Kadom al-Jabouri after five years and after ten years:

Saddam's statue: the bitter regrets of Iraq's sledgehammer man

Peter Beaumont in Baghdad 

The Observer, Saturday 9 March 2013 15.38 EST

Kadom al-Jabouri became famous when he took his hammer to the dictator's statue. Now he wishes he had never done it

Ten years ago, Kadom al-Jabouri became the face of the fall of Baghdad. Pictured with a sledgehammer while attempting to demolish the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in the city's Firdos Square, Jabouri's jubilant act of destruction made front pages around the world.

For Tony Blair and President George W Bush, the image was a godsend, encapsulating the delight of a grateful nation that their hated dictator had been ousted. The US networks showed the statue's fall for hours on end.

However, almost exactly a decade later, the "sledgehammer man" – who was helped by a US tank carrier to finally topple the statue – furiously regrets that afternoon and the symbolism of what he was involved in. "I hated Saddam," the 52-year-old owner of a motorcycle spares shop told the Observer. "I dreamed for five years of bringing down that statue, but what has followed has been a bitter disappointment.

"Then we had only one dictator. Now we have hundreds," he says, echoing a popular sentiment in a country mired in political problems and corruption, where killings still occur on an almost daily basis. "Nothing has changed for the better."

Video from the time shows Jabouri, a huge bull of a man in a vest top with close-cropped hair, battering the statue's concrete plinth with furious intensity.

What actually happened that day is still the subject of rival claims. A report in the Los Angeles Times in 2004 suggested that the toppling of the statue was stage-managed. Jabouri denies that. His claim is contested by the American soldiers involved, including the crew of the M-88 tank tow truck that eventually pulled the statue down. Two years ago they told the New Yorker that the hammer belonged to them and that a first sergeant called Leon Lambert handed it to Iraqis who then took turns using it, Jabouri being the first of them.

These days Jabouri is still recognisable as the man from those images, the former champion power-lifter who spent 11 years in Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam. Despite his formidable physique, he could only break off chunks of concrete. Even with a rope supplied by the crew of the M-88, the crowd was still not strong enough to shift it. In the end it was the vehicle that pulled it down.

Link to video: Saddam Hussein statue toppled in Bagdhad, April 2003

Asked why he had been in prison under Saddam, Jabouri answers only that his crime was "semi-political". He has said in the past that he was sent to jail after complaining that Saddam's son, Uday, had not paid him for fixing his motorbike. Eventually he was released in 1996.

Whatever his subsequent regrets, the day the statue came down remains etched in his memory. "I was in my shop here on my own. It was around noon. I heard that the Americans were in the suburbs. I went to get my sledgehammer and headed to Firdos Square," he said. "I had the idea in my mind of knocking down the statue so I went to do it. There were secret police still in the square and fedayeen [Saddam's paramilitary forces]. They were watching what I was doing. But my friends surrounded me to protect me, if they shot.

"The Americans came 45 minutes later. The commander asked if I needed a hand and pulled it down. It was just me at first. Then 30 of us. Then 300. In the end there were thousands in the square. It was all about revenge for me, for what the regime had done to me, for the years I spent in prison."

The regrets began, he says, two years later under US occupation, which he loathed. Nothing since has changed his mind – not the end of the occupation nor the handover of control to Iraq.

"Under Saddam there was security. There was corruption, but nothing like this. Our lives were protected. And many of the basics like electricity and gas were more affordable. After two years I saw no progress. Then there came the killings, robberies and sectarian violence."

He blames Iraq's politicians and the Americans for what has happened to Iraq. "The Americans began it. And then with the politicians they destroyed the country. Nothing has changed. And things seem to get worse all the time. There's no future. Not as long as the political parties running the country are in power," he said.

The "saturation coverage" of the fall of Saddam's statue – according to the most in-depth analysis by the New Yorker's Peter Maass two years ago – "fuelled the perception that the war had been won, and diverted attention from Iraq at precisely the moment that more attention was needed, not less".

The reality, as seen by Jabouri and other Iraqis with the benefit of hindsight, is that the worst times were only beginning, not coming an end.

"In India, people ask you about China, and in China, people ask you about India: which country will become the more dominant economic power in the 21st century? I now have the answer: Mexico," Thomas L Friedman, the New York Times columnist, contended last month after spending a few days in the Mexican city of Monterrey. He went on: "If Secretary of State John Kerry is looking for a new agenda he might want to focus on forging closer integration with Mexico rather than beating his head against the rocks of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan or Syria."

The other Americas are booming: Latin America has its best prospects for a century

DAVID USBORNE 

BUENOS AIRES  INDEPENDENT

SUNDAY 10 MARCH 2013

In the annals of geopolitical insults, few have been more sweeping than Richard Nixon's admonition to a young Donald Rumsfeld as he pondered his future career. "Latin America doesn't matter," he offered. "People don't give a damn about Latin America". He said it in 1971. Would anyone in Washington dare say it again?

