White House releases beta version of Iraq 5.0.

After five long years, the United States has finally secured victory in the War on Terror, George W. Bush declared today.

I'm as surprised as you are. This is what the president said this morning at the Pentagon:

The announcement comes 5.0 years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and 4.9 years after Bush declared, "Mission accomplished!"

In this morning's speech, Bush also said:

The BBC's report on the speech notes:

Don't let that spoil your celebration.

Latest appraisal of Iraq debacle comes from an unlikely source: the magazine for mercenaries.

The latest piece of evidence that the Bush regime bungled post-invasion Iraq — and one of the first bits we've read from a high official that it likewise bungled Afghanistan's "reconstruction" — comes from the unlikeliest source: the trade journal for mercenaries like Blackwater.

Career diplomat Robert Pearson, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Iraq invasion, treats the re-destruction of Iraq as a given — merely background for his article about how the mercenary industry can pitch in to help around the world.

Quite unintentionally, what Pearson says dovetails neatly with Charles Ferguson's response to preposterous pasha Jerry Bremer's op-ed about who didn't do what in the early stages of the Iraq disaster. (All you need see is Ferguson's journalistically groundbreaking video letter to the editor, "The Debacle of Disbanding the Iraqi Army - 9/14/07." )

If Bremer and the White House hadn't disbanded the Iraq Army, there wouldn't have been as much chaos, and "private security contractors" from companies like Blackwater wouldn't have invaded Iraq in such numbers. There are an estimated 129,000 private contractors of all types in Iraq, almost as many as the number of U.S. soldiers before the "surge" began last January.

Pearson matter-of-factly writes, on page 11 of the September/October issue of the super-jingoistic and wonderfully named Journal of International Peace Operations:

What a mess! In this magazine that features a full-page ad for Blackwater — the main U.S. mercenary company and the one now being driven out of Iraq — Pearson, an ally of Colin Powell's, notes that serious planning for post-invasion Iraq began in the fall of 2003.

Yes, that's six months after the U.S. invaded.

Even then, the White House refused to go along. Oh, at first, SecDef Don Rumsfeld did. But the regime refused to fund State's Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS, as it was known):

Wait. It gets worse. At least we had this S/CRS in place. But while Iraq and Afghanistan veered quickly into chaos, S/CRS had to fight to find some fighting elsewhere to fight. Pearson writes:

This episode also illustrates the struggle between Powell and Rumsfeld over the Bush-Cheney regime's "war on terror." It was a battle that Powell continually lost.

By the way, if you're interested in becoming a mercenary, especially now that Blackwater has been kicked out of Iraq and there's nobody left to guard Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. officials have been forbidden to leave Baghdad's Green Zone, be sure to attend the "annual summit" of the International Peace Operations Association on October 28-30 in D.C.

Here's a question, raised in 1979 by the mellifluous Mighty Diamonds:

Thirty years later, the answer's clear: The Pentagon, that's who. At best we'll get the "rogue security contractor" excuse from the Bush regime for Sunday's cacophonous killing of 11 Iraqis in Baghdad by the North Carolina mercenary army Blackwater.

That excuse has worked before. As I wrote in July 2004, it was used by the Pentagon after the Abu Ghraib tortures came to light. SecDef Don Rumsfeld blamed "rogue" soldiers.

Our memories are short when it comes to the mercenaries employed by the Bush regime. As I pointed out in August 2004, private "interrogators" from CACI were employed by the Pentagon at Abu Ghraib, where all that "fear up" went down.

After this latest incident of privatized violence, we have Blackwater saying its boys were ambushed. Blackwater has 1,000 "troops" in Iraq and guards Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Yes, they guard Crocker, and the administration guards them. Monday's Washington Post concisely captured the two versions of the latest Blackwater escapade. Here's the first:

Followed by the second version:

They wanted to shoot them some Ay-rabs, pal. The way I see it, the Mighty Diamonds sang about the possibility of dreadlocked Rastafarians someday making bodyguards pay the price:

But don't worry, Blackwater bodyguards, the Bush regime will shelter you. Iraq's citizens are the ones who can't hide. As of this morning, IBC's "documented civilian deaths from violence" totals somewhere between 72,596 and 79,187.

