The government doesn't want you to see this picture

Since 1991 the Pentagon has banned press photographers from any place where the coffins or bodybags of US service members can be seen. All remains of troops killed in Iraq return to the United States through Dover Air Force Base, usually in the middle of the night, and press photographers are not allowed in. The photo above was taken aboard a cargo plane in Kuwait by Tami Silicio, at the time an employee of Maytag Aircraft. Maytag fired her yesterday because she took the picture and gave it to the Seattle Times (Seattle Times: Woman loses her job over coffins photo). Ms. Silicio isn't the only person who has managed to thwart the Pentagon's wishes. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Russ Kick of the Memory Hole got hold of 361 photographs of returning coffins which you can see by following this link: The Memory Hole: Photos of Military Coffins (Casualties From Iraq) at Dover Air Force Base. Mr. Kick is also offering these photos, free of charge, to the press. The Pentagon claims this policy is to protect the feelings of the families of dead service members, but that doesn't explain why they ban pictures of coffins where the identities of the casualties are not given. We know the real reason. The White House wants to hide the true cost of war from the American people. If Americans are faced with the reality of what is happening to our troops in Iraq they might start to question whether the dubious benefits of this war are worth the price in American lives. The answer, of course, is no. "It is good that war is terrible, otherwise we would become over fond of it." - Robert E. Lee.
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Viva España!

Spain announced last night it was expediting the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, jolting its coalition partners after another weekend of heavy losses and setbacks. Hours after his government was sworn in, the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, ordered an abrupt recall of Spain's 1,300 troops, saying they would leave Iraq "in the shortest possible time". He said he was no longer prepared to wait until his previous deadline of June 30 because there was no sign of the UN taking control of the post-war occupation. Miguel Moratinos, the foreign minister, was quoted by Egyptian media as saying the pullout would happen within 15 days. Defence staff have already drawn up plans, officials in the new government said last night.

(Guardian: Spain to pull troops out 'as soon as possible') Note to John Kerry: get a clue. Pulling our troops out of Iraq is the only viable solution to George Bush's mess. Any other option will be seen as a continuation of Bush's policy of colonial aggression and will be met by continued Iraqi resistance, resulting in more dead Americans.
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Surprise!

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims to be "surprised" by the recent large scale violence in Iraq.

"I certainly would not have estimated that we would have had the individuals lost that we have had lost in the last week," he told a press conference, responding to questions on the deaths of at least 93 U.S. troops since March 31.

(Reuters: Death Toll Mounts, U.S. Extends Iraq Troop Tours) According to retired Marine General Anthony Zinni he must be easily surprised, because Zinni and other senior officers had warned him of this exact outcome years before.

"I'm surprised that he is surprised because there was a lot of us who were telling him that it was going to be thus," said Zinni, a Marine for 39 years and the former commander of the U.S. Central Command. "Anyone could know the problems they were going to see. How could they not?" For years Zinni said he cautioned U.S. officials that an Iraq without Saddam Hussein would likely be more dangerous to U.S. interests than one with him because of the ethnic and religious clashes that would be unleashed. "We're betting on the U.N., who we blew off and ridiculed during the run-up to the war," Zinni said. "Now we're back with hat in hand."

(San Diego Union-Tribune: Warnings ignored, says retired Marine And then there is the 2002 State Department report, "The Future of Iraq", which specifically warned of armed resistance to US occupation, which was reported in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, and right here in the Truth back in 2003. I'll quote and link to the Guardian article because they don't require registration or charge money for archived articles.

The year-long study accurately forecast many of the problems besetting US-led forces. It said that, far from hailing the American troops as liberators, Iraqi society had been so brutalised by the former regime that the people would react coolly to US attempts to build democracy. The report, the Future of Iraq, reveals a strain of idealism or, at worst, naivety in the Bush administration's approach. It said that attempts to encourage Iraqis to throw off three decades of dictatorship and embrace democracy would not be easy. Among other forecast outcomes was the risk associated with quickly disbanding the Iraqi army, which the US promptly did. The report said that jobs would need to be found for the decommissioned troops to prevent them turning against coalition troops.