If the region has demanded at least occasional attention from the West in more recent years, it has largely been because of one country and its (to Westerners) vexing leader. But now Hugo Chavez has gone and a new conversation has started: what will Latin America look like without him?

Viewed from Buenos Aires, the death – and the embalming – of the Venezuelan populist seems at once both important and peripheral. As the residents of this city, los porteños, crammed the downtown cafés yesterday for their cortados and cappuccinos, they could not miss the posters everywhere showing Chavez under the slogan: "To cry for him is not enough. We must follow his example". Yet their own president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, went to Venezuela only to attend the lying in state, leaving before the funeral.

She attempted to explain via Twitter. "How I would have liked to be there! But I can't: the heat, my chronic hypertension and the doctors ban me." The reality is that Ms Fernandez rushed home to deal with a deepening economic crisis, a teacher's strike in Buenos Aires province and fallout from a guilty verdict on Friday in the gun-running trial of one of her predecessors, Carlos Menem.

There is also the referendum in the Falkland Islands. The result is hardly in doubt. How passionately she reacts is likely to be in direct proportion to the political pressures she is facing at home. Under Ms Fernandez, Argentina has seen inflation spiral: some say to 25 per cent, though the government insists it is lower. Last month, Argentina was reprimanded by the International Monetary Fund for failing to offer honest and transparent economic indicators. If it doesn't fix things, it could face expulsion from the organisation, which would be unprecedented.

If Ms Fernandez has other things to attend to, so does the continent. While it may be true that Chavez's passing may spell change for his country and those few neighbours that depended on him for support, financial and ideological, such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia, the rest of Latin America is hardly in stasis. The continent is cooking. The Olympic Games are coming. So is the World Cup. Exports to China and elsewhere of everything from soya beans to oil and iron ore are booming. And millions of Catholics are praying for a first Latin Pope, perhaps Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiga, currently the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, or Joao Braz de Aviz of Brazil.

"From a macroeconomic point of view, Latin America is probably in the best position it has been almost in a hundred years and certainly in the last 60 or 70 years," Miguel Kiguel, an economic analyst in Buenos Aires and a former chief economist at the World Bank, said here last week. "For the first time since the 1920s perhaps, the region is experiencing a period of reasonable growth, high commodity prices, relatively low inflation, on average, low debt, external balances and increases in national reserves." Stoking the furnace, he says, are Brazil and Mexico.

The rest of the region can hope the rising fever in those two countries is contagious. "In India, people ask you about China, and in China, people ask you about India: which country will become the more dominant economic power in the 21st century? I now have the answer: Mexico," Thomas L Friedman, the New York Times columnist, contended last month after spending a few days in the Mexican city of Monterrey. He went on: "If Secretary of State John Kerry is looking for a new agenda he might want to focus on forging closer integration with Mexico rather than beating his head against the rocks of Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan or Syria."

Britain is already noticing. When David Cameron, the Prime Minster, attended the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, last June, he flew on to Mexico City for bilateral talks with the then Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, before returning to London. As his officials pointed out, Mexico is expected to rank as the world's seventh largest economy by 2020. Last September, Mr Cameron found himself in New York for the UN General Assembly. Did he go straight home when he was done? No, he travelled first to Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Brasilia.

Conversation at breakfast with an ex-pat British businessman, Tom, turns to Brazil and the World Cup. The challenge of hosting the quadrennial soccer festival in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016 has sent Brazil into a frenzy of building and sanitising. Slums, or favelas, are being razed and new rail lines are being strung across the landscape. One indicator of the heat being generated is the $60,000 that some apartment owners in Rio are asking for from fans who wish to rent them for the month of the tournament. Tom will be staying with friends.

Chile, which has taken a more conservative path than its neighbours, continues to stand out as the continent's poster child for economic and political stability. In Brazil, meanwhile, there has been some tempering of the economic explosion that made it a founding member of the Bric group of fast-growing nations, together with Russia, India and China. Last year, its GDP growth slowed to 0.9 per cent from 2.7 per cent in 2011 and 7.5 per cent in 2010. But Brazil, as it expands new oil exploration and benefits from high commodity prices, still has its economic house in order. The post-Chavez era may also give Brazil room to assert itself on the diplomatic stage.

"Venezuela was seen as having all this clout basically because Chavez was leading a group that was populist and nationalist, and Brazil has not got into that game," says Mr Kiguel. "Somehow it has maintained a balance between Venezuela and Chile, if you want to take the extremes, and you can expect it to keep that role." Argentina has less scope for influence. "It is going to be very difficult for Argentina with Cristina to be a leader in the region."

Those in Washington or elsewhere who believe that, without Chavez, Venezuela will evolve quickly into what they would recognise as a mature democracy, might want to consider the experience of Argentina. Peron died in 1974 and yet this country has still not escaped the mythology of his populism. And they didn't embalm Peron.

