Smith told the court-martial jury that he wished he had learned in basic training how to better avoid getting into trouble with superiors. Soldiers who do not "end up in a heap of trouble," he said.
Prosecutors said Smith let his unmuzzled black Belgian shepherd Marco bark and lunge at several prisoners for his own amusement. One of the photographs that exposed the Abu Ghraib scandal shows his dog straining on its leash, just inches from the face of a cowering prisoner.
"Soldiers are not supposed to be soft and cuddly," Smith testified.
Defense attorneys said Smith was a good soldier who believed he was doing what the government wanted canine handlers to do at the prison in Iraq: provide security and frighten interrogation subjects. Defense attorney Capt. Mary G. McCarthy said all that Smith's dog did to prisoners was bark at them.
Master Sgt. Shannon Wilson, who directly supervised Smith at the kennels in Fort Riley, Kan., where Smith's unit is based, testified that Smith was an exceptional soldier whose infractions didn't amount to abuse.
"Anything short of being bit is a psychological deterrent," Wilson said.
The defense also argued that Abu Ghraib was a dangerous, chaotic place where policies were so murky that even the colonel who supervised interrogations testified he was confused.
The jury deliberated for about 18 hours over three days. The trial began March 13.
Smith was found guilty of maltreating three prisoners, conspiring with another dog handler in a contest to make detainees soil themselves, dereliction of duty, assault and an indecent act. The assault charge was dismissed.
The indecency conviction was for Smith directing his dog to lick peanut butter off the genitals of a male soldier and the breasts of a female soldier.
Smith expressed remorse for that action. "It was foolish, stupid and juvenile. There is nothing I could do to take it back. If I could, I would," Smith said.
The trial of the other dog handler, Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, 31, of Fullerton, Calif., is set for May 22.
Smith was acquitted of maltreating and assaulting two other detainees - one of whom was bitten hard on both thighs by Cardona's dog, according to testimony - and of conspiring with prison guards to unlawfully harass detainees.
Nine other soldiers have been convicted of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, in many cases by forcing them to assume painful positions and humiliate themselves sexually while being photographed. Former Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. received the longest sentence - 10 years in prison. Lynndie England, a 23-year-old reservist photographed giving a thumbs-up in front of naked prisoners, is serving three years behind bars.
The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights First, which had observers at the trial, said the verdict sends "a powerful message that abusive interrogation techniques using unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees is strictly prohibited."
But attorney Avi Cover said in a statement, "There have been prosecutions going down the chain of the command but not going up. It's not enough to prosecute the people who were following orders."
© 2006 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.kansascity.com

Here is an Email I sent to Andrew Sullivan 15 March 2006

The blogsphere is only one stop along a highway populated by growing numbers of Americans of all political and religious beliefs who realize we are faced with the task of removing President GW Bush and VP Cheney from office.

No one really wants this, but moral values worth protecting demand it. The issues raised by Abu Ghraib and Guantainamo and other unseen unnoticed places of abuse are of an administration that entered office with a hidden agenda; the destruction of Saddam Hussein regardless of consequence.
As a nation we cannot allow such a wickedness to stand. As a moral civilization, however flawed, we must act. If for any reason to give notice to future generations that we were not fools and we willingly slapped down those who treated us like fools.

In fact the final sad truth of the Bush camp, is a profound moral disconnect backed by a cold indifference to consequence and a stunning clumsiness that has created unspeakable suffering.
I suspect honest observers realized that FEMA Director Brown was George Bush under a different name. An arrogant aristocrat surrounded by like-minded buddies horribly distanced from the American people and not caring one whit that they are.

The real message of GW Bush concerning torture, and misrule is “Go away you’re bothering me.”
The president truly believes in his faith and his self importance and his staff stokes these convictions every day, that any chance the president may see error or think the rest of us might be right is lost or ignored.
George Bush reminds me of an angry man convinced he is right and all his critics are unreasonable partisans when in fact they are not!

911 earned Mr. Bush a rare place in our national life, a genuine chance at greatness. And he bungled it so deeply we are all grief-stricken at the end result. (Linking Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden will be etched into Mr. Bush’s tombstone as a reminder of human folly)

Mr. Bush brazenly carries on selling tall tales and willful misapplication of fact long after most men would have gracefully slipped away. His persistence in trying to sell himself and his blood soaked causes only ads to everyone’s discomfort. As history shows us, the popular furies will come.
I am sure that soon enough real Christians who actually take God and Jesus seriously and who’s moral values are genuine and not to be toyed with will choke back tears and instruct their politicians to vote for the President and Vice Presidents removal from office.

