Date Iraq War Began:  March 19, 2003

Date of 1000 Deaths in Iraq:  Sept. 9, 2004 (18 months from start)

Date of 2000 Deaths in Iraq:  October 25, 2005 (13 months from 1000th death)

Date of 2500 Deaths in Iraq:  June 15, 2006 (8 months from 2000th death)

Date of 3000 Deaths in Iraq:  December 31, 2006 (6 months from 2500th death)

JK – 12-23-2006:

Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous — it is immoral.

I’d rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

  JK – 12-20-2006:

You can put another 100,000 troops into Iraq and it’s not going to make a difference without resolving the fundamental differences between the stakeholders.

JK – 12-23-2006:

This isn’t a time for stubbornness, nor is it a time for halfway solutions—or warmed-over “new” solutions that our own experience tells us will only make the problem worse. The Iraq Study Group tells us that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” It joins the chorus of experts in and outside of Baghdad reminding us that there is no military solution to a political crisis. And yet, over the warnings of former secretary of state Colin Powell, Gen. John Abizaid and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington is considering a “troop buildup” option, sending more troops into harm’s way to referee a civil war.

We have already tried a trimmed-down version of the McCain plan of indefinitely increasing troop levels. We sent 15,000 more troops to Baghdad last summer, and today the escalating civil war is even worse. You could put 100,000 more troops in tomorrow and you’re only going to add to the number of casualties until Iraqis sit down together at a bargaining table and compromise. The barrel of a gun can’t answer the question of how you force Iraqi nationalism to trump sectarian loyalty.

[...]

Conversation is not capitulation.

The Washington Post marks the death of Saddam Hussein and reviews his life’s history in this article:

During Hussein’s years in power, he strove to harness his country’s bountiful supply of oil to build Iraq into a major power in the Middle East and reclaim the glory of past Arab civilizations.

[...]

Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Auja, a cluster of mud-brick huts outside Tikrit, north of Baghdad. His father, Hussein Majid, was a peasant who disappeared before his son was born. His mother, who remarried, entrusted Hussein to the care of an uncle, Khayrallah Tulfah, an army officer and opponent of the British-backed monarchy then ruling Iraq.

Hussein started elementary school when he was about 10. At 18, he moved to Baghdad with Tulfah and enrolled at the Karkh high school. Soon after, he joined the Baath (or Renaissance) Party, the Arab nationalist movement founded by a Syrian Christian in the 1940s. Its members were angered by what they saw as the subservience of Arab peoples under European colonialism, and they yearned to create a single socialist Arab state.

Hussein became known as “a party strongman, and in 1959, at age 22, he participated in an attempt to assassinate Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem, the Iraqi ruler who had overthrown the monarchy with other military officers the year before.” After the failed assassination attempt, he went to Egypt for a time, and upon his return to Iraq assumed an even greater role within the Ba’ath party. His position was secured when a relative, Gen. Ahmed Hassan Bakr, seized power and Hussein became the number two man responsible for the intelligence and security services. In 1979, he led a palace coup which moved Bakr aside and he “simultaneously assumed the titles of president, prime minister, chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, secretary general of the Baath Party’s regional command and commander in chief of the armed forces.”

In 1980, Hussein tried to take advantage of instability in neighboring Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution had recently ousted the shah, by bombing Iranian airfields and sending his troops over the border. The eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ensued cost hundreds of thousands of lives on each side and left Iraq staggering under a debt estimated at $75 billion. It was in this war that Hussein first used the chemical weapons he would later turn on his own people in Kurdistan.

Over the course of the war, the U.S. government under presidents Ronald Reagan and later George H.W. Bush sought to weaken Iraq’s bonds with its rival, the Soviet Union, as well as to prevent Iran from expanding its power in the region. It provided Iraq with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies, along with weapons and military intelligence.

