One of Ours

Below is the full text of the redacted memo upon which Jason Vest’s April 20 article prepared for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) is based...given the high degree of reader interest and number of media queries the current story has generated, we have decided to go ahead and release the memo. It was originally sent as an e-mail and was received...with the headers redacted.— Editor

I want to emphasize: As great as the problems we face, and the criticisms back home, and mindful of the sacrifice that almost 600 Americans have made, what we have accomplished in Iraq is worth it. While Iraqis joke, “Americans go home — and take us with you.” The gratitude which they express is sincere and unsolicited, and not limited to a single political class. The political bickering back in the United States has worried Iraqis, who fear that a Kerry victory will mean an American withdrawal, short-term civil war, and long-term empowerment of the most radical elements of society throughout the Islamic world...

...It is easy to see progress in Baghdad. Driving from Jadriya to Mansour around 7 p.m. on March 4, shops were bustling. Women and girls, some with hair covered and other not, crowded shops selling the latest fashions from Italy via Lebanon, cell phones and electrical gadgets, fancy shoes, and cell phones...Pundits and others harp on lack of security, but shopkeepers pile electrical appliances, clothes, bicycles, and other goods on the street...Traffic police go through the motions, but remain too fearful to enforce regulations.

Street lights function irregularly and traffic lights not at all, but private investors have brought in generators so that shops can function after dark. Electricity in Baghdad is fluctuating between three hours on and off, in rotation, and four hours on and off. There is no consistency. Despite assurances to the contrary, neither the CPA nor the Ministry of Electricity publishes a schedule of power cuts and rotations...the demand this year will be greater than ever before because of the influx of new appliances...

...Baghdadis have an uneasy sense that they are heading toward civil war. Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds professionals have say that they themselves, friends, and associates are buying weapons fearing for the future. CPA is ironically driving the weapons market: Iraqi police sell their “lost” U.S.-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied. Interior ministry weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high.

The frequent explosions, many of which are not reported in the mainstream media, are a constant reminder of uncertainty. When a blast occurs, residents check their watch. If it’s on the hour, chances are that it’s a controlled explosion destroyed confiscated ordinance...most Iraqi politicking occurs between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m., and so if CPA bases its cables on Governing Council meetings and an occasional dinner with primary actors, it is missing a great deal)...

...the south may be calm, but it seems the calm before the storm. Iranian money is pouring in... Bremer has encouraged re- centralization in Iraq because it is easier to control a Governing Council less than a kilometer away from the Palace rather than 18 different provincial councils who would otherwise have budgetary authority. The net affect, however, has been desperation to dominate Baghdad, and an absolutism borne of regional isolation. The interim constitution moves things in the right direction, but the constitution is meaningless if we are not prepared to confront challenges.

Throughout Iraq, we are handicapped by our security bubble. Few in CPA- Baghdad get out of the Green Zone anymore, at least outside the normal business of going to their respective ministries, etc. Most drivers work during the day, but not in the evening hours when Baghdad is most alive. The U.S. Government has spent millions importing sport utility vehicles which are used exclusively to drive the kilometer and a half between the Convention Center and the Palace. We would have been much better off with a small fleet of used cars, and a bicycle for every Green Zone resident.

...Despite the success of the Information Collection Program in rolling up Baathist and Salafi cells targeting Americans, large concentrations of Americans and Brits do make tempting artillery targets...The isolation is two-sided: Iraqis realize that the entrances to the Green Zone are under surveillance by bad-guys, and they also fear that some of the custodial staff note of who comes and goes. No one prevents people from entering the parking lot outside the checkpoint to note license plate numbers of “collaborators.”...a segment of Iraqi society seeks to avoid meeting Americans because they fear the Green Zone.

... It is ingrained in the Iraqi psyche to keep a close hold on their own thoughts when surrounded by people with guns. Even those willing to talk to Americans think twice, since American officials create a spectacle of themselves, with convoys, flak jackets, and fancy SUVs. No one in Hilla, Nasriya, or Basra can surreptitiously complain, for example, about Iranian influence to Americans or British officials in CPA-SC or CPA-S when they feel that all eyes — including those of people reporting to the Iranians — are watching them. Likewise, no one in Baquba can complain of the presence of Baathis when they feel that Americans’ [in]ability to be inconspicuous may bring them personal harm...

...One CPA official, who will remain anonymous, drew an apt metaphor: Watching CPA handle an issue is like watching six-year-olds play soccer. Someone kicks the ball, and one hundred people chase after it (hoping to be noticed), without a care as to what else happens on the field...

...Iraqis present at the 4 a.m. conclusion of the Governing Council deliberations on the interim constitution were mocking Dan Senor’s request that no one say anything to the press until the following afternoon. It was obvious to all that an American wanted to make the announcement and so take credit. Our lack of honesty in saying as much annoyed the Iraqis...