From Salon

3/14/06

These harrowing tales will eventually destroy the Bush Administration

The Abu Ghraib files279 photographs and 19 videos from the Army's internal investigation record a harrowing three months of detainee abuse inside the notorious prison -- and make clear that many of those responsible have yet to be held accountable.
By Joan Walsh
Mar. 14, 2006 The human rights scandal now known as "Abu Ghraib" began its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photos and stories that introduced the world to devastating scenes of torture and suffering inside the decrepit prison in Iraq.
Today Salon presents an archive of 279 photos and 19 videos of Abu Ghraib abuse first gathered by the CID, along with information drawn from the CID's own timeline of the events depicted. As we reported Feb. 16, Salon's Mark Benjamin recently acquired extensive documentation of the CID investigation -- including this photo archive and timeline -- from a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib and who is familiar with the Army probe.
Although the world is now sadly familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full dossier of the Army's own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. Most of the photos have already been seen, but the Army's own analysis of the story behind the photos has never been fully told. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside Abu Ghraib's notorious cellblock 1A, and it tells the story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the rampant abuse of prisoners there. The annotated archive also includes new details about the role of the CIA, military intelligence and the CID itself in abuse captured by cameras in the fall of 2003.
The Bush administration, which recently announced plans to shut the notorious prison and transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq, would like the world to believe that it has dealt with the abuse, and that it's time to move on. But questions about what took place there, and who was responsible, won't end with Abu Ghraib's closure.
In fact, after two years of relative silence, there's suddenly new interest in asking questions. A CID spokesman recently told Salon that the agency has reopened its investigation into Abu Ghraib "to pursue some additional information" after having called the case closed in October 2005. Just this week, one of two prison dog handlers accused of torturing detainees by threatening them with dogs went on trial in Fort Meade, Md. Lawyers for Army Sgt. Michael J. Smith argue that he was only implementing dog-use policies approved by his superiors, and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the former commander of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, was granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony at Smith's trial.
Meanwhile, as Salon reported last week, the Army blocked the retirement of Major Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former Guantánamo interrogation commander who allegedly brought tougher intelligence tactics to Abu Ghraib, after two senators requested that he be kept on active duty so that he could face further questioning for his role in the detainee abuse scandal. Miller refused to testify at the dog-handler trials, invoking the military equivalent of the Fifth Amendment to shield himself from self-incrimination, but Pappas has charged that Miller introduced the use of dogs and other harsh tactics at the prison. Also last week, Salon revealed that U.S. Army Reserve Capt. Christopher R. Brinson is fighting the reprimand he received for his role in the abuse. Brinson, currently an aide to Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., supervised military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and some of the other guards who have been convicted in the scandal. Now Brinson joins a growing chorus of Abu Ghraib figures who blame the higher command structure for what happened at the prison.
Against this backdrop of renewed scrutiny, we think the CID photo archive and related materials we present today merit close examination. In "The Abu Ghraib Files," Salon presents an annotated, chronological version of these crucial CID investigative documents -- the most comprehensive public record to date of the military's attempt to analyze the photos from the prison. All 279 photos and 19 videos are reproduced here, along with the original captions created by Army investigators. They have been grouped into chapters that follow the CID's timeline, and each chapter has been narrated with the facts and findings of the Taguba, Schlesinger, Fay-Jones and other Pentagon investigations (see sidebar).
But the documentation in "The Abu Ghraib Files" also draws from materials that have not been released to the public. Among these is the official logbook kept by those military soldiers who committed the bulk of the photographed abuse. Salon has also acquired an April 2005 CID interview with military police Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., one of the ringleaders of the abuse. (One hundred seventy-three of the 279 photos in the archive were taken with Graner's Sony FD Mavica camera.) The interview was conducted several months after Graner was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He received a grant of immunity against further prosecution for anything he revealed. The documentation also draws from the unpublished testimony of Brinson to the CIA's Office of Inspector General about the death of a prisoner at the hands of the CIA.
Thanks in part to that additional sourcing, "The Abu Ghraib Files" sheds new light on the 3-year-old prison abuse scandal. While many of the 279 photos have been previously released, until this point no one has been able to authenticate this number of images from the prison, or to provide the Army's own documentation of what they reveal. This is the Army's forensic report of what happened at the prison: dates, times, places, cameras and, in some though not all cases, identities of the detainees and soldiers involved in the abuse. (Salon has chosen to withhold detainee identities not previously known to the public, and to obscure their faces in photographs, to protect the victims' privacy.)
Some of the noteworthy revelations include:
The prisoner in perhaps the most iconic photo from Abu Ghraib, the hooded man standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands, was being interrogated by the CID itself for his alleged role in the kidnapping and murder of two American soldiers in Iraq. As noted in Chapter 4, "Electrical Wires," a CID spokesman confirmed to Salon that a CID agent was suspended in fall 2004 pending an investigation and later found "derelict in his duties" for his role in prisoner abuse. Salon could not confirm whether the agent was punished for his role in the abuse of the hooded man connected to electrical wires, known to military personnel as "Gilligan."
The CID documentation, as well as other reporting, confirmed that a March 11 New York Times article identifying the prisoner in the iconic photo as Ali Shalal Qaissi, a local Baath Party member under Saddam Hussein and now a prisoners' rights advocate in Jordan, was incorrect. The CID photo archive confirms that a prisoner matching Qaissi's description -- he has a deformed left hand -- and known by the nickname "The Claw" was held at the prison and photographed by military police on the same night as the mock electrocution, but he was not the one standing on the box and attached to wires. The CID materials say all five photos of the hooded man were the prisoner known as "Gilligan." It remains possible that Qaissi received similar treatment, but there is no record of that abuse.
Chapter 5, "Other Government Agencies," tells the story behind photos of the mangled corpse of Manadel al-Jamadi, known as the "Ice Man," who died during interrogation by a CIA officer. No one at the CIA has been prosecuted, even though al-Jamadi's death was ruled a homicide. The chapter adds new detail about the CIA's role in the prison drawn from Christopher Brinson's testimony to CIA investigators.
As explained in Chapter 1, "Standard Operating Procedure," some of the 279 photos and 19 videos in the archive depict controversial interrogation tactics employed in cellblock 1A. Among the examples of abuse on display in the photos were techniques sanctioned by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for use on "unlawful enemy combatants" in the "war on terror." These include forced nudity, the use of dogs to terrorize prisoners, keeping prisoners in stress positions -- physically uncomfortable poses of various types -- for many hours, and varieties of sleep deprivation. Some of these techniques migrated from Guantánamo and Afghanistan to Iraq in 2003. (The abuse depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos did not occur during interrogation sessions, but in some cases military guards allege they were encouraged to "soften up" detainees for interrogation by higher-ranking military intelligence officers.)
Military intelligence personnel and civilian contractors employed by the military appear in some of the photographs with the military guards, and entries from a prison logbook captured in the archive show that in some cases military police believed their tough tactics were being approved by -- and in some cases ordered by -- military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. The logbook also documents prisoner rioting and the regular presence of multiple OGA (other government agency) detainees held in the military intelligence wing.
Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn't planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison -- at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners -- its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for "actionable intelligence" was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the "war on terror." Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules.
But while the Pentagon's own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date only nine enlisted soldiers have been prosecuted for their crimes at Abu Ghraib (see sidebar). An additional four soldiers and eight officers, including Brinson, Pappas and Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military police at Abu Ghraib, have been reprimanded. (Pappas and Karpinski were also relieved of their posts.) To date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib.
Our purpose for presenting this large catalog of images remains much the same as it was four weeks ago when we first published a much smaller number of Abu Ghraib photos that had not previously appeared in the media. As Walter Shapiro wrote, Abu Ghraib symbolizes "the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers." The documentary record of the abuse has come out in the media in a piecemeal fashion, often lacking context or description. Meanwhile, our representatives in Washington have allowed the facts about what occurred to fester in Pentagon reports without acting on their disturbing conclusions. We believe this extensive, if deeply disturbing, CID archive of photographic evidence belongs in the public record as documentation toward further investigation and accountability.
While we want readers to understand what it is we're presenting, we also want to make clear its limitations. The 279-photo CID timeline and other material obtained by Salon do not include the agency's conclusions about the evidence it gathered. The captions, which Salon has chosen to reproduce almost verbatim (see methodology), contain a significant number of missing names of soldiers and detainees, misspellings and other minor discrepancies; we don't know if the CID addressed these issues in other drafts or documents. Also, the CID materials contain two different forensic reports. The first, completed June 6, 2004, in Tikrit, Iraq, analyzed a seized laptop computer and eight CDs and found 1,325 images and 93 videos of "suspected detainee abuse." The second report, completed a month later in Fort Belvoir, Va., analyzed 12 CDs and found "approximately 280 individual digital photos and 19 digital movies depicting possible detainee abuse." It remains unclear why and how the CID narrowed its set of forensic evidence to the 279 images and 19 videos that we reproduce here.
Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred. As the Schlesinger report states in its convoluted prose: "We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere." Also, the documentation doesn't include many details about the detainees who were abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib. While the International Committee of the Red Cross report from February 2004 cited military intelligence officers as estimating that "between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake," much remains unknown about the detainees abused in the "hard site" where the Army housed violent and dangerous detainees and where much of the abuse took place.
Finally, it's critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of "rendition," or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq. Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed.
Read Chapter 1: Oct. 17-22, 2003 -- "Standard operating procedure"

