Informed Comment: Bush Abdicates to Generals on Iraq; <br> 10 Killed in Sadr City; <br> Al-Maliki Excludes Sadrists
War turns Republics into dictatorships. The logic is actually quite simple. The Constitution says that the Congress is responsible for declaring war. But in 2002 Congress turned that responsibility over to Bush, gutting the constitution and allowing the American Right to start referring to him not as president but as ‘commander in chief’ (that is a function of the civilian presidency, not a title.)

Now Bush has now turned over the decision-making about the course of the Iraq War to Gen. David Petraeus.

So Congress abdicated to Bush. Bush has abdicated to the generals in the field.

That is not a Republic. That is a military dictatorship achieved not by coup but by moral laziness.

Crooks and Liars » Sen Menedez to Amb. Crocker: Reconstruction billions have worsened everyday Iraqi life
Some of Menendez’s figures are downright infuriating. This is what $25 billion has gotten us:

43% of population lives in absolute poverty
prior to war 19% of children suffered malnutrition; today 28%
last year 75% elementary-aged kids went to school; now 30%
prior to war 50% lacked access to clean water; now 70%
only 50 of 142 primary health care centes are open to publicAmbassador Crocker’s response is exactly what you would expect:

“Security conditions made it difficult to bring projects to closure in a timely fashion.”

What a tangled web we weave.

Heckuva job Bushie.

An honest editor might change that to:

Despite reality, Bush continues to lie.

AFP: Pentagon says new Iraq fighting arises from surge’s success
The Pentagon on Wednesday said an eruption of violence in southern Iraq, where US-backed government forces were battling Shiite militias, was a “by-product of the success of the surge.”

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said it showed that the Iraqi government and security forces were now confident enough to take the initiative against Shiite extremists in the southern port of Basra.

“Citizens down there have been living in a city of chaos and corruption for some time and they and the prime minister clearly have had enough of it,” he said at a Pentagon press conference.

More on the deteriorating situation in Southern Iraq here from Juan Cole.

Five years on, Bush again talks of Iraq victory | U.S. | Reuters
President George W. Bush said on Wednesday he had no regrets about the unpopular war in Iraq despite the “high cost in lives and treasure” and declared that the United States was on track for victory.

And exactly what would Iraq look like in this iteration of his standard victory speech? It’s changed enough times that I’ve lost track.

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 03/10/2008 | Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam’s regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

Greater Wignuttia is all over this story with thier usual panche:

Gateway Pundit fabulously mistates the whole thing, 

UNBELIEVABLE!

Just when you thought that the mainstream media had hit rock bottom…
McClatchy Newspapers reported today that there is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq…”

No where does it say that there is no Al-Qeada in Iraq, but you can’t let that get in the way of a good spittle flecked rant.

Where to begin? How about Hitchens adding up the comparative costs of the containment policy that was demonstrably working? They’ve yet to find the mythical WMDs that were supposed to have made Saddam a worldwide threat. The policy pursued  by Bush Sr. and Clinton worked, plain and simple, at a much lower cost in blood and treasure, even if you totally ignore the plight of the Iraqi people and the uncounted death and suffering they endured. It would have still been cheaper in America blood and treasure, even if you take the morally indefensible position of ignoring the suffering inflicted on innocent families.

Their lame joint effort to affix a cost to the Iraq war is entirely based on an unspoken assumption that has nothing to do with economics or even with political economy. And that assumption (widely shared but seldom if ever articulated) is that our engagement with Iraq was somehow “a war of choice” — to use a favorite catchphrase from a few years ago — and thus that all of its costs, ranging from the physical damage to Iraqi infrastructure to the moral damage to our warriors, could have been avoided by abstention.

I don’t know anybody who knows anything about the subject who believes anything so frivolous.

Yes Chris it WAS a war of choice. It’s your lame attempt to rewrite history to favor your viewpoint that’s “frivolous”.

Update : An additional takedown by attaturk here.

The Washington Monthly sets out to end the debate on torture by presenting a series of short essays from people across the political spectrum on why torture is, in fact, bad. The real tragedy here is that is necessary to make this point in the USA in the 21st century.

