This story should make every American furious. We have been outsourcing military functions for years under programs initiated years ago when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense. This process was accelerated under the last Bush administration.
The result is the story we have below.
Basically, according to whistle blowers who just testified before Congress, soldiers in Iraq were getting electrocuted due to shoddy work done in Iraq by KBR. KBR was a subsidiary of Haliburton, and it’s not even a U.S. company – they transferred their headquarters to the Cayman Islands in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. How patriotic.
I’m getting tired of Republicans talking about wasteful spending now that Obama is president after living through the Bush years. So much money was wasted by that administration, it’s a disgrace. At least Obama wants to invest in health care for people who can’t afford it.
There are so many examples of how this party has completely lost its way, but this news item takes the cake.
A group of 31 House Republicans have introduced a resolution “declaring victory in Iraq,” which is bound to evoke images of “Mission Accomplished” and George W. Bush in a flight suit.
The intention of the resolution isn’t actually celebratory. It’s intended to set a political trap by declaring, six weeks into Obama’s presidency, that all responsibility for the six-year conflict, which was initiated by President Bush on flawed evidence and incompetently pursued for much of his presidency, is now Obama’s to lose.
These guys are complete morons. It’s amazing that they would try to declare victory when we still have 150,000 troops in Iraq and the Iraqi government needs to hide from its own people behind our army in the Green Zone!
This is pure politics, but it’s also dumb politics. The GOP is turning into a sideshow.
With “Fiasco,” Tom Ricks wrote one of the definitive books on the Iraq War, and he’s not optimstic about the situation we face in 2009.
Obama’s first year in Iraq is going to be tougher than Bush’s last year. Three reasons for that: First, three rounds of elections are scheduled in 2009, and those tend to be violent in Iraq. Second, the easy U.S. troop withdrawals have been made, and the pullouts at the end of this year will be riskier. Finally, none of the basic existential problems facing Iraq have been answered-the power relationships between groups, leadership of the Shiites, the sharing of oil revenue, the status of the disputed city of Kirkuk, to name just the most pressing ones. Compounding the problem will be the incorrect perception of many Americans that the Iraq was all but over when Obama took office.
Despite the conventional wisdom that the war is nearly over, Obama’s war in Iraq may last longer than Bush’s, which clocks in at a robust 5 years and 10 months. “So now you back in the trap–just that, trapped,” to quote Big Boi and Dre. My best guess is that we will have at least 35,000 troops there in 2015, as Obama’s likely second term is winding down. (Self-promotional moment: more on all this in my book “The Gamble: General Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-08,” out Feb. 9 from Penguin Press.)
I have no idea what’s going to happen in Iraq, but I suspect Obama will push hard to change the strategic situation in the Middle East, and he’s determined to wind down this war. Having 35,000 troops there in 2015 would be a disappointment.
The movie is just as bad as the Bush presidency. Josh Brolin gives an inspired performance, but most of the film falls flat.
The film works best when focusing on Bush’s life story and his rise to the presidency. His relationship with his father was central to his life, and his interactions with his parents and Laura inspired the more interesting parts of the film.
Regarding his presidency, however, all we see are caricatures of the people around him. Scenes are invented based upon public statements we saw in other contexts, but they seem forced and inauthentic. Historians can rightfully criticize the roles of administrations officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, but the portrayals of these men in the film are ridiculous.
Someday, we’ll see a serious movie that delves into the disasterous Bush presidency and the march to war, but “W” is not that movie. Oliver Stone goes for a lighter touch, but he doesn’t deliver enough laughs to make this a successfult comedy. In the end, it’s mostly a waste of time.
General Petraeus repeats what most respected foreign policy professionals believe – we have to be willing to talk to our enemies.
Petraeus also came out unambiguously in his talk at Heritage for opening communications with America’s adversaries, a position McCain is attacking Obama for endorsing. Citing his Iraq experience, Petraeus said, “You have to talk to enemies.” He added that it was necessary to have a particular goal for discussion and to perform advance work to understand the motivations of his interlocutors.
All that was the subject of one of the most contentious tussles between McCain and Obama in the first presidential debate, with Obama contending that his intent to negotiate with foreign adversaries without “precondition” did not mean that he would neglect diplomatic “preparation.”
McCain, apparently perceiving an opportunity for attack, Tuesday again used Obama’s comments to attack his judgment. “Sen. Obama, without precondition, wants to sit down and negotiate with them, without preconditions,” McCain said, referring to Iran.