An Unbelievable Mess

From Andrew Sullivan 3/14/06
If you really want to know how the debacle of the Iraq invasion went awry, you can read this astonishing memo from John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad, just after the fall of Baghdad and just as Paul Bremer was arriving. The memo was recovered as part of the Gordon/Trainor investigation, in "Cobra II". Here it is:
"Subject: Personal: Iraq: What's Going Wrong?
1. A Baghdad First strategy is needed. The problems are worst in the capital, and it is the one place we can't afford to get it wrong. But the troops here are tired and are not providing the security framework needed. We need a clear policy on which Ba'athists can return, a more concerted effort on reconstruction, and an imaginative approach on the media. For all this, money needs to be released by Washington. The clock is ticking.
Detail
2. Four days in Iraq has been enough to identify the main reasons why the reconstruction of Iraq is so slow. The Coalition are widely welcomed, but are gradually losing public support.
3. Garner's outfit, ORHA, is an unbelievable mess. No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure, and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis. Bremer's arrival is not a day too soon. Garner and his top team of 60-year old retired generals are well-meaning, but out of their depth. Tim Cross is widely seen as the only senior figure offering direction ...
4. It is clear that Baghdad is the biggest problem. Other parts of Iraq are getting organised: there are minimal Shia/Sunni tensions; town councils have been agreed in the sensitive cities of Mosul and Kirkuk; and so on. But Baghdad has the worst security, a poor level of essential services and no information flow ...
Security
5. No progress is possible until security improves. Crime is widespread (not surprising as Saddam released all the criminals). Car-jackings are endemic. Last week the Ministry of Planning was re-kitted out ready to resume work; that night it was looted again. The evening air is full of gunfire. There is still a climate of fear on the streets and that is casting a shadow over all else.
6. A big part of the problem is the US Third Infantry Division. They fought a magnificent war and now just want to go home. Unlike more mobile US units they are sticking to their heavy vehicles and are not inclined to learn new techniques. Our Paras company at the embassy witnessed a US tank respond to (harmless) Kalashnikov fire into the air from a block of residential flats by firing three tank rounds into the building. Stories are numerous of US troops sitting on tanks parked in front of public buildings while looters go about their business behind them. Every civilian who approaches a US checkpoint is treated as a potential suicide bomber. Frankly, the 3rd Inf Div need to go home.
7. The military culture in the capital needs to change before their replacements (another heavy armour division) arrives. An operational UK presence in Baghdad is worth considering, despite the obvious political problem. Transferring one of our two brigades is presumably out of the question, but one battalion with a mandate to deploy into the streets could still make an impact. CGS saw the problem last Friday and can offer more professional advice.
8. Re-forming the Baghdad police ... needs to be accelerated. The police need to start patrolling with sympathetic soldiers, rather than with one police car sandwiched between four Humvees. Weapons, uniforms, funds, vehicles, access to fuel and a functioning judicial process are all problems.
De-Ba'athification
9. The other fear among ordinary people in Baghdad is that the Ba'athists could still come back. ORHA have made mistakes, appointing quite senior party figures in the trade and health ministries, at Baghdad University and so on. Several political leaders I have seen say a line should be drawn at the "firqa" level of the Ba'ath party and all those at that level and the three above should be excluded, about 30,000 in all. Whatever, we need to set out a clear policy.
Reconstruction
10. With security and credible de-Ba'athification will come the chance for durable reconstruction. Power is back, though is not robust. Water is running but is not potable. 40% of Baghdad's sewage is pouring into the Tigris untreated. A GSM mobile phone system is desperately needed as communications are dire. Bechtel who have the main contract are moving far too slowly.
11. Quick results projects are also needed to show there is progress. We need visibly successful projects, however small: schools and hospitals reopening, new bakeries, food distribution points. That is not a substitute for long term development, but it would meet genuine needs.
Information
12. Baghdad has no TV, and no newspapers apart from party political rags. I was given two fliers yesterday, one calling for the assassination of all Ba'athists, the other for the killing of all US forces. That, and rumour, are the only information flowing. An ORHA TV project is due but its content will be tightly controlled and it risks not being credible. I have pressed them, as a start, to broadcast a Premier League game each day, but the Americans don't yet get it.
13. More progress is being made with radio: the BBC (English and Arabic) should be up on FM this week. But, as all political leaders have stressed, Baghdad needs independent newspapers, radio stations and terrestrial TV stations. One idea is to give satellite dishes and screens to cafes so that people can have access to pan-Arab channels - but it needs funding.
14. OFU-iA also needs a public face. Bremer's people already have this in mind, as ORHA's bunker image is painfully apparent.
Funds and public sector salaries
15. Finally, money needs to be available, not least to pay police officers and public service workers. This is held up in Washington. The US administration are refusing to release Iraqi money to pay salaries. Decisions are needed on salary levels and which currency should be used.
15. There are hundreds of small problems needing attention. But the big five areas set out above, and security, is both the most important and most sensitive. There will be an instinct in Washington to allow Bremer time to find his feet. That will take another week or more - and the clock is ticking. I will talk to him, but will have to feel my way at first."
What's clear is that the Brit felt a sense of extreme urgency just weeks after the invasion. He felt that a massive overhaul was needed then. His first demand was that Baghdad be secured. Almost three years later, I asked an administration source what the goal was for the next twelve months. The source said: securing Baghdad. Two and a half years later, they still hadn't managed to control the capital. The chaos still exists, the good will has been squandered, the project on life-support. The issue is and was competence. And the man who was responsible for this - Donald Rumsfeld - is still in his job.

Andrew Sullivan gets better every day!