Yes, the Blackwater "incident" was notable. But as the IBC "recent events" list notes, on that same Sunday, many other Iraqis died, and not at the hands of American mercenaries, whom our press continues to euphemistically label "contractors" or "bodyguards."

One of the victims was a 12-year-old boy who was killed in Diwaniya during a raid by U.S. and Iraqi troops, according to news reports assembled by IBC. Wonder what happened there?

In any case, this particular bloody Sunday was predestined. IBC's list of 38 people who were killed just the day before includes this entry:

And this one:

New reports on Iraq confirm previous reports. Further reports coming. The best report, by Larry Korb, goes unreported.

While we're waiting for the Petraeus report — which will be written by the White House, as previously buried in an L.A. Times story — the press is playing up a new report to Congress that says the Iraqi national police force (its army, kind of) won't be ready to handle the chaos until later this century.

But that's old news. The freshest report wasn't commissioned by Congress or the White House or the Pentagon. And it didn't have anything to do with the Senate Democrats trying to "reframe" the "Iraq debate," as the New York Times put it in a detailed story yesterday about that irrelevant bluster.

The most dynamic and relevant report comes from Larry Korb, a high-ranking Defense official under Ronald Reagan, and it's going unreported. Now a senior fellow at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, Korb released on August 27 an actual plan for pulling out of Iraq. Read "How to Redeploy: Implementing a Responsible Drawdown of U.S. Forces from Iraq" or listen to Korb talk about it, or do both.

More than a week after its release by the mainstream and highly visible think tank, Korb's report hasn't even hit the news pages and has gotten only a little play on op-ed pages. But it's detailed and realistic, compared with all the other pullout plans — of which there are none, except for the Bush-Cheney regime's current strategy, pictured above.

Seriously, Korb's plan is pretty damn good reading, and it comes from someone who's no flaming liberal pinko. But, then, veteran Iraq watcher Tony Cordesman's reports have been consistently ignored since before the 2003 invasion.

Here's what Korb's report says:

That's nice, but how do we do it?

And not only maps. Korb and his collaborators lay out a detailed month-by-month schedule, division and brigade by division and brigade — which equipment to leave and which to take with us, and doing it all with the least danger to our troops and to the Iraqis who haven't already fled their country.

Now that's a report worth reading. Meanwhile, we're deluged in the press with old news and report upon report upon report that say the same things and don't offer solutions, except to "disband" or "start over." Too late for that talk. Stuck in a bad place, our big wheels are spinning and not getting us or our troops anywhere.

Treating the latest of such reports as fresh, the Washington Post puts it this way this morning.

Yes, but the New York Times broke that very report last week, saying:

The Times played the breakdown of the police as a scoop, and the rest of the media followed right along. But that, too, was mostly old news.

Yet another report, way back on June 7, made the same points, as was reported at the time — or, rather, underreported.

That June report was, and is, readily available from the Pentagon. Check it out yourself (PDF). Its details are devastating, especially for a document just sitting there on the Pentagon website. For instance:

Corruption? Oh, brother. The details reported three months ago were staggering:

And who knows how many instances have gone unreported and haven't been investigated? That's because even the investigators are deathly afraid:

But the Pentagon's June report went relatively unnoticed, maybe because of how it ended:

With such a bland summary of explosive facts, further fact-finding was clearly needed. You'd think enough facts have been found. But do we really need to point out that it's always safer for politicians to either "reframe debates" or commission their own studies and reports than to listen to people like Korb and Cordesman and then hammer out hard decisions?

The New York Times pulled out of Iraq coverage even before the war started when it sent in Judy Miller to beat the WMD war drums.