Near the end of the war, Hussein inaugurated another bloody campaign, this time against the Kurds in northern Iraq, who were aligned with Iran. During the 1987-88 Anfal campaign, a systematic effort to destroy rural Kurdish life, the Iraqi military dropped poison gas on villages, bulldozed homes and killed, tortured and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. The Kurdish government estimated that 182,000 people died in the campaign.

The article goes on to describe his invasion of Kuwait, the result of the 1st Gulf War, and the years of sanctions that followed. Then it mentions the period of time that we are all more familiar with: the second invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s capture.

What the article does not do is adequately outline how involved the US government was with Iraq and in particular, with Saddam Hussein all throughout his career. <!-more-> For that you’ll need to go to Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment. Juan notes,

The tendency to treat Saddam and Iraq in a historical vacuum, and in isolation from the superpowers, however, has hidden from Americans their own culpability in the horror show that has been Iraq for the past few decades.

He goes onto outline US government involvement in Iraq stretching back into the 1950’s and moving forward to the very active period of engagement during the 1980’s as a result of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations. Some of the participants’ names will be very familiar.

But as one commenter on Salon put it,

It’s easy … to forget that missing WMD notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was a monster. He killed people on a mass scale. ... He created and ruled over a system that destroyed the lives of countless Shia and Kurd Iraqis, and many Sunnis too. The US didn’t have to force or cajole the shaky new Iraqi regime and its imperfect, nascent judicial system into trying Saddam. If anything, US influence was used to exercise a measure of constraint so that he was not tortured and then strung up in a public square for the cathartic edification of the Iraqi people.

...as soon as Saddam was captured, he was a dead man, and not because of the US; it was because of the Iraqi people, and the demand from a strong majority of Iraqis from all backgrounds that some sort of justice - belated and imperfect as it may be - be meted out to their oppressor. In the end, we were just observers to this final, shabby, and inevitable act.

Considering this point in history brings two thoughts to mind - first, how important it is to know the history of our country and its involvement with other countries and people on this small planet, and second - how important is the co-equal status of the three branches of our government. Congressional advice and oversight of our foreign policy is crucial to our nation’s future security.

Below is a statement from Frank Lowenstein. Frank accompanied Sen. Kerry to the Middle East, serves on Sen. Kerry’s Senate staff, and is a longtime Kerry national security advisor.

Statement of Frank Lowenstein

“It’s a weird feeling seeing this photo of Sen. Kerry debated and decoded like some artifact out of the DaVinci Codes. It’s strange to me because I was there when the photo was taken. I traveled with Sen. Kerry throughout his Middle East trip. I’m his foreign policy staffer. Myself and Major McKnight were sitting right there when this photo was snapped.

Snubbed? Alone? Hardly. Sen. Kerry isn’t eating alone. In fact that photo is at an off the record breakfast meeting Senator Kerry conducted early Sunday morning with the very real Marc Santora of the New York Times Baghdad bureau and his younger colleague from the newspaper.

The man shown in the green shirt across from Sen. Kerry is Marc Santora. Right after that interview was completed, Senator Kerry videotaped a message expressing his and the country’s support for the troops, to be shown on the armed services network in Iraq. Just the night before, Sen. Kerry was in that very same mess hall at a table where he ate dinner with about 10 U.S. soldiers.

Additionally, Senator Kerry spent nearly a day and half (out of two days in Iraq) outside of the Green Zone because he felt strongly that he wanted to hear from troops on the front lines. On Saturday morning, he greeted U.S. soldiers in Basra, and also met many British troops while he was there. On Saturday afternoon, he flew to FOB (Forward Operating Base) Warhorse, where he had a town hall meeting with over 100 soldiers. On Sunday morning, he was briefed by U.S. commanders at a training camp for Iraqi security forces. On Sunday evening, he traveled to another FOB where he had a long dinner in the camp mess hall with soldiers, including many from Massachusetts.

These troops are nothing short of amazing, and my boss knows that with every fiber of his being. He’s a combat veteran. He’s been there.