Nasty! Read it and think about what you might do?
'The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state'

By Alasdair Palmer (Filed: 19/02/2006)
For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.
"They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.
Dr Patrick Sookhdeo

"The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.
"It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent."
Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.
"It is already starting to happen - and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue."
For someone with such strong and uncompromising views, Dr Sookhdeo is a surprisingly gentle and easy-going man. He speaks with authority on Islam, as it was his first faith: he was brought up as a Muslim in Guyana, the only English colony in South America, and attended a madrassa there.
"But Islamic instruction was very different in the 1950s, when I was at school," he says. "There was no talk of suicide bombing or indeed of violence of any kind. Islam was very peaceful."
Dr Sookhdeo's family emigrated to England when he was 10. In his early twenties, when he was at university, he converted to Christianity. "I had simply seen it as the white man's religion, the religion of the colonialists and the oppressors - in a very similar way, in fact, to the way that many Muslims see Christianity today.
"Leaving Islam was not easy. According to the literal interpretation of the Koran, the punishment for apostasy is death - and it actually is punished by death in some Middle Eastern states. "It wasn't quite like that here," he says, "although it was traumatic in some ways."
Dr Sookhdeo continued to study Islam, doing a PhD at London University on the religion. He is currently director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He also advises the Army on security issues related to Islam.
Several years ago, Dr Sookhdeo insisted that the next wave of radical Islam in Britain would involve suicide bombings in this country. His prediction was depressingly confirmed on 7/7 last year.
So his claim that, in the next decade, the Muslim community in Britain will not be integrated into mainstream British society, but will isolate itself to a much greater extent, carries weight behind it. Dr Sookhdeo has proved his prescience.
"The Government, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, are fundamentally deluded about the nature of Islam," he insists. "Tony Blair unintentionally revealed his ignorance when he said, in an effort to conciliate Muslims, that he had 'read through the Koran twice' and that he kept it by his bedside.
"He thought he was saying something which showed how seriously he took Islam. But most Muslims thought it was a joke, if not an insult. Because, of course, every Muslim knows that you cannot read the Koran through from cover to cover and understand it.
The chapters are not written to be read in that way. Indeed, after the first chapter, the chapters of the Koran are ordered according to their length, not according to their content or chronology: the longest chapters are first, the shorter ones are at the end.
"You need to know which passage was revealed at what period and in what time in order to be able to understand it - you cannot simply read it from beginning to end and expect to learn anything at all.
"That is one reason why it takes so long to be able to read and understand the Koran: the meaning of any part of it depends on a knowledge of its context - a context that is not in the Koran itself."
The Prime Minister's ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government's policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair's Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting.
Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. "Yes - and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.
"The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work - yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.
"It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.
"Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both."
Perhaps the explanation is just that they do not take it seriously. "I fear that is exactly the problem," says Dr Sookhdeo. "The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.
They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.
"For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.
'Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion - and it is their aim to achieve this.
"That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.
"Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."
That plan, says Dr Sookhdeo, is being followed in Britain. "That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" or "violating the rights of Muslims" to deny them sharia law.
"There's already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.
"Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.
"The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that."
Dr Sookhdeo's vision of a relentless battle between secular and Islamic Britain seems hard to reconcile with the co-operation that seems to mark the vast majority of the interactions between the two communities.
"Well, it isn't me who says Islam is at war with secularisation," he says. "That's how Islamic clerics describe the situation."
But isn't it true that most Muslims who live in theocratic states want to get out of them as quickly as possible and live in a secular country such as Britain or America? And that most Muslims who come to Britain adopt the values of a liberal, democratic, tolerant society, rather than insisting on the inflexible rules of their religion?
"You have to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed leaders," explains Dr Sookhdeo. "I agree that the best hope for our collective future is that the majority of Muslims who have grown up here have accepted the secular nature of the British state and society, the division between religion and politics, and the importance of allowing people to choose freely how they will live.
"But that is not how most of the clerics talk. And, more significantly, it is not how the 'community leaders' whom the Government has decided represent the Muslim community think either.
"Take, for example, Tariq Ramadan, whom the Government has appointed as an adviser because ministers think he is a 'community leader'. Ramadan sounds, in public, very moderate. But in reality, he has some very extreme views. He attacks liberal Muslims as 'Muslims without Islam'. He is affiliated to the violent and uncompromising Muslim Brotherhood.
"He calls the education in the state schools of the West 'aggression against the Islamic personality of the child'. He has said that 'the Muslim respects the laws of the country only if they do not contradict any Islamic principle'. He has added that 'compromising on principles is a sign of fear and weakness'."
So what's the answer? What should the Government be doing? "First, it should try to engage with the real Muslim majority, not with the self-appointed 'community leaders' who don't actually represent anyone: they have not been elected, and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with them.
"Second, the Government should say no to faith-based schools, because they are a block to integration. There should be no compromise over education, or over English as the language of education. The policy of political multiculturalism should be reversed.
"The hope was that it would to ensure separate communities would soften at the edges and integrate. But the opposite has in fact happened: Islamic communities have hardened. There is much less integration than there was for the generation that arrived when I did. There will be much less in the future if the present trend continues.
"Finally, the Government should make it absolutely clear: we welcome diversity, we welcome different religions - but all of them have to accept the secular basis of British law and society. That is a non-negotiable condition of being here.
"If the Government does not do all of those things then I fear for the future, because Islamic communities within Britain will form a state within a state. Religion will occupy an ever-larger place in our collective political life. And, speaking as a religious man myself, I fear that outcome."
e-mail syndication@telegraph.co.uk
Muslims want sharia law in UK
© Copyright of Telegraph Group