But five years later, it still hasn't re-entered the battle, judging by its inept handling of the Bush-Bremer dustup over who was responsible for disbanding the Iraq Army back in 2003.

Ignoring explosive material published a year ago in the British press and played up practically everywhere in the world but in the major American papers, the Times downplayed SecDef Donald Rumsfeld's role in the tragic blunder of dismantling the army and police, and the paper didn't even mention Dick Cheney.

Over the weekend, Robert Draper, peddling his book Dead Certain, said Bush had been taken aback by the tragic decision announced by Bush regime czar Jerry Bremer to disband Iraq's army in the spring of 2003.

That was in a September 2 Times story by Jim Rutenberg, who apparently hadn't talked to Bremer about Bush's comments. (Rutenberg's story was just a hack job titled "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy.") Bremer rushed over to the Times and dropped off a bundle of letters that, he claims, show that Bush knew of the plan and liked what Bremer was doing.

Here's how Times reporter Edmund L. Andrews handled the gift from Bremer in the September 4 story:

The Andrews story makes it sound as if Bremer was briefing Rumsfeld about this plan, that the plan was something that Bush and Bremer were hammering out. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In October 2006, David Blunkett, Britain's Home Secretary during the crucial pre-invasion and immediate post-invasion period, told all in an interview with the Guardian (U.K.) and the serialization of his diaries from that time. Unlike Bremer's book published earlier this year, Blunkett was candid about his screw-ups and about what he did — and didn't do. More importantly, he reveals just who was making the big decisions for the U.S. Here's a hint: It wasn't Bremer and it wasn't Bush. From the Guardian story by Patrick Wintour and Julian Glover:

This 2006 story wasn't totally ignored in the U.S. press. The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum summed it up well on October 8, 2006:

Drum's right. It wasn't surprising in 2003 that the decision was being made by Rumsfeld and Cheney, not Bremer, and it certainly wasn't surprising in 2006. So why was the Times story so clueless?

This isn't the first time Times reporter Andrews has mishandled a big story. Back in 2004, Andrews blew a vital news angle about corporate tax breaks. Read my October 12, 2004, post, in which I wrote:

If you want something beyond my immature screed, read this October 2004 measured analysis of the corporate tax cuts, courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' Joel Friedman.

Regarding the Bremer-Bush dustup and the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, the New Yorker's George Packer parses it and takes the long view. Packer also shrewdly notes that it's not wise to give the Bush regime too much credit for being orderly enough to make decisions. Bush's White House and Pentagon were, and are, a dysfunctional family. Writing about the blunder of dismantling the Iraq Army, Packer notes:

There's good news from fractured, chaotic Iraq: Thanks to the U.S., Iraqi factions are putting aside their tribal and political differences and are pledging unity to save their country.

If you read only U.S. newspapers and watch U.S. TV, you probably missed this fascinating development.

Not that this is a triumph of U.S. diplomacy. The factions are those that have launched thousands of deadly attacks on American soldiers and Iraqi police, and they're unifying only to drive the U.S. occupiers out of their country.

You might have heard Colin Powell say July 18 on NPR that the U.S. cannot maintain its current level of American-soldier fodder in Iraq beyond mid-2008. Powell lied in February 2003 about WMD in Iraq, but he's probably not lying now. NPR's intro noted:

But the bigger news — practically ignored by U.S. media — was from Seaumas Milne of the Guardian (U.K.), who wrote July 19 from Damascus:

But just because these rebels are announcing a political alliance doesn't mean that it's a peaceful one. Milne's story continues:

It's only smart for the Sunni rebel groups to try to position themselves now for what inevitably will be peace talks — to the chagrin of the Bush regime — between the insurgents and U.S. officials (forget the Iraqi "government, which has little control over the country). And it's smart for them to try to distance their own violence against Shi'ites (and U.S. soldiers) from other rebels' bombings of civilians (and U.S. soldiers).