Sen. Kerry knows that if you’re in public life, you’re going to have things you say and do taken out of context, sometimes photos even. It goes with the job. I just wanted to set the record straight about this photo not just because I was there and I know the truth, but because Sen. Kerry enjoyed his time and his conversations with the troops, and I hate to see anyone try to make some political hay out of all this or pretend this photo is something it’s not.”

During his interview with David Gregory on the Today show on Dec. 20th, JK said:

...while everybody is focused on Iraq, there is a major crisis brewing that will have an impact on Iraq, on Israel and on the politics of the region in Lebanon. And Lebanon is an immediate crisis. It’s a two-week crisis, not a several-month crisis. And we think it is critical that there be greater focus.

With that in mind, here is a round up of reporting and analysis on Lebanon. As with any written account, there are biases to be considered in how each author records their thoughts but taken as a whole, these articles provide insight into the complexity of the crisis.

The Washington Post, “Lebanon’s Slow Slide From Hope To Deadlock” by Anthony Shadid, Washington Post Foreign Service, Sunday, December 24, 2006; A01

The Nation, “People’s Revolt in Lebanon” by Mohamed Bazzi, the Middle East bureau chief for Newsday since 2003, based in Beirut, posted December 20, 2006 (January 8, 2007 issue)

Reuters, “ANALYSIS-Lebanon conflict overlaps with Mideast turmoil” by Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent, 28 Dec 2006 11:40:12 GMT

Foreign Affairs, “The New Middle East” by Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Bush administration official, November/December 2006 issue

AP, “Lebanon sees more than 1,000 war deaths” by Sam F. Ghattas, Associated Press’ correspondent in Beirut, Thu Dec 28, 12:47 PM ET

The New York Times, “Despite a Lull at Holidays, Beirut Digs in for a Struggle” by Hassan M. Fattah, Published: December 29, 2006

Washington Post, “U.S. Readies Security Aid Package To Help Lebanon Counter Hezbollah” by Robin Wright, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, December 22, 2006; Page A29

UPI, “Analysis: Syria, Iran won Lebanon war” by Marianna Belenkaya, RIA Novosti political commentator, Moscow, Dec. 28

The Independent, “Review of the year: The Middle East” By Robert Fisk, Published: 29 December 2006

washingtonpost.com, World Opinion Roundup column titled “Lebanon: Civil War or Nasrallah’s Peace?” by Jefferson Morley, posted December 5, 2006; 1:53 AM ET

Matthew Yglesias commented on the President’s proposal “to increase the end-strength size of the Army” and continued on to note “this is a longstanding Democratic Party idea, something backed by John Kerry.”

Beachmom, in another ‘recommended list’ diary at dailykos.com, wrote about JK’s interview with David Gregory in a piece titled ‘Kerry: More troops in Iraq will only “up the casualties and increase the violence”’.

She concluded with:

He added, after being asked what “success” is in Iraq, one simple sentence:

KERRY: Fundamental stability and transformation of responsibility to the Iraqis as fast as possible.

As fast as possible. There you have it. Now let’s see if we can get the rest of the Democrats to say it as clearly and succinctly as Senator Kerry. Or, to quote the soon to be retired commander of CENTCOM General Abizaid:

“We’ve got to get the [expletive] out.”

Let’s all pay attention now.

  A number of blogs took note of JK’s editorial, “When Resolve Turns Reckless”, in the Washington Post:

Dailykos.com had two diaries, one of which stayed at the top of the Recommended List for quite some time. EZWriter enthused about JK’s choice of words in a post titled “Kerry: Flip this White House to stop “insanity” YES! The I word!”. The subsequent discussion went on to collect almost 500 comments.

Jo Fish at the Democratic Veteran noted in a post titled “JOHN KERRY IS RIGHT … AGAIN”:

...Once again, John Kerry hits the nail on the head:

I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world’s complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous—it is immoral.

I’d rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

Those are the words of a leader. Not the words of a policy ignoramus whose first instinct is to protect himself politically and physically at all costs.

...John Kerry, whom I still respect and admire a great deal, has written an excellent op-ed for The Washington Post on Iraq.

