On Another Front (The Homefront)

From the AP:

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

[snip]

Some advocates say such an early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future.

Emphasis mine. Uh, yeah. That sounds like a tragic understatement. Read the whole article here.

Vanity Fairing

Included on our packing list for travel to Mexico was the October Vanity Fair, a subscription we've enjoyed this year as a gift from our sister-in-law Wendy. So even as the volume of the movie on the 8 hour bus ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca (everybody agrees it only takes 5 1/2 or 6 but we've yet to experience such a short ride) overpowered us I was able to get my fix of glossy fashion ads and haute couture.

One reason I really like Vanity Fair is for the political reporting, and the October issue is no exception. I realize the month is nearly spent and, periodicals existing in the perennial race for readers that they do, Christmas editions will be on newsstands shortly. That aside, let me direct your attention to a pair of articles that are well worth reading.

The first, Todd Purdum's "Inside Bush's Bunker," is a thorough look at what goes into making the White House arguably one of the most secure installations on the planet. The bunker in question, however, is every bit as much mental, emotional and intellectual as it is physical. Purdum, through interviews, accounts and, by necessity, a bit of informed speculation, offers a peek inside what could be characterized as the most media unfriendly and closed-minded administration this side of Iran. For an idea of how the President gets his information and whom he trusts for pushback or outside ideas (nearly no one, and trusting and listening to are two different things) this article is a must read.

I have not yet finished reading "Billions Over Baghdad," but the content is scandalous, or would be if as a citizenry we could just quit caring about whether Paris is in jail or Britney has her kids for the night. Here Donald Bartlett and James Steele investigate how, from start to finish, the Coalition Provisional Authority (I last blogged on the CPA here) arranged for nearly 12 billion dollars in US cash money--literally 363 tons--to be withdrawn from the Federal Reserve and airlifted to Baghdad from 2003-2004. More than $9 billion of that has since "gone missing" with no one to account for it. And not theoretical money, money on paper or electronic funds. We're talking about tangible bills, ones, fives, tens, twenties and hundreds with the likenesses of dead white men on the faces and the seal of the US government on their backsides. The authors point to croneyism from the Pentagon and the White House, confusion as to how the CPA was mandated and to whom it answered*, a compliant and increasingly bamboozled Congress, and a breathtaking lack of concern about what the money actually went for, as reasons why it was so easy for anybody with open hands to capture what may have been the real loot of the Iraq War.

So there you have it, my plug for print media for the month. Check it out online (free) or go to the library for an afternoon of reading (also free) or get your hands on a rumpled and dog-eared copy from the beauty salon or motor vehicle office (we wish!) and don't let it go until you've read these articles about the people in charge of our country today.


*Sidenote: the CPA apparently answered to nobody. The article points out that the Coalition Provisional Authority, in actuality, was neither a US government agency nor a UN body nor an Iraqi entity). In essence the CPA mandated, approved and oversaw the CPA, and in the confusion of post-invasion Iraq that was enough for the world.

Getting Into the Mix

Via Juan Cole, Turkey is planning a military invasion into northern Iraq to root out members of the Kurdish guerrilla organization PKK. That is, if US and Iraqi forces forces don't do something about it first.

Turkey is putting pressure on the US and Iraqi governments to reduce the presence of the Kurdish group, seen as a threat to Turkey's borders, or prepare for Turkish air strikes and a possible incursion.

In a fresh bout of sabre-rattling on Wednesday, the chief of staff, General Yasar Buyukanit, asked the government in Ankara to set the parameters for an incursion across the border. "Will we go to northern Iraq just to fight PKK rebels, or, for example, what will we do if we come under attack from local Iraqi Kurdish groups?" Gen Buyukanit said.

Sounds like your average, run-of-the-mill preemptive warfare if you ask me. I hear the US has no problem with that sort of strategy.

Meanwhile, to the south, CNN reports that an Iranian backed Hezbollah leader is in custody and is connected to the January 20 Karbala attack that killed 5 American troops. I don't have any problem with the details, but I do question the timing. Does anybody hear a little summer sabre-rattling?

Yeah, I'm All About Benen Again

It's embarrassing to fawn so openly, but the guy makes so much sense you can't escape it. Steve Benen on the deadliest quarter in Iraq, and on NYT reports that low-tech, al-Qaeda linked terrorism appears to be spreading beyond Iraq:

Insurgents are treating Iraq as some kind of Terrorism School, and are applying the lessons they've learned after graduation.

Here's a crazy idea: we could withdraw from Iraq, deny terrorists a "cause celebre" for jihadists, and stop making it harder to combat terrorism.

You got it, Steve. Let met get you a microphone.

Congress Looking to Rally

Via ThinkProgress, news is out that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi plan to join together in an effort to get America out of Iraq. Seems they had to hear the bad news--disapproval ratings as high as 71%--before they felt convinced that Americans were ready to end the war. We'll wait and see how it all plays out.

Too Shockingly Stupid Not to Share

Via TPM, Bush declares Iraq will be a success when it looks like Israel. Like Josh said, "That should go over well."

The 8-Front War

Juan Cole does some math and delivers a clear estimation of who's fighting whom in Iraq.