Carlos Bernata, 39, a management consultant in Buenos Aires who flies across the whole of Latin America for work, despairs of the government's handling of the economy. Meanwhile the mystique of Peron and of his second wife, Evita –which Ms Fernandez exploits whenever she is able – remains as potent as ever, he says, even among the young. "I am optimistic for the continent," he says, "but not for Argentina."

Allan Savory, a soft-spoken Zimbabwean biologist, farmer and environmentalist who has spent a lifetime studying and practicing techniques that combat desertification around the globe. In fact, he’s built a career and a business challenging what many consider facts about livestock – that they’re bad for the planet and contribute to climate change. On the contrary, Savory says, livestock are a solution to climate change and an effective means by which to fight hunger, poverty and violence across much of the Third World.

HAT TIP: RUFUS

Maybe we can stop the slaughter of wild horses:

7 Questions About Wild Horses for Interior Secretary Nominee Sally Jewell

By ANDREW COHEN    ATLANTIC

MAR 6 2013, 11:33 AM ET

On Thursday on Capitol Hill, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a confirmation hearing to consider the nomination of Sally Jewell for the position of Secretary of the Interior. She comes to the room offering some measure of comfort to two of the primary constituencies that care most about the post. Big oil? Check -- she worked for years for Mobil Oil, out in the oil and gas fields of Oklahoma. Environmentalists? Check -- she comes to Washington, D.C., from R.E.I., the "outdoor recreation" company, where she was a longtime advocate for conservation.

But Jewell is mostly a blank slate when it comes to two key areas of the Interior Department's portfolio which are in famous and direct conflict with one another. The first relates to the federal government's complicated relationship with the ranching and livestock industries. Jewell does not appear to have much of a public record when it comes to her views on the concept of welfare ranching -- the age-old, under-reported pork-barrel policy by which the federal government practically gives away the use of our public land to private ranching and farming interests by means of well-below-market lease rates.

The second unknown area of Jewell's resume involves the fate of nation's wild horses, which roam public lands and which have suffered greatly over the past few years as a result of the ruinous policies of Jewell's would-be predecessor, Ken Salazar. For wild horse advocates, the good news is that Jewell doesn't come from a longtime ranching family, as Salazar did, or have a long record of hostility to the nation's herds, as he does. 

The bad news is that Jewell may today know so little about the legal status of the horses, and so little about the political and economic background of their current predicament. that she may not be able to quickly focus on their situation. And that, these advocates fear, could be catastrophic to the herds.

Despite Jewell's background with Mobil, she will likely be tagged on Thursday by Republicans for being too much of an conservationist. And despite her history of work on conservation causes, she may be tagged by Democrats for her career in oil -- and also for her benefactor's disappointing record of conservation during his first term in the White House. In either instance, the topic of wild horses isn't likely to be raised at all. The ranching and livestock lobby certainly doesn't want to bring attention to their recent success in ridding the range lands of the horses. And the horse lobby isn't now strong enough to force a senator, a committee -- or Congress as a whole -- to yet raise a ruckus.

With all this in mind, here are the seven horse-related issues Jewell should have to address before she is confirmed for the post.

1. The slaughter of wild horses. Under the direction of Secretary Salazar, and at the behest of the powerful ranching, livestock, oil and gas lobbies, the Bureau of Land Management in the past few years has rounded up approximately 37,000 of the nation's wild horses from public lands. These roundups are cruel, often deadly, and always hazardous to the health and safety of the animals. Madame Secretary-designate, please take a few minutes to watch this video:

The federal government now holds these horses in cramped pens at significant expense to taxpayers. In the meantime, the BLM has allowed known advocates of horse slaughter to buy thousands of these horses. As secretary, are you prepared to stop these harsh roundups, to unequivocally protect wild horses from slaughter, and to impose a zero-tolerance enforcement policy against those individuals who seek to buy them for slaughter as well as against those BLM employees who knowingly sell them to these individuals? If so, how exactly?

2. The care of captured wild horses. In addition to the economic burden to taxpayers of the roundup and corralling of all these horses, horse advocates are growing increasingly concerned about the conditions many of the captured horses live in. The situation has gotten consistently worse over the years as federal and state budgets have been tightened. For example, in 2011, abused horses were removed from such conditions in Utah. Please watch this video, Madame Secretary-designate, and tell us specifically what you plan to do to better ensure that these federally protected horses are more humanely treated:

3. The long-term solution. We all know that the current situation with the corralled wild horses is unsustainable as an economic or political policy. Approximately 50,000 of them are now so housed, which means that more are currently in pens than roaming free as intended under federal law. Some advocates believe that the horses should be returned to public lands -- the tiny fraction of those lands from where they came, where they still would be overwhelmed by the numbers of sheep and cattle which graze there (at below-market lease fees). Other advocates believe the Bureau of Land Management should aggressively pursue birth control methods in the herds to reduce population growth while sustaining the viability of the herds.