Hussein Saw Iraqi Unrest as Top Threat
By MICHAEL R. GORDONand BERNARD E. TRAINOR
As American warplanes streaked overhead two weeks after the invasion began, Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani drove to Baghdad for a crucial meeting with Iraqi leaders. He pleaded for reinforcements to stiffen the capital's defenses and permission to blow up the Euphrates River bridge south of the city to block the American advance.
But Saddam Hussein and his small circle of aides had their own ideas of how to fight the war. Convinced that the main danger to his government came from within, Mr. Hussein had sought to keep Iraq's bridges intact so he could rush troops south if the Shiites got out of line.
General Hamdani got little in the way of additional soldiers, and the grudging permission to blow up the bridge came too late. The Iraqis damaged only one of the two spans, and American soldiers soon began to stream across.
The episode was just one of many incidents, described in a classified United States military report, other documents and in interviews, that demonstrate how Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without.
Only one of his defenses — the Saddam Fedayeen — proved potent against the invaders. They later joined the insurgency still roiling Iraq, but that was largely by default, not design.
Ever vigilant about coups and fearful of revolt, Mr. Hussein was deeply distrustful of his own commanders and soldiers, the documents show.
He made crucial decisions himself, relied on his sons for military counsel and imposed security measures that had the effect of hobbling his forces. He did that in several ways:
¶The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.
¶He put a general widely viewed as an incompetent drunkard in charge of the Special Republican Guard, entrusted to protect the capital, primarily because he was considered loyal.
¶Mr. Hussein micromanaged the war, not allowing commanders to move troops without permission from Baghdad and blocking communications among military leaders.
The Fedayeen's operations were not shared with leaders of conventional forces. Republican Guard divisions were not allowed to communicate with sister units. Commanders could not even get precise maps of terrain near the Baghdad airport because that would identify locations of the Iraqi leader's palaces.
Much of this material is included in a secret history prepared by the American military of how Mr. Hussein and his commanders fought their war. Posing as military historians, American analysts interrogated more than 110 Iraqi officials and military officers, treating some to lavish dinners to pry loose their secrets and questioning others in a detention center at the Baghdad airport or the Abu Ghraib prison. United States military officials view the accounts as credible because many were similar. In addition, more than 600 captured Iraqi documents were reviewed.
Overseen by the Joint Forces Command, an unclassified version of the study is to be made public soon. A classified version was prepared in April 2005. Titled "Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Combat Operations," the study shows that Mr. Hussein discounted the possibility of a full-scale American invasion.
"A few weeks before the attacks Saddam still thought the U.S. would not use ground forces," Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, told American interrogators. "He thought they would not fight a ground war because it would be too costly to the Americans."
Despite the lopsided defeat his forces suffered during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, Mr. Hussein did not see the United States as his primary adversary. His greater fear was a Shiite uprising, like the one that shook his government after the 1991 war.
His concern for the threats from within interfered with efforts to defend against an external enemy, as was evident during a previously unknown review of military planning in 1995. Taking a page out of the Russian playbook, Iraqi officers suggested a new strategy to defend the homeland. Just as Russia yielded territory to defeat Napoleon and later Hitler's invading army, Iraq would resist an invading army by conducting a fighting retreat. Well-armed Iraqi tribes would be like the Russian partisans. Armored formations, including the Republican Guard, would assume a more modest role.
Mr. Hussein rejected the recommendation. Arming local tribes was too risky for a government that lived in fear of a popular uprising.
While conventional military planning languished, Mr. Hussein's focus on internal threats led to an important innovation: creation of the Fedayeen paramilitary forces. Equipped with AK-47's, rocket propelled grenades and small-caliber weapons, one of their primary roles was to protect Baath Party headquarters and keep the Shiites at bay in the event of a rebellion until more heavily equipped Iraqi troops could crush them.
Controlled by Uday Hussein, a son of the Iraqi leader, the Fedayeen and other paramilitary forces were so vital to the survival of the government that they "drained manpower" that would otherwise have been used by Iraq's army, the classified report says.
Mr. Hussein was also worried about his neighbor to the east. Like the Bush administration, Mr. Hussein suspected Iran of developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Each year the Iraqi military conducted an exercise code-named Golden Falcon that focused on defense of the Iraq-Iran border.
The United States was seen as a lesser threat, mostly because Mr. Hussein believed that Washington could not accept significant casualties. In the 1991 war, the United States had no intention of taking Baghdad. President George H. W. Bush justified the restraint as prudent to avoid the pitfalls of occupying Iraq, but Mr. Hussein concluded that the United States was fearful of the military cost.
Mr. Hussein's main concern about a possible American military strike was that it might prompt the Shiites to take up arms against the government. "Saddam was concerned about internal unrest amongst the tribes before, during or after an attack by the U.S. on Baghdad," Mr. Aziz told his interrogators. Other members of Mr. Hussein's inner circle thought that if the Americans attacked, they would do no more than conduct an intense bombing campaign and seize the southern oil fields.
Steps to Avoid War
Mr. Hussein did take some steps to avoid provoking war, though. While diplomatic efforts by France, Germany and Russia were under way to avert war, he rejected proposals to mine the Persian Gulf, fearing that the Bush administration would use such an action as an excuse to strike, the Joint Forces Command study noted.
In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.
To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.
Mr. Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government's control.
Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview "deterrence by doubt."
That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein's efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.
Even some Iraqi officials were impressed by Mr. Powell's presentation. Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaish, who oversaw Iraq's military industry, thought he knew all the government's secrets. But Bush administration officials were so insistent that he began to question whether Iraq might have prohibited weapons after all. "I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed we had these weapons," he told interrogators after the war, according to the Iraq Survey Group report.
Guarding Against Revolt
As the war approached, Mr. Hussein took steps to suppress an uprising. Fedayeen paramilitary units were dispersed throughout the south, as were huge stashes of small-caliber weapons. Mr. Hussein divided Iraq into four sectors, each led by a member of his inner circle. The move was intended to help the government fend off challenges to its rule, including an uprising or rioting.
Reflecting Mr. Hussein's distrust of his own military, regular army troops were deployed near Kurdistan or close to the Iranian border, far from the capital. Of the Iraqi Army, only the Special Republican Guard was permitted inside Baghdad. And an array of restraints were imposed that made it hard for Iraq's military to exercise command.
Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai, Mr. Hussein's defense minister who had distinguished himself during the Iran-Iraq war, held an important title, for example. But he had little influence. "I effectively became an assistant to Qusay, only collecting and passing information," he told interrogators, referring to a son of Mr. Hussein.
To protect Baghdad, Mr. Hussein selected Brig. Gen. Barzan abd al-Ghafur Solaiman Majid al-Tikriti, a close cousin, to head the Special Republican Guard even though he had no field experience, had failed military staff college and was a known drunkard. Asked about his military skills, General Tai laughed out loud. Even so, the Special Republican Guard commander was closely monitored by Mr. Hussein's agents and later told American interrogators that he had held the most dangerous job in Iraq. "They watched you go to the bathroom," he said. "They listened to everything you said and bugged everything."
Once the war began, field commanders faced numerous restrictions, including bans on communications, to minimize chances of a coup.
"We had to use our own reconnaissance elements to know where the other Iraqi units were located on our flanks," the commander of the First Republican Guard Corps told interrogators. "We were not allowed to communicate with our sister units."
Even as the Americans were rapidly moving north, Mr. Hussein did not appreciate the seriousness of the threat. While the Fedayeen had surprised the allied forces with their fierce resistance and sneak attacks, Iraqi conventional forces were overpowered.
At an April 2 meeting, General Hamdani, the commander of the Second Republic Guard Corps, correctly predicted that the American Army planned to drive through the Karbala Gap on the way to Baghdad. General Tai, the Iraqi defense minister, was not persuaded. He argued that the attack in the south was a trick and that the main American offensive would come from the west, perhaps abetted by the Israelis. That day, Mr. Hussein ordered the military to prepare for an American attack from Jordan.
As a sop, General Hamdani received a company of Special Operations forces as reinforcements and was finally granted permission to destroy the Euphrates River bridge southwest of Baghdad. But it was too little, too late.
By April 6, the day after the first United States Army attack on Baghdad, the so-called thunder run, Mr. Hussein's desperate predicament began to sink in. At a safe house in the Mansour district of Baghdad, he met with his inner circle and asked Mr. Aziz to read an eight-page letter.
Mr. Hussein showed no emotion as the letter was read. But Mr. Aziz later told interrogators that the Iraqi leader seemed to be a defeated man, and the letter appeared to be his farewell. His rule was coming to an end.
"We didn't believe it would go all the way to Baghdad," a senior Republican Guard staff officer later told his interrogators. "We thought the coalition would go to Basra, maybe to Amara, and then the war would end."

