Return to Karmah

Last year, in my post The Surge is Working!, I said to check on a general's prediction that Karmah would be cleared by the end of July. Maybe it was. But three weeks ago three marines and 17 Iraqis were killed by a suicide bomber.

On July 2, Iraqi army forces found a cache of weapons in Karmah. Some might take this as positive news. Others who are more skeptical might take it as Iraqi army members sympathetic with the resistence giving up some relatively low value weapons to deflect suspicion that was on them after the bombing.

From Robert Reid's AP story:

Two policemen said the bomber was able to penetrate security because he was a wearing camouflage uniform of the Iraqi police commandos. Both policemen spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Meanwhile, Marines moving headquarters out of Fallujah.

The military thinks they can prevent reporting of the truth. Here is Zoriah's blog post that got him unembedded.

Today's Ted Rall cartoon from gocomics.

Crocker Al-Jazeera interview transcript

Jasim Al-Azzawi interviewed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker. Thanks to Juan Cole for disseminating this. See the video. This is not a full or official transcript, but my slow typing paraphrase. Watch the video if you want complete accuracy.

q. How do we understand conflicting statements by Iraq and U.S. governments about the Status of Forces Agreement negotiations.

a. I don't see a contradicton. We are saying the same thing.

q. Iraq National Security Advisor Rubaie said Iraq will not accept a SOFA without a withdrawl date.

a. The next day he talked about a 'planning time horizon'. Force withdrawls are underway and will continue. The last 'surge' brigade will leave soon. Combat troop numbers down 25% over last year.

q. With the improved security in iraq, explain the rush to reach a SOFA before the end of July.

a. Getting it right is more important than getting it quick. Both governments are anxious to get an agreement.

q. On December 31 the UN mandate runs out. Three optioins are: a short, temporary agreement, another UN mandate, a long term agreement. What is the rush?

a. We need to have basic legal agreement that provides authority and protections for US forces to operate. A short term agreement is a possibility until a longer term agreement is done.

q. why do doubters suspect a short agreement is a ploy to get foot in the door>

a. Americans and Iraqis seek the same thing: Iraqis fully in charge of security.

q. 31 iraqi legislators wrote congress they reject any agreement without a timetable to leave completely, i.e. no bases or troops left behind. Are you taking into account the will of the Iraqi people?

q. Iraqis are concerned that the agreement has supplemental, undeclared provisions. Can you assure that final agreement won't have secret provisions

a. This will be an open transparent document. It must go before Iraqi parliament, and we have pledged to be fully open with the US Congress. It doesn't make sense to brief parliaments on positions that are not final.

q. Lt. Gen Dubik says Iraqi troops will be fully functional by 2009, and the US role will be for training and other issues. When will iraqi forces take control?

a. They are already taking control. 75% of Iraqi units are "in the lead".

q. How do you explain that the GAO says that number is only 10%?

a. In terms of operational readiness assessments, ORA 1 is the highest, ORA 4 is the least...blah blah...
ORA 2 instead of ORA 1 doesn't mean that units are incapable of fighting.

q. You say only 3 of 18 benchmarks are not met. The GAO says 9 of 18 not met.

a. When we talk about benchmarks, they can be fully realized or show satisfactory progress. It is not a black and white situation. Not 100% operationally ready doesn't mean not capable. Debaathification is not done but there is a law, so we think that is satisfactory progress.

q. There are several factors for improved security. Several sources say Iran is lessening aggressiveness

a. iran has suffered setbacks. iran supported militias hurt in combat with iraqi forces. Many fled to Iran. Iran not helping, but Iraqi forces are hurting militias. Iran's stated policy is to support democratic Iraq. Its behavior is opposite, to undermine it, and support militias, not the government. Iran has to decide what kind of relationship it wants. The past is bitter, but there is opportunity.

q. How doe you assess Iraq's future will it be a prosperous democratic country?

a. iraq is emerging from violence of past years as a democratic country in charge of own affairs. It will take time to overcome problems from the Saddam era.

20th Anniversery of US Terrorist Attack on Iranian Civilian Airliner

The history of the US terrorist shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the USS Vincennes.

Cancer on the Presidency

The following excerpt from the Watergate tapes should be required reading in every high school history class in the United States.

DEAN: Right. Uh, so that's, that's it. That's
the, the extent of the knowledge. Now,
where, where are the soft spots on this?
Well, first of all, there's the, there's the
problem of the continued blackmail

PRESIDENT: Right.