Many say that if the current situation continues, and if the BLM cannot find habitats where most of these horses can be repatriated, thousands of them will inevitably be euthanized or sold for slaughter. (Indeed, in Oklahoma, where the BLM held a public meeting earlier this week, state officials again want to legalize horse slaughter.) As Secretary of the Interior, how will you solve this long-term problem of what to do with these horses which now are essentially "wards of the state" thanks to Obama Administration policies? Do you support finding new public-land habitats for them? Do you support their repatriation to former grazing areas?

4. Transparency at the Bureau of Land Management. In theory, the Interior Department is supposed to be an honest broker between private and public interests competing for the management and use of public lands. In practice, when it comes to wild horses anyway, the BLM has for generations been little less than an instrument for the business interests it is supposed to regulate. For example, the National Wild Horse and Burro Advisory Board, which is supposed to give the public a meaningful voice in wild horse policy, is stacked with individuals with long ties to livestock and ranching interests. One of these members, in fact the newest "public" member to join the Board, is vocally supportive of horse slaughter.

Are you prepared as secretary to ensure that horse advocates, who may be more openly critical of current BLM policies than their counterparts in the ranching and livestock industries, are more invested in the process by which wild horse policies are created? If so, how? Earlier this week, at the Oklahoma meeting, members of the public were given only three minutes each to publicly express their views about the BLM's wild-horse policies. And under Secretary Salazar (as noted below), the BLM has been consistently unwilling to publicly respond to public comment and criticism about wild horse policy. Will you be willing to ensure more transparency and public participation in this regulatory process? If so, how?

5. Political give-and-take. In southern Wyoming, urged on by BLM officials, a ranching and livestock group, aided by other corporate interests, has sued the federal government to "zero out" most of the wild horses living on a vast 2-million-acre swatch of public and private land that includes several local herd management areas. Now, having encouraged the very lawsuit filed against it, the BLM agrees with the plaintiffs that the horses should be removed from these lands even though there is strong evidence that the existing herds are doing no more damage to these lands than the livestock which outnumber them by many orders of magnitude.

Are you prepared, as Secretary of the Interior, to extract from the ranching, livestock, and energy industries explicit promises to protect the herds in exchange for their continued push to extract natural resources (oil, natural gas, etc.) from public lands at below-market costs? In other words, what fair and reasonable price are you going to impose on these industries for ridding public lands of federally protected horses? What are you going to say to these corporate officials when they continue to ask the BLM to remove wild horses from public lands for their own commercial benefit? Are you prepared to call for nationwide market rates for federal leases on public grazing lands?

6. Personal outreach. A lifelong Colorado rancher, your would-be predecessor was singularly unresponsive to public requests from wild horse advocates. He repeatedly refused to meet with them as he authorized the round ups of tens of thousands of horses. Salazar refused even to respond to a petition signed by 25,000 citizens and by 20 members of Congress seeking information about the BLM's sale of approximately 1,700 wild horses to a known horse slaughter advocate. And last fall he threatened to punch out a reporter who asked him to comment on the sale of these horses.

What, specifically, are you going to do to reach out, personally, to wild horse advocates so that you can better educate yourself about the plight of the herds? Are you prepared to meet privately with such advocates on a regular basis -- say, four times a year -- to ensure they have more direct input into the policies affecting the horses? Given the federal laws and regulations designed to govern the preservation and management of the wild horses, do you see it as part of the core responsibilities of the Interior Secretary to engage in such meetings?

7. Conservation. Opponents of wild horses say that the herds do great damage to public lands and that they draw down precious natural resources. But empirical evidence -- and common sense -- tell us that the relatively small number of wild horses on public lands do far less damage to the environment than do the relatively large number of cattle and sheep which also graze those lands. In other words, a million sheep and cattle destroy more public grazing lands in America than do a few thousand horses. And the remaining herds live on only a tiny fraction of federal public lands to begin with.

As a dedicated conservationist, are you prepared to view the economic conflict over wild horses in those terms and to implement policies which take a broader view of the causes of environmental harm to public lands? In other words, as a conservationist, are you prepared to consider the scientific possibility that cattle and sheep pose a far larger problem to the environment than do wild horses? And, if that's the case, what specifically do you propose to do about it to save America's protected wild horses from extinction while better protecting our public lands and better distributing the economic price of such protection?

And now, we're arguing over whether the president of the United States in his role as commander in chief in an ill-defined, barely articulated "global war on terror" has the right to kill U.S. citizens without presenting any sort of charges to any sort of court. In fact, it's worse than that, since the president won't even share his rationale for what he may or may not believe with the country's legislature.

3 Takeaways from Rand Paul's #StandwithRand #Filibuster About Drone Strikes

Nick Gillespie| Mar. 7, 2013 9:20 am reason

For all of the late-night punch-drunkiness that eventually ensued on Twitter (well, at least on my feed), yesterday's 12-hours-plus filibuster led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is among the most electrifying and insipiring events in recent political memory. The point of the filibuster - which derailed a confirmation vote on John Brennan as Barack Obama's CIA head - was to call attention to the president's insufficient answers to questions about his policy of targeted killings via drones and, one assumes, other methods.