U.S. Must Stop Force Feeding Guantanamo Detainees, Doctors Say
March 10 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. should comply with international agreements and stop force-feeding detainees on hunger strike at its anti-terrorism prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, A group of medical doctors said.
Two hundred and sixty three doctors from seven countries, including the U.S., U.K., Ireland, and Germany, signed the letter condemning the practice, which involves strapping detainees to a chair, forcing a tube into their stomach through their nose, and feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water.
``The World Medical Association specifically prohibits force-feeding in the Declarations of Tokyo and Malta, to which the American Medical Association is a signatory,'' said lead author Dr. David J. Nicholl of the Department of Neurology at the City Hospital in Birmingham, in an open letter published today in The Lancet, a British medical journal. ``Those breaching such guidelines should be held to account by their professional bodies.''
There are now 490 detainees in Guantanamo, some of whom were captured when the U.S. ousted Afghanistan's Taliban regime in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S. The United Nations called for the immediate closure of the center in a Feb. 16 report, which concluded that practices such as force-feeding and prolonged solitary confinement may amount to torture.
``Prisoners have a right to refuse treatment,'' Nicholl said in a telephone interview today. ``Physicians do not have to agree with the political views of the prisoners but they must respect their informed decision.''
Internal Bleeding
Nicholl said that if he were to force-feed a patient, he'd be referred to a medical council and charged with assault. The practice can cause internal bleeding and nausea.
About 40 detainees held at Guantanamo are refusing food in an attempt to gain their freedom, according to a Jan. 6 statement on the Southern Command Web site. The U.S. has said detainees are considered to be on a hunger strike after missing nine consecutive meals.
``There's no medical indication to force-feed someone on 10th meal,'' Nicholl said. ``It's a face-saving measure not a life-saving measure, and only those who suffer from psychiatric illness should be forced to eat.''
Article by Caroline Alexander (Bloomberg)

Muslims ask French to cancel 1741 play by Voltaire
Monday, March 06, 2006By Andrew Higgins, The Wall Street Journal
SAINT-GENIS-POUILLY, France -- Late last year, as an international crisis was brewing over Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Muslims raised a furor in this little alpine town over a much older provocateur: Voltaire, the French champion of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
A municipal cultural center here on France's border with Switzerland organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe's commitment to secularism. The play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance.
The production quickly stirred up passions that echoed the cartoon uproar. "This play ... constitutes an insult to the entire Muslim community," said a letter to the mayor of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, signed by Said Akhrouf, a French-born cafe owner of Moroccan descent and three other Islamic activists representing Muslim associations. They demanded the performance be cancelled.
Instead, Mayor Hubert Bertrand called in police reinforcements to protect the theater. On the night of the December reading, a small riot broke out involving several dozen people and youths who set fire to a car and garbage cans. It was "the most excitement we've ever had down here," says the socialist mayor.
The dispute rumbles on, playing into a wider debate over faith and free-speech. Supporters of Europe's secular values have rushed to embrace Voltaire as their standard-bearer. France's national library last week opened an exhibition dedicated to the writer and other Enlightenment thinkers. It features a police file started in 1748 on Voltaire, highlighting efforts by authorities to muzzle him. "Spirit of the Enlightenment, are you there?" asked a headline Saturday in Le Figaro, a French daily newspaper.
A debate on Swiss television last month degenerated into a shouting match when the director of the Saint-Genis-Pouilly performance accused a prominent Muslim of campaigning to censor Voltaire in the past. The two men also have traded insults in the French media.
Meanwhile, the name Voltaire -- and the Enlightenment tradition he embodies -- has frequently been cited by pundits across Europe commenting on the Danish cartoon furor. That controversy has triggered violent clashes in Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, leaving scores dead. It has led to the arrest of nearly a dozen Muslim journalists who re-published some of the drawings and has driven the original artists into hiding.
Sunday in the Pakistani city of Karachi, about 50,000 people, many chanting "Hang those who insulted the prophet," rallied to protest the cartoons. The protest, held a day after a visit to the country by President Bush, also featured chants of "Death to America." In a video broadcast Sunday, Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, also denounced the Danish drawings, saying they showed the West has double standards because "no one dares to harm Jews ... nor even to insult homosexuals."
"Help us Voltaire. They've gone mad," read a headline last month in France Soir, a daily newspaper.
Editors in France, Germany and elsewhere have explained their decision to reprint the drawings by pointing to principles enshrined in a statement often attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire said something similar, but the phrase was coined in 1906 by a biographer of Voltaire to sum up the French writer's views.
"Fanaticism," the play that stirred the ruckus in Saint-Genis-Pouilly, portrays Muhammad as a ruthless tyrant bent on conquest. Its main theme is the use of religion to promote and mask political ambition.
For Voltaire's Muslim critics, the play reveals a centuries-old Western distortion of Islam. For his fans, it represents a manifesto for liberty and reason and should be read not so much as an attack on Islam but as a coded assault on the religious dogmas that have stained European history with bloody conflict.
When Voltaire wrote the play in 1741, Roman Catholic clergymen denounced it as a thinly veiled anti-Christian tract. Their protests forced the cancellation of a staging in Paris after three performances -- and hardened Voltaire's distaste for religion. Asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce Satan, he quipped: "This is not the time to be making enemies."
Jean Goldzink, a scholar who edited a French edition of "Fanaticism," sees in today's tumult a repeat of the polemics aroused by Voltaire in his lifetime. "It is the same situation as in the 18th Century," Mr. Goldzink says. "Then it was Catholic priests who were angry. Now it is parts of the Muslim community."
Voltaire, the pen-name of Francois-Marie Arouet, peppered his writing with irreverent barbs that riled the Church. He described God as "a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh," and wrote that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Mr. Goldzink, the scholar, says Voltaire mocked all religions but had some sympathy for Islam, which Voltaire described as "less impure and more reasonable" than Christianity and Judaism.
Banned from Paris by France's Catholic king, Voltaire moved to Geneva. He quickly irked Swiss authorities, who burned one of his books. He then moved to a chateau a few miles from Saint-Genis-Pouilly and wrote a "Treatise on Tolerance." He later campaigned in vain to reverse a blasphemy conviction against a French noble, who was tortured, beheaded and then incinerated -- along with a copy of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary."
Accusations of blasphemy attract mostly yawns today in mainly secular Europe, though they do sometimes excite the dwindling Christian faithful. Monty Python's 1979 film "Life of Brian" was banned for a time in parts of Europe. More recently, "Jerry Springer: The Opera," which portrays Jesus as a homosexual who dances around in diapers, drew protests from Christian groups. Still, it ran for months in London and was broadcast by British state television.
Some devout Muslims are trying to revive taboos against blasphemy, and there are signs of growing self-censorship on matters even tangentially related to Islam. In January, the Belgian town of Middelkerke cancelled a planned art display that featured a fiberglass model of Saddam Hussein submerged in a fish tank in his underwear. The Czech artist, David Cerny, describes his work "Shark" as "a reflection on dictatorship." Officials say they worried it might upset local Muslims.
Herve Loichemol, a French theater director who produced the recent readings of Voltaire's play in Saint-Genis-Pouilly and Geneva, says he wasn't trying to provoke Muslims but knew from experience his production might anger some. He pushed ahead anyway. Banning blasphemy "admits private beliefs into public space," he says. "This is how catastrophe starts."
In the early 1990s, Mr. Loichemol had proposed staging the play to mark the 300th anniversary of Voltaire's birth in 1694. Islamic activists objected, among them Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim whose grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist movement in Egypt. Mr. Ramadan wrote an open letter in October 1993 warning that performing Voltaire's play would "be another brick in an edifice of hatred and rejection in which Muslims feel they are being enclosed."
After weeks of debate, Geneva authorities dropped the play, citing financial reasons. Mr. Loichemol, who lives near Voltaire's old chateau outside Geneva, denounced the decision as a revival of intolerance. Mr. Ramadan, who has become one of Europe's most influential Muslim intellectuals, has since tried to distance himself from the campaign to censor Voltaire, saying he admires the writer and has taught "Fanaticism" to students. In an interview last year with the French magazine Medias, he said he was in Egypt when the play got canned and "was not even aware of this affair."
Last spring, Mr. Loichemol decided to take another stab at reviving the play and persuaded Saint-Genis-Pouilly to include it in a program of cultural events, along with Flamenco dancers and a lowbrow farce.
Mr. Akhrouf, the cafe owner and activist, says that in early December, he got an agitated phone call from a friend who had just received a leaflet advertising the event. Mr. Akhrouf found a copy of the play on the Internet and started shaking with rage as he read the portrayal of Muhammad as a fanatic.
Shortly afterward, he attended Friday prayers at a big mosque in Geneva and talked about his concerns with Hafid Ouardiri, a mosque official and veteran of the earlier anti-Voltaire campaign. They drafted a letter to the mayor demanding the play be cancelled "in order to preserve peace."
Mr. Ouardiri, an Algerian-born former leftist radical, came to France in the 1960s and says he used to chant the 1968 student slogan, "It is forbidden to forbid." Now a devout Muslim, he says he champions "the need to forbid." Algeria and other Muslim countries, he says, were colonized by Europeans "nourished by Voltaire."
Mayor Bertrand considered dropping the play. But after talking to aides and voters, he decided to stand by Voltaire.
A meeting two days later to defuse the crisis got nowhere. Mr. Bertrand, flanked by officials from France's security service and other state bodies, quoted a section of France's constitution that guarantees free speech. Mr. Akhrouf and Mr. Ouardiri pleaded with authorities to try to understand Muslim feelings. Mr. Akhrouf broke down in tears. "I was very emotional," he says.
The night of the reading, riot police took up positions outside Saint-Genis-Pouilly's cultural center. An hour into the performance, the mayor got called out of the hall because of street disturbances. The mayor says the mood was "quasi-insurrectional," but damage was minor. Police chased Muslim youths through the streets.
Now that tempers have calmed, Mayor Bertrand says he is proud his town took a stand by refusing to cave in under pressure to call off the reading. Free speech is modern Europe's "foundation stone," he says. "For a long time we have not confirmed our convictions, so lots of people think they can contest them."
He does have one regret: He found the play, five acts in archaic verse, "deeply boring."