...he’s been right about Iraq for a long time. And no matter who wins the Democratic nomination in ‘08, this is the position Democrats - and critics of the war generally - ought to be taking with respect to Iraq….

Make sure to read his piece in its entirety. It’s important that you do. (And then go see The Democratic Daily and Liberal Values for more.)

Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily put together a lengthy piece with excerpts from the op-ed as well as other recent articles containing JK’s statements regarding global troop strength and the futility of a “troop surge in Iraq”.

Ron Chusid at Liberal Values highlights his favorite excerpt and then goes onto provide several examples (with links) of JK’s consistency in delivering the same message on Iraq.

Joseph Hughes at Hughes for America simply posted an excerpt he found meaningful with the title, “He’s Exactly Right”.  

<a href=”News From Me http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2006_12_26.html#012646”>News From Me posted a link to the WaPo article with the title, “Recommended Reading”.

A post about the op-ed by globalvillage at Democratic Underground was promoted to the DU front page.

Let us know if we missed any other good references to the op-ed in the comments below.  

Robert Freedland has an interesting commentary on what’s humorous and what’s not at his blog which says, in part:

But I am not joking.

It isn’t funny what is happening in America.

Guantanamo wasn’t a joke.

Haditha doesn’t keep me up late laughing.

Abu Ghraib didn’t tickle my funny bone.

Katrina didn’t make me chuckle.

Ignoring the FISA Courts didn’t leave me rolling in the aisles.

Editing Global Warming reports by lobbyists who leave to work for Exxon wasn’t amusing.

Signing statements aren’t exactly great ‘punch lines’.

Phoney reporters in the White House Press pool wasn’t entertaining.

Outing a CIA Agent wasn’t good for a laugh.

Lying to get us into a war and fixing facts wasn’t a great late night stand-up routine.

“What’s a little dunk” and Americans endorsing torture doesn’t bring a smile to my face.

Extraordinary Rendition of individuals from the United States to third world countries wouldn’t make a great humor story.

The Mexico City Policy that denies financial support to African women who are at risk because the clinic mentioned abortion doesn’t make me grab my ribs in glee.

A stem cell policy that requires fertility labs to throw unused frozen embryos into the garbage instead of using them to research into the causes of Parkinson’s or cures for spinal cord injuries is not what I would call a great “ha ha ha”.

No these things don’t give me a big HO HO HO this Holiday Season.

So I am not joking. And I am not laughing.

[...]

John Kerry was right and is right on the issues facing America. Issues that aren’t funny. Issues that reach into the very core of what America means.

Hear, hear, Robert … well-said.

Bob Geiger noted JK’s support for veterans in his blog post analyzing just how the outgoing majority party suppressed legislation proposed by Democratic legislators that related to military and national security issues. Bob has some interesting stats that you may want to check out.

Then there was this post on Democratic Underground by dailykoff which just made us smile:

 I have a message for Senator Kerry:  Run, John, Run!

Check out the rest of dailykoff’s plea here.

And finally there’s this post by Mark Barrett at The Premise which, although it doesn’t reference JK directly, does add some enlightenment.

...it’s worth noting when the American press veers in the opposite direction, suppressing casualty figures almost like the Bush administration itself. If you’ve been watching the news at all lately you know that over the past three or four months U.S. troop deaths in Iraq have spiked.

[...]

In fact, the press was quite good at documenting the spike in troops casualties and deaths even through the mid-term elections. This after falling silent about such icky subjects as death and dismemberment during the 2004 cycle.

So why do I think the press has fallen silent again? Because of the average troop-deaths, by month:

07/06: 1.48 08/06: 2.13 09/06: 2.57 10/06: 3.55 11/06: 2.57 12/06: 3.41

Did you know the rate of troops killed had spiked again this month? Because I sure didn’t. But maybe that’s because I’ve been being bombarded with brooding stories about how hard George Bush is thinking about how to win in Iraq, when I’m not being told whether retailers are happy about their profits this year.