Here are three takeaways from yesterday's epic event:

1. It shows what one man can do to call attention to a hugely important issue that nonetheless is largley ignored by the mainstream media and the political establishment.

Elected in 2010, Rand Paul has rarely been the Republican - or the Democrat's - media favorite. He's been heckled big time from his own side (which initially worked against his election) and across the aisle as an irresponsible ideologue (he's a dirty tea-bagger don't you know!). Among a good chunk of his father's most devoted followers, he's been assailed as a neo-con war hawk who was willing to trim his libertarian bona fides to win favor with the D.C. party crowd. His sad-sack opponent in the general election, Jack Conway, set new lows with the infamous "Aqua Buddha" ad that accused Paul of everything short of devil worship; his opponent in the GOP primary, Trey Grayson, had already trotted out many of the same pathetic lines.

Yet since showing up in D.C., Paul has been exactly what Reason dubbed him: "The most intersting man in the Senate" who has offered specific legislation and made extended arguments for a unified vision of limited government that is not only fully within some great lines of American political tradition but urgently needed in the current moment. Senators who pride themselves on their foreign policy expertise and have free-loaded for decades in D.C. haven't made a speech as thoughtful and out-front as the one he delivered a while back at The Heritage Foundation, for god's sake.

Rand Paul didn't speak or act alone yesterday, of course - and props to the dozen or so colleagues (including a Democrat or two) who joined him on stage or otherwise engaged him. But the opthamologist from Bowling Green, Kentucky almost singelhandedly brought the news cycle to a halt yesterday by insisting that the American government answer some basic questions about how, when, where, and under what circumstances it thinks it has the right to kill its own citizens.

2. It shows the power of transpartisan thought and action. Make no mistake: Despite the presence of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), yesterday's filibuster was a GOP-conducted orchestra. But what was most bracing and ultimately powerful thing about the filibuster was that none of the speakers exempted the Republican Party or former President George W. Bush, whose aggrandized view of executive power still roils the sleep of the Founding Fathers, from withering criticism and scrutiny. How else to explain that hard-left groups such as Code Pink were proud to #standwithrand yesterday on Twitter? The same with reliable Rand and GOP critic Eugene Robinson and many others who up until yesterday thought little of Rand Paul.

The filibuster succeeded precisely because it wasn't a cheap partisan ploy but because the substance under discussion - why won't the president of the United States, his attorney general, and his nominee to head the CIA explain their views on limits to their power? - transcends anything so banal or ephemeral as party affiliation or ideological score-settling.

The chills started early in the filibuster as Paul said things along the lines of, "If you're gonna kill people in America [as terrorists], you need rules and we need to know your rules," and "To be bombed in your sleep - there's nothing American, nothing constitutional, about that" (these quotes are paraphrases). Those are not the words of a career politician trying to gain an advantage during the next round of horse-trading over a pork-barrel project. They are the words of a patriot who puts his country first and they inspire accordingly.

3. It ties a direct line between the abuses of power and the growth of the state.

Despite using various self-identifiers over the years (he's called himself a libertarian, a conservative, a constitutional conservative, etc.) Rand Paul has always been rightly understood as an advocate of sharply limited and small government. During his Senate race, for instance, he said questions about drug legalization should be pushed back towards the states, where different models could be tried in accordance with the wishes of the people most directly affected. He presented a budget that was heavy on spending cuts that would have balanced the budget in five years. He has called for either actually declaring war on countries such as Iraq and Libya or getting the hell out. What unites his positions is a default setting against giving the federal government a free hand to do whatever it wants irrespective of constitutional limits.

A year or so ago, we were debating whether the government had the right to force its citizens to engage in particular economic activity - that was the heart of the fight over the mandate to buy insurance in Obamacare. That overreach - and the fear that a government that can make you buy something can also theoretically make you eat broccoli - was at the heart of Rand Paul's opposition to the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruled that in fact, the federal government not only has the right to regulate commercial transactions that take place anywhere in these United States, it has the right to force them to take place.

And now, we're arguing over whether the president of the United States in his role as commander in chief in an ill-defined, barely articulated "global war on terror" has the right to kill U.S. citizens without presenting any sort of charges to any sort of court. In fact, it's worse than that, since the president won't even share his rationale for what he may or may not believe with the country's legislature.

By foregounding the issues of limited government, transparency, and oversight as they relate specifically to the most obvious and brazen threat to civil liberties imaginable, Rand Paul and his filibuster have also tied a direct line to a far more wide-ranging and urgently needed conversation about what sort of government we have in America - and what sort of government we should have.

The Madness of King George Bush - Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it.

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, One Day Even the Drones Will Have to Land

Posted by Peter Van Buren at 8:15AM, March 07, 2013.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.

