Good Money Afer Bad

Last month, I read William Gibson's excellent new novel, Spook Country, the plot of which centers on the MacGuffin of a shipping container full of cash, making its way back from Iraq to the United States. It's a great book; read it.

First, though, read "Billions over Baghdad," an appalling piece by Donald L. Barlet and James B. Steele which describes how, with incredible naiveté and incompetence, the United States government transferred nearly $12 billion (with a B, as they say) to the non-government in Iraq in the months after we toppled Saddam. 12 billion bucks, entirely in cash.

By all accounts, the New York Fed and the Treasury Department exercised strict surveillance and control over all of this money while it was on American soil. But after the money was delivered to Iraq, oversight and control evaporated. Of the $12 billion in U.S. banknotes delivered to Iraq in 2003 and 2004, at least $9 billion cannot be accounted for. A portion of that money may have been spent wisely and honestly; much of it probably wasn't. Some of it was stolen.

There are too many fantastic, nauseating details in the piece to really do it justice, from the extra-legal existence of the CPA to the sheer physical dimensions of this much money. Viz.:

During the [Coalition Provisional Authority]'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

726,000 pounds of cash, all belonging by law to the Iraqi people, now mostly gone into the hands of crooked American contractors, regular Iraqi crooks, insurgents and terrorists, and who knows whom else. Sick, and sicker for being just one example of the towering incompetence of the Bush administration.

Neocomedy

I hope we can all agree that the neocons are our enemies. I hope, further, that we can all agree that it's good to make fun of them. Stealing from Andrew Sullivan's blog, Scott Horton at Harpers has put up a few jokes:

Q: What do you get when you cross a neocon with a lemming?
A: Peace.

Q: How many neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb.

A None. God won’t let their light bulbs go out. And it’s an impertinent question.
OR
A. None. George Bush predicts the light bulb will be fully capable of changing itself within 3 months.

If Only the War Were Imaginary, Too

From today's American Progress Report:

Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner said yesterday that a feared Iraqi insurgent Omar al-Baghdadi "never existed." "General Bergner told reporters that a senior Iraqi insurgent captured this month said that the elusive Mr. Baghdadi was actually a fictional character whose declarations on audiotape were read by a man named Abu Abdullah al-Naima.

Why do they call it "intelligence" again? Read the full article in the Times to get the full flavor of this wacky situation: the guy might have been faked by al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia so that they could get more Iraqis to believe in that organization's aims, or the guy might really exist and the captured Qaeda operative who claims he didn't exist is lying, or or or.

Bush Invictus

Peter Baker's new Washington Post piece on George Bush claims that

At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.

Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?

These are the questions of a president who has endured the most drastic political collapse in a generation. Not generally known for intellectual curiosity, Bush is seeking out those who are, engaging in a philosophical exploration of the currents of history that have swept up his administration. For all the setbacks, he remains unflinching, rarely expressing doubt in his direction, yet trying to understand how he got off course.

Honestly, this soul-searching isn't that impressive. In the piece, Bush's interlocutors find him variously exhausted-seeming or upbeat, curious or disengaged, broadly concerned or obsessed with Iraq (to the point of touching one wounded soldier's injured eye), interested in making things right before his presidency ends or just "counting on vindication after he is dead." It's a pretty pathetic picture, but think of that, folks - we have the dubious honor of living through the last days of the worst presidency ever!

Extricandae copiae!

Finally, the anti-war movement can use a classical allusion, just like our chickenhawk friends with their prattle about Greece against Persia, "Carthage must be destroyed," and all that. Kevin Drum at Political Animal got his readership to come up with a Latin way to say, "Bring the troops home," more or less:

Extricandae copiae!

The British Government

This brilliant video makes a song out of Bush's infamous "Sixteen Words" ("The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," from his 2003 State of the Union).

Let's just say it's the most positive effect those words have ever had. (The little scene with multiple Ann Coulters and Condi Rices lined up on either side of Nixon repeating Bush's words is particularly good.)

76% of America Hates You, George

A CBS-New York Times poll (cited here) finds that only 24% of the public approve of Bush's handling of the war. That's not quite the same thing as his overall approval rating, which hovers in the low 30s, but since the war is Bush's signature issue, it's worth noting that he's bad territory. According to Scott Horton at Harper's, the last (and only!) president facing such broad-based public disapproval was Richard Nixon - just before he fricking resigned the presidency.

