Plan for your PR, Pelosi

As we approach eight years of war, too many military families are quietly coming apart at the seams. The public hears the most dramatic stories and statistics -- soldiers killing their wives, themselves, each other. Less well known are the effects that prolonged war and multiple deployments have had on our daily lives. As the wife of a commander of a battalion that deployed last year, I know that many of us feel embittered, powerless and disconnected from the Army in which we and our husbands serve.
The blogosphere provides a sense of the many families coping with health issues and the less tangible effects of war and military life, including how marginalized many feel. "Spare me the rah rah party line about how much the Army is doing for the soldiers once they come home," wrote one wife whose husband had suffered a traumatic brain injury. "[T]hey don't do even half of what they should to provide adequate treatment for soldiers coming back from deployment." Wrote another wife: "We are outsiders living inside an institution that doesn't want to see or hear us. . . . You don't have to wear a uniform to be wounded by these wars, but no one outside of those of us impacted seem[s] to know this."
Dishearteningly, the response from Army and Defense Department leaders has been haphazard, sluggish and widely ineffective.

The above is from Kristina Kaufmann's "Army Families Under Fire" (Washington Post) which is probably the only must read in the paper's this morning. Last night, we noted US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and US House Rep Rush Holt visit to Iraq and there's not a great deal you can say about it though many try. In the New York Times, Campbell Roberston covers it with "Pelosi Meets With Iraq Leaders in a Surprise Visit to the Country" (A8 in the national edition). Online a version of the article appears with Timothy Williams added to the byline and an opening about the Kurdistan region being allowed to sale oil (only thep hoto of Pelosi with Ayad al-Sammaraie runs in the paper, a Reuters photo by Saad Shalash, the other photo online does not appear in the paper). Jack Dolan covers it for McClatchy here. Anthony Shadid and Nada Barki cover it for the Washington Post and probably do the strongest job (including when you factor in AP) because they've got some perspective and context. We'll note this section:

Pelosi was careful not to signal any long-term military commitment in Iraq, saying the United States intends to "help economically and culturally."
She expressed hope that "all of this struggle will be worth it in the end." But she warned against thinking "there's a guarantee there might not be some continued violence."

And we'll also note that when the Trade Minister's brother got arrested depends upon which outlet you read this morning. (We'll stick with Saturday based on the BBC.) Actually, we'll point out one more thing: Pelosi and Holt wanted publicity for their visit. They bungled it. Neither features photos on their website. By the time their offices get around to posting photos, the news cycle will have moved on. (And with Pelosi, it's two websites. Her Congressional one and her Speaker website.) It was really dumb to have made a visit like that and not been prepared ahead of time to ensure that you got the publicity you wanted. (And the trip was pure PR.)

Dropping back to Sunday's New York Times, Sam Dagher's "Arrest of Ex-Militant Who Switched Sides Shows Iraqi Reconciliation Pitfalls" (A12 in the national edition) addressed the continuing targeting of the Sahwa members. Mullah Nadhim al-Jubouri was arrested on May 2nd along with two brothers and charged with terrorism. He tells the paper, "Arresting Awakeing leaders at this juncture is a very big mistake that created a security void." Most important line in the article: "The Awakening members in Dhuluiya will get their last paychecks from the American military this month, after which the government is supposed to take over, according to Mr. Jubouri's deputy, Mohammed, who also goes by the same tribal last name." It's the same old song . . . And I'm remembering all the nasty e-mails that came in here, specifically from two news outlets, insisting we were wrong and they were right, that all Sahwa were paid by al-Maliki in April. I won't hold my breath awaiting news that they've e-mailed again to say, "Woops!"

On not being in the mood yesterday, Mike's already called and you can read his site tonight. He's going to write about some of the issues during the latest edition and my problem was and is, if people are preparing a report and we need to do a rollout, we do one. There was a short feature that was either completed or would have taken two seconds to complete that got killed and may run next week but it is part of a rollout for a feature Dona, Jess, Isaiah and Dallas will be writing next month. It's also part of a new focus we'll be doing at Third. I'm not mad at anyone (including Jim) but I did think it was incredibly rude to have had Isaiah participating ALL NIGHT during the writing edition when the only reason he was participating was for the feature that got killed. (Isaiah asked that his name not be listed in Jim's note to the readers, lest anyone think he's been forgotten.) On Ava and my end, we were talking to friends working on Fringe when they mentioned something that we worked into one sentence and did so because it was part of what we thought was the rollout for the upcoming article and for part of Third's new focus. It's a funny line so it's fine that's it's still in there but it was supposed to be part of a focus that didn't happen. Mike'll go into this at length tonight. He didn't ask (maybe because he knew) so I'll note this here. We're going through next November. We may go past that, but we made the decision to go through November. Elaine, Ava and I want to bail, we're tired of it. Others wanted to continue so we'll do another six months or so. My one request was that, for Third, we think of one thing we're not doing that we could be doing to make it worth six more months. I tossed that out two weeks ago and Dona, Ty and Jess came up with an emphasis which I think is a good one (and has been hugely popular the other times we've accidentally stumbled upon it). That new thing being brought in is part of the story Dona, Jess, Dallas and Isaiah will be doing. And three of them will have to fly somewhere for this story. I think it's an interesting story, I think it's a new element, I'm looking foward to seeing the photos and reading the copy. This paragraph covers Third's writing edition so I'm tossing out links for all (copying and pasting from Jim's note):