Yet Petraeus emphasized throughout his lecture that reaching out to insurgent groups — some “with our blood on their hands,” he said — was necessary to the ultimate goal of turning them against irreconcilable enemies like Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Petraeus favorably cited the example of one of his British deputies, who in a previous assignment had to negotiate with Martin McGuiness of the Irish Republican Army, responsible for killing some of the British commander’s troops. The British officer, Petraeus said, occasionally wanted to “reach across the table” and choke his former adversary but understood that such negotiations were key to ending a war.
Under George W. Bush we’ve wasted billions of dollars on a war in Iraq, while we’ve ignore our economy and infrastructure at home. The world is moving forward, but we’re going backwards.
Tom Friedman went to China during the Olympics, and he was struck by incredible progress made by the Chinese in such a short period of time. Meanwhile, we’re asleep at the switch.
The difference is starting to show. Just compare arriving at La Guardia’s dumpy terminal in New York City and driving through the crumbling infrastructure into Manhattan with arriving at Shanghai’s sleek airport and taking the 220-mile-per-hour magnetic levitation train, which uses electromagnetic propulsion instead of steel wheels and tracks, to get to town in a blink.
Then ask yourself: Who is living in the third world country?
Yes, if you drive an hour out of Beijing, you meet the vast dirt-poor third world of China. But here’s what’s new: The rich parts of China, the modern parts of Beijing or Shanghai or Dalian, are now more state of the art than rich America. The buildings are architecturally more interesting, the wireless networks more sophisticated, the roads and trains more efficient and nicer. And, I repeat, they did not get all this by discovering oil. They got it by digging inside themselves.
I realize the differences: We were attacked on 9/11; they were not. We have real enemies; theirs are small and mostly domestic. We had to respond to 9/11 at least by eliminating the Al Qaeda base in Afghanistan and investing in tighter homeland security. They could avoid foreign entanglements. Trying to build democracy in Iraq, though, which I supported, was a war of choice and is unlikely to ever produce anything equal to its huge price tag.
But the first rule of holes is that when you’re in one, stop digging. When you see how much modern infrastructure has been built in China since 2001, under the banner of the Olympics, and you see how much infrastructure has been postponed in America since 2001, under the banner of the war on terrorism, it’s clear that the next seven years need to be devoted to nation-building in America.
We need to finish our business in Iraq and Afghanistan as quickly as possible, which is why it is a travesty that the Iraqi Parliament has gone on vacation while 130,000 U.S. troops are standing guard. We can no longer afford to postpone our nation-building while Iraqis squabble over whether to do theirs.
A lot of people are now advising Barack Obama to get dirty with John McCain. Sure, fight fire with fire. That’s necessary, but it is not sufficient.
Obama got this far because many voters projected onto him that he could be the leader of an American renewal. They know we need nation-building at home now — not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in Georgia, but in America. Obama cannot lose that theme.
He cannot let Republicans make this election about who is tough enough to stand up to Russia or bin Laden. It has to be about who is strong enough, focused enough, creative enough and unifying enough to get Americans to rebuild America. The next president can have all the foreign affairs experience in the world, but it will be useless, utterly useless, if we, as a country, are weak.
Anyone who thinks the Obama campaign can’t throw a punch hasn’t been paying attention to the recent ads from the Obama team.
The latest ad is very powerful. They pick up on the latest news that Iraq has a $79 billion oil surplus, while we’re spending over $10 billion per month on the Iraq War. The also explains that McCain votes with Bush 95% of the time.
It’s a powerful ad linking McCain, Bush and the Iraq War to our current economic difficulties. The tag line at the end – The Middle Class First – is a powerful one as well.
This number is disturbing. Some outsourcing is inevitable in modern warfare, but the idea that so much money is being spent on private firms means that we’ve increased the number of firms that profit from warfare.
We already have a military industrial complex, where weapons firms lobby our elected officials and drive more military spending than we need. Yet these firms have more of a long-term interest in building our military strength. With private contractors taking over military support operations, you now have a situation where billions of dollars are at stake and are dependent on military action. War means huge profits.
Unfortunately, we all know that this will result in some level of corruption. That always happens when the government doles out huge contracts, and the problem worsens when you have an incompetent administration. Even more disturbing, we now have a situation where billions are tied to continued military operations. It’s naive to think this will have no effect on decisions that should be based strictly on national interest and matters of life and death.