(The Guardian: Pentagon was warned of Iraq chaos after war ) So if Rumsfeld really was surprised by the continuing resistance and bloodshed in Iraq, it's either because he doesn't read the reports prepared for him or he's an idiot. I report, you decide. Meanwhile those peaceniks at the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute have issued another report critical of Bush and Rumsfeld's approach to military action.

The Bush administration went to war in Iraq with a flawed strategy that sought victory "on the cheap" and is now paying the price in the form of a growing insurgency and doubts about its goal of building a democracy, a top U.S. Army analyst says in a recent report. Echevarria said the administration's Iraq strategy was flawed because its goal of regime change in Iraq required a labor- and time-intensive effort. But the administration instead wanted "to win the war quickly and on the cheap." "While this emerging way of war looked to employ new concepts, such as shock and awe and effects-based operations, designed to win battles quickly, it had no new concept for accomplishing the time-intensive and labor-intensive tasks of regime change more quickly and with less labor," his report concluded.

(Reuters: Army Analyst Calls Bush Iraq War Strategy Flawed) (Strategic Studies Institute: Toward an American Way of War) Almost as disturbing as Rumsfeld's negligence in ignoring, even ridiculing, these advance warnings from defense and foreign policy experts is his continuing refusal to admit it even as his critics are being vindicated.
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Focus on what happened after 9/11

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States hearings have been in the news a lot recently, but have not been covered here on the Truth. There are many serious unanswered questions about the conduct of the Bush administration before, and especially on, September 11, 2001. But to me Bush's worst misconduct took place after the horrible events of that day. Ciro Scotti, a senior editor at BusinessWeek, summed up my feelings in his column this week:

What George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz really have to answer for is the insidious way in which they used the Twin Tower horror to coax the country into supporting an attack on Iraq. Why was this Administration so hell-bent on taking out Saddam Hussein that it would turn its back on a world offering sympathy and support after September 11? Why was it so adamant in its adventurism that it would gild the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S. -- and then put our troops in harm's way -- when no clear or present danger existed? Those questions demand answers.

(Business Week: Blame Bush for What Came After 9/11) What he said.
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At long last, the plan is revealed

Amid the mistakes (calling Donald Rumsfeld the Secretary of State) and lies (referring to Saddam Hussein as an "ally" of Al Qaida) in last night's press conference, George W. Bush let a little bit of truth slip out. He finally revealed his rationale for including an invasion of Iraq in his Global War on Terror™:

A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have incredible change.

Apparently Bush's plan is to establish a democracy in Iraq, which will, he assumes, be friendly to the United States. The existence of a free society in Iraq will, according to this plan, inspire others in the Middle East to overthrow autocratic regimes that oppose the US and sponsor or provide haven for terrorists. This is not news to those of us who have been paying attention. It is the same plan put forth several years ago by the Project for the New American Century, a small think tank whose members are the principal architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. But this ambitious plan was not discussed by the Bush gang before the Iraq war started, even when they were providing reasons for the war. Why might that be? One reason is the unprecedented arrogance of the Bush administration. They do not feel they have to explain their reasoning to anyone, least of all the American people they are supposed to be working for. Secondly, public debate would reveal that this is a pretty stupid plan. The idea that a foreign nation can bring democratic government to Iraq through force of arms shows profound ignorance of the social, religious, and political situation in Iraq. To assume that a democratically elected Iraqi government would be friendly to the United States requires a virtually total misunderstanding of the Arab world. Further, the plan does not speak to what will happen to the Arab autocracies that are friendly to the United States, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait. On top of that, the activities of the United States in Iraq belie Bush's claim that we are there to bring democracy. Closing newspapers is not democracy. Shutting down labor unions is not democracy. Using schools as military bases is not democracy. Refusing to hold elections is not democracy. The fact that Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force examined maps of Iraqi oil fields during at least one of their secret meetings suggests that there might be other motives involved. Certainly it is arrogant of Bush to assume that the new Iraqi government will invite US troops to stay in the country after June 30 and that they will host a US ambassador in the giant embassy complex we are building in Baghdad. I am reminded of the foreign policy code words used during the Reagan era, when a "democracy" was a dictatorship friendly towards the United States. Whether or not the pipe dream of triggering a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East was the real reason Bush started this war, it is clear now that the entire enterprise in Iraq has been a failure. They don't want us there, we have no business being there, and it is time to leave.
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The British perspective

