Category: Iraq

Meeting Goals in Iraq

Cheney: U.S. Close To Meeting Goals In Iraq, (USA Today)…Wire reports, Jan 5, 2009

 WASHINGTON — Vice President Cheney said Sunday that the United States is accomplishing its aims in Iraq. Interviewed on CBS’ Face the Nation, Cheney offered a spirited defense of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, of which he was a top advocate.

“We are close to achieving most of our objectives. We have a significant reduction in the overall level of violence,” Cheney said.

The vice president, who leaves office in two weeks, also cited as successes the removal of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, a new Iraqi constitution, elections and a recent U.S.-Iraqi agreement. It gives the Iraqi government the lead role in providing security for the country and calls for a U.S. military withdrawal by 2011.

“All of these things by anybody’s standards would be evidence of significant success,” Cheney said.

In a recent series of farewell interviews, Cheney has been defending the decision to invade Iraq and the subsequent U.S. occupation. More than 4,200 U.S. servicemembers have died in the nearly 6-year-old war.

Cheney acknowledged pre-war intelligence that concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was wrong. Still, he argued that Saddam had the technology, the personnel and the desire to build such weapons again.

Asked if the violent insurgency that followed the 2003 invasion could have been avoided if the United States had deployed more troops, Cheney said the administration had failed to take into account a post-Saddam power vacuum where no Iraqi was willing to take charge and maintain order.

“There weren’t any Iraqis early on who were willing to stand up and take responsibility for their own affairs,” he said. “So I would chalk that up to miscalculation.”

President Bush – Interview

Bush On His Record, (Wall Street Journal)…Kimberley A. Strassel, Dec 20, 2008, pg.13

As he sits at his mile-high desk, clad in his Air Force One crew jacket, George W. Bush is as he has ever been: upbeat, focused, confident in his past decisions and in the future.

On Iraq …

The action that will always most define the Bush presidency will be the invasion of Iraq. It is also the decision he remains most visibly passionate about, especially given it was the cornerstone of his broader “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. That agenda, he says, is working, and he remains confident that while it “was widely criticized by some as being hopelessly naïve and idealistic, is really the only practical way to provide long-term security . . .” He is convinced the region is stepping into a new era, and will continue on that path “unless America loses nerve in our belief in the universality of freedom.”

Would it have been easier to just replace Saddam with another strongman? “Early on, I knew we were in an ideological conflict, and you don’t win ideological conflicts by replacing one strongman with another. . . . And frankly, that’s been a big shift in our foreign policy in the Middle East, which is — and this is not a criticism of anybody, it’s a recognition that presidents deal with the realities of the situation. But in the Cold War, to prevent communism from taking root in the Middle East, we promoted stability. Well, it just so happens that over time people became so resentful and so hateful that they were swayed by a group of very smart and very capable ideologues to become their foot soldiers.”

On the home front:

He also counts as an accomplishment his protection of the homeland, in particular that he is “leaving behind tools that future presidents will be able to use — and even though they were controversial when they were implemented, people are going to get in that Oval Office and say, now I understand why this tool is important.”

Iraq: U.S. Public Support for Withdrawal

Poll Finds Support For Obama’s War Views. (Washington Post)…Michael A. Fletcher and Jon Cohen

Americans are more upbeat about U.S. prospects in Iraq than at any time in the past five years, but nearly two-thirds continue to believe the war is not worth fighting and 70 percent say President-elect Barack Obama should fulfill his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. forces from the country within 16 months, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Iraq Rebuilding: Cost of Poor Quality

Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders, (New York Times)…James Glanz and T. Christian Miller, Dec 13, 2008.

Poor planning, waste and deception led to $200 billion failure, report says

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

James Glanz reported from Baghdad, and T. Christian Miller, of the nonprofit investigative Web site ProPublica, reported from Washington.

Iran: Drop in IEDs

U.S. Says Drop In Iraq Deaths Tied To Iranian Arms Cutback, (Los Angeles Times)…Julian E. Barnes

A marked decline in the number of explosive devices coming into Iraq from neighboring Iran has helped reduce the frequency of deadly attacks against U.S. service members, a top U.S. general said Thursday.

Iraq: Significance of the Security Agreement

Milestone In Baghdad, (Washington Post)…Charles Krauthammer, Dec 5, 2008.

The barbarism in Mumbai and the economic crisis at home have largely overshadowed an otherwise singular event: the ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States.

They must not pass unnoted. They were certainly noted by Iran, which fought fiercely to undermine the agreements. Tehran understood how a formal U.S.-Iraqi alliance endorsed by a broad Iraqi consensus expressed in a freely elected parliament changes the strategic balance in the region.

For the United States, this represents the single most important geopolitical advance in the region since Henry Kissinger turned Egypt from a Soviet client into an American ally. If we don’t blow it with too hasty a withdrawal from Iraq, we will have turned a chronically destabilizing enemy state at the epicenter of the Arab Middle East into an ally.

Also largely overlooked at home was the sheer wonder of the procedure that produced Iraq’s consent: classic legislative maneuvering with no more than a tussle or two — tame by international standards (see YouTube: “Best Taiwanese Parliament Fights of All Time!”) — over the most fundamental issues of national identity and direction.

Iraq Security Agreement – Referendum by July 30, 2008

Top Shiite Cleric In Iraq Raises Concerns About Security Pact, (Washington Post)…Sudarsan Raghavan and Saad Sarhan, Nov 30, 2008.

Iraq’s preeminent Shiite spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has expressed concern about the country’s security agreement with the United States, saying it gives the Americans the upper hand and does not do enough to protect Iraqi sovereignty, an official at his office said Saturday.

The agreement, approved by Iraq’s parliament Thursday, calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from towns and cities by next summer and from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Sistani, whose words carry great weight in Iraq, did not reject the pact outright and indicated that he would leave it to voters to decide its fate in a national referendum to be held by July 30. His comments will almost certainly bring pressure on the Shiite-led government and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to fulfill their promise to hold the vote.