Here’s a quote from the essay by Bob Barr (he’s not your typical dirty hippy, liberal peacenik):

This administration has gone beyond even the Bizarro World standard of declaring up to be down or left to be right. Not only is torture not torture, but there exists insufficient clarity even to know what is torture so we can determine whether an interrogation technique is torture or not. While the extreme sophistry and word gamesmanship practiced to a fine art by this administration might make a high school debating coach proud, it does great disservice to the notion that we exist in a society in which there are rules and norms of behavior with clarity and definitiveness and in which government agents as well as the citizenry are held to standards of behavior. This is not something of which we as Americans should be proud, and the use of torture will come back to haunt us in ways this administration apparently either doesn’t realize or simply doesn’t care about.

Kenneth M. Duberstein (former Reagan Chief of Staff) & Richard Armitage (Deputy Sec Def):

We will not win the war on terror merely by being brutal or tough. We must build policies that are first and foremost effective. Torture undermines our effectiveness in this struggle because it debases us. It reduces us to the same brutality as our enemies, and it alienates people around the world who, as General Colin Powell wrote, are “beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

America must keep itself free and secure by explicitly and unequivocally rejecting torture.

Across its history, America has been many things: a beacon of hope, the arsenal of democracy, a champion of human rights, and a liberator. In this long litany, there is no room for torture. It is not what we are about as a country.

Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore – The Boston Globe
Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq – including about 10,500 Americans – are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Basically: borrow around a trilllion from the Chinese to give Iran a new client state next door, occupy it for the next thirty years, and still keep oil at $106 a gallon barrel. Yes: lots to debate.

Death, strategic and financial disaster, way to go Bushie.

File this one under “no shit?”

The great unanswered question of the last six and a half years is: why haven’t we been attacked again? There are logically two – not necessarily exclusive – possibilities: our defense has been getting much better; their offense was over-rated. I suspect that technology, good police work, and plenty of heroic stories that neither you nor I know about have made a difference. But seven years is a long time. And Bush is not exactly Mr Competence, is he?Have we misread the world – and over-estimated the threat – even more profoundly than we realize? That is the question.

A small band of cave dwelling bomb throwers was never an existential threat to the US. On the other hand, the reaction to terrorism by the Bush administration most definitely is a threat to the principles this nation has always stood for.

The questions are:

• Are we better off for this huge cost in blood and treasure?
• Did we buy better security?
• What were the opportunity costs of going into Iraq?

I’d argue that we are less secure, and less able to respond to terrorist threats elsewhere and missed the opportunity to capture those who were behind 9-11. Also our policies and tactics in the war have greatly assisted the cause of Jihad by imprisoning people without due process and torturing captives. It serves to prove them right about us to the world and assists in fund raising and recruitment efforts.

I heard that Prince Harry has been secretly serving with the British Army in Afghanistan since December, this is until he was outed by Matt Drudge. Military officials will now have to pull Harry out of his unit because he’s such a high profile target that he endangers other members of his unit.

Two things strike me about this story. First Matt Drudge is an asshole for breaking this story despite the obvious fact that it place lives in danger. Maybe that should just be a base assumption that just goes without saying. Secondly, I applaud the tradition of military service in the royal family and I wish the elite families in our country would feel the same obligation to serve in the military. If you want to be in a position to be commander-in-chief and order people to die in battle, you should have a very, very good idea of what that means on a real personal level.

This was the closest thing to political progress from the Iraqi national gvoernment the administration could find since the begining of the surge. Shot down in flames.

Michael Kinsley lays out why, in Bush’s own terms, the surge is a failure. Simply put the stated purpose was to increase troop levels temporarily for the purpose of reducing violence enough to begin bringing troops home. We have yet to get back to the 130,000 level prior to the surge and further draw downs have been paused. There are still about 150,000 military personnel in country now and political progress has been minimal at best. Yes victory is ours and we can’t withdraw because we’re winning. Yes let’s remain in Iraq forever, it’s done such wonderful things for both nations.

Unchecked surveillance threatens security as well as privacy
The debate over changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal framework governing how agencies like the NSA conduct wiretaps—is typically framed as a contest between the competing values of security and privacy. But in an article published in the latest issue of IEEE Security & Privacy, a team of top network security experts argue that large-scale digital surveillance creates new security risks and vulnerabilities as well. “The US,” the authors warn, “could build for its opponents something that would be too expensive for them to build for themselves: a system that lets them see the US’s intelligence interests, a system that could tell them how to thwart those interests, and a system that might be turned to intercept the communications of American citizens and institutions.”

Mukasey Demurs on Waterboarding – New York Times
“Given that waterboarding is not part of the current program and may never be added to the current program, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to pass definitive judgment on the technique’s legality,” the attorney general said, speaking in the cautious way that his Senate questioners have sometimes found evasive and infuriating.