Blumenthal: Emerald City exposed

[kskiska]

Journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran pulls back the curtain on the Green Zone in Baghdad to reveal the flops and failures of the Bush war team.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Sep. 14, 2006 | On the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush delivered the culmination of yet another series of speeches on Iraq and the war on terror. For more than a year, he has periodically given speeches on military bases and before specially invited audiences who applauded his carefully crafted phrases, slightly altered on each occasion, as though these scenes represented widespread public support for his policies. But this Sept. 11 was different from the other anniversaries, partly because of the passage of half a decade but mostly because of what Bush has done with the years.

Bush hoped with his latest speech to reanimate his early iconic stature in the week after the terrorist attacks, when the whole country and world were unified in sympathy. Even "evil" Syria and Iran offered assistance in tracking down al-Qaida. Bush prompted us that "the wounds of that morning are still fresh." His evocation of emotion was an attempt to filter memory. We were guided to remember the trauma as the primal experience for sustaining Bush's politics. By touching the source of pain he tried to redirect it into an affirmation of every twist and turn he has taken since the fateful day.

(snip)

The Green Zone, according to Chandrasekaran, was "Baghdad's Little America," an insular bubble where Americans went to familiar fast-food joints, watched the latest movies, lived in air-conditioned comfort, had their laundry cleaned and pressed promptly, drove GMC Suburbans and listened to a military FM radio station, "Freedom Radio," that played "classic rock and rah-rah messages." Most Americans in the Green Zone wore suede combat boots. In the office of Dan Senor, the CPA press secretary, only one of his three TVs was turned on -- to Fox News.

Jay Garner, a retired lieutenant general, was appointed the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the precursor to the CPA. On his way to Iraq, Garner asked the neoconservative Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, for the planning memos and documents for postwar Iraq. Feith told him there were none. Garner was never shown the State Department's 17 volumes of planning titled "The Future of Iraq" or the CIA's analyses. Feith's former law partner, Michael Mobbs, was appointed head of civil administration. Mobbs had no background in the Middle East or in civil administration. "He just cowered in his room most of the time," one former ambassador recalled. Mobbs lasted two weeks.

more…
http://salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/09/14/iraq/

[babylonsister]

1. Blumenthal was on Hardball recently. I had never seen him, so

it must have been a coup for Tweety, or not.
But he makes lots of sense.

[rodeodance]

2. Liz Cheney ducked out also!

.....Rumsfeld handed the first effort for political transition in Iraq to Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney, deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. She had had no experience in the region beforehand. She then handed off the task to someone named Scott Carpenter, the former legislative director to Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. One disaster followed another as convoluted manipulations of the Iraqis produced frustration, chaos, sectarian friction and outbursts of violence. The CPA finally chose the leaders of the interim government, writes Chandrasekaran, "in the equivalent of a smoke-filled room."

Bremer assigned the job of dealing with sectarian militias to his director of security, David Gompert, who had served on the elder Bush's National Security Council. Gompert negotiated with the Kurds to demobilize their militia, called the peshmerga. In his agreement with Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, to disband the militia, Gompert allowed that the Kurds would be permitted to have a brigade of "mountain rangers." After Gompert signed the document, he asked Barzani the translation of "mountain rangers" into Kurdish. "We will call them peshmerga," he said. No militias were disbanded.

After the invasion, there was no plan to restore electricity. The United Nations and the World Bank calculated it would cost at least $55 billion over four years for minimal investment in Iraq's infrastructure. By the end of the CPA's existence, only 2 percent of the $18.4 billion authorized by Congress for infrastructure, healthcare, education and clean water had been spent. However, $1.6 billion had been paid to Halliburton. One year after that, only one-third of the allocated funds had been spent on Iraq's needs. Unemployment was at least 40 percent, electricity was on only about nine hours a day for the average Iraqi household, and $8.8 billion of Iraqi oil funds was unaccounted for.

A year after the CPA was dissolved, its veterans held a reunion in Washington. As Chandrasekaran writes, most of them had "landed at the Pentagon, the White House, the Heritage Foundation, and elsewhere in the Republican establishment, upon their return from Baghdad." One of them, who worked for Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, declared that in that office "the phrase 'drinking the Kool-Aid' was regarded as a badge of loyalty."

To conclude the festivities, Bremer gathered his former employees around the glow of the TV set to watch President Bush deliver one in his series of speeches on Iraq, staunchly declaring that there was "significant progress in Iraq" and that the "mission in Iraq is clear."

John Agresto, the president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, N.M., was among the dreamers recruited for the CPA. Rumsfeld's wife was on his board and he had worked closely with Lynne Cheney when she was chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Reagan administration. He came to Iraq to build a whole new university system and left having accomplished almost nothing. "I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality," he said. But he is nearly alone among them in his shock of recognition.

-- By Sidney Blumenthal

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2006/09/14/iraq/print.html