What a "Secure" Province Looks Like
by Billmon

But Tom Lasseter, the Knight-Ridder reporter who's made something of a gig for himself pointing out the gap between fantasy at the top and reality on the ground -- basically by letting the guys actually fighting the war tell their own stories -- has done it again. He recently filed this report from the province of Diyala, which lies to the east of Baghdad, well outside the Sunni Triange: Commanders for the 3rd Infantry Division in Diyala said the number of attacks there had dropped from about a dozen a day last year to seven. Roadside bombs, they said, have decreased by a third. The latter trend, though, hasn't held up this month. In September 2004 there were 72 roadside bombs detonated or found, but 106 this month. "They say attacks are down. Well, no [shit]," [Staff Sgt. Donnie] Hendricks said. "We're not patrolling where the bad guys are." U.S. patrols on a parallel road, Route Marie, ended in late May. Pointing to Route Marie on a map on the wall of his barracks, Hendricks traced a 2-mile stretch of the road with his index finger. "They kicked our [ass] off this road," Hendricks said. "They hit us with so many IEDs we had to stop using it." Needless to say, a province in which stretches of main highway have been turned into no go zones for U.S. military convoys can hardly be called pacified. And the routes that are open aren't much better:

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Experiencing Withdrawal Symptoms in Iraq

Recently, our top commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., was brought back to the United States, officially to consult with George Bush on what the President still calls "our strategy for victory." Along with retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Centcom Commander Gen. John Abizaid, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Casey then testified before Congress on military "progress" in Iraq. As Rumsfeld confidently told the Armed Services Committee, ``Every single week that goes by, the number of [Iraqi] security forces goes up, the total.'' In a statement from the White House Rose Garden after meeting with his generals, the President made the same point: "The growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping our coalition address a challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war. And General Casey discussed this with us in the Oval Office… Now, the increasing number of more capable Iraqi troops has allowed us to better hold on to the cities we have taken from the terrorists… We're on the offense. We have a plan to win." Before Congress, however, Casey painted a rather different picture of the Iraqi national-army-that-isn't. In fact, on a crucial point, his testimony bore little relation to the assessments that either George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld claimed they had heard. Last June, the Pentagon informed Congress that three Iraqi battalions were finally at "Level 1" of preparedness -- that is, "fully trained, equipped, and capable of operating independently" of U.S. forces. On Thursday, Casey lowered this estimate to one battalion (evidently not even one of the previous three), calling it a "step backward." In other words, of the 100-plus battalions in the American-created Iraqi army, only one -- perhaps 1,000 soldiers -- is capable of heading off on its own to fight, out of sight of its American protectors. Donald Rumsfeld has often talked about the "metrics" of success. Well, here's perhaps the most significant metric we have on the Iraqi military -- the essence of what passes for a Bush administration plan for the pacification of Iraq -- and it speaks the world.

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The Greatest Strategic Disaster in US History

Capitol Hill Blue, the Washington, D.C., publication that cultivates relationships with White House staffers, reports one White House aide saying, "It's like working in an insane asylum. People walk around like they're in a trance. We're the dance band on the Titanic, playing out our last songs to people who know the ship is sinking and none of us are going to make it."

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