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, and Ava,
Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz,
Ruth of Ruth's Report,
Wally of The Daily Jot,
Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ
and Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends.

Back to the Sunday New York Times, Tamar Lewin's "Drafted at 19, Opposing Military Recruiters at 61" ran on A19 of the national edition and dealt with Miles Wooley who teaches at Southwest Miami High School, a veteran of Vietnam, and someone who opposed to the campus military recruitment going on, "I love my school and my students, and in a way they've become my children, so the intensity of recruitment struck me as wrong. I recognize the need for a national defense, but high school students are too young and unformed to really question what they're being told, and it feels to me like exploitation."

Remember Steven D. Green faces his sentencing hearing today. The defense is planning a sob-fest.

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.

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Counter-insurgency is not ethical, it's that basic

Antiwar.com rolls in touting Col. Gian Gentile as an unrecognized savior and slams CNAS for being having several people (Nagl, Kilcullen, Exum, me) being focussed on counterinsurgency. Note to bloggers: This is what happens when someone writes about an area about which they know absolutely freaking nothing. This is one reason, for example, I try to avoid writing about, among other things, basketball, golf, cats, oboes, scuba diving, physics, Maxwell's demon, electric cars, farming, abstract sculpture, the works of Anthony Powell, South America, or Buddhism.
What's Antiwar's point here? Bad on CNAS, I guess, for being interested in issues like protecting the population. I mean, does Antiwar.com understand what it is advocating here? I've seen how the U.S. military operated in Iraq in 2003-06, and I really think we don't want to go back to that approach.

The above is from Thomas E. Ricks' "Why knowing something is important" (Foreign Policy). Ricks is the author of The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq 2006-2008 -- a book I strongly recommend. I don't know what Antiwar's point is (they're a libertarian site so we generally don't link to them) but if Ricks' wants to be a blogger, he's written the perfect post. If he wants to be considered a journalist, he needs to dial it down about a thousand.

After he does, he might ask himself, "Center for a New American Security?" American? Then get trashy David Kilcullen the hell out of your organization. You never should have let him in to begin with. Non-Americans in a organization entitled "Center for a New American Security" and you don't see a problem?

How about non-Americans who appear before Congress trashing our laws -- Smith-Mundt Act most recently on Thursday, see that day's snapshot -- you really think that looks good for your organization?

Counter-insurgency is something Ricks doesn't understand. He thinks he does because he's part of the new wave that met with the modern day equivalent of the Nazis -- that's all they are, Sarah Sewer, Sammy Power, all of them. (Added "all of them" refers to the 'creative trust' Power, Sewer, McFate, et al. I was not calling Thomas a Nazi.)

Thomas E. Ricks is the one who doesn't know what he's talking about in this regard.

He throws out what he saw in Iraq (with a link to his previous book) but he didn't report some of the important events in that book. If he's going to hop a high horse about what he knows then he damn well better of told all he knows. It is laughable for someone asking twenty or so dollars for a book -- a lengthy one -- to turn around and claim that someone else doesn't know everything he or she does.

And it is insane to offer that there is only A (which he kind-of witnessed and sort-of wrote about in Fiasco) or B and that A was awful so B must be done.

Life is rarely so simplistic that there are only two choices.

I don't know Gian Gentile or of him. We're not interested. Antiwar is and that goes to the political differences between this community and that site. But this "the military will save us!" thread is one that Antiwar and Thomas E. Ricks share, though neither would easily cop to it.

Here's reality that Ricks needs to face: He doesn't know what's he's talking about.