This new Sunni alliance does increase the pressure on George W. Bush's regime to start pulling out — as Bush's father should have done 61 years and nine months ago.

But withdrawing from Iraq is too big a decision to leave to the president. What does Dick Cheney think? He told a cluster of Boys State delegates in Wyoming last month:

No problem. A number of our soldiers will continue to arrive home in coffins.

While the big dailies tear themselves away from the Israeli-Palestinian death dance to focus this morning on another U.S. "surge" against Iraqi rebels in Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, the residents of Fallujah, west in the desert, are once again being squeezed to death.

We bombed the hell out of Fallujah in April 2004 and again that fall. The next year, we found out, thanks to Human Rights Watch, that Camp Mercury, outside the desert city, was home to our self-described "Murderous Maniacs," who routinely tortured Iraqi civilians for amusement — our soldiers called it "fucking" them. We bombed a hospital to rubble and refused admittance to aid workers. Exactly two years ago, Fallujah was such a madhouse of destruction that Americans were fighting with Americans.

Guess what? We're doing it again to Fallujah. This war has gone on so long that the tragedies are being re-enacted in full. And the Pentagon is spinning this latest Fallujah tragedy of increased chaos and misery into yet another fairy tale of "stabilization."

If you want to measure our progress in Iraq, just keep an eye on Fallujah, where hysteria keeps repeating itself. With such a pattern, no wonder our own hospitals are overloaded with stressed-out, freaked-out, mentally ill U.S. soldiers.

Things could always be worse, and they are if you live in Fallujah. The U.N. news service IRIN reports this morning:

Water? Forget about it. Electricity? Only if you have your own generators and fuel. IRIN continues:

Oh, yeah? Here's how the Pentagon's permanently embedded reporter Tim Kilbride of the American Forces News Service spins it, writing only five days ago:

In fact, we're even winning the Iraqis' hearts and minds, according to Marine Col. Richard Simcock, commander of Regimental Combat Team 6:

"Success" is in fact the key word in this "district-type plan." The Pentagon propaganda continues:

Except from those who are still alive.

It's bad enough that the Pentagon's just-released report on Iraq contains some frightening news — some of it quite blunt — for U.S. soldiers and their families. But a closer look reveals some even worse news on the semantic front. In other words, the War Department tried like hell to put a smiley face on things but just couldn't. That means the situation is really bad.

The bottom line is that George W. Bush announced a "New Way Forward" on January 10 — the regime must have borrowed the name from Mao — and a "surge" of U.S. troops, officially named Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Enforcing the Law, or Law and Order), was launched on February 14. The fardh is something of a farce. Known by its acronym of FAQ (someone has a sense of humor, even if it's unintentional), the surge was supposed to start quelling the violence in Baghdead. Instead, the number of attacks overall has risen and has spread from Baghdad to places like Diyala province.

Since the surge began, the percentage of attacks against the U.S. has declined slightly, but the percentage of attacks against civilians and Iraqi army and cops has increased. The overwhelming majority of attacks, as always, are aimed at American soldiers, proving once again that the only thing that unifies Iraqis who have guns and bombs is that they want us the hell out of their country.

The report's language, though, is the point. The report is titled "Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq." What it measures is instability and insecurity.

A key chapter is titled "National Reconciliation." What it measures is the increasing number of schisms, concluding that "some analysts see a growing fragmentation of Iraq."

"Some analysts"? That's a handy device used by the Pentagon to try to distance itself from its own conclusions. Reporters use that technique when asking tough questions without directly making the accusations themselves so that the conversation doesn't get too personal and the person being questioned will keep talking — "Some people say you did indeed take $10,000 in bribes, Congressman Phil N. DeBlank, and that the money, they say, was in small bills stuffed into a brown envelope."