Even 13bn years ago, stars lived fast and died young

By Mark Henderson, Science Correspondent
A GIGANTIC star that blew up in a vast cosmic explosion soon after the dawn of time has been detected by astronomers in an unprecedented sighting that offers valuable insights into the infancy of the Universe.
The cataclysmic event took place 12.8 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the big bang, and has provided scientists with their first opportunity to study an individual star that formed so far back in time.
On September 4 last year Nasa’s Swift satellite picked up a huge burst of gamma radiation coming from the constellation of Pisces. It was immediately identified as the signature of an exploding star with a mass many times greater than the Sun’s. Astronomers then watched the 80-second flash using Swift’s X-ray telescope and several powerful ground-based telescopes, and publish their findings today in the journal Nature.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most violent events in the Universe, created when giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, or by collisions between super-dense neutron stars. They release so much light and energy that they can be seen at vast distances from Earth, over which it is normally impossible to resolve stars or even galaxies.
The newly detected burst, known as GRB 050904, is particularly significant as it is easily the farthest — and thus the oldest — such event ever observed. Never before have scientists been able to see the signature of an individual star — albeit one that has just passed through its death throes — so far away or so long ago.
“This was a massive star that lived fast and died young,” said David Burrows, Professor of Astronomy at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the study team.
“This star was probably quite different from the kind we see today, the type that only could have existed in the early Universe. Because the burst was brighter than a billion suns, many telescopes could study it even from such a huge distance.”
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, said in a Nature commentary: “Light from the oldest and farthest stellar explosion yet seen was emitted when the Universe was a mere infant.
“It provides a close-up view of how and when stars formed, and how they affect the primordial gas around them. For the first time, the most distant objects that can be identified are not just galaxies — and therefore huge agglomerates of stars, gas and dust — but also individual stars.”
The event shows that even in the very early life of the Universe, huge stars had both formed and lived long enough to burn out their fuel supplies and form black holes in great explosions. While standard theories of the early Universe have predicted this, the gamma-ray burst offers the first direct observational evidence that it actually happened.
The research is helping to flesh out the story of what happened in the first billion years or so after the big bang. Immediately after the big bang the Universe was opaque in the “cosmic Dark Ages”, which ended after between 200 million and 500 million years.
The new work implies that the Universe then began a furious phase of star formation, producing massive stars such as the one that triggered GRB 050904, which rapidly burnt themselves out. “This means that not only did stars form in this short period of time after the big bang but also that enough time had elapsed for them to evolve and collapse into black holes,” said Giancarlo Cusumano, of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Palermo Italy, a senior member of the research team.
Daniel Reichart, of the University of North Carolina, who led the scientists, said: “Gamma-ray bursts and their afterglows are the most brilliant transient events in the Universe. “One of the most exciting aspects of this discovery is the brightness of the afterglow — extrapolating back to a few minutes after the burst, the afterglow must have been exceptionally bright. We are finally starting to see the remnants of some of the oldest objects in the Universe.”
From Times of London 8 March 2006

