Bring em on!

I have spent the last several years trying figure out if the Bush/Cheney administration and the neocons are stupid and delusional, just plain crazy or if there is some bizarre method to their madness. I'm beginning to think it must be all of the above. They are constantly ranting about Iran but they have and continue to do all of Iran's dirty work in Iraq. They toppled Iran's arch enemy, Saddam, they put the most pro-Iranian elements in Iraq in power and they continue to defend those elements with US blood and treasure. The latest example is this:
Iraqi Army Takes Last Basra Areas From Sadr Force
But of course they didn't do it alone.

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

While the administration talks about about Iran's support for al-Sadr the Iranians are laughing. They like al-Maliki's government just fine since it is supported and controlled by the pro-Iranian ISCI and Da'wa party. The Iraqi security forces are primarily members of the Badr Brigade - a creation of the Iranians.

While that is stupid it is not nearly as stupid as this:
Secretary of State Rice Mocks Muslim Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a Coward

BAGHDAD — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Now the American and British air strikes may have driven the Mehdi army underground but only to fight another day. The always stupid and incompetent Rice has just poured gasoline on embers which will flare up even sooner resulting in the deaths of both Iraqis and Americans. This administration is criminally stupid and incompetent.

It would be funny if it were not so deadly

As shocking as the evil of the Bush administration is it takes second to the complete incompetence the administration as demonstrated. The members of the Bush administration would have been at home in Leonard Wibberley's Duchy of Grand Fenwick. The newest example of the deadly incompetence of the Bush/Cheney cabal is documented by David Rose in Vanity Fair;
The Gaza Bombshell
Go read the article but here are the facts in a nutshell:

• The administration demanded that elections be held in Palestine, the Democracy thing you know.
• Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council which took everyone in the administration by surprise. They must not have been listening to Rumsfeld when he said Democracy is messy.
• The Bush administration told the Abbas to dislove the recently elected government and declare Marshall law.
• They then armed his party, Fatah.
• When word of this leaked out the result was a civil war which Hamas won.
• Hamas confiscated most of the US supplied weapons are are now using them to shoot at Israelis.

Not even the very talented Leonard Wibberly could make stuff like this up. Of course the queen of the Peter Principal - the ever incompetent Condi Rice is right in the middle of all of this. Of course Condi is the queen because she has risen far above of level on incompetence.

Yet another power play

This is yet just another tyrannical power play by the Bush/Cheney cabal.
In Surprise Step, Bush Is Vetoing a Military Bill

CRAWFORD, Tex. — For months President Bush harangued Democrats in Congress for not moving quickly enough to support the troops and for bogging down military bills with unrelated issues.

And then on Friday, with no warning, a vacationing Mr. Bush announced that he was vetoing a sweeping military policy bill because of an obscure provision that could expose Iraq’s new government to billions of dollars in legal claims dating to Saddam Hussein’s rule.

[....]

In a “statement of disapproval,” or pocket veto that lets the bill expire on Dec. 31, Mr. Bush said that the provision could result in preliminary injunctions freezing Iraqi assets in American banks — $20 billion to $30 billion, according to a senior administration official — and even affect commercial ventures with American businesses.

Of course The New York Times fails to mention that since the Senate is officially in session the "pocket veto" is not legal but of course this means nothing to the mobsters in the Bush administration who continue to shred the constitution. But I'm sure that Benito Giuliani approves.

So what should the Democrats do? The situation in Iraq, Afghanistan and the entire region is going to rapidly deteriorate in the next few months. If the Democrats do anything to obstruct the financing of the wars they will be blamed for that deterioration. On the other hand if they let Bush win this one it will be yet another step down the road to a tyrannical unitary executive. The Democratic "leadership" in both the House and the Senate was incompetent from the very beginning and it's too late to do anything about it now. They find themselves between a rock and a hard place with no place to go. As a result Bush will once again get what he wants.

Still more incompetence and another debacle

Most could see the problems with the PKK coming and many could see a way to avert them. Unfortunately none of those people were in the Bush administration' State Department.
A Missed Moment In Iraq

The Bush administration has only itself to blame for the quandary it faces with Turkish forces poised to intervene in northern Iraq. The Turks want to retaliate against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), whose insurgents killed 12 Turkish soldiers Sunday. A massive retaliation would be a major misfortune for Turkey, Iraq and the United States.

First, it would undermine the stability of the only part of Iraq where the United States is welcome. Second, it could plunge Turkey into an Iraq quagmire of its own.

Sadly, this crisis was predictable and predicted. U.S. officials have long known that a Turkish incursion was just one terrorist event away. As tensions mounted, the administration had numerous opportunities to engage in preventive diplomacy. A combination of lack of imagination, incompetence and sheer lack of knowledge at the State Department has caused this impasse. To make matters worse, on Tuesday the department tried to shift the blame to the Iraqi Kurds, expressing unhappiness over their inaction.