The criticism of his book was that it focused on the US military and ignored Iraqis. That was a point he allowed was valid. I didn't and I don't. He's a military reporter and that was the focus of his book. I don't think he should have attempted to suddenly become an expert on Iraqis in a month or two to add a chapter or pad out the book. That wasn't his focus and I did not and do not fault him for that. But he needs to grasp that his focus has never been the Iraqis and, therefore, he needs to grasp that his cheerleading of counter-insurgency is based on the US needs.

That is the heart of the long and historical objection to counter-insurgency and for him to try to act as though he's smarter or more informed than Anti.war while failing to grasp his obvious blind spot is really something.

Some people, not Ricks, were defending the use of psychologists and psychiatrists in the 'questioning' of prisoners not all that long ago. Earlier in the decade, look it up, a number of 'respectable' people were justifying that. There were a number of us refusing to go along with that because there is such a thing as ethics. And that's what Ricks fails to grasp. He knows his military, he got a degree in journalism (so he's as informed academically as a general studies major) but he doesn't know the first damn thing about a real field with real ethics.

Please, let's not pretend journalism ever had any ethics. PR created 'ethics' for journalism when it moved from a craft to a profession. As a general rule, any profession that depends upon exposing the personal lives of people in pain to the public can't qualify as highly ethical. "Kick 'em when they're up, kick 'em when they're down" as Don Henley so aptly described the 'ethics' of journalism. In fact, Don's probably captured journalism better than anyone:


Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry

We can do the innuendo
We can dance and sing
When it's said and done we haven't told you a thing
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!

(I've known Don for years for anyone who needs a disclosure. Many summers ago, I drank him under the table in a drinking contest involving straight vodka.)

Ricks holds no degree in the social sciences and he can't speak to or write of the ethical boundaries for any field without doing considerable research so he needs to get off the high horse with regards to Antiwar.com. These little screeds are great for driving his traffic but every time they take place, it hurts his book sales. Intentionally or not, he is defining himself by who he is raging against and that's well and good until you're trying to sell a product. When you're trying to sell a product, a book on Iraq, to a nation that believes the Iraq War was wrong (and even more believes the illegal war is over), you don't need to be ripping apart every outlet known as being against the war because you are defining yourself -- intentionally or not -- as for the war. That is how you will be seen and it's not going to help book sales.

That's a problem for a friend of mine who's busted their ass on Ricks' book and it's a problem for the book itself which is wonderful and one of the year's finest books -- a book that needs to be read by as many people as possible.

David Price does know the ethics of a social science field and he is a member of Network of Concerned Anthropologists. This is from his "Pilfered Scholarship Devastates General Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual" (CounterPunch)


Last year, the anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez determined that anthropologists Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen authored sections of the Manual and contributed to new Iraq counterinsurgency programs, relying on embedded military ethnographers in "Human Terrain System" teams, using anthropologists to assist troops making judgments in the field, employing cultural knowledge as a weapon of "pacification." Drs. McFate and Kilcullen have become media darlings. Kilcullen took on warrior-anthropologist status in last year's uncritical New Yorker profile by George Packer; profiles of McFate in the New Yorker, the S.F. Chronicle Magazine, and More (a glossy women's magazine "celebrating women 40+") sculpt images of Kilcullen and McFate as heroic soldier-thinkers, uncompromisingly harnessing knowledge for the state's agenda. This media campaign provides McFate with frequent opportunities to characterize her critics publicly (as she recently did in the Wall Street Journal) as having no ideas about the military beyond "waving a big sign outside the Pentagon saying, 'you suck.'" While such outbursts make Dr. McFate seem like a character right out of Team America, the military and intelligence community takes her and her work very seriously.
Montgomery McFate holds a Harvard law degree and a Yale anthropology Ph.D. and has worked for various organizations linked to U.S. military and intelligence agencies, including RAND, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Institute for Defense Analysis' Joint Advanced Warfighting Program. She is currently the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System's Senior Social Science Adviser. McFate's current role as Senior Social Science Adviser for the Human Terrain program demonstrates how the military is implementing the Manual's approach to the use of culture as a battlefield weapon. Human Terrain Teams are now embedding anthropologists with troops operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Human Terrain anthropologists have publicly identified themselves (the anthropologist Marcus Griffin even writes a blog on limited elements of Human Terrain work while working in Iraq), while others do not disclose their identity. Human Terrain anthropologists use ethnographic knowledge to advise and inform troops in the field while traveling with armed escorts and are, in some instances, themselves armed and wearing uniforms, yet McFate maintains that these anthropologists are in compliance with basic anthropological ethical standards, mandating that participants in research projects participate under conditions of voluntary informed consent.
In a recent exchange with Dr. McFate, Col. John Agoglia and Lt. Col. Edward Villacres on the Diane Rehm Show, I pressed McFate for an explanation of how voluntary ethical informed consent was produced in environments dominated by weapons. In response, McFate assured me that was not a problem because "indigenous local people out in rural Afghanistan are smart, and they can draw a distinction between a lethal unit of the U.S. military and a non-lethal unit." It also remains unclear how Human Terrain Teams comply with basic ethical standards, mandating that their research does not result in harm coming to the individuals they study as a result of their work.
Human Terrain research gathers data that help inform what Assistant Undersecretary of Defense John Wilcox recently described as the military's "need to map Human Terrain across the Kill Chain". The disclosure that anthropologists are producing knowledge for those directing the "kill chain" raises serious questions about the state of anthropology.

