More Evidence Of Bush's Failures In Iraq & Afghanistan

Iraqi Premier Orders Work Stopped on Wall

In an earlier post I asserted that the wall being built to divide neighborhoods in Baghdad was an ineffective and useless strategy. Evidently Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki has seen the light and arrived at the same assessment. Even Iraqi citizens interviewed by CBS and ABC news complained that the wall would not resolve the violence and would exacerbate the tensions and division between factions among Iraqi peoples.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Sunday that he was ordering a halt to construction of a controversial wall that would block a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad from other areas, saying it reminded people of “other walls.”

The announcement, which he made in Cairo while on a state visit, appeared intended to allay mounting criticism from both Sunni Arab and Shiite parties about the project.

“I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop,” Mr. Maliki told reporters during a joint news conference with the secretary general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. “There are other methods to protect neighborhoods.”

A spokesman for the American military, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said the military would remain “in a dialogue” with the Iraqi government about how best to protect citizens. The military did not say whether the wall’s construction would be halted.

Mr. Maliki did not specify in his remarks what other walls he referred to. However, the separation barrier in the West Bank being erected by Israel, which Israel says is for protection but greatly angers Palestinians, is a particularly delicate issue among Arabs.

In Baghdad, the wall would surround the Adhamiya neighborhood, a Sunni Arab enclave bordered by Shiite areas. Adhamiya often comes under mortar attack and suffers incursions from those neighborhoods. However, it has also been a stronghold of militant Sunni Arab groups, and the wall would have helped the Iraqi security forces to control their movements.

Iraq’s Desperate Exodus

An issue that is just beginning to receive media attention is the exodus and refugee situation that is being created by our failures in Iraq. During an interview with several Iraqi citizens this morning, ABC News heard several Iraqis complain that the Iraqi government was unable to protect or serve the people or Iraq, that the promises coming from US and Iraqi big shots were nothing more than rhetoric, and that Iraq was in an ongoing spiral into deep despair.

But this report demonstrates several more failures occurring in Iraq, including a failure to protect those seeking refuge in neighboring countries, financial and resource support for refugees, and what it means when so many people are unwilling to remain in a nation that is apparently (evidently) doomed to endure a civil war. All that needs to happen for a full=blown civil war to occur is the withdrawal of US and coalition forces. However, such a calamity could be avoided if the cultural and religious norms of the native Iraqis were taken into consideration and the country divided into three (possibly four) autonomous regions--even with the possibility of each region becoming a sovereign nation--that share in the oil wealth in an equitable manner.

Four years of war have exacted a terrible toll on Iraqis, with no end in sight. Car bombings and other violence now kill an average of 100 people a day. Two out of three Iraqis have no regular access to clean water. Children are malnourished and too many are dying from preventable diseases and the near collapse of the health care system.

And an incredible total of four million people — one out of every seven Iraqis — have been forced to flee their homes. If Iraq continues this descent, the refugee tide could turn into a regional tsunami, with potentially convulsive political consequences.

Yet, as with so much about this war, the Bush administration is refusing to acknowledge the human cost of its horrendous errors and pretending that the problem will be contained within Iraq’s borders. It will not.

Half of Iraq’s displaced people have already fled. Jordan, a country of six million people, is now sheltering 750,000 Iraqis. Syria, with a population of 19 million, has about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. Their governments say they are unable to keep coping with such large inflows. Jordan has already moved to limit new arrivals — barring Iraqi men between the ages of 17 and 35. Others have been less welcoming. Kuwait has completely shut its doors. Saudi Arabia is building a $7 billion border fence to keep Iraqis out.

And then there is the United States. Washington has taken in only some 500 Iraqi refugees since the war began. The Bush administration promises to do much better this year, and officials are floating hypothetical numbers as high as 25,000. That would help. But the bumbling track record of this administration’s refugee bureaucracy makes it seem unlikely. And under current policy, some of Iraq’s most desperate refugees could be deemed ineligible under provisions of the Patriot and Real ID Acts that treat ransom paid to free relatives from kidnappers as “material support” for terrorism.

The administration needs to be doing a lot more. It needs to ensure that the most threatened refugees — usually those who have worked with American forces — can find safe haven here. It should provide generous assistance, well beyond the $18 million it has now pledged, to the United Nations refugee agency, to help poor countries like Jordan and Syria cope with the large numbers already there. Washington also needs to begin serious and detailed discussions with all of Iraq’s neighbors — including Syria and Iran — on how to lessen the violence inside Iraq and help those who try to escape it.