National Security, Part II

The sniping between Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and the White House over National Guard assistance to Greensburg - destroyed last Friday by a giant tornado - has been nauseating and, you gotta think, totally predictable.

It's largely the administration that's ratcheted up the rhetoric, with Tony Snow using the press secretary's lectern to channel The Secret by saying, "If you don’t request it, you’re not going to get it." Down in the trenches, the wingers think the Democrat Sebelius is a lefty loon out to make the preznit look bad (who wouldn't want that?), exploit others' suffering for her own political gain (see "9/11, responses by Bush to"), and generally fumble her duties.

The Times, sticking to the facts, ma'am, reports that

In Kansas, the National Guard is operating with 40 percent to 50 percent of its vehicles and heavy machinery, local Guard officials said. Ordinarily, the Guard would have about 660 Humvees and more than 30 large trucks to traverse difficult terrain and transport heavy equipment. When the tornado struck, the Guard had about 350 Humvees and 15 large trucks, said Maj. Gen. Tod Bunting, the state’s adjutant general. The Guard would also usually have 170 medium-scale tactical vehicles used to transport people and supplies — but now it has fewer than 30, he said.

And it's not the shortages per se that matter, but the fact that apparently much of this kind of equipment was "pre-positioned" in places that made it harder and slower to get it to Greensburg.

And yes, so while it's terrible that the citizens of that ruined town had to wait and suffer while the rain destroyed what the wind hadn't, I'm worried more about what might happen if there was a major terrorist attack in the U.S. right now. With so many National Guard troops, and so much of their equipment, off fightin' terra in Iraq, who would keep the peace, hunt for survivors, bag the corpses, and move the rubble if, god forbid, we something even a fraction as big as 9/11 occurred now?

If al-Qaeda believes in "hitting them when they're down," they must be cocking a fist right now. Who'd have thought that Bush's policies would become their best force multiplier?

National Security, Part I

Writing at Political Animal, Kevin Drum makes an excellent point: contra the statements of the administration, American withdrawal from Iraq will likely lead quickly to the destruction of al-Qaeda in Iraq:

If we leave Iraq, the country is unlikely in the extreme to become an al-Qaeda haven. Partly this is because it's rage at the American presence itself that provides a big part of the fuel for AQI's growth. Our withdrawal would eliminate that source of rage and devastate AQI's ability to continue its recruiting. Partly it's because, as we're seeing in Anbar province right now, even Sunni extremists don't like AQI. Left to their own devices they'll kill off AQI jihadists in order to protect their own tribal turf. And partly it's because once we withdraw, non-Kurdish Iraq will be free to finish its inevitable transition into a Shiite theocracy — a transition that's sadly unavoidable whether we stay or not. Yes, this transition will be bloody, but in the end Iraq will almost certainly be composed of the Kurdish north, which has no use for al-Qaeda; the remaining Sunni sheikhs, who also have no use for al-Qaeda; and the victorious Shiite central government itself, which likewise has no use for murderous Sunni jihadists on its soil. Between the three of them, AQI isn't likely to last a year.

I'm not a big fan of internecine combat (apart from Mets-Yankees fans), but I've gotta say, having the Shi'ite murderers kill the al-Qaeda murderers sounds fine to me.

Happy May Day

It's May 1, so the Turks are rioting, the Finns are drunk, and the Americans are still suffering with the worst president ever - nothing "may be" about it. To that last point, see Greg Mitchell's summary of how the New York Times analyzed W's "Mission Accomplished" speech four years ago today. It ain't pretty. From an editorial:

From the moment that Mr. Bush made his intention of invading Iraq clear, the question was never whether American troops would succeed, or whether the regime they toppled would not be exposed to the world as a despicable one. The question was, and still is, whether the administration has the patience to rebuild Iraq and set it on a course toward stable, enlightened governance. The chaotic situation in Afghanistan is no billboard for American talent at nation-building. The American administration of postwar Iraq has so far failed to match the efficiency and effectiveness of the military invasion. But as the United States came to the end of one phase of the Iraqi engagement last night, there was still time to do better.

If only.

Waving the Con-flag-ration

Quick - what kind of un-American terror-loving non-supporter of the troops would say something as deranged as this?

America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment. If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference.

