Wednesday, August 11, 2010

SOFA doesn't mean 'end of war'

The reality in Iraq may defy that deadline, because many American and Iraqi officials deem the American presence to be in each nation's interest.
"For a very long period of time we're going to be on the ground, even if it's solely in support of its U.S. weapons systems," said Ryan C. Crocker, who was the American ambassador in Baghdad until 2009 and helped to negotiate the agreement that tethers the two countries and mandates that all American troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011.
Even as that deadline was negotiated, he said, a longer-lasting, though significantly smaller, presence of American forces had always been considered to be likely.

The above is from Tim Arango's "U.S. and Iraqi Interests May Work Against Pullout" (New York Times) and they're talking about what? Oh, that's the right, the Status Of Forces Agreement. You know the SOFA, right? Sold as the end of the Iraq War. And you know that to make that case, you had to play stupid. You had to ignore every basic to contract law. You had to be a willful idiot. Apparently you also had to attack those of us who knew what the hell we were talking about.

The SOFA never meant the end of the war. Peace talks were not what the SOFA was about and how idiotic that so many people who should have known better (they lived through the Paris Peace Talks) instead whored it out as "End of war." That's never what it was. It replaced the UN mandate for the occupation of Iraq by foreign forces -- a yearly mandate. The SOFA was a three year contract which had a kill clause (but, after activated, the SOFA dies in 12 months -- meaning it's pointless for either side to kill it now). For the uninformed, a peace treaty never ends 3 years from now. That's not how they work. A large number of the once-upon-a-time informed either developed Alzheimer's or decided to lie. Take it up with them. Meanwhile AFP reports:

The Iraqi army will require American support for another decade before it is ready to handle the country's security on its own, Iraq's army chief of staff said on Wednesday.
Lieutenant General Babaker Zebari said Iraq's politicians had to find a way to "fill the void" after American troops withdraw from the country at the end of next year under a bilateral security pact.


AP notes that Barack Obama talks Iraq today "with his national security team". Huh? When we noted the national security aspect last week, chief beggar of Panhandle Media, we'll call him "Scrotum," e-mailed to insist that I "yet again" did not know what I was talking about. I didn't know what I was talking about on the SOFA -- Scrotum still swears it ends the Iraq War, vagrants can be delusional -- and I didn't know what I was talking about re: the incoming (US) control of Iraq because Iraq would not be a "national security" issue. That's how it's been tasked. You may not like that fact, but take it up with the administration. Today's meeting just brings Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama up to speed with an earlier meeting. Robert Gates (scheduled to be at today's meeting) was briefed already. AFP reports:

The Iraqi army will require American support for another decade before it is ready to handle the country's security on its own, Iraq's army chief of staff said on Wednesday.
Lieutenant General Babaker Zebari said Iraq's politicians had to find a way to "fill the void" after American troops withdraw from the country at the end of next year under a bilateral security pact.

R.M. Schneiderman's "Mercenaries to Fill Void Left By U.S. Army" (Newsweek) covers some of the details of the continued Iraq War:

An influx of mercenaries will become especially important for the State Department, as the military leaves and as Iraqi security forces—while much improved—remain unable to provide the necessary security for what Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, calls “a major expansion” of the department’s postwar presence. Indeed, the number of private security contractors employed by state will grow from roughly 2,700 to as many as 7,000. And those figures don’t include the more than 1,000 tasks that state will inherit from the military once it leaves, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, a bipartisan government panel created in 2008.
These tasks—which include clearing travel routes and driving armored combat vehicles—do not involve attacking, and thus are not military functions, Kennedy argues. But they do potentially increase the chances that “people acting in the name of the U.S.…can get the U.S. involved in perceptions of misconduct,” says a spokesman for the contracting commission.


Karen DeYoung and Ernesto Londono (Washington Post) report that this transition/transformation was agreed to "more than two years ago" and that the economic climate today is different with skyrocketing costs and a Congress increasingly concerned about rising costs: "The State Department has signaled in recent weeks that it will need up to $400 million more than initially requested to cover mushrooming security costs, but lawmakers seem in no mood to acquiesce."

Meanwhile Sadiya is slammed with a bombing. BBC News reports that Iraqi soldiers were shot at from a home and as they were about to raid the home in Saadiya, it blew up. Jomana Karadsheh (CNN) adds 11 people died in the bombing. Deng Shasha (Xinhua) reports at least five Iraqi soldiers were injured and that at least 2 of the dead were civilians: "In the morning, Iraqi security forces and civil a defense tram removed the debris of the collapsed house and found bodies of a man and a woman who were shot dead before the explosion of the house, the source added. The insurgents apparently attacked the house earlier at night and killed the two victims, and then they planted bombs in the house before they sent a false information to the security forces saying that hostages were kept in the house, the source said."

We'll close with Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld's "And the Lies Go On" (World Can't Wait):

Since BP announced that CEO Tony Hayward would receive a multi-million dollar golden parachute and be replaced by Bob Dudley, we have witnessed an incredibly broad, and powerful, propaganda campaign.
A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow themselves to be used to transfer the propaganda, like the New York Times, this message: "The government is expected to announce on Wednesday that three-quarters of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak has already evaporated, dispersed, been captured or otherwise eliminated -- and that much of the rest is so diluted that it does not seem to pose much additional risk of harm."
The Times was accommodating enough to lead the story with a nice photo of a fishing boat motoring across clean water with several birds in the foreground.
This message was disseminated far and wide, via other mainstream media outlets like the AP and Reuters, effectively announcing to the masses that despite the Gulf of Mexico suffering the largest marine oil disaster in US history, most of the oil was simply "gone."
Thus, it's only what is on the surface that counts. If you can't see it, there is not a problem.
This kind of government cover-up is nothing new, of course.



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