Afghan Bombings Kill 9 and Wound More Than 40

Things are not much better in Afghanistan. While the death toll is not as high as it is in Iraq, there are too many innocent Afghani civilians being killed. The Taliban is still able to raid outposts, caravans and operations without much in the way of consequence, and Pakistan is still turning a blind eye toward stopping the Taliban and its supporters from aiding and abetting these criminals. The overall mission in Afghanistan, which is a lot more justifiable than our invasion and occupation of Iraq, is in chaos and in danger of becoming yet another failure. The drug trafficking that is occurring in those regions is not only the only reliable support for many farmers and villagers, but also funds tribal/regional warlords and militias, as well as funding the Taliban itself.

Two bombings, one of them a suicide attack, rocked the eastern town of Khost on Sunday, killing nine people and wounding more than 40, officials said.

The suicide bomber was on foot and blew himself up in a busy market square as the police were pursuing him. The blast killed eight people and wounded at least 40, including several children, according to the provincial health chief, Dr. Gul Muhammadin Muhammadi. Six people were in critical condition, he said. The three officers who were chasing the bomber were among the wounded, and the senior officer was in critical condition, said the provincial police chief, Col. Muhammad Ayub.

The other bomb, made of explosives packed into a video camera, exploded in a video store, killing the owner, Colonel Ayub said. He added that the attack, which also wounded seven people, might have been the result of a private feud.

In the suicide bombing, three police officers were patrolling the area when they noticed the bomber and began to follow him, Colonel Ayub said. “They wanted to arrest him alive, and our police fired a warning shot in the air, to let people know there was a threat,” he said. “He was fleeing from the area, and when he saw that he was going to be caught he blew himself up.”

The eight people killed in the attack included workers from tea houses and restaurants, day laborers waiting for work and some passers-by, Colonel Ayub said.

The town of Khost has suffered many killings and suicide attacks in recent months. It lies close to the border with Pakistan, and the lawless Pakistani tribal regions of Waziristan, where Taliban militants and their allies are running training camps and preparing suicide bombers to fight in Afghanistan. The bombers can cross the border easily on foot along shepherds’ paths and smuggling routes, Colonel Ayub said.

Deadlines, War Money and Pork

President Bush is still in the business of lying to us about the state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan, including pressuring and threatening Congress with blatantly false rhetoric about being responsible for undermining our troops on the ground. Of course, the Dems still allow unrelated appropriations ("pork" or "earmarks") to be attached to important bills. So the current public relations battles between a half-wit administration and a lost leadership in Congress continues, all the while keeping our troops in harm's way and spending millions of our tax dollars on a daily basis.

At least the Dems do not have the gall to insult our intelligence and disgrace our troops in the rhetoric they offer. As a veteran of two branches of the military, I find Bush's position not only untenable, but thoroughly lacking in morality, ethics, compassion, understanding and reason.

President Bush is taking every opportunity to rail against the troop withdrawal deadlines in the war-spending bills that Congress is readying for passage. He warns that Congressional attempts to set deadlines will harm the troops in Iraq, because a political fight over timetables will delay money needed for the frontlines.

The assertion is completely contrived. Mr. Bush voiced no such misgivings last year, when the Republican-led Congress took until June to complete a war financing bill. The $103 billion Mr. Bush wants— and Congress is ready to provide — is for spending through the end of September. It’s not needed in a lump sum or on any particular date in the near future. In the end, the real obstacle to getting the money promptly to the troops will be the veto that the president has threatened to issue on the final bill.

To further disparage the bills, Mr. Bush also accuses the Democrats of larding them up with “pork.” That’s just as diversionary as Mr. Bush’s attempts to convince Americans that Congress is withholding money from the troops. The bills include roughly $20 billion in extra spending. About a quarter of it, nearly $5 billion, is for health care for veterans and active-duty members of the military and for expanding some military bases while closing others. Billions of dollars more are for other federal responsibilities that have been chronically neglected during the Bush years, including $1.3 billion to pay for post-Katrina levee repairs in Louisiana, $750 million for the state and federal health care partnership that insures poor children and roughly $500 million to help the poor pay for heat in the winter. And on it goes, money for homeland security, wildfire suppression, avian flu preparedness and other national issues.

Relatively little of the extra spending is targeted to lawmakers’ home districts — a precondition for labeling something pork. Mr. Bush invariably chooses to mock $25 million allotted for spinach growers in California. But that money is intended to mitigate growers’ losses from their voluntary recall of spinach during a bacterial contamination last September, which is the type of emergency that supplemental spending bills are supposed to address.

Ideally, all nonemergency government spending — which obviously includes the Iraq war at this point — would be included in the annual federal budget. But ever since he started the war in 2003, Mr. Bush has maneuvered to pay for it via separate emergency measures. That ploy created a false impression of urgency, which made lawmakers who questioned the spending seem irresponsible. The effect was to short-circuit real debate about the war. Now that Democrats are using the bill precisely to raise questions — and pose answers — Mr. Bush is desperate to derail it.