It’s Christmas, and I’m not going to tell anybody what that should mean. But what it shouldn’t mean is that we lose sight of the people who are dying in our name.

Thanks, Mark, for reminding us where the focus should be.

The Washington Post invited JK to do a special 1200 word essay this Sunday. It’s about the question of how this Administration which has attacked others for “shifting” positions has reached a point where their steadfastness is now “stubborness”—costing lives. It’s available now at washingtonpost.com.

Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous—it is immoral.

I’d rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.

We cannot afford to waste time being told that admitting mistakes, not the mistakes themselves, will provide our enemies with an intolerable propaganda victory. We’ve already lost years being told that we have no choice but to stay the course of a failed policy.

Conversation is not capitulation. Until recently, it was widely accepted that good foreign policy demands a willingness to seize opportunities and change policy as the facts change. That’s neither flip-flopping nor rudderless diplomacy—it’s strength.

How else could we end up with the famous mantra that “only Nixon could go to China”?

When Churchill urged, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty, never give in,” he added: “except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

This is a time for such convictions.

Go read the entire essay and then come back and tell us which are your favorite quotes and why.

Being willing to talk to your adversaries is a sign of well-grounded diplomacy. JK made some clear statements this week about the importance of diplomacy on a region-wide basis in the Middle East.

Interview with David Gregory on the Today Show: [ transcript | video ]

The fundamental resolution that I’ve heard in every country I’ve been to - I’ve been to Egypt - I met with President Mubarak; I’ve been to Jordan - met with King Abdullah yesterday; we’re here in Syria today; going to Israel from here; I was in Lebanon yesterday - everywhere people are saying, “You’ve got to have a comprehensive political reconciliation process.” And we’re here to explore whether that can be broader than it’s been in the past and we think it can.

[...]

But nothing is going to resolve Iraq without this fundamental political reconciliation. You have a divide between Sunni and Shia. And you have criminal elements. You have ex-Baathist elements. You’ve just got an enormous historical cultural problem. And the only way to overcome it is with major assistance from outside countries and from us to get that political resolution.

[...]

And I’ll tell you, right out here in the Middle East, David, this is more of a tinderbox than a lot of people are focused on.

The Boston Globe article on 12-21-2005:

“He [President Assad] offered some very direct and concrete ways in which they could be helpful in Iraq,” Kerry said in an interview conducted by telephone from Damascus. “I came away with a distinct feeling that there are opportunities here. There are fronts in which we can work together if people are inclined to.”

Kerry said the Assad government is interested in approaching the Iraq war from a regional perspective, where other Middle East issues - including the Israeli Palestinian conflict—are part of the equation.

[...]

“I think you’ve got to talk with people,” Kerry said. “You can disagree with them and disagree with them and disagree with them, and you may not get anywhere, but you’ve got to talk to people.”

Interview with Alex Chadwick on NPR’s Day-To-Day program: [ transcript | audio ]

And the fact is I think there are very real possibilities that Senator Dodd and I will certainly relate to the Administration that we think they can follow up on and they could conceivably elicit some great cooperation. I believe that possibility is real. And I think that they certainly spoke clearly, definitively and specifically about the way they’re prepared to do things with respect to Iraq and how important they think it is that there be a regional-wide effort.

[...]

Ronald Reagan talked to Gorbachev. Richard Nixon sent Kissinger to talk to the Chinese. We need to engage. This is too dangerous a world not to. And …we’re trying to help the administration and I think they will be pleased with today’s discussion, I really do.

As Kerry notes, the diplomatic situation in the Middle East is extremely complex and dynamic. To help you keep up, here are some other related items that will be of interest to those following JK’s travels closely.

— Daniel Levy at the Huffington Post highlights interactions with Syria including the discussion in Israel that resulted from Olmert’s comments on the ISG report, the Syrian offer to meet and the Syrian visit of Senators Kerry and Dodd. He noted, “In Israel, this all set off a heated and almost unprecedented debate on the current state of Israeli-American relations.”