A place like many others

FROM "THE BELMONT CLUB" 3/8/06
Robert Kaplan's article in the Atlantic, The Coming Normalcy, is a curious mixture of pessimism and optimism. The pessimism stemmed from his doubt a solution could be found for anarchy in the Third World, from which would come terrorism, plagues and humanitarian catastrophe.
Twelve years ago in this magazine, I published an article, "The Coming Anarchy,” about the institutional collapse of Third World countries owing to ethnic and sectarian rivalries, demographic and environmental stresses, and the growing interrelationship between war and crime. Was it possible that Iraq, of all places, might offer some new ideas about how situations of widespread anarchy can be combated? It certainly was the case that, despite a continuing plague of suicide bombings, significant sections of the country were slowly recovering from large-scale violence, as well as from the effects of decades of brutal dictatorship. The very U.S. military that had helped to bring about the anarchy in Iraq was now worth studying as a way to end it, both here and elsewhere in the Third World.
Kaplan describes how much of what passes for an insurgency is actually crime which had escaped the modus vivendi it had enjoyed under Saddam but had now been dislocated from its old containing vessel. Reining in this chaos meant constructing a new order to replace Saddam's.
In these very early stages, at least, ending anarchy is about, well, ending anarchy. A nation-state must monopolize the use of force. In Iraq, that means killing some people and apprehending others. "You're dealing with a gang mentality,” explained Captain Phillip Mann of Antioch, California, a thirty-two-year-old intelligence officer and graduate of Fresno State University. "There is a pool of young men in Mosul without jobs who sell drugs, and do kidnappings. With a high inflation rate and little economy, being an insurgent pays. You've got to make the insurgency a very unattractive profession to these people, who are not motivated by religious ideology.” One thing they sell is pornography, which is found by the new Stryker brigade in Mosul whenever insurgent hideouts are overrun. "We've adopted a gang-tackle approach,” Mann went on. "If we get shot at, like in Palestine [a retirement community for former regime generals in southeast Mosul, which supported the insurgents], we surround the area and go house to house, every time. We keep doing this till people get tired and start helping us. Our message: ‘We don't give in—we're not going away, so work with us.'
Iraq as viewed by those who lived inside it looked extremely different from those who saw it from the outside. At a meeting with municipal officials and police chiefs that Kaplan attended, a mukhtar or local official was furious at what he believed was an American decision to release prisoners from Abu Ghraib.
"I cannot resume my role as mukhtar,” he said. "They will kill me. The contractor down the street was threatened if he continued to repair the neighborhood. If you are so serious about security, then why did you Americans release prisoners from Abu Ghraib?” Many of the detainees that had lately been released from Abu Ghraib were known to be hardened criminals from the Mosul area, and the release had undermined the credibility of American troops here. Turner replied that the decision was one taken by Iraq's own new government. The former mukhtar wasn't convinced. For Iraqis meeting with Americans in Mosul, the name "Abu Ghraib” had a different connotation than it did in the United States. Here it meant not brutality but American weakness and lack of resolve.
To the mukhtar, concerned about surviving in the streets of Mosul the word Abu Ghraib meant something different from the Amnesty International bureaucrat worried about presenting his next report. One of Kaplan's recurring assertions in The Coming Normalcy is that the American shortcomings for dealing with situations like Iraq -- which he views as prototypical of an anarchic Third World society -- go far beyond any defects in planning for the invasion of Iraq peculiar to the Bush administration. In Kaplan's view the long-established bureaucratic instruments are simply structured wrongly: they are too monolithic and uncoordinated to effectively transform any typical anarchy into democratic order. He thinks the armed forces, whose lives are at stake, have adapted most by pushing responsibility downward to the brigade rather than the divisional level. "Flattening" the decision-making and intelligence cycle process has helped the Army and Marines get on top of the military aspects of the insurgency, but it hasn't helped reconstruction much. Everywhere he went, soldiers and Marines asked, 'where is USAID, where is the State Department?' And the answer unfortunately, was that neither USAID nor the State Department had the money or the bureaucratic configuration to fight a joint battle with the military against the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.
"We can race around the battlefield and fix little problems,” one Army major complained to me, "but where is the State Department and USAID to solve the big problems?” Whereas commentators in Washington tend to blame the machinations of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon for keeping the State Department out of Iraq, all of the mid-level military officers I spoke with—each of whom desperately wanted to see civilian aid and reconstruction workers here—said that if the State Department got the requisite funding, it could be as bureaucratically dynamic as their own battalions, and infrastructure-rebuilding would not be where it appeared to be: at the zero point.
Commentary
Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon's strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon's campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies -- and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.
Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states. Occasionally some force of exceptional virulence would escape or be set loose to ravage the outside world: destroy a temple in India, athletes in Munich or a subway in Paris. Through the 80s and 90s the rest of the world toted up its losses at each outbreak, mended its fences and hoped it would never happen again. But after September 11 the problem grew too big to ignore, yet the question of how to destroy anarchy, already by definition in a shambles, remained.
Anarchy is self-defending, as the failed United Nations relief mission to Somalia in 1990 discovered to its cost. It will appropriate relief supplies, money and aid workers themselves as gang property, the economic basis of its system. Anarchy absorbs violence just as it absorbs relief and even gains strength from it when weapons, designed to disrupt ordered societies, are unleashed on it. Countries like Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Iran are defended less by frontier fortifications than by the sheer toxicity of their societies. Not for nothing did Saddam release tens of thousands of hardened criminals from jail immediately before the invasion of Iraq. They were his wolves upon the frozen steppes.
It would be a serious mistake to think that the problem of confronting national security threats within the context of anarchy is limited to Iraq. Iraq is simply where the West must come to grips with The Coming Anarchy because it cannot step around it. And it is not the only place. An earlier post noted how the eviction of the Taliban from Afghanistan has simply shifted the fighting to Pakistan, the country in which the Taliban was first born. The real metric in any war against rogue "states" will not be the reduction of strongpoints, like Tora-bora given such prominence by the media, but the reduction of anarchy which constitutes their energy core.
Kaplan correctly understands that no campaign against Iran, Syria or any similar state can be expected to succeed until the lessons of OIF are successfully internalized. And the key he hints, is learning how to use force to allow indigenous order to emerge. If Napoleon wrought the army-killer in the 18th century as the answer to his strategic dilemmas, America must invent a anarchy-killer in the 21st; or a globalized world in which boundaries are ever more tenuous will be permanently at risk.
posted by wretchard at 3:39 AM 142 comments