We don’t get it.  We really don’t.  We may not, in military terms, know how to win any more, but as a society we don’t get losing either.  We don’t recognize it, even when it’s staring us in the face, when nothing -- and I mean nothing -- works out as planned. Take the upcoming 10th anniversary of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq as Exhibit A. You could describe what happened in that country as an unmitigated disaster -- from the moment, in April 2003, U.S. troops first entered a Baghdad in flames and being looted (“stuff happens”) and were assigned to guard only the Interior Ministry (i.e. the secret police) and the Oil Ministry (well, you know what that is) to the moment in December 2011 when the last American combat unit slipped out of that land in the dead of the night (after lying to Iraqi colleagues about what they were doing).

As it happened, the country that we were going to garrison for a lifetime (to the thankful cheers of its inhabitants) while we imposed a Pax Americana on the rest of the region didn’t want us.  The government we essentially installed chose Iran as an ally and business partner.  The permanent bases we built to the tune of billions of dollars are now largely looted ghost towns.  The reconstruction of the country that we promoted proved worse than farcical, as former State Department official Peter Van Buren, author of the already classic book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, reminds us.  And an outfit proudly carrying the al-Qaeda brand name, which did not exist in Iraq before our invasion, is now thriving in a still destabilized country.  Consider that just the start of a much longer list.

For Americans, however, a single issue overwhelms all of the above, one so monumental that we can’t keep our minds off it or on much of anything else when it comes to Iraq.  I’m talking, of course, about “the surge,” those five brigades of extra combat troops that, in 2006, a desperate president decided to send into an occupied country collapsing in a maelstrom of insurgency and sectarian civil war.  Admittedly, General David Petraeus, who led that surge, would later experience a farcical disaster of his own and is in retirement after going “all in” with his biographer.  Still, as we learned in the Senate hearings on Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Pentagon chief, the question -- the litmus test when it comes to Iraq -- remains: Was the surge strategy he implemented a remarkable success or just a simple, straightforward success in essentially buying off the Sunni opposition and, for a period, giving the country a veneer of relative -- extremely relative -- calm?  Was it responsible for allowing us to leave behind a shattered Iraq (and all of Washington’s shattered imperial dreams) with, as President Obama put it, our “heads held high”? Oh, and lest you think that only right-wing Republicans and the rest of the crew that once cheered us into Iraq and refused to face what was happening while we were there find the surge the ultimate measure of our stay, check out Tom Powers’s recent admiring portrait of the surge general in the New York Review of Books.

Here’s at least one explanation for our inability to look defeat in the face and recognize it for what it is: like the proverbial horseman who prefers not to change mounts in midstream, we have an aversion to changing experts in mid-disaster, even when those experts have batting averages for pure wrongness that should stagger the imagination.  In fact, you could say that the more deeply, incontrovertibly, disastrously wrong you were about Iraq, the more likely the media was in the years after, on one disaster “anniversary” after another, to call on you for your opinion.  At the fifth anniversary of the invasion, for example, the New York Times rounded up a range of "experts on military and foreign affairs" to look back.  Six of them had been intimately involved in the catastrophe either as drumbeaters for the invasion, instigators of it, or facilitators of the occupation that followed. Somehow, that paper could not dig up a single expert who had actually opposed the invasion.

In other words, we’re talking here about a country that, for wisdom, regularly consults the walking dead, the zombies of our Iraq experience. And don’t think that, in the coming days, some of them won’t be back again to offer their balanced thoughts on what it all meant.  Only one kind of expert has been noticeably missing all these years in the mainstream media when it comes to assessing our Iraq experience: those benighted, misguided types in their millions who, before March 2003, were foolish enough to go out into the streets of global cities and oppose the invasion entirely.

To inoculate you against the coverage in the anniversary week to come, and against the spirit of our American times, TomDispatch offers Peter Van Buren, who had a ringside seat at part of our Iraqi follies, on what these 10 years from hell actually meant for us as well as others. Tom

Mission Unaccomplished

Why the Invasion of Iraq Was the Single Worst Foreign Policy Decision in American History

By Peter Van Buren   TOMDISPATCH.COM

I was there. And “there” was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness -- not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington’s war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we -- and so many others -- will pay the price for it for a long, long time.

The Madness of King George

It’s easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.

By then, the U.S. “reconstruction” plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts -- at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned -- we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.

In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.

Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or... um... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.

In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn't a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.

In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the Potemkin Chicken Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with the rooster’s cry each morning some camera crew came out for a visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford, then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow ambassador to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that “teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing to rely on Americans,” is still online (including this charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine).

We weren’t stupid, mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough to learn to look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at first, a kind of insider’s joke you all think you know the punch line to. Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a war whose costs will someday be toted up in the trillions. Really, at the end of the day, what was the harm?

The harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, “At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory ‘thank you,’ followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power.” How could we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, “It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked.”