If today's entry seems unusually short, it's because Seumas Milne at the Guardian has expressed my impressions of the war more eloquently than I ever could. That's why he does this for a living, and I'm just a hack. There's an excerpt below, but I urge all my readers to read the editorial in its entirety: The Guardian: Bush and Blair have lit a fire which could consume them.

Unlike in, say, Spain or Australia, we are hamstrung in Britain by the fact that all three main political parties are committed to maintaining the occupation, including the Liberal Democrats - whose former leader and Bosnian governor Lord Ashdown yesterday argued for at least another decade in Iraq. But opposition to such latter-day imperial bravura is strong among the British public and across all parties, and must now find its voice. There is a multiplicity of different possible mechanisms to bring about a negotiated, orderly withdrawal and free elections. Tony Blair calls that "running away" and admitting "we have got it all wrong". But he and Bush did get it wrong: there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraq wasn't a threat, there was no UN authorisation, and the invasion was manifestly illegal. Foreign troops in Iraq are not peacekeepers, but aggressors. The lessons of empire are having to be learned all over again.

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The Vietnam Comparison

Senator Edward Kennedy provoked Republican outrage earlier this week when he called the war in Iraq "Bush's Vietnam". Let's move past the rhetoric and look at the facts:

• We have no good reason for being there.
• Most of the locals don't want us there.
• The occupation was horribly planned.
• The Secretary of Defense is apparently oblivious to the facts on the ground.
• The President and his cabinet have repeatedly lied to the American people about it.

Sounds like Vietnam to me.
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This April Fool's joke isn't funny

A little over a year ago George W. Bush played a whopper of a prank on the people of the United States, Iraq, and the rest of the world. Claiming it was an integral part of the Global War on Terror™, he ordered a military invasion of Iraq. Never mind that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Never mind that UNSCOM inspectors had returned to Iraq and, following up leads from the United States as well as their own previous work, had found no evidence that Iraq still possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction™. Never mind that most of Iraq's neighbors in the Persian Gulf did not consider Saddam's regime a threat to regional security. Never mind that Bush's own Defense Secretary, National Security Advisor, and Secretary of State had all previously said publicly they did not consider Iraq a significant threat to the United States. A year later the prank is still being played out. The promised reconstruction of Iraq has not happened. The promised establishment of democracy there has been replaced by a handpicked governing council. The number of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq has reached 600. That number refers only to those killed in action; troops who die later of wounds received in combat are not counted. The number of wounded provided by lunaville is only an estimate; the Pentagon no longer includes the wounded in its casualty figures. Yesterday there was a particularly violent incident in the Iraqi town of Falujah. Four Americans were killed by Iraqis and the bodies were pulled from their burning vehicle, mutilated, and displayed to a cheering crowd. Some American newspapers declined to print photographs of the incident, such as this one: (Photo appears courtesy of Reuters News Service) Most news reports referred to the killed Americans as "civilian contractors". This is technically correct, as the four were not members of the US armed forces. But what most reports failed to mention is that they were armed paramilitaries employed by Blackwater USA, a private security company that, according to their web site, "provides training and tactical solutions for the 21st century". There are two differences between these mercenaries and the American soldiers and marines in Iraq: the mercenaries chose to go there, and they receive much better pay. Still, it is understandable that after hearing about the way they were killed and how their remains were treated their countrymen would feel the urge to avenge them. Indeed Paul Bremer, the American governor of Iraq, called the images from the Fallujah attack "horrific" and promised retaliation. That reminds me of another horrific image from the Iraq war: This is Ali, a young boy who lost both his parents and both his arms to a US bombing attack. It is understandable that his countrymen would feel the urge to avenge him, don't you think?
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