No, it's none of the Democratic candidates for president, or even the current frontrunner for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota - it's a retired U.S. army general, Tony McPeak.

He utters these faintly treasonous lines at the end of a Rolling Stone-sponsored discussion of Iraq's future. On his blog, Kevin Drum warns that the conversation's not uplifting, and boy is he right. The discussants mention a wider war involving Turkey and Iran, the collapse of Jordan's monarchy, even "nuclear events going off in the Middle East" (that eternal optimist McPeak again). Read the discussion at your peril.

Michele Bachmann: Too Stupid for Congress

Poor Michele Bachmann: she's dumb as a box of rocks, and in Congress. That's not a good combination for her, or for the country. In fact, it's only good for generating some cruel laughs, like those I emit in reading her attempts to explain what she meant the other week when she said that Iran was teaming up with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq to partition the country and create a "Iraq State of Islam."

Her latest effort to make her brain control her mouth appears in the Strib, and it reads like a C+ freshman-year essay. The gist:

I said that an agreement had already been made to divide Iraq and create a safe haven for terrorists. Rather, I meant that America's adversaries are in agreement that a divided Iraq benefits their objective to expel America from the region, resulting in Iraq being a safe haven for terrorists.

What's up with that "rather"?

Anyhow, she goes on to say,

Let me make myself clear: Both Al-Qaida and the Iranian regime hope for the United States to fail in bringing democracy to Iraq. Destabilizing Iraq is one of their tactics. Moreover, they wish for the destruction of the United States and Israel.

And after some easy quote-mining of our "enemies," concludes - as you knew she would - "The United States faces very real and clear threats from both Al-Qaida and Iran. We must stand strong in the face of terrorism and support our troops in Iraq."

QED, haters!

More at the Minnesota Monitor.

From Bad to Not-Worse?

Writing in the Washington Monthly, Robert Dreyfus takes on the conventional wisdom that an American withdrawal from Iraq will lead to worsening chaos and violence there. This idea is strongest, ironically, among the neocons who used to say that toppling Saddam Hussein would lead to a thousand years of golden peace and prosperity.

But if it was foolish to accept the best-case assumptions that led us to invade Iraq, it’s also foolish not to question the worst-case assumptions that undergird arguments for staying. Is it possible that a quick withdrawal of U.S. forces will lead to a dramatic worsening of the situation? Of course it is, just as it’s possible that maintaining or escalating troops there could fuel the unrest. But it’s also worth considering the possibility that the worst may not happen: What if the doomsayers are wrong?

This beautiful thinking makes the entire piece well worth reading. Not that Dreyfus thinks things are going to get better - it's more likely that they just won't get worse in the same ways. Al-Qaeda won't take over the country, a la 1990s Afghanistan, or even have much influence in a presumably Shi'ite-dominated country. Sunni-Shi'ite violence will probably continue, but may lessen when the antagonist of both parties - the United States - is out of the picture. Kurdish moves towards independence, which would shatter the country, will falter without that group's biggest patron (the U.S. again) around. And with American troops absent as targets and power-brokers, the regional powers - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Syria - will have to cooperate, if only tacitly or indirectly, to keep Iraq from imploding and spilling the war into their territories.

All in all, it's a massive "lesser of two evils" argument, but then again, less evil is less evil.

Iran So Far Away

The political blogosphere is buzzing with news and information about the increasingly sharp confrontations between the U.S. and Iran, not only in Iraq and not only with guns. Riffing on a great Anthony Shahid article in the Washington Post, Josh Marshall has a good summary and editorial:

Over the last five years we've overthrown both governments and in each case, though to differing degrees, created a power vacuum into which the Iranians have been free to extend themselves. Read Shadid's narrative of events and you see that if the US government were in the pay of Iranian agents they would have been hard-pressed to find a series of actions and policies better crafted to increase Iranian prestige and power in the region and decrease ours. We took out hostile powers to their east and west and then took the regional hegemonic power -- i.e., us -- and weakened it dramatically, greatly enhancing, at least in relative terms, their power...

And here we come back to the recurring theme of the Bush presidency: the president's perverse effort to be the beneficiary of his own incompetence and policy disasters.

And Iran's power is waxing. And we're supposed to rely on the approach of the White House, the guys who created the terrible situation in the first place, to solve the consequences of their latest screw up. It's like a perpetual motion machine of calamity and self-justification.