By 2009, of course, it should all have been so obvious. We were no longer inside the neocon dream of unrivaled global superpowerdom, just mired in what happened to it. We were a chicken factory in the desert that no one wanted.

Time Travel to 2003

Anniversaries are times for reflection, in part because it’s often only with hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our lives. On the other hand, on anniversaries it’s often hard to remember what it was really like back when it all began. Amid the chaos of the Middle East today, it’s easy, for instance, to forget what things looked like as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had been invaded and occupied quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets (the British, the ancient Greeks…) could never have dreamed of. Iran was frightened, seeing the mighty American military on its eastern border and soon to be on the western one as well, and was ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S. was rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for torture.

Most of the rest of the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with dictators reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception, though predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make some sort of deal. (He did.) All that was needed was a quick slash into Iraq to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart of Mesopotamia. Our future garrisons there could obviously oversee things, providing the necessary muscle to swat down any future destabilizing elements. It all made so much sense to the neocon visionaries of the early Bush years. The only thing that Washington couldn’t imagine was this: that the primary destabilizing element would be us.

Indeed, its mighty plan was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their lust for everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team missed a diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today’s saber rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq imploded. As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by history, turned up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret gulags, rendition, drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at home. The sleaziest of deals were cut to try to salvage something, including ignoring the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi Rice-Qaddafi photo-op rapprochement in Libya.

Inside Iraq, the forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by the U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war between Israel and Iran inside Lebanon (where another destabilizing event, the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli invasion of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended. Today, in fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host, Syria, with multiple powers using “humanitarian aid” to push and shove their Sunni and Shia avatars around.

Staggering neocon expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically more powerful, with sanctions-busting trade between the two neighbors now valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that decade, the U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran’s strategic counterbalances, Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run by Nouri al-Malaki, who had once found asylum in Tehran.

Meanwhile, Turkey is now engaged in an open war with the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey is, of course, part of NATO, so imagine the U.S. government sitting by silently while Germany bombed Poland. To complete the circle, Iraq’s prime minister recently warned that a victory for Syria's rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda which would further destabilize the region.

Meanwhile, militarily burnt out, economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lacking any moral standing in the Middle East post-Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring flickered out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region. And even that hasn’t stopped Washington from pursuing the latest version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.

Having noted the ease with which a numbed American public patriotically looked the other way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell, our leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American drones and special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever deeper into Africa, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier version of the state of perpetual war George Orwell once imagined for his dystopian novel 1984. And don’t doubt for a second that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes for our American world.

Happy Anniversary

On this 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any measure, a dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny Department of State advises American travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens “remain at risk for kidnapping... [as] numerous insurgent groups, including Al Qaida, remain active...” and notes that “State Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq advises the use of Protective Security Details.”

In the bigger picture, the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in 2003. Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In 2003, at that infamous “mission accomplished” moment, only Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were considered “extreme danger posts.” Soon enough, however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya, once boring but secure outposts for State’s officials, now fall into the same category.

Other places once considered safe for diplomats and their families such as Syria and Mali have been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at all. Even sleepy Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department had its Arabic language school there, is now on reduced staff with no diplomatic family members resident. Egypt teeters.

The Iranian leadership watched carefully as the American imperial version of Iraq collapsed, concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed away from initial offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at least for a while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity, aided by the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network. North Korea, another A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther from Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor China pursued its own path of economic dominance, while helping to “pay” for the Iraq War by becoming the number-one holder of U.S. debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S. debt held overseas.

And don’t put away the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief for an absent George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration on this 10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently reminded us that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he had “long since given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the right decision,” Blair added that new crises are looming. “You’ve got one in Syria right now, you’ve got one in Iran to come,” he said. “We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult. But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle.”

Think of his comment as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe, Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that it stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was not an aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of thinking that is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline is slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however, even the drones will have to land.

Obama has been sharply criticised for the secrecy surrounding his extension of America's "targeted killing" campaign against al-Qaeda terrorist suspects using missile strikes by unmanned drones. The secret campaign has killed an estimated 4,700 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. A quarter are estimated to have been civilians prompting anger among human rights campaigners.

Barack Obama ‘has authority to use drone strikes to kill Americans on US soil'

President Barack Obama has the authority to use an unmanned drone strike to kill US citizens on American soil, his attorney general has said.

By Jon Swaine, Washington 

TELEGRAPH

6:52PM GMT 06 Mar 2013

Eric Holder argued that using lethal military force against an American in his home country would be legal and justified in an “extraordinary circumstance" comparable to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

"The president could conceivably have no choice but to authorise the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland," Mr Holder said.

His statement was described as "more than frightening" by Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, who had demanded to know the Obama administration's position on the subject.

"It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans," said Mr Paul, a 50-year-old favourite of the anti-government Tea Party movement, who is expected to run for president in 2016.

Mr Holder wrote to Mr Paul after the senator threatened to block the appointment of John Brennan as the director of the CIA unless he received answers to a series of questions on its activities.