Anyway, the report's section titled "Political Commitments" is about the lack thereof:

And the section titled "De-Ba'athification Reform" is actually about re-Ba'athification: the long-overdue strategy of re-admitting into the government bureaucracy people who were lesser members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party — many people had to join Saddam's party to get government jobs, just as people on Long Island had to join the Nassau County GOP (until recently, the nation's most powerful local political machine) if they wanted jobs. The Bush regime and its preposterous pasha, Jerry Bremer, swept everyone out of the army and government in 2003, a move that since has been called the U.S.'s gravest miscalculation of the entire Iraq debacle.

Digression: Way back on May 14, 2003, when Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, the San Francisco Chronicle's Robert Collier wrote:

Good move, Jerry. You earned your Medal of Freedom then and there. (See "Full Medal Jackoffs," December 15, 2004.)

Back to the current Pentagon report. On the re-Ba'athification, it notes:

To be fair, the report's section titled "Government Reform" is about something that hasn't yet happened:

And finally, the section titled "Rule of Law" shows that there isn't much:

One thing, however, that the surge has done is increase the number of people arrested:

"Beds"? Those are prison-cell beds. At last, some good news: We're building more prisons. That's something the U.S. knows about: We have the highest prison population rate in the world.

The report says the U.S. has vowed to show the Iraqis how to run their prisons. The report doesn't say who we're sending them to do that. Hopefully it's not Lynndie England.

First the dome, then the minarets. The news today from Iraq is even more grim than usual.

The terrorist bombing this morning of a sacred shrine in Samarra comes on the heels of a really grim assessment by an American general of how many more centuries we'll be in Iraq.

It was only last month that a U.S. Marine blogging smartly from Iraq as Licari of Arabia wrote about the February 2006 terrorist bombing of the Golden Dome — the Al Askari shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad — as a "sentinel event." Licari explained that the "psychological damage to Iraq's Shia population was stunning." Riots and more bloodshed ensued after that bombing.

So what's going to happen after this morning's bombing of the shrine's minarets? As the BBC reports:

At least this time, we didn't directly do the damage. Back in 2004, we dropped a 500-pound bomb on a Fallujah mosque, pulverizing both of its minarets. "Yes, good, destroy a mosque and create another 10,000 jihadists," I wrote at the time.

Today's bombing will roil Iraq even more, and remember: It was only yesterday that Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey painted one of the grimmest assessments yet of our agonizing entanglement in the Iraq debacle. As the Washington Post reported this morning:

Dempsey laced his sober analysis with a morsel of erudition:

Sisyphus was a scumbag leader who was punished for his trickery by being forced to roll a huge boulder up a hill. Each time he did so, the boulder would escape his grasp and roll all the way back down. So he would have to do it again and again. Forever.

Maybe I credited Dempsey with too much savvy. Yes, the boulder may not roll over us, but we're going to keep trying to push it up the hill again and again. And we'll inevitably fail.

In this modern-day tragedy, the boulder is crushing Iraqis each time it rolls down the hill. And who's being punished by having to do the damn pushing? Not our scumbag leaders but American soldiers.

It probably all sounds like Greek to our Congress. It certainly did back in October 2002 when they paraded lemming-like behind the Bush regime over the cliff and down into Iraq.

Amid the stifling heat, the prickly rash of a hated occupation by foreign soldiers, and the outbreak of car bombings by terrorists, frustrated Iraqis are blowing up their own government.

That's odd: Don Rumsfeld's propaganda machine doesn't mention that this morning. Instead, the Defense Department proclaims:

Terrorists in Iraq have been unable to derail the political process, a new Defense Department report on Iraqi stability and security states. Still, the report contends, insurgents "remain capable, adaptable, and intent on carrying out attacks."

The report to Congress on measuring stability and security in Iraq says the inability of insurgents to derail political progress is a "noteworthy strategic indicator of progress toward a stable security environment."

Is this some sort of sick joke? The "report" is nothing more than the latest Weekly Status Report—the same vague charts—that the U.S. government has been pumping out for months, only this time accompanied by more bullshit.