...The interim constitution has been quite a success. I can be quite cynical about most Iraqi politicians, but I do think that it’s hard to not give Ahmed Chalabi credit for getting the deal we got. When I see the results of his maneuvering and coalition building, I wonder how much farther we could have gotten if so many in the U.S. government had not sought to undermine him at every possible opportunity...

...the interim constitution is just an exercise in Governing Council and CPA masturbation if not enforced. The fact that we do nothing to roll up Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi which is running around Najaf, arresting and torturing people, and trying Iraqis before their own kangaroo courts signals to Iraqis that we lack seriousness. It also telegraphs weakness not only to Muqtada al-Sadr, but also to others who realize they cannot win legitimacy through the ballot box, and therefore will seek to grab it through violence. Yes, we would have violence for two or three days after arresting Muqtada (whom, after all, has had murder charges leveled against him by an Iraqi prosecutor), but that would subside...

...If we fail to fire corrupt ministers, we promote an air of unaccountability...

...Iraqis politicians, ordinary Iraqis, and U.S. contractors have the sense that Bremer’s goal is to leave Iraq with his reputation intact. He therefore hesitates to take tough but necessary decisions, instead hoping to foist them onto his successor or international organizations...We need to use our prerogative as occupying power to signal that corruption will not be tolerated. We have the authority to remove ministers. To take action against men like [REDACTED] would win us applause on the street, even if their GC sponsors would go through the motions of complaint. The alleged kickbacks that [REDACTED] is accepting should be especially serious for us, since he was one of two ministers who met the President and has his picture taken with him. If such information gets buried on the desks of middle-level officials who do not want to make waves, then short- term gain will be replaced by long-term ill...

...we appointed the Governing Council members. Their corruption is our corruption. When [REDACTED] work to exclude followers of other trends of Shi’a political thought from minister and deputy minister positions, Iraqis blame Bremer, especially because the Governance Group had assured Iraqis that their exclusion from the Governing Council did not mean an exclusion from the process. As it turned out, we lied. People from Kut, for example, see that they have no representation on the Governing Council, and many predict civil war since they doubt that the Governing Council will really allow elections...

...It would be a very grave mistake to transfer authority to the United Nations. Kofi Annan once said that “Saddam Hussein is a man I can do business with.” Not only can we expect such a tape to be aired often on Iraqi television, but also we can expect further revelations that Kofi Annan was speaking literally and, not just figuratively...the audit has uncovered serious wrongdoing in banks, and discrepancies of billions of dollars. Anger is rising at just how little Iraq got for its money under UN auspices, when the UN oversaw contracts that inflated prices and delivered substandard if not useless goods. While the Western press has focused on officials like Benon Sevan who, according to documents, received discounted oil, the real scandal appears to be in some of the trading companies which would convert such oil shares to cash. For example, Sevan cashed his oil share with a Panamanian trading company, which, it turns out, was controlled by Boutros-Boutros Ghali...Senior UN officials know that an independent audit is being conducted, and are not cooperating...to allow the United Nations to again loot Iraq will be problematic at best.

A real problem remains the lack of security over Iraq’s borders...if we want to truly secure the border, we need to deploy far greater numbers than we have now, jail anyone caught taking bribes, and imprison any infiltrators for more than a year to send the signal to neighboring countries that such behavior will no longer be tolerated...

SARABURI, Thailand — The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.

"I can't believe we'll be Americans," said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. "We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere."

Yang, a soldier in America's "secret" war in Laos in the 1960s and '70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists...

just a question out of the blue..How come the suicide bombings have stopped with the siege of Fallujah ?

perhaps all the people who control the suicide bombings and the suicide bombers are located in that town...
if not, how come (touch wood) there has not been a single suicide attack for one month?

I think the Americans should not give up on that city until they arrest all the terrorists and the teenage-trouble makers.

...We are dealing with a group of Islamo fascists, hypocrite opportunistic clerics, terrorists from outside Iraq, fanatic Iraqi Wahabis and remnants of the old regime who are united in an unholy alliance with different perspectives and goals but they all know that they have this frightening single enemy; democracy and freedom in Iraq.
A great proportion of these powers are now taking shelter in the west parts of Iraq and mainly in Fallujah, using it as a base and terrorizing the innocent people there to make it look that the whole city is supporting them, and in my opinion any attempt to solve this problem 'peacefully' through negotiations will have a disastrous outcome. It will give these people the legitimacy they are seeking as a 'resistance to the occupation’ and this will affect the way the rest of the Iraqi people look at the whole struggle. We should not fall into the trap the pacifist fell in and this applies to Al-Sadr and his group of followers too. These abscesses should be opened, it will be very hard, painful and it will stink, but it has to be done. I don't claim to know how this can be done, as it still a very hard task and requires a skilful aproach to minimize the dangerous expected side effects, but I have faith in the coalition forces and I have faith that the Iraqi people will soon identify these people as the evil and hypocrite they are.

Things have been busy here. You know I can't say much about it. However, I do know two things. One, POTUS has given us the