Antiwar.com Blog

(see 10 for introduction)
4.5 next

“Progressive” bellwether John Nichols supports the right-to-vote amendment in Tuesday’s Capital Times, that’s 105 columns down, five to go and he’ll have made it through the year without using the word “Israel.” If that isn’t exciting enough, a new story line is developing–he hasn’t used “Iraq” since early November. “Iraq” used to be a staple, appearing in 40% of his columns. It could be that with the election over, he no longer feels the urgency to beat Bush over the head with it. In any case, having a streak within a streak like this is unprecedented in the annals of countdowns.

Young readers might be suprised to learn that some people found the Clinton administration’s Iraq policy–“economic sanctions constituting the most comprehensive state of siege ever imposed in modern history”–as intolerable as they have found Bush’s. Take, for example, Kathy Kelly, who in 1996 co-founded Voices in the Wilderness. Earlier this year, she “can’t help but wonder why the pictures of suffering Iraqi children never raised equivalent concern or indignation” as the Abu Ghraib photos. And last week, with the media obsessing over Kofi Annan and the Oil for Food program, she can’t help but ask “is there no columnist who will remind us that 500,000 children under age five died as the U.S. used the UN to wage economic warfare?”

In 1995, John Nichols named Kathy Kelly “woman of the year,” but now the Capital Times offers her no solace. Of course, Annan is defended, but the sanctions are “UN” and their effect is unmentioned. It’s Said all over again.

Speaking of hounded Secretary-Generals, Madeleine Albright and the Clinton administration waged “a singularly vicious and personal campaign” against Annan’s predecessor. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was the victim of “a wholesale and increasingly brutal assault.” His fate was sealed when he released a report undercutting Israel’s claim that its attack on a UN center in Qana, Lebanon, was an accident.

Wherever the point of departure, the trail always seems to lead back to 1996, the middle of the Clinton years. Half a million dead Iraqi children and the Qana massacre have been linked before, in a fatwa and an interview.

note:

Had Robert Fisk not been on the scene in Qana, there probably wouldn’t have been a UN report.

"Heroes are essential to the improvement of society" – and the 20^thCentury had such a hero in Andrei Sakharov, famed Soviet physicist and much, much more – fighter for human rights and democracy in the midst of that lethally minded and cold-souled tyrant, the former Soviet Union. December 14^th was the 15^th anniversary of his death. I suppose the need to wish that the 21^st Century give rise to more heroes like Sakharaov speaks grimly about the underlying world situation, but for the sake of us all, I heartily hope others of equally strong intellect, courage, and moral conviction will be there when needed. Here and here are more about Sakharov.

Here.

Judge it for yourself.

“And to George W. Bush: You have asked us to “Bring it on.” And, so have we, like never expected.

Have you another challenge?”

WMV downloadable file here. Please download rather than hotlink.

Yuschenko isn’t interested in finding out who tried to murder him until after the election.

Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko called for a serious investigation to determine how he was poisoned by dioxin, but urged it be conducted after the December 26 presidential run-off election to avoid influencing the results.
[..]
“I don’t want this factor to influence the election in some way – either as a plus or a minus,” Yuschenko said in Russian as he left the clinic and headed back to Kiev.

“This question will require a great deal of time and serious investigation. Let us do it after the election – today is not the moment.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think if someone tried to kill me, I’d want to know who it was. Also, I’m trying to imagine how an investigation would affect the election. It’s kind of central to the election already, isn’t it?

I thought I’d do a report on Fallujah Reconstruction:

American warplanes pounded Fallujah with missiles Sunday as insurgents fought running battles with coalition forces in the volatile western Iraqi city. The U.S. military said two troops died in separate incidents.

Well, OK then!

Via the indispensable Yankeedoodle at Iraq Today, we find this interesting article by Phil Carter in the NY Times. Phil argues that the Great Armor Crisis is due to the US military fighting a conflict in which there are no front lines with equipment designed for support behind the front lines.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the military has slowly recognized that its fundamental assumptions about warfare are being rendered obsolete. In Somalia, American troops faced guerrillas adept at trapping military convoys in ambushes in urban areas. In Bosnia, partisans on both sides used land mines to great effect, making every road a potential hazard. And now in Iraq, the insurgency has transformed the battlefield into one that is both nonlinear and noncontiguous, with sporadic fighting flaring up in isolated spots around the country.

Simply put, there are no more front lines. In slow recognition, the Army purchased light armored vehicles in the late 1990’s for its military police to conduct peacekeeping, and more recently spent billions of dollars to outfit several brigades with Stryker medium-weight armored vehicles, which are impervious to most small arms and rocket-propelled grenades and can be deployed anywhere in the world by airplane.

But the fact that there is no longer a front line also means there aren’t any more “rear” areas where support units can operate safely. Support units must now be prepared to face the same enemy as the infantry, but are having to do so in trucks with canvas doors and fiberglass hoods because Pentagon procurement planners never expected they’d have to fight. Remember that Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the Iraq invasion’s most celebrated prisoner of war, was a supply clerk with a maintenance company.

Americans who have never served in the military may not realize the scale of the problem. Napoleon’s army may have marched on its stomach, but ours requires a juggernaut of mechanics, medics, logisticians and truck drivers carrying everything from ammunition to underwear to keep moving. As a general rule, these support troops outnumber combat soldiers by about seven to one.

Phil has additional commentary on his own article on his blog, Intel Dump.

However, there remains a giant elephant in the room: equipment. The Army’s “MTOE’s” — “modified table of organization and equipment” — have not changed much, except for organizational changes such as the move to create “units of action” that are more flexible and modular. Unfortunately, these units still contain much of the same flawed equipment allocations, such as light-skinned vehicles with no armor to protect the crew and too few crew-served weapons for force protection. These MTOEs were drawn up a long time ago. Though they have been revised many times, they have not been changed to incorporate the new realities of warfare. That’s a real problem, and it’s one that must be fixed.

For more detail on the problem, visit Noah Schachtman at Defense Tech, here and here. Those posts point out the issues involved in acquiring new equipment and armor kits for equipment already deployed. Considering the unexpected levels of wear and the enormous resupply effort required for simply keeping the equipment already in Iraq running, one wonders how the addition of some 12,000 troops, many light infantry (i.e. no armored vehicles – the 82nd Airborne currently deploying is an example) will affect the current crisis. More troops mean not only more possible targets for the resistance, but also far more supplies.