Iraqi govt. to call for withdrawal timetable--U.S. said to firmly oppose

[tristano's ghost]

Iraqi govt. reconciliation plan

And I thought this war was an imperialistic boondoggle, and not about true freedom and sovereignity...

The Iraqi govt. plan calls for the following:

A timetable for withdrawal of occupation troops from Iraq. Amnesty for all insurgents who attacked U.S. and Iraqi military targets. Release of all security detainees from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Compensation for victims of coalition military operations.

What do they know?! F*&% them, right? We'll get out when we feel like getting out... which is never. Permanent occupation, baby, though we will eventually downgrade to Occupation Lite. As Josh Marshall points out, the Democrats should simply start saying, "More of the same... that's the current GOP plan." More of the same.

More of the same.

[Uli]

This is gonna be interesting.

I am not exactly sure what that resolution was that the repubs passed last week but they certainly talked a lot against a timetable.

[Gary Sisco]

Good luck. Now the puppets get to feel the strings fe true.

[Gary Sisco]

From Sullivan's site:

A reader sums it up pretty well, I think:


Sorting through your blog entries and the readers' emails you've posted yields the following five Iraq options:

(1) If we pull out now, it will be a disaster.

(2) If we keep going indefinitely the way we're going now, it will be a disaster.

(3) If we keep going until January 2009 the way we're going now, the new President will have no choice but to pull out quickly, which will be a disaster.

(4) Have faith that this administration will be more competent from now to January 2009 than it has been so far.

Andrew, I am through putting any faith in this administration. No significant policy they have advanced has turned out like they said it would - the budget, the environment, the cost of Medicare D, torture, WMD, Saddam-Al Qaeda, rebuilding Afghanistan, funding No Child Left Behind, global warming (remember Christine Todd Whitman promising the EPA under Bush would do something about it?), etc. ad nauseam. Have they not practically eliminated funding for civilian rebuilding in Iraq? (Gotta have that estate tax cut.)

How is the military supposed to maintain its present deployment levels for two and a half more years? Stop-loss orders?

One more option:

(5) Have faith that the new Iraqi government will be able to make up for the deficiencies of the Bush administration, if it continues to receive Bush administation help.

Is this faith justified? This seems to me where our inquiry must focus. I confess I don't have enough information to give a reasonable answer, though the reports of rampant corruption and atrocities by people in police and army uniforms are ominous. But we must realize that, if we stay, it's because we have confidence in the new Iraqi government. If we don't have that confidence, we should get out now. We have asked far too much of our military already. If we are to continue stop-loss for two and a half more years, we better have a damn good reason. Faith in the Bush administration is nowhere near good enough.


Agreed. Hence my persistent attention to developments in Baghdad. But if we do pull out too soon, and Maliki is too weak to survive, we will have to deal with the Jihadist-riddled failed state that may emerge (and already has emerged in an embryonic form) in Iraq. Those forces will not decide to leave us alone because we have left. if anything, the reverse is true. They will claim victory and press the war further onto our shores and elsewhere. The one thing we have to keep in mind is that, however screwed up the Iraq policy has become, the enemy has not gone away. Withdrawal from Iraq would not mean that this existential struggle is over. It would mean that the enemy has been strengthened and ready to take the war against the West (and "heretical" Islam) to a more lethal stage.

********************

Of course, Sullivan apparently fails to notice that, one, there already *is* a "jihadist-ridden, failed state in Iraq" -- courtesy of the US. Two, by his logic that follows, the US should stay in Iraq and prosecute the war there forever. Afghanistan as well. Somalia, too. Sudan, as well. And so forth.

But of course it can't and won't.

A war against a tactic, terrorism, can't be won by military means. A tactic isn't something that can be defeated, like an army in a particular place.

Which is one of the things that makes the war even madder than they ordinarily are.

[Gary Sisco]

There is also the further issue of empire. No empire has ever existed that hasn't been met with resistance and harassment from its peripheries. Imperial US is no different and won't be.

Empire means continuous warfare on one level or another and can't mean otherwise, so Americans had better get used to continuous warfare because that's what their future holds, like it or not. No policitian, no punditariat can do anything about that.

[Gary Sisco]

Things are so much better now for the Iraqis:

LA Times, today:

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000
Higher than the U.S. estimate but thought to be undercounted, the tally is equivalent to 570,000 Americans killed in three years.
By Louise Roug and Doug Smith, Times Staff Writers
June 25, 2006


BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.

ADVERTISEMENTThe toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

In the same period, at least 2,520 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west. Health workers there are unable to compile the data because of violence, security crackdowns, electrical shortages and failing telephone networks.

The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition, the ministry said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide death toll figures to the government in Baghdad.

In the three years since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, the Bush administration has rarely offered civilian death tolls. Last year, President Bush said he believed that "30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."

Nongovernmental organizations have made estimates by tallying media accounts; The Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts.

The Health Ministry gathers numbers from hospitals in the capital and the outlying provinces. If a victim of violence dies at a hospital or arrives dead, medical officials issue a death certificate. Relatives claim the body directly from the hospital and arrange for a speedy burial in keeping with Muslim beliefs.

If the morgue receives a body — usually those deemed suspicious deaths — officials there issue the death certificate.

Health Ministry officials said that because death certificates are issued and counted separately, the two data sets are not overlapping.

The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.

However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

The documented cases show a country descending further into violence.

At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had been shot execution-style. Many showed signs of torture — drill holes, burns, missing eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled, beheaded, stabbed or beaten to death.

The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces.

But Health Ministry records do differentiate causes of death. Almost 75% of those who died violently were killed in "terrorist acts," typically bombings, the records show. The other 25% were killed in what were classified as military clashes. A health official described the victims as "innocent bystanders," many shot by Iraqi or American troops, in crossfire or accidentally at checkpoints.