The amount of waste discovered so far in Iraq has been stunning. A new administration will need to take a close look at how we dole out money, and whether the government needs to put the brakes on this outsourcing trend.
Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria takes a close look at Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy, noting Obama’s emphasis on realism, in sharp contrast to John McCain and George W. Bush, who have embraced the wide-eyed idealism of the neoconservatives.
The rap on Barack Obama, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been that he is a softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America’s enemies. John McCain and his campaign, conservative columnists and right-wing bloggers all paint a picture of a liberal dreamer who wishes away the world’s dangers. Even President Bush stepped into the fray earlier this year to condemn the Illinois senator’s willingness to meet with tyrants as naive. Some commentators have acted as if Obama, touring the Middle East and Europe this week on his first trip abroad since effectively wrapping up the nomination, is in for a rude awakening.
These critiques, however, are off the mark. Over the course of the campaign against Hillary Clinton and now McCain, Obama has elaborated more and more the ideas that would undergird his foreign policy as president. What emerges is a world view that is far from that of a typical liberal, much closer to that of a traditional realist. It is interesting to note that, at least in terms of the historical schools of foreign policy, Obama seems to be the cool conservative and McCain the exuberant idealist.
Just as with his other policies, Obama takes a much more nuanced approach to the world, recognizing that the world is a complex place. In contrast, McCain seems to embrace W’s simplistic “good vs. evil” approach to most situation.
Obama rarely speaks in the moralistic tones of the current Bush administration. He doesn’t divide the world into good and evil even when speaking about terrorism. He sees countries and even extremist groups as complex, motivated by power, greed and fear as much as by pure ideology. His interest in diplomacy seems motivated by the sense that one can probe, learn and possibly divide and influence countries and movements precisely because they are not monoliths. When speaking to me about Islamic extremism, for example, he repeatedly emphasized the diversity within the Islamic world, speaking of Arabs, Persians, Africans, Southeast Asians, Shiites and Sunnis, all of whom have their own interests and agendas.
Obama never uses the soaring language of Bush’s freedom agenda, preferring instead to talk about enhancing people’s economic prospects, civil society and—his key word—”dignity.” He rejects Bush’s obsession with elections and political rights, and argues that people’s aspirations are broader and more basic—including food, shelter, jobs. “Once these aspirations are met,” he told The New York Times’s James Traub, “it opens up space for the kind of democratic regimes we want.” This is a view of democratic development that is slow, organic and incremental, usually held by conservatives.
In the flatlands north of Baghdad sits a prison with no prisoners. It holds something else: a chronicle of U.S. government waste, misguided planning and construction shortcuts costing $40 million and stretching back to the American overseers who replaced Saddam Hussein.
“It’s a bit of a monument in the desert right now because it’s not going to be used as a prison,” said Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, whose office plans to release a report Monday detailing the litany of problems at the vacant detention center in Khan Bani Saad.
The pages also add another narrative to the wider probes into the billions lost so far on scrubbed or substandard projects in Iraq and one of the main contractors accused of failing to deliver, the Parsons construction group of Pasadena, Calif.
“This is $40 million invested in a project with very little return,” Bowen told The Associated Press in Washington. “A couple of buildings are useful. Other than that, it’s a failure.”
In the pecking order of corruption in Iraq, the dead-end prison project at Khan Bani Saad is nowhere near the biggest or most tangled.
Bowen estimated up to 20 percent “waste” — or more than $4 billion — from the $21 billion spent so far in the U.S.-bankrolled Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund. It’s just one piece of a recovery effort that swelled beyond $112 billion in U.S., Iraqi and international contributions.
Conservatives get furious if some Americans game the system and take advantage of social programs. Where’s the outrage for wasting up to $4 billion on useless projects in Iraq?
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told a German magazine he supported prospective U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months.
In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.
“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
It is the first time he has backed the withdrawal timetable put forward by Obama, who is visiting Afghanistan and us set to go to Iraq as part of a tour of Europe and the Middle East.
Obama has called for a shift away from a “single-minded” focus on Iraq and wants to pull out troops within 16 months, instead adding U.S. soldiers to Afghanistan.
Asked if he supported Obama’s ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.
“Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.”
From a purely political point of view, this helps Obama by giving legitimacy to his plans. Bush and McCain have always said that we would leave if the Iraqis asked them to stay.