—Time Magazine has a remarkable exclusive report about the Bush Administration’s efforts to “quietly nurtur[e] individuals and parties opposed to the Syrian government in an effort to undermine the regime of President Bashar Assad. Parts of the scheme are outlined in a classified, two-page document which says that the U.S. already is “supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists” in Europe.”

—Steve Clemons recounts an interesting comment from a UAE official in a meeting he participated in which affirms the message of region-wide diplomacy in the face of thwarting terrorism wherever it appears.

—The Iraq Study Group report: see recommendations 15 and 16 for the Baker-Hamilton Commission’s proposed approach of diplomatic re-engagement.

—The New York Times reference page on Syria

UPDATE: Just uncovered this article from The Nation by a US Special Forces officer, Major Bill Edmonds, who served in Iraq. It affirms on a retail level, the importance of diplomacy and the weakness of a military solution that is not accompanied by a vigorous political and diplomatic effort. With a hat-tip to L.C. Johnson at No Quarter, here is the introduction of a tale that should be required reading.

For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am an American soldier in the Army Special Forces. I have just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, where I lived, shared meals, slept and fought beside my Iraqi counterpart as we battled insurgents in the center of a thousand-year-old city. I am a conflicted man, and I want you to read the story of that experience as I lived it. In the interest of security, I have omitted some identifying details, but every word is true.

ThinkProgress nailed it today and was rewarded by a host of links back to their post. What did they say that caused so much interest? Just this:

FLASHBACK: Bush Said Kerry Proposal to Increase Size of Military Would Make The Country ‘Less Safe’

Yesterday, President Bush announced his intention to increase the “overall size” of the Army, acknowledging that the current forces were “stressed.” The Washington Post reports he’s considering an increase of 50,000-70,000 troops.

On June 3, 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) — campaigning for the presidency — proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops. Bush quickly slammed the proposal as unnecessary and counter-productive.

[ Read the rest here ]

  Numerous other bloggers have commented on the ThinkProgress post and linked back to it.

Kos on Daily Kos

Too bad Kerry didn’t win. Or at the very least, too bad Bush didn’t listen to Kerry.

Atrios at Eschaton:

If Bush had, you know, listened to Kerry we’d already have a bigger military.

  Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory

The death of another talking point

...John Kerry wanted to increase the size of the military in 2004, and President Bush insisted that his proposal would make us “less safe.”

Tracy Russo at the DNC blog:

What ThinkProgress said

  Pamela Leavey at The Democratic Daily

So, we see once again that Bush has flip-flopped all over the map on an issue and we see once again, that John Kerry was right. Too darn bad, Bush was so bullheaded back in ‘04 that he never heeded Kerry’s proposal. It does appear that time and time again Kerry is light years ahead of Bush on so many issues, including the fact that we’re losing in Iraq.

After John Kerry proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops, President “Mission Accomplished” dispatched a spokeman to aver that the country would be “less safe” under Kerry’s approach. [Source] Today, though, Bush thinks adding troops is a great idea: “I want to share one thought I had with you, and I’m inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops, the Army, the Marines”.

Oops! Hey! Wait a minute! Don’t we call that a FLIP-FLOP?

Waldo Jaquith

So this would make us, what, 57% more unsafe?

Remember when Sen. Kerry proposed expanding the Army by 40,000 troops, and President Bush declared that would make the country “less safe”? So was Bush lying then, or is he lying now, when he says we should expand the overall size of the army, perhaps by 50k-70k troops?

As JK said during this exchange with David Gregory on the Today Show yesterday morning: [ transcript | video ]

GREGORY: Let me ask you first about headlines this morning. The president now wants to increase the size of the U.S. armed forces. A good idea?

KERRY: Well, it shouldn’t be confused with increasing the numbers of troops in Iraq itself.

Two years ago, during the campaign, I said and recommended that we need to increase the size of our armed forces for our global responsibilities by at least 40,000 troops. So that’s a good idea.