And we're caught on the gears.

Iraqi Dead

With another couple car bombs killing a few hundred more Iraqis today and yesterday, I'm all the more interested in a visit next month to Carleton by one of the statisticians who worked on the study in the Lancet which estimated that about 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war.

I didn't know much about the study beyond the facts that its estimated death rate was far higher than other estimates and that the numbers were instantly politicized by the Left and the Right. Helped out the college library, I did a bit of reading on the methodology and conclusions, and I came away impressed.

First and most important, the methodology yielded not a single figure of Iraqi dead, but a range and a likelihood:

The Lancet study, designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is based on a survey conducted between May and July by a team of 10 Iraqi health workers...The team visited 47 neighborhoods in 18 different regions across the country, going door-to-door and asking families about recent deaths. They collected data from a total of 1849 households containing 12,801 residents. For the 14 months before the invasion, the Iraqi families reported 82 deaths, an annual death rate of 5.5 per 1000 people. Within the same households, 547 people died between the start of the invasion and July of this year--an annual increase of 7.8 deaths per 1000. By applying this rate to the entire population of 27 million, the researchers conclude that 655,000 more Iraqis have died than would have if the invasion had never happened. About 8% of these extra deaths are attributed to deteriorating public health, but an estimated 601,000 are violent--56% from gunshots and about 13% each from air strikes, car bombs, and other explosions. The researchers calculate a 95% probability that the true number of violent deaths lies between 426,369 and 793,663.

The probability rating (which is very high) and the range (which is both very wide and extremely high) are crucial pieces of information that don't usually get cited. Short story: it is far more likely than not that about half a million Iraqis have died due to the war.

There is, as you'd expect, some reasonable dissent to this set of conclusions, disagreement, which the Science article describes. There was also some unreasonable, flippant dissent, like this from our Dear Leader:

I don't consider it a credible report... I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me and it grieves me... This report is one -- they put it out before. It was pretty well -- the methodology is pretty well discredited.

Ah, but not so, Mr. President. Guess which giant, rich, and influential institution uses the selfsame "cluster surveying method"? Let Les Roberts, one of the study's co-authors, tell you:

This cluster survey approach is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.

In other words, it's a good enough technique when we want to figure out how many people the Bad Guys killed, but it's "pretty well discredited" when it's used to figure out how many people the U.S. has killed - or been indirectly responsible for killing.

Rich and Wrong

Radar Online has just published a great piece which looks at eight pundits' attitudes toward going to war in Iraq (four were pro, four were con) and their careers since weighing in. Asks the magazine, "surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America?"

The sad answer:

pro war and now "getting rich by being wrong"
Thomas Friedman (NY Times, every other table at Barnes & Noble)
Peter Beinart (the New Republic)
Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek, etc.)
Jeffrey Goldberg (the New Yorker)

anti war and now "right but poor"
Robert Scheer (former LA Times columnist)
William S. Lind (a little-known conservative writer)
Jonathan Schell (the Nation and Harper's)
Scott Ritter (former WMD inspector)

My wallet's telling me it's time to attack Iran. Who's with me?

The McCain Doctrine

Our good ol' maverick from Arizona is, of course, the leading advocate for the surge of American troops escalation of the war. Today's "Progress Report" from the Center for American Progress points out that he doesn't quite have his math down yet:

In October, McCain declared that "another 20,000 troops in Iraq" were necessary to stem the violence. Five weeks later, that number shot up five times. "We must have more troops over there, maybe 20,000 more Marines, and 80,000 Army," McCain said. "We have to have a big enough surge that we can get Baghdad under control." One month after that, McCain's recommendation had dropped back down. “I would advocate two additional combat units in the Anbar Province, four in Baghdad with one in reserve. That's about 30,000," he told NBC News. On Jan. 4, during a Today Show appearance, McCain was asked, "Will 20,000 do the job in your opinion?” He responded, "I'm not sure. ... To make it of short duration and small size would be the worst of all options to exercise, in my opinion." And on Friday, when asked, "How many troops are you calling for in Iraq?" McCain answered, "We are not specific on numbers."

Backers of the McCain Doctrine keep saying that it's the troops already in Iraq who want more troops there, but Colin Powell - continuing his effort to rehabilitate himself after the embarrassments of his term as secretary of state - has the right response: "The colonels will always say they need more troops. That's why we have generals."