It also isn’t a surprise. Malaki has been hinting at this for years, and he’s repeated it often in the last month. The Bush administration tried to negotiate long-term bases, but it’s becoming clearer that the Iraqis have different ideas.
As for what’s best for Iraq, nobody knows. Malaki is certainly trying to consolidate power, and by calling for a withdrawel be blunts some of the criticism coming from Sadr.
It’s certainly a positive development from the American point of view. We cannot maintain our presence there. It’s killing our economy, and it’s hurting the efforts in Afghanistan.
McCain has been saying since last year that he was against sending more US troops to Afghanistan, while Barack Obama was arguing we needed more troops there. His campaign was repeating that policy as recently as last week, but now he’s changed his position and is calling for more troops, mimicking the Obama policy. He even moved up his foreign policy speech by two days in an effort to trump Obama’s speech today.
The press is starting to pick up on this, and it will reinforce Obama’s point that Afghanistan and Al Qaeda need to be the focus of our counter-terrorism efforts.
This is a great move, and as Jacob Heilbrunn explains, it’s a blow to McCain. Hagel is a veteran as well and aa Republican Senator who opposes the Bush administration policy in Iraq.
I’m curious to see who else joins Obama as it might signal potential VP picks. Biden seems like an obvious choice for the trip regardless of whether Obama is seriously considering him for the trip, but if Evan Bayh joins them, it increases the odds that he’s the pick.
Many in the media have been critical of Barack Obama, suggesting that he wasn’t tough enough to battle the GOP in the fall. They cited his unwillingness to attack Hillary Clinton as an example.
Obama, however, did not want to alienate Hillary’s supporters. He got tough at times, but he often held back, knowing he would need her supporters in the fall.
With McCain, Obama is not holding back. He’s still running a generally positive campaign, but he’s showing he’s more than willing to go toe-to-toe with McCain on foreign policy and other isuues.
The latest scuffles involves McCain’s mistatement shere he claimed that our troops in Iraq were down to pre-surge levels. That was incorrect. Troop levels are 20,000 above pre-surge levels. McCain, however, would not acknowledge that he mispoke.
We all misspeak sometimes. I’ve done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you’d think that Senator McCain would just admit that he made a mistake and move on. But he couldn’t do that. Instead, he dug in. And the disturbing thing is that we’ve seen this movie before — a leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain refused to admit that he made a mistake. And that’s exactly the kind of leadership that we’ve had through more than five years of fighting a war that should’ve never been authorized, and should’ve never been waged.
We don’t need more leaders who can’t admit they’ve made a mistake, even when it’s about something as fundamental as how many young Americans are serving in harm’s way.
This is great stuff. McCain was gaining traction with the issue of Obama’s visits to Iraq, but then he makes a fundamental mistatement about troop levels and is unwilling to correct himself. And then Obama hammers him. Get ready for more of the same.
This guy looked like such a fool when he was press secretary, mostly because he was such a terrible liar. His attempts to avoid answering questions were pathetic. Now we know why. Basically, the man has a brain and a soul.
With his new book, he comes clean and tells the truth about the Bush White House. Some former colleagues have criticized him for not speaking up back then. His response was very credible – at the time he gave Bush and his team the benefit of the doubt. Now he knows they were not telling the truth. Here’s McClellan on the Today show.
Peggy Noonan blasts today’s pathetic Republican Party. She’s not saying anything new. She just has a way with words, and her essay sums up the problems nicely.
These problems, however, have been apparent for years, and even Peggy has been late to the party. In Kansas in 2006, old Republicans bolted from the party and won seats as Democrats.
The Republicans deserve to get crushed in the fall. If that happens, it will be the best possible result for the party (and the country).
I’ve had MSNBC on all day and I’ve heard virtually nothing about the situation in Iraq, despite the developing story regarding the increase in violence and the battles in Basra.
Of course, they’ve given plenty of air time to Barack Obama’s bowling score and the Monica Lewinsky questions lobbed at Chelsea Clinton.
This story in the Washington Post shows how low we’ve been willing to sink to restore “security” in Iraq. We’ve basically turned Fallujah over to a thug from Saddam’s regime, and he’s happily using Saddam’s tactics to control the city.
Why are our soldiers dying for this?
The reduced death toll from Iraq is a mirage. What price are we paying to reduce the death toll numbers just to convey the impression of improved “security”?