A missed opportunity

The irony is that both Iraqi Kurds and the AKP government directly or indirectly signaled the Bush administration that they were interested in a deal. I know that senior Iraqi Kurds have forwarded ideas to U.S. officials. The AKP, on the other hand, sought to test the waters first by sending its intelligence chief two years ago to talk to the Kurds -- something the government is loath to do officially -- and by organizing a private meeting this year between the Kurdish Regional Government's prime minister, Nechirvan Barzani, and then-Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul. The chief of the Turkish general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, who in a fiery speech warned the government not to talk to the KRG, scuttled Gul's meeting.

The Bush administration missed an opportunity when it failed to see and support the desire for such dialogue and use its good offices to construct a "grand bargain" between the Iraqi Kurds and Ankara. At minimum, such a bargain would have required the Iraqi Kurds to dislodge the PKK from Iraq and for the Turks to offer guarantees on trade and security to the Iraqi Kurds.

For the United States, this would have meant the consolidation of northern Iraq; paradoxically, a Kurdish north at peace with Turkey is the best antidote to separation from Iraq. In short, this would have been a winning situation for all.

The best the administration can hope for now is to persuade the Turks to engage in a limited cross-border military operation. That might contain public anger and assuage a vitriolic press.

The only other thing to hope for is bad weather. With the onset of winter and dwindling military activities, Washington will perhaps have the diplomatic window of opportunity it almost closed. Three years late, it will be much harder to succeed.

Of course we are dealing with a State Department headed by Condoleezza Rice - the most incompetent National Security advisor in history who became the most incompetent Secretary of State in history. She has zero respect and credibility in the world so don't expect this or any other "diplomatic" efforts to be successful until 2009.

(Cross posted at OOIBC)

Postponing the inevitable

AP's Robert Burns has just returned from Iraq and reports there are some military gains.

In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year.

It is a phase with fresh promise yet the same old worry: Iraq may be too fractured to make whole.

No matter how well or how long the U.S. military carries out its counterinsurgency mission, it cannot guarantee victory.

Only the Iraqis can. And to do so they probably need many more months of heavy U.S. military involvement. Even then, it is far from certain that they are capable of putting this shattered country together again.

It's been an uphill struggle from the start to build Iraqi security forces that are able to fight and—more importantly at this juncture—able to divorce themselves from deep-rooted sectarian loyalties. It is the latter requirement—evenhandedness and reliability—that is furthest from being fulfilled.

There is no magic formula for success.

The Iraqis are no closer to political stability than they were before the much heralded national election and in fact when Petraeus reports in a month there may be virtually no government at all. The US cannot continue current troop levels more than a few months. What happens when the US draws down. We have seen a preview in the South.
As British Leave, Basra Deteriorates

As British forces pull back from Basra in southern Iraq, Shiite militias there have escalated a violent battle against each other for political supremacy and control over oil resources, deepening concerns among some U.S. officials in Baghdad that elements of Iraq's Shiite-dominated national government will turn on one another once U.S. troops begin to draw down.

What we see from the administration is more of what the former war supporter Michael Ignatieff referred to as confusing wishes with reality. Burns continues:

Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists—rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act.

Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence. They are also counting on improvements in the Iraqi army and police, which are burdened by religious rivalries and are not ready to take over national defense duties from U.S. troops this year.

U.S. military leaders want Congress and President Bush to give them more time to keep trying—to reach a point, perhaps in 2009, when the Iraqis will be closer to reconciliation and ready to provide much of their own security.

The incompetence and ignorance of the Bush administration may have broken Iraq but it's time to recognize that the US does not have the resources, military or political to fix it. The longer the US stays the more Americans die for nothing.

Falling Apart

While we hear about supposed military success as a result of the surge what we don't hear about is that the government is about to fall.
Sunni Arab bloc quits Iraqi government

BAGHDAD - Iraq's largest Sunni Arab political bloc announced its withdrawal from the government Wednesday, undermining Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's efforts to seek reconciliation among the country's rival factions.

Violence continued unabated, with 50 people killed and 60 wounded when a suicide attacker exploded a fuel truck near a gas station in western Baghdad. Another 17 died in a separate car bomb attack in a central region of the capital. The U.S. military announced the deaths of three American soldiers killed by a sophisticated, armor-piercing bomb.

Rafaa al-Issawi, a leading member of the Front, said at a news conference in the capital that the bloc's six Cabinet ministers would submit their resignations later in the day.

Al-Issawi said the decision to pull out from the government followed what he called al-Maliki's failure to respond to a set of demands put forward by the Accordance Front last week, when it gave the prime minister seven days to meet its demands. The ultimatum expired Wednesday.

Among the demands: a pardon for security detainees not charged with specific crimes, the disbanding of militias and the participation of all groups represented in the government in dealing with security issues.

"The government is continuing with its arrogance, refusing to change its stand and has slammed shut the door to any meaningful reforms necessary for saving Iraq," al-Issawi said.

Over at The Huffington Post Chris Weigant explains:
Things (In Iraq) Fall Apart?

While everyone watching the news from Iraq is focused on whether the "surge" is working or not (in anticipation of General Petraeus' upcoming report to Congress), there are powerful undercurrents at work in the region which may do more to define the future of Iraq than any upcoming "the-glass-is-half-full" report in Washington, D.C.