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And the war drags on . . .

Throughout history, those who collaborate with the occupiers of their country tend to end up hung out to dry, or dead. The occupation of Iraq is no different; collaboration and the poison fruits that come of it are on full display for the history books once again. Only now, the rapidity with which this is happening is staggering.
On May 5, the Iraqi military killed Basim Mohammed and detained his brother. Mohammed was a member of the Sahwa, the 100,000-strong Sunni militia composed mostly of former resistance fighters that the US created in order to use them to battle al-Qaeda in Iraq, as well as paying them off to draw down the number of attacks against occupation forces.
The Sahwa, who were supposed to be given government jobs either in security or in civil services, have been betrayed. Instead of being given the promised jobs, they have been consistently targeted by the Iraqi military, and at times the US military, which has left them vulnerable as well to attacks from al-Qaeda. As a result, they are walking off their security jobs for lack of pay, and have largely ceased their military operations against al-Qaeda. The predictable result is what we have been witnessing over the last months -- a slow but steady increase in the number of attacks against Iraqi and US forces and a dramatic rise in the spectacular car bomb attacks in largely Shia areas that kill scores at a time.
The obvious solution would be for the Obama administration to pressure its client government in Baghdad to fulfill promises to incorporate the Sahwa into its ranks, as well as applying pressure to Prime Minister Maliki to lay off targeting the Sahwa and its leadership.
Instead, Sahwa members like Mohammed are being killed and their family members detained, and the attacks continue. On May 3, Iraqi forces arrested Nadhim al-Jubouri, a Sahwa leader in the volatile Salahadin province. In March, Iraqi forces detained Adil al-Mashadani, head of another Sahwa group in the Fadhil neighborhood of central Baghdad -- which ignited clashes between US, Iraqi and Sahwa forces that left three men dead and set the stage for more bloodletting.

The above is from Dahr Jamail's "Laying the Groundwork for Violence" (Dissident Voice) and tonight the BBC reports Abed al-Kairiya ("senior member" of Sahwa, "Awakening," "Sons Of Iraq") was killed in a roadside bombing outside of Baghdad Saturday. In other news, today US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and US House Rep Rush Holt visited Iraq. Pelosi's office notes that they met with Nouri al-Maliki and with Ayad al-Smarai who is the new Speaker of Parliament and was his first meeting with any elected American officials since he became the Speaker. The issues discussed on the trip were:

rooting out wide-spread corruption that is impeding reconstruction and the delivery of services to the Iraqi people;
providing security to all Iraqi citizens;
resolving the border conflict between the Kurds and Iraqis; and
building a strong Iraqi intelligence capability.

On the issue of corruption, Natalia Antelava (BBC) reports Sabah Mohammed al-Sudani, brother of Trade Minister Abd Falah al-Sudani (CIA spelling, also spelled Abed al-Falah al-Sudani and Abdel Falah al-Sudani), was arrested Saturday after he and his brother "vanished in late April as they were about to be arrested." Trade Minister al-Sudani was born in Iraq but lived elsewhere.



His official bio includes:

-Ph.D in Biochemistry, Swansea University , Wales, UK,1981
- Researcher at the Biochemistry Department, Swansea University,Wales,UK
- Member of the British Royal Society of Biological Sciences
- Defending strategic analyzer and political editor, Al-A'alam weekly magazine London,UK
- Founding member of the Islamic House in London,UK
- President and member of the Muslims Youth Association, London ,UK,1986
- Former President of Orient Center for Studies ,London,UK
- Member of Iraq National Assembly,2005
- Minister of Education of the Republic of Iraq,(2005-2006)
- Member of Iraqi Parliament,2006

A government made of exiles. A government of exiles installed by the US (photo below with Carlos Gutierrez, then US Secrectary of Commerce, in July of 2006).