With the entire country a battleground, it is likely that some of the dead may have been insurgents or members of militias.

"The way to think about the violence is that it's not just the insurgent attacks that matter," said David Lake, a member of the Center for Study of Civil War, an international group of scholars who study the causes and effects of internal strife. "What we should be concerned about is the sense of security at the individual level…. If the fear has gotten out of control."

Societies fall apart when people stop believing the government can keep them safe them and instead turn to militias for protection, said Lake, who is a professor of political science at UC San Diego.

"The question is, have we crossed that threshold? My sense is, we probably have, and that's why I'm worried about the long-term outcome."

Three years of fighting have taken their toll on the country. Gauging how many people died in the first year after the invasion, which included the initial invasion and aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and weeks of near-anarchy afterward, has proved difficult.

According to a 2003 Times survey of Baghdad hospitals, at least 1,700 civilians died in the capital just in the five weeks after the war began. An analysis by Iraqi Body Count, a nongovernmental group that tracks civilian deaths by tallying media reports, estimated that 5,630 to 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed nationwide from March 19 through April 2003.

Health Ministry figures for May in each of the last three years show war-related deaths more than tripling nationwide, from 334 in May 2004 to 1,154 last month. And as the violence has continued to escalate, it also has become increasingly centralized. At least 2,532 people were killed nationwide last month. Of those, 2,155 — 85% — died in Baghdad.

"Everything has increased," said one official in the Health Ministry who didn't want to be identified for security reasons. "Bombings have increased, shootings have increased."

Iraqi Body Count estimates that 38,475 to 42,889 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. The estimate does not include deaths among the Iraqi security forces.

The toll in Iraq has been a sensitive issue for the Bush administration, which has maintained that it doesn't track civilian deaths. However, military officials in Baghdad acknowledged that they track the number of civilians accidentally killed by U.S. troops.

Eric Stover, Director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center and an expert on medical and social consequences of war, said that the high death toll makes rebuilding society increasingly difficult.

"The way to look at the effects of deaths on that scale is also in the context of how people are living," said Stover, who has also done human rights work in Iraq and identified mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"It's not just the immediate deaths that people are dealing with, but fractured lives. They are living in this constant state of fear. It's a very gloomy picture."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roug reported from Baghdad and Smith from Los Angeles. Times staff writer Raheem Salman in Baghdad contributed to this report.

[tristano's ghost]

This is peachy. At least among the sources quoted here, it's the Democratic pols demanding that there be no amnesty granted, and it's generally the GOP guys throwing in cautionary notes with respect to the sovereign wishes of the Iraqi govt. I don't think I can stomach any more "run to the right of the GOP" posturing on the part of the Dems. JFK and the "missile gap," yada yada yada...

Iraq amnesty offer upsets U.S. lawmakers By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
48 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Members of Congress on Sunday denounced any Iraqi plan that would grant amnesty to insurgents responsible for the deaths of U.S. troops.

As part of a plan to mend sectarian strife, Iraq's prime minister has proposed extending amnesty to insurgents and opposition figures who have not been involved in terrorist activities.

Lawmakers are still trying to ascertain the details of the reconciliation plan that Nouri al-Maliki released on Sunday. It came out after a week of intense debate in Washington over the deployment of U.S. forces and political posturing on the war months before November's elections.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said extending amnesty to anyone responsible for killing U.S. troops was "unconscionable."

"For heaven's sake, we liberated that country," Levin said on "Fox News Sunday." "We got rid of a horrific dictator. We've paid a tremendous price. More than 2,500 Americans have given up their lives. The idea that they should even consider talking about amnesty for people who have killed people who liberated their country is unconscionable."

Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that while he opposes amnesty, the United States must respect Iraq's sovereign right to decide its own future.

He said the U.S. government will not dictate, but will consult with Iraqi officials on all aspects of the plan.

"I want the Iraqi people to take this decision unto themselves and make it correctly," Warner said. "And I hope it comes out ... no amnesty for anyone who committed an act of violence, of war crimes."

In presenting the plan to the Iraqi parliament, al-Maliki said Sunday that insurgent killers would not escape justice regardless of whether their victims were Iraqis or U.S.-led coalition forces.

"The launch of this national reconciliation initiative should not be read as a reward for the killers and criminals or acceptance of their actions," he said.

The White House welcomed the initiative, yet did not comment specifically on Iraqi plans to embrace certain insurgents, saying the plan was still being developed.

"Reconciliation must be an Iraqi process, led by Iraqis," White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said. "We, of course, stand by, ready to assist in this effort — if the Iraqis request our help. But it's important to note that this is the first step, and it's a process that will take time to fully develop."

Sen. Mitch McConnell (news, bio, voting record), R-Ky., said on ABC's "This Week" said he does not believe the Iraqi government intends to grant amnesty to people who killed Americans.

Sen. Richard Lugar (news, bio, voting record), R-Ind., said if there is to be peace in Iraq, al-Maliki must find a formula for moving forward that is acceptable to all. "I'm hopeful that one of elements of the formula that he presents to the Sunnis is not amnesty because that is going to run into solid opposition, obviously, in the United States," Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CBS' "Face the Nation."

Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., urged President Bush to get a commitment from al-Maliki that there will be no amnesty for anyone who has killed U.S. troops.

[Gary Sisco]

If you don't amnesty the people doing the fighting who would you amnesty? Duh? Shit gets dumber every day. I swear both parties choose positions based on what the other says, alone.

A friend has a letter in the local rag yesterday advocating a plebiscite in Iraq: US stays or US goes.

I think we'd see about how far "democracy" flies if that were to happen.