The biggest, and most disturbing, of these is the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki seems to be losing whatever tenuous grip he holds on the reins of government. Boycotts of the Iraqi Parliament are threatened from almost every side, it seems -- Shi'ite, Sunni, and Kurd. As if this weren't bad enough, Maliki also faces an open revolt from within his own Dawa party. And at the same time he seems to be advocating kicking Petraeus out of his country.

While the story which the mainstream media seemed to pay attention to this week from Iraq was that the Iraqi Parliament was taking a month off for vacation (incidentally and completely ignoring the fact that our own American Congress -- and probably President Bush -- will also be taking the entire month off), the real story may be that the Iraqi Parliament may not even have a post-vacation government to come back to.

As Weigant points out when we invaded Iraq and got rid of the Sunni tyrant we were in effect fighting Iran's war. Cheney's man Chalabi certainly knew this since he was apparently working for the Iranians at the time.

Unfortunately (since Bush reportedly had to be told what "Sunni" and "Shi'ite" actually meant, right before we invaded), our support was based solely on political expediency. At some point, it is assumed, someone explained the fact that Shi'ites were the people who ran the next-door government of Iran -- and ever since, our strong support for the Shi'ites has been somewhat fading.

Someone in the White House eventually realized that overthrowing Saddam in order to benefit Iran was probably not the best outcome of the war that the American people could hope for. After all, first we kicked the Taliban out of Afghanistan (removing a huge headache for next-door neighbor Iran), and then we removed Saddam from Iraq (also next-door to Iran, and whom the Iranians had actually fought a war against). Our entire military policy was actually benefiting Iran, and so the spin emanating from the White House began to change, a few months back.

The embarrassing facts "on the ground" were that most of the Iraqi Army (and virtually all of the Iraqi police) which we had so expensively trained, was actually sectarian Shi'ite. And these police were (at night) slipping out to become "death squads" who would deposit dozens upon dozens of Sunni dead bodies -- tortured with power drills, sometimes beheaded -- on the streets of Baghdad each and every morning.

A little military success is meaningless.

And so, we will have enraged every single faction in Iraq, even the only one which liked us to begin with.

While most pundits will be focused this September on such tactical yardsticks as the number of bodies in Baghdad each morning and the number of U.S. military killed in the past month, it needs to be pointed out that these are merely tactical numbers. The larger picture is the overall strategy -- which, it appears on all fronts, we are losing.

So when you hear the reports this September, keep in mind that the most apt Vietnam analogy yet is the "strategic big picture." And in the immortal terminology from Vietnam, it can only be described as: a "clusterfuck."

A Legacy Of Dangerous Incompetence

The legacy of George W. Bush will be incompetence at all levels of his administration. Even many on the right now admit that Donald Rumsfeld will go down as one of the most incompetent "leaders' of the DOD ever. Condolezza Rice was one of the most incompetent National Security Advisers and was allowed to advance and become the most incompetent Secretary of State. Vice President Dick Cheney is not so much incompetent as he is insane. The result of all of this of course is an incredibly dangerous situation in the Middle East. But of course it doesn't stop there.
The Price of Blind Loyalty

For months now we've talked about how the scandal at the Justice Department would have a terrible impact upon the government's ability to adequately and accurately enforce and ensure the rule of law. Now we are beginning to see precisely how this is happening. No longer can anyone claim that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' lack of leadership and candor hasn't hurt his troops "on the ground" -- in the federal courts.

In this morning's Los Angeles Times, Richard Schmitt tells us: "Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics. Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors."

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, came the news about "vacancy problems" at the Justice Department caused in part by the scandal and also by the White House's reaction to it. And in the Sunday New York Times came the thumbsucker piece about how the subpoenas issued last week to former White House counsel Harriet Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor are going to cause a legal showdown over executive privilege.

Were these problems and confrontations avoidable? Absolutely.A strong and independent attorney general never would have let such partisanship seep into the Justice Department from the White House; never would have given creative defense attorneys another argument to make in court against the government. (And the fact that some of these arguments will never succeed is beside the point; that federal prosecutors now have to defend themselves and their political motives drains time and energy and resources away from legitimate business.)

We now have a Justice Department that is unable to recruit talented attorneys and prosecutors that spend more time defending themselves than they do prosecuting. Yes this is the fault of the incompetent Alberto Gonzales but ultimately it is the fault of the most incompetent President in recent history if not ever.

And at the bottom of it all-- or at the top of it all, depending upon your view -- is the president of the United States. His failure to fire his buddy Gonzales, and his failure to demand (sincerely and not just for the cameras) that all of his subordinates cooperate with the investigation, has brought us to this unhappy place, where smart lawyers don't want to work at the Justice Department, current prosecutors have to defend their political persuasions in court, and the judicial system has to now gear up for a constitutional showdown that long ago could have been avoided. All of this is the price all of us are paying for one man's blind loyalty to another.

George W. Bush wanted a legacy. He will have one - the most incompetent administration in history.