Short Stories, Long Odds

In a breaking story released predictably at an ungodly hour on a Sunday, the CPA was audited and the resulting report shows that around $9,000,000,000.00 is missing, misappropriated, or impossible to account for.

The official who led the authority, L. Paul Bremer III, submitted a blistering written reply to the findings, saying the report had “many misconceptions and inaccuracies” and lacked professional judgment.

Bremer said the report “assumes that Western-style budgeting and accounting procedures could be immediately and fully implemented in the midst of a war.”

So says L. Paul from now until the end of all things.  Being in the midst of a war does not, however, explain all of the report’s findings, like those which follow the jump:

Authority staff learned that 8,206 guards were on the payroll at one ministry, but only 602 could be accounted for, the report said. At another ministry, US officials indicated there were 1,417 guards on the payroll but could confirm only 642. When staff members of the US occupation government recommended that payrolls be verified before salary payments, authority financial officials “stated the [authority] would rather overpay salaries than risk not paying employees and inciting violence,” the inspector general said.

It is possible that I’m being a little hard on L. Paul, and there are some difficulties involved in managing a country you just invaded.  Among L. Paul’s other rebuttals were these reasonable factoids:

With more than a million Iraqi families depending on government salaries, there would have been an increased security threat if civil servants had not been paid until modern pay records were developed.

US policy was to build up the Iraqi force guarding government facilities, and it was better to accept an imperfect payroll system than “to stop paying armed, young men” providing security.

The report was suggesting the authority “should have placed hundreds of [authority] auditors” in Iraqi ministries, contrary to US and UN policy of giving Iraqi ministers responsibility for budgets.
 - all quotes from Boston Globe

My initial argument with this is that there is a marked difference between not being able to account for money and not being able to account for employees. It is also an odd argument to say that you don’t want to stop paying the guys with guns when you just fired 400,000 guys with guns. But I’m a professional, so L. Paul gets his say.

So you don’t want to stop paying the guys with the guns, and if you have to have an imperfect payroll system to keep everyone happy, then I suppose you can excuse a small discrepency here or there. That being said, there’s a whole lot of money that can’t be accounted for, and the fact that the CPA’s officials are doing their best to blame it on Iraqis is disappointing.  Hell, it’s disappointing that this even happened.

I also should note, as I play the role of Transparency International Devil’s Advocate, that despite the wartime position Iraq found itself in, the disregard of accountability for money and expenditure – and keep in mind, this is the Iraqi people’s money, so if they weren’t dodging mortars I would hope they’d be upset –  is a poor precedent to set for an emerging free nation.  It doesn’t instill a sense of financial responsibility in… well, in anybody, really.

Seeing as how so much of American credibility rightly rests on the handling of the Iraq war and the resultant foreign policy, we have some important questions to ask.  Primary among those is, “Why did it take so long for this come out?” and immediately on the heels of that, “Who are we going to hold accountable for the $9,000,000,000.00 of Iraqi money that has seemingly vanished?”  

I’m not saying someone should swing for this, and its fair to say that this will disappear pretty soon and chalked up as economic collateral freedom costs or something, but $9,000,000,000.00 buys a lot of food or medicine or could keep the power and water on in Iraq for at least what, a few weeks?

Sorry, sorry. My bad. School started and I got a van. In the course of doing that, I missed some important things. Let me pontificate, in brief:

Bush’s Inauguration Speech
Freedom: Used something like 29 times. Liberty: Used about half as often and almost always qualified, as in “your liberty”, “their liberty”, etc. I had planned to write a long essay about this brand of codification and what it means, but it is obvious I didn’t get to it. The point of it was this: presidential speechwriters don’t get to be presidential speechwriters by not knowing the meanings of the words they use.

Freedom is more often a broad, generalized idea, while liberty has specific implications as to government and how it interacts with the body politic. Liberty, specifically, is often cited as meaning “freedom from unjust governmental restriction, oppression, or control.” It almost always has “freedom” as a descriptor or qualifier, freedom being far more broadly interpreted. This is something to consider, especially with another four years of misbegotten foreign policy stretching out in front of us.

From a taste perspective, I question the usage of MC Ashcroft’s “Let The Eagle Soar” as a featured inauguration ditty.

Also, when Bush put the rest of the world’s leader’s on notice and pledged that our mission is to end tyranny world-wide, he meant it. Which brings me to my next point, about everyone’s favorite angry militant Islamic state:

Iran
The European Press is shucking a lot more news and analysis about Iran than American media outlets. For instance, observe the differences between a CNN search and a BBCNews search for the term “Iran”. If you look at the BBC search, you will see that many people are concerned about Iran for a myriad of reasons, but Americans remain largely unaware of how tense the situation is becoming because of everything else we talk about instead.

I have brought up Iran several times and people sometimes even say “Wow, you talk about Iran a bunch.” I do, and there’s good reason – not to whip an old turn of phrase, but Iran is a powder keg, and it is a powder keg INSIDE the powder keg that is the Middle East, and also, Iran is lit.

