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Singing the Baghdad Blues

You know the Bushies are worried when Demented Donald “Freedom is Untidy” Rumsfeld rings up the New York Times and starts treating reporters as if he thought they were members of a similar species. The point of the administration-initiated story headlined Looting Is Derailing Detailed U.S. Plan to Restore Iraq on page one of today’s Times appears to be:

1) To head off any Democratic criticism (unlikely) or public perception that however successful the military campaign in Iraq might have been (and given the fact that there are no WMDs and no Saddam, even that is subject to challenge) the post-war occupation to date has been a complete and unmitigated disaster. By admitting there are “problems,” the administration obviously hopes to make its failure to properly plan for the fall of Iraq an “old” story.

2) To blame the intelligence services, rather than the Pentagon, for underestimating the difficulty of getting Iraq up and running again. The article quotes an unknown White House official as saying "From the outside it looked like Baghdad was a city that works. It isn't." What about those wonderful local connections that our boy Chalabi is supposed to have had in the city? Didn’t they know Iraq’s infrastructure had greatly deteriorated under ten years of American-led sanctions?

3) To bolster the idea that it really did have a plan for post-war Iraq but that the plan was overwhelmed by circumstances that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen—even by Pentagon wonks who clearly know just about everything about everything .

"You couldn't know how it would end," Rumsfeld told Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger of the Times in a curiously Hemingwayesque telephone conversation on Friday. "When it did end, you take it as you found it and get at it, knowing the single most important thing is security."

That’s as close to an acknowledgement of a mistake as you’ll ever hear from that crazy old son-of-a-bitch but it won’t wash. Iraq is a bigger mess today than it was when American troops arrived because virtually all of the assumptions the bright boys at the Pentagon made about the war—and its aftermath—have proven to be wrong. Sorry, Don. It’s time for you to hit the early bird buffet at the Foster City Retirement Village.

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:23 AM

Unsolved mysteries... the drugs and terror connection

The tv ads on Super Bowl Sunday told us that the money that Bobby paid for the joint he’d smoke after school would be passed from the dealer to the terrorists to buy the weapons to bomb the building where Judy’s father was killed. But what if we helped train the terrorists and our allies ran the drugs.

That’s the $64 question nobody inside the Beltway wants to answer. And the irony is that before 9/11 we were spending three times as much moolah to fight drugs than terror. And the bottom line on the total aggregrate spending is producing dubious results and a burgeoning growth industry flying in the face of Constitutional rights. It's all too reminiscent of the mysterious Inslaw/Promis scandal of the late 1980s.

Maybe Congress ought to try and figure out what Parvez Musharraf and his drug dealing intelligence service has done for us lately. Or our friends in Turkey where poppy fields are more important than air fields. And Hamid Karzai, whose nation is top of the poppies in heroin production, and who talks about reducing output from behind a cordon-sanitaire of US forces who protect his enclave from fractious druglords. And maybe just for fun, ask drug czar and Arkansas old-boy Asa Hutchinson what he knows about the Mena airport in his home state.

The list gets longer. Syria and Lebanon, and the fertile fields in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental. And, uh, Colombia. Not to mention China, Burma, Thailand, India and the pot fields and meth labs in the good old USA that help fund right wing terror. And we haven’t even gotten to the coke trade.

Though he has been quiet lately, Louis Farrahkhan that the CIA was involved in the crack trade as early as the 1980s. But that’s not likely to ring any distant bells that DCIA George Tenet will acknowledge. But one can only wonder if Louis the Lip was just smokescreening for his own crew. You go down 60th and Stony Island people vote twice, tell you what you want to hear.

So where’s the connection? It’s right where it always has been since Iran-Contra. Middle East-Latin America-USA. Right in front of our noses. And the piece that Washington seems to have the most difficulty dealing with is the Latin America-Middle East component.

It’s all too convenient for Washington and its media lackeys to make FARC the only problem in Colombia to justify the Vietnamization of the “war on drugs” there. But what about all the “non-leftist/non guerrilla” drug kingpins with ties to the Middle East. Our experts don’t seem to be saying much those crews. Or the loose-cannon Brits and Israelis who train their gunmen. And when you stop to think about it, there are a lot of similarities between the MO of the late Pablo Escobar and Osama bin-Laden.

posted by Groom 1:17 AM