How many fronts are there in the Iraq War? The Sunni Arab guerrillas of the center, west and north are themselves fighting a four-front war. They are fighting US troops. They are fighting Shiites. They are fighting Kurds in the Kirkuk region and Ninevah and Diyala provinces. And they are fighting other Sunni Arab forces (Baathists fight Salafi fundamentalists, and both fight tribal levies gravitating to the Americans).

Then there is a muted Shiite front with two dimensions. Radical Shiites attack US forces. And, in Basra, Diwaniya and elsewhere, there is Shiite on Shiite violence as the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (often infiltrated into the Iraqi police) fights the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.

So that makes 6-- four Sunni Arab fronts and 2 Shiite fronts.

Then there are the Kurds. Of course they are fighting the Sunni Arabs. But they have also given haven to two terrorist groups. One is the PKK, or Kurdish Worker's Party, which operates in Turkey's eastern Anatolia, blowing things up and killing people. Some 5,000 PKK fighters are holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan, to the rage of the Turkish government in Ankara. The other is PEJAK, an Iranian-Kurdish terrorist group that launches attacks in Iran. Both Iran and Turkey have lobbed mortars and artillery shells over the border into villages of Iraqi Kurdistan as a way of lodging a complaint and making a threat against these Kurdish forces.

Cole admits that not all 8 fronts are necessarily engaged in serious fighting simultaneously. Any one of these sites, however, can make bad trouble in the region worse. Flare-ups in fighting also put American troops at risk and make trouble for American war planners as they map strategies and assess the best of bad options.

My favorite part, though?

By the way, why does the Bush administration allow its Kurdistan allies to harbor PKK terrorists? I thought that sort of thing was a no-no in the age of the war on terror? Wasn't it even the casus belli for Bush's two big invasions? Or is it all right to do terrorism to Turkey and Iran, but not to the US and Britain? I'm confused.

When Juan Cole is confused you know it's a real mess.

Three Words: Troop Readiness Levels

Fox News boasts that the President has won the standoff with Democrats over the supplemental Iraq war funding bill, and NPR reports that "Democrats appear to have blinked" in the stare down between the White House and the Hill. There are three words I need to hear now from Congressional Dems, and those words are not "Memorial Day Recess."

House and Senate Democrats both acknowledged today that a date-certain withdrawal from Iraq will not be part of the language of the new bill that will go to the President. Okay, we sort of saw that coming. The Democratic leadership will take a lashing from Dems who insist we need to get out of Iraq ASAP. Much as I agree, I'm already over that and resigned to the political reality of the troop funding spin. Democrats don't think they can afford to take the fall if the public perceives a lack of support for the troops, and they're not sure the President won't end up on the high side of this particular debate.

Discussion now needs to turn to troop readiness levels, and it needs to do so loudly and repeatedly. I can't think of a single White House talking head who will come up with a convincing answer to the question "How do you justify sending under-equipped troops back into combat?"

Instead of troop readiness levels, discussion this afternoon revolves around benchmarks for Iraqi lawmakers and the Iraqi army. I can't even get excited enough about this topic to seriously assess it. If the fighting stopped then maybe--maybe--the Iraqi government could meet some benchmarks. But the fighting isn't going to stop and any discussion of benchmarks is a completely transparent, and deplorable, attempt to shift responsibility for the entirety of the current state of disrepair onto the Iraqis, without acknowledging the U.S. role in throwing the country into chaos.

I don't know enough about Jack Murtha and the nuances of intra-Democratic politics to grasp why troop readiness levels has not been the standard of Congressional oversight all along, but I firmly believe that, if we want to measure anything, we ought to measure our own performance in the field, and be prepared to show the American public that our troops are supported in word and deed.

AQI: A Self Fulfilling Prophecy?

Kevin Drum takes on Andrew McCarthy in a recent post at Washington Monthly. In a nutshell, Kevin says that Andrew is crazy and wasting our time by suggesting that Dems know that the best way to defeat al-Qaeda is to stay in Iraq and fight the bad guys there. For the most part I agree with Kevin, although I take issue with this nugget:

In fact, there's a dirty little secret of the Iraq war that neither party is eager to acknowledge publicly: namely that the fastest way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is probably for us to leave and let the Iraqis do it themselves. Republicans don't want to acknowledge this for the obvious reason: they want to stay in Iraq and this doesn't help their cause.

(emphasis mine)

I'm not so quick to agree that Republicans, as a group, want to stay in Iraq. It sounds like the average Republican joe these days is ready to see the U.S. get out of Iraq. Republican politicians simply want to stay in power, and as Iraq drags on--indeed, grows bleaker by the day--they don't know how to do that now without doubling down on the bet and hoping to see this thing through to some sort of less-than-politically-disastrous outcome.

McCarthy suggests that Republicans ought to hit the American public over the head with the reminder that Dems criticize the Bush administration for not pursuing al-Qaeda aggressively enough after 9/11, yet lo and behold here we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq exactly like the Dems say we should. Just one problem with this: AQI flourishes to the extent that it does precisely because of the vacuum left behind after our "mission" was "accomplished" four years ago. The Bush administration did all it could to link al-Qaeda to Iraq, and now that prophecy has fulfilled itself.