Iran the powder keg is lit, that is, rather than implying the whole country is drunk.

They aren’t.

So, consider this story I saw just today on the wire – Israel is so totally ready to bomb Iran it is totally not funny. I mentioned this before (”Israel prepares to drop bombs, album” 10/22/04), and if you’re wondering why I always refer to the foreign policy precept of the pre-emptive strike as the most terrible thing since mung, here’s why: Israel is saying it will pre-emptively strike Iran, and Iran is saying it will pre-emptively strike everyone. The British Parliament demanded a straight, unqualified pledge out of Tony Blair today that the UK wouldn’t get involved with any military action against Iran, and his answer? “I don’t think the US is planning on attacking them.”

Sigh.

Many times when I discuss this with young people, I hear their reply of “Yeah, but we could totally kick Iran’s ass!” I remind them that

• this is what they said about Iraq
• there is absolutely no guarantee we could kick Iran’s ass because we’re not sure how much military strumph they have built up and secreted away, and
• they wouldn’t need much to put the hurt on us if we open a second front against Iran while we’re still in Iraq

Bush is now saying that he will not rule out military action against Iran. Blair said the same thing before he left #10 Downing today, presumably on his way to tea or a rollicking good game of ‘footie’. Iran and Israel are saying, without mincing words, that they are going to attack each other.

Its going to happen, and the recent upswing in activity as well as the new unforgiving, hard-line diplomatic language makes me feel like it will be a lot sooner than later. Iran isn’t just saying they’re going to attack Israel or American forces, they are emphatically stating they can repel any US attack.

Besides, mission accomplished after the elections on Sunday, right? We’ll need something else to do!

SHOULDER MOUNTED ROCKET SCARE
Oh, apparently we have to root out terrorists with bazookas standing on rooftops shooting down passenger planes!

The very fact that this was news for two days represents a fundamental problem with Joe American’s perception of terrorism – he has no idea what terrorism actually is or how it works. By its very nature, terrorism is a long-term engagement for the terrorist or terrorist organization. These guys aren’t camped out in the woods waiting for a plane to fly over so they can run out, climb a tree, and shoot it down – operationally, terrorist organizations plan for YEARS before they do anything and all variables are considered. A terrorist organization that makes snap judgment and rash operational decisions is one that doesn’t last long.

One of the reasons we’re having such a hard time fighting the insurgency in Iraq is because of this very misconception – the insurgents are guerilla fighters and now their ranks have been swelled by the resultant influx of terrorist recruits. We began by attempting to fight them as a traditional force, with the philosophy that once we kill them all, they’re gone. Remember “Smoke ‘em out of their holes”?

The absolute and catastrophic short-sightedness of the DOD and the Pentagon in this respect is astonishing – people have actually been surprised that we’re having a hard time in Iraq, or that insurgent numbers are increasing. Just yesterday Bush was grandstanding about the Iraq War, saying “I’ve always considered it to be a part of the War on Terror”.

Well, now it is, genius, but it certainly wasn’t before we got there.

So anyways, I highly doubt that al-Qaeda will put people in place in the United States to shoot down airliners. It doesn’t fit with the M.O. that any amount of study about terrorist organizations will reveal al-Qaeda to have.

Iraqi Elections
You think its hard getting to YOUR polling place? I bet you don’t have to duck mortar fire on your way to vote.

The Iraqi Elections are going to be a disaster, plain and simple. Most of the Sunni population feel as if the election is a joke, or a sham, or a fraud. Most of them aren’t going to vote, so the parliamentary representation will be disproportionate. Many Americans are still blissfully unaware of the concept of election illegitimacy, even after 2000. If they pay attention at all, they are about to be introduced to it on a grand scale.

Also, you can bet that people are going to have problems voting because, rather than seeking to disenfranchise them like what happens here in America, in Iraq people are trying to kill you.

Finally, it won’t help that, when people finally survive the fucking Gauntlet Terminator of Democracy and get in the booth, the ballot is hideously complicated.

Note that I’m not bring the intelligence of the average Iraqi into question. I think all people have tiny strokes when they go into voting booths, which makes the ballot at least five times as difficult to understand than it actually is. You’ve all seen the kind of problems we have here, and we weren’t voting directly on several hundred candidates.

I don’t know why, but I just saw this on CNN and it made me chuckle, so I thought I would share.

To round out this post, here’s something I like to do occassionally called “How are people finding Damn The Man?” I have made bold the search terms I find totally puzzling.