I've written plenty about these weekly reports—at first produced by Defense and now by State—how they've become less and less informative as the situation in Iraq has gotten worse and worse, how they constantly overstate the number of Iraqi cops and soldiers.

This latest version, transmogrified by Rumsfeld into "good news," doesn't even mention that the total number of "trained" troops includes those who have gone AWOL.

Compare page 12 of this new Rumsfeld report with page 6 of the July 6 State Department Weekly Status Report and you'll see what I mean: It's the same chart, with the "soldiers" and "cops" columns reversed. The numbers are very similar but slightly different, which is odd, because each chart says the data are as of July 4.

Of course, only the State Department version includes the footnotes about the figures being padded by the AWOL troops. Below are the charts I'm talking about. Sorry they're so small, but I'm hemmed in by the layout. Click on each to get the PDF files.

I guess Rumsfeld figures that Congress is too stupid and lazy to compare the two charts and realize that he and his staff are—in addition to twisting, massaging, and omitting—just making up this shit as they go along. I guess he's probably right.

Besides the lies, what the Bush regime is neglecting to tell you is that the political process in Iraq is blowing up without the direct aid of explosives.

Just a couple of days ago, the Baghdad provincial council unanimously decided to fire the city's governor, Alaa al-Tamimi, accusing him "of being incapable of dealing with his responsibilities," says the daily Al-Adala (brought to us by the intrepid Ali Kadhim Marzook in the Baghdad bureau of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting). The IWPR's summary continues:

The council also said he is not firm in dealing with his staff, which resulted in bad services for the people and corruption. The council added that he is always out of Iraq and relies on people who are not competent to run his office. They accused him of corruption, saying he used 13 billion Iraqi dinars a month as salaries for the office of guards and security, but no one knows where this office is.

Digression: George W. Bush was right: We really are building a Western-style democracy there. Al-Tamimi would be right at home in the Nassau County GOP, Al D'Amato's old machine, which plundered one of the nation's richest counties and left its citizenry with outrageously high taxes and poor services. (Full disclosure: That includes me.) Alaa al-Tamimi. Al D'Amato. They even sound the same. End of digression.

You careful readers of Iraqi politics, please note: Alaa al-Tamimi is not to be confused with Alwan al-Tamimi, deputy leader of the Diyala provincial council, who was blown up for real on June 2 in Baquba. A car bomb killed the latter al-Tamimi and three of his bodyguards as their convoy drove past.

Bodyguards aren't safe even when their boss isn't around: Earlier that day, the bodyguards of Deputy Prime Minister Ruz Nuri Shawis were eating in a Baghdad restaurant when it exploded. The bomb not only destroyed the place but also set eight cars on fire. Shawis wasn't there, because he travels by air. Of his guards, who traveled by car, one of them was killed and six others injured.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out who's getting blown up, who's getting kicked out, who's doing what. Maybe that's because, as the daily Al-Sabah reports, Iraq's Ministry of Information has been dissolved.

Well, at least the courts are functioning. After all, Saddam Hussein is about to go on trial, right?

But the legal office of the Council of Ministers, according to the daily paper Baghdad, has decided to get rid of the court system's director general, security director, and seven judges of the criminal court. That's because they had contact with the dissolved Baath regime. Twelve to 17 more judges face ouster for the same reason.

That shouldn't stop Saddam's supposedly upcoming trial. Only the hell that is Iraq itself could do that. His lawyer Giovanni di Stefano—at least di Stefano claims to be one of Saddam's lawyers—wants a change of venue for obvious reasons, telling the Associated Press the other day:

"Do you fancy spending a year or more in Baghdad, going to court five days a week? Would you feel safe there?

"Baghdad couldn't even prevent the recent kidnapping and killing of the Egyptian ambassador. There are also many Iraqis who want to see Saddam executed and many others who want to see him freed. That means the defense and prosecution would both be in danger there."