DEAN: ...which will not only go on now, it'll goon
when these people are in prison, and it will
compound the obstruction of justice
situation. It'll cost money. It's
dangerous. Nobody, nothing--people around
here are not pros at this sort of thing.
This is the sort of thing Mafia people can
do: washing money, getting clean money, and
things like that, uh--we're--we just don't
know about those (noise) things, because
we're-not used to, you know--we are not
criminals and not used to dealing in that
business. It's, uh, it's, uh--

PRESIDENT: That's right.

DEAN: It's tough thing to know how to do.

PRESIDENT: Maybe we can't even do that.

DEAN: That's right. It's a real problem as to
whether we could even do it. Plus there's a
real problem in raising money. Uh, Mitchell
has been working on raising some money. Uh,
feeling he's got, you know, he's got one,
he's one of the ones with the most to lose.
Uh, but there's no denying the fact that the
White House, and uh, Ehrlichman, Haldeman,
Dean are involved in some of the early money
decisions.

PRESIDENT: How much money do you need?

DEAN: I would say these people are going to cost,
uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, -
two years. (Pause)

PRESIDENT: We could get that.

DEAN: Uh, huh.

PRESIDENT: You, on the money, if you need the money, I
mean, uh' you could get the money. Let's
say--

DEAN: Well, I think that we're going--

PRESIDENT: What I mean is, you could, you could get a
million dollars. And you could get it in
cash. I, I know where it could be gotten.

DEAN: Uh, huh.

Maliki Timetable

The Iraqis want a timetable.

The Republicans have been mindlessly parroting the fascist mantra, "a timetable for surrender". How is it surrender if the Iraqis themselves want a timetable? Unless, of course, the war is not about freeing Iraq, about getting the Iraqis to "stand up", about leaving an Iraq that is stable, but instead is about conquering and occupying Iraq. Of course, if that is the case, all the talk about "the surge is working" is meaningless.

No timetable equals permanent occupation. Tomorrow's headline: Republicans continue push for permanent occupation of Iraq.

Cosmic Music of Burritos, Byrds and Scruggs

Rummaging around the internet I stumbled on Christine's Tune by the Flying Burrito Brothers, and a performance of You Ain't Goin Nowhere by the Byrds and Earl Scruggs.

These two performances are just stunning to me. Talk about your 'roots' music or your 'alt country', it don't get more rootsy or more alt. Sneaky Pete's solos with the fuzzbox remind us that putting a guitarist like Nels Cline together with Wilco should appear completely natural.

Let me quote extensively from Joel Cohen's liner notes to "An American Christmas":

Where, we may ask, are the songs the mass media forgot to promote? Where are the true and good works of the American spirit? Why are they so hard to come by? The answer, at least in part, has to do with the way we tend in this country to become estranged from our own roots. For in fact, our music history has been written wrong, and our past denied. No wonder it takes some effort to locate our best music. Our past denied? That is a heavy accusation, and a hard one to prove all up and down the line: but let us test it with one work that was highly respected in its (fairly recent) day: Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, American Supplement (New York, 1941). ... We began with religious music; but American sacred song is not the only area in which almost everything real and vital in our music history is ignored or written off by the official Grove's chronicle. Stephen Collins Foster does get an entry, but there is nothing on Joplin (Grove's does allow, paternalistically, that "in the future the various colleges for Negroes will become able to magnify training so as to produce decided results.") Charles Ives (b. 1874) does not exist for the 1941 Grove's, not even in the rapid survey of post-1900 activity, but Deems Taylor (b. 1885) has an entry, and there are elogious articles on Edward MacDowell and Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (the latter with a full-page photo). And don't even think of looking for Jelly Roll Morton's (b. 1885) name in these paler-than-thou pages. Conclusion: Our official music history has misled us. The finest of the wheat has too often been thrown aside, and much energy is spent cataloguing and canonising the chaff. Americans, awake! We have one of the most rich, diverse, and challenging musical civilisations on this planet! We also, unfortunately, have a collective inferiority complex abour popular culture, and a dreary, stifling tendency to make "official" thoughts and "correct" attitudes replace the spontaneous movements of the soul. As a result, the media and the official circuits of distribution often ignore what is best in our musical heritage, and the public has been miseducated to prefer counterfeit culture to the real thing. Much of American music defies classification -- that is in large part why academic historians have such trouble dealing with it.

Defies classification indeed!

Christine's Tune



You Ain't Goin' Nowhere