Pelosi and anyone else can make as many visits as they want and it doesn't mean a damn thing. It never will. You can't turn a country over to the exiles. You can't do that and expect it to have any legitimacy with the people of the country. After WWII, the US was among those deciding who would have power in western Germany and who wouldn't. Collaborators with the Nazi regime? Largely kept up (initially). But they didn't go running in search of exiles and they easily could have. Who was targeted? Those were the people (initially) put in charge. So, for example, presses were turned over to Communists and other targeted groups.

There was never a reason to go to war with Iraq. And you hear so many people talk about "we bungled the occupation" as they try to promote illegal wars of choice in the future. I don't believe in doing that but I do think it bears pointing out that the Iraqi government has never had any legitimacy with the Iraqi people because it is not the Iraqi people. al-Maliki is only one of the many exiles. You don't respect people who leave your country to save their own hides and only return after a foreign power topples your government. You don't see those people as being part of your country because they high tailed it out decades ago. While you lived (and suffered), they were off in other countries. The idea that they would then be installed as your leaders is offensive. These installed leaders are Iraqi by birth only and they have no history within the country. And the decision to install these exiles goes to the same arrogance, lack of respect and disregard for history that started the illegal war.


They're just there to try and make the people free,
But the way that they're doing it, it don't seem like that to me.
Just more blood-letting and misery and tears
That this poor country's known for the last twenty years,
And the war drags on.
-- words and lyrics by Mick Softly (available on Donovan's Fairytale)

Last Sunday, ICCC's number of US troops killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war was 4278 and tonight? 4287. Saturday the US military announced: "A U.S. Soldier was killed in a non-combat related vehicle accident May 9. The accident is under investigation. The name of the deceased is being withheld pending notification of next of kin and release by the Department of Defense." And they announced: "JOINT BASE BALAD, Iraq -- A 3rd Sustainment Command (Expeditionary) Soldier died here as a result of non-combat related causes May 8.
The Soldier’s name is being withheld pending next of kin notification and release by the Department of Defense." In other violence . . .

Bombings?

Sahar Issa and Hussein Kadhimm (McClatchy Newspapers) report a Baghdad roadside bombing which wounded three. Saturday Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reported a Mosul roadside bombing which injured one person.

Shootings?

Sahar Issa and Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) report Brig Gen Hakeem Jassim was shot dead in Basra last night. Saturday Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reported 1 police officer shot dead in Mosul and three civilians wounded.


New content at Third:

Truest statement of the week
Truest statement of the week II
A note to our readers
Editorial: Justice for Abeer?
TV: Smart drama and the real fringe
One Sings The Other Doesn't
Magazine throws bash
The Progressive Celebrates 100 Years of Racism
Passing a historical problem off as something 'new...
The woman who should sit on the Court
Diane Rehm censors Abeer
Community reactions to the verdict
She sounds like an idiot
Highlights

Isaiah, where's Isaiah? He's saying that the series he did for El Spirito at the last minute left him without any ideas. I believe he's being kind. It was a long, long session at Third this morning. I just want to get this post done and up, eat something quickly and go to bed. So I will say thank you to Isaiah and note he plans to do a comic at some point during the week. And we have to finish Jim's note to the readers still (for Third). I didn't open the Times today, I'll look at it tomorrow.

Brett Barrouquere (AP) has an interesting look into the limited minds of Steven D. Green's defense team. Pru notes "Iraq occupation leaves a trail of lies and misery" (Great Britain's Socialist Worker):

The end of the British occupation of southern Iraq was accompanied with the usual pomp and circumstance.
Plaques to brave troops were unveiled while the politicians who took us into this war declared it a “noble deed”.
It was anything but. The troops were sent into Iraq on the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction capable of hitting Britain in 45 minutes.
They were kept there on a lie – that they were holding back the tide of extremism and building democracy.
And now they are being withdrawn on another lie – that it is a “job well done” and the country is in a better state now it was before.
Worst of all is the claim that, despite the illegal occupation, the Iraqis appreciate the professionalism of the British army.
The harsh truth is that George Bush and Tony Blair’s war was not worth the life of a single soldier or any of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who perished. Instead of bringing peace the war has left a trail of destruction, misery and uncertainty.
The British occupation was mired in scandal. Stories of torture, summary executions, the shooting of civilians and mass roundups are still emerging.
Far from the “withdrawal” marking the end of the occupation, Britain has simply handed its bases over to the US army.
Iraq is still not independent, democratic or secure. The invasion has created a region that will continue to be the centre of instability and war for years to come.
© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.
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