Mr Paul on Wednesday evening took to the floor of the Senate to launch an old-fashioned filibuster in an effort to delay a vote on the approval of Mr Brennan for CIA director. “I won’t be able to speak forever, but I’m going to speak as long as I can,” he said, before embarking on several hours of criticism of Mr Obama’s compliance with the US constitution.

Mr Obama has been sharply criticised for the secrecy surrounding his extension of America's "targeted killing" campaign against al-Qaeda terrorist suspects using missile strikes by unmanned drones.

The secret campaign has killed an estimated 4,700 people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. A quarter are estimated to have been civilians prompting anger among human rights campaigners.

According to research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes killed between 474 and 881 civilians – including 176 children – in Pakistan between 2004 and last year.

Criticism within the US has focused on the implications for terror suspects who are also US citizens, after Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric born and educated in the US, was killed in Yemen in 2011.

The administration claims it has the legal authority to assassinate Americans provided that they are a senior al-Qaeda operative posing an imminent threat and it would be "infeasible" to capture them.

This justification emerged only last month in a leaked memo from Mr Holder's department of justice. Mr Obama this week agreed to give Congress his full set of classified legal memos on the targeting of Americans.

Civil liberties campaigners accuse the president and his aides of awarding themselves sweeping powers to deny Americans their constitutional rights without oversight from Congress or the judiciary.

Mr Holder stressed in his letter that the prospect of a president considering the assassination of an American citizen on US soil was "entirely hypothetical" and "unlikely to occur".

Yet “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorise the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States," he wrote.

Appearing in front the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, Mr Holder reiterated that "the government has no intention to carry out any drone strikes in the United States".

Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, told him his reference to "extraordinary circumstances" such as September 11 or the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbour were "extremely concerning".

"It is imperative that we understand the operational boundaries for use of such force," Mr Grassley said. "American citizens have a right to understand when their life can be taken by their government absent due process."

Daphne Eviatar, a senior counsel at Human Rights First, said: “It’s hard to see how authorities could not be in a position to arrest someone yet be able to kill them.

“The administration should publish all its legal memos on targeted killing. Classified information can be redacted if necessary. There is no reason for legal opinions justifying ongoing US programmes to be kept secret.”

Aquaponics - I just may try this. It looks like healthy fun.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which ought to be a registered foreign agent, opens its annual conference in Washington today. Its three big goals right now are to make sure US government aid to Israel is exempted from the across the board budget cuts of the sequester; to make sure Israel can with impunity go on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank; and to get permission from Congress for the Israeli Air Force to bomb Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.

Israel Lobby asks Congress to Approve Attack on Iran & to Exempt Israel from Sequester

Posted on 03/04/2013 by Juan Cole

News from what Ross Perot used to call the guys in sharkskin suits and alligator shoes– the lobbyists who routinely outvote you and me on Capitol Hill:

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which ought to be a registered foreign agent, opens its annual conference in Washington today. Its three big goals right now are to make sure US government aid to Israel is exempted from the across the board budget cuts of the sequester; to make sure Israel can with impunity go on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank; and to get permission from Congress for the Israeli Air Force to bomb Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities.

Since Israel is a middle-income country with a nominal per capita income higher than Spain or South Korea, it is mysterious why the US taxpayer should outright give it so much money every year– more especially since the Israelis are breaking international law with their aggressive colonization of the West Bank, which causes no end of trouble for the United States in the Muslim World. Why it should be exempted from the effects of the sequester, when ordinary Americans will not, is further mysterious.

But the maneuvering around the sequester and aid is a minor issue compared to the attempt to do an end run around President Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel by getting senators to sign a permission slip for Israel to attack Iran, saying that the senate:

“urges that, if the Government of Israel is 3 compelled to take military action in self-defense, the 4 United States Government should stand with Israel 5 and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support to the Government of Israel in its defense of its territory, people, and existence.”

Although the resolution denies being an authorization for war, that is clearly what it is. It was introduced by Lindsey Graham (of course) and Robert Menendez.

The resolution also seeks to expand America’s unilateral war on the Iranian economy, which is arguably illegal in international law, by trying to punish European companies, including pharmaceuticals, that sell to Iran. The US financial blockade is already making some medicines hard to come by for strapped Iranian families with ill children.

An Israeli attack on Iran would certainly draw in the United States. Thousands of US personnel in Baghdad, Qatar and Bahrain would be vulnerable to covert, proxy attacks in response. The Pentagon has repeatedly warned the Israelis about doing anything that might force the US into hostilities, and the brass won’t be happy about this irresponsible resolution.

Former National Security Council staffer and Columbia professor of Political Science Gary Sick notes, “Initiating a war is the gravest step any nation can take. This legislation would effectively entrust that decision to a regional state. Such a decision is an American sovereign responsibility. It cannot be outsourced.”

Just Foreign Policy has suggestions for how you can protest this irresponsible resolution to your elected representatives.