1 teabagged
2 damn the man
3 josh grossfeld
4 american archives the amount $1000.000.00
5 damntheman.net
6 dick cheney swears on senate floor video
7 mike oren
8 teresa heina kerry
9 wtf04 bush
10 1980’s pop song analysis
11 2006 midterms
12 benefits of swinger marriage
13 big centerfold december 2004
14 colorado lowest mortgage rate refinance
15 damn if you do poster
16 damn the man website
17 daniel-rubin
18 defensive ads
19 desperate housewives angry with abc cancelling program
20 how to repair fiberglass boat
21 lil wayne
22 little giant ladder opinion
23 oren peacewalker
24 peacewalker
25 scanner frequency descrambler
26 seymour hersch texas fired
27 the razor mephistos
28 trombone legislation
29 what people say about bmw’s
30 wtf04
31 www.damntheman.net

The indefatiguable Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon are running secret recon missions in Iran.

Let me give you a bit of perspective, in case you thought the escalation in Iraq was as bad as it can get:

• Iraq, while home to plenty of Islamic extremists, had a mostly demoralized military and no weapons of mass destruction.
• The government of Iraq, despite Hussein’s overtures to the rest of the Arab world concerning his piety, was largely secular.
• The government in Iraq also had some dealings with terrorist organizations, but most of the real Islamist-extremist powerhouse terror groups looked down on Hussein because of his habit of only giving lip service to his religion.
• Also, the Iraqi Army, which was mostly compliant upon promises from the US of roles and continued employment in a post-Saddam Iraq, were all fired, and summarily had their pensions cut. These pensions were later partially re-instated in some cases, and a small portion of those soldiers actually did get jobs. I’m telling you this because you can bet that if we invade another country, the Army is going to be a lot less cooperative, to say the least.

Iran, on the other hand:

• is a government almost entirely comprised of Islamic extremists.
• Ever since the overthrow of the US-installed Shah in 1979, Iran has been an ideological pit of vipers from the state-funded terrorist groups all the way up to the top levels of government.
• Legislation is passed with cries of “death to America” as regularly as the members of our Senate miss votes.
• I don’t know much about their military manpower or tactical capabilities, but I do know that they’ve got a weapons stockpile that, had it been found in Iraq, would have gone a long way towards meeting the justification we were given by the Pentagon and the administration. Problem is, its in Iran.

This problem deserves further examination of what military operations against another sovereign Arab country would mean to our continuing foreign relations disaster, but it would almost certainly mean another exponential increase in recruits for Islamic Extremist terror groups. This stuff is like material for terrorist stroke books.

If you read the story, tell me if you crack up at the line about how clandestine special forces ops are strengthening the diplomatic process. More on this later.

Mr. Navarette (Dallas Morning News),

In response to your piece “… at the Democrats’ Peril“, I believe your stridently partisan logic falls apart in several key areas:

A) Everyone I know or speak to that personally has a problem with Gonzales as AG has that problem because of his actions, not his race. This includes civil servants and elected officials all the way down to Hector, my neighbor who is also a small business owner. Hector says he doesn’t like the idea of Gonzales getting to make decisions about civil liberties, because if he can justify circumventing the Geneva Conventions, what’s to stop him from also saying “In this specific situation, the Geneva Convention does not apply.”?

B) To say that Gonzales cannot be held responsible for Abu Ghraib and then immediately condemn “the goons on the night shift” is unfair in and of itself. Policy and counsel judgments have as much deliverable, pointed power in this country today as a cudgel did 30 years ago. In a time when morals and values are so important to the American public, the cold calculated disregard of human rights by a legal authority should by all means come under scrutiny. Yes, Spc. Graner and his band of ghouls all deserve what they got, but that accountability can’t stop there. You make headway in the right direction when you lay some blame at the feet of President Bush, but again this falls short.

C) Implying that a united front of Latino solidarity stood strong in the face of a liberal onslaught against Gonzales is ridiculous. For one thing, who are you to speak for all Latinos? Saying “Hurt us and we’ll hurt you” codifies Latinos in politics as little more than vindictive, reactionist Republicans. For another, why is it that the GOP only becomes concerned with championing the advancements of a diverse population when it is one of their appointees on the line? You can’t call yourself a dedicated defender of the public good when you can only be bothered to act in your own interest.

I also don’t need to tell you your implication that liberals shudder at the idea of a Republican president being the first to appoint a Mexican to the Supreme Court borders on the ridiculous. Your political reasoning, that Dems fear losing the Latino vote, is base and incorrect – in large part, they are already bereft of the Latino vote. It should be possible, in this country, to raise the question as to whether someone is right for a job without it turning into a race issue. It should also be possible for Congressional and Senate Democrats to thoroughly vet a presidential appointee – as has recently been evinced to be more necessary than ever – without being accused of obstructionism.

Saying the stakes couldn’t be higher is true – Gonzales will one day soon have powers as yet unrealized by most of the American public and be the chief component in the legal steerage of the ship of state. To claim that any questioning of his appointment is race-motivated is unfounded, sophomoric, and irresponsible. Clean up your journalistic act and stop fishing for unassailable ways to defend President Bush’s actions and intentions.

Josh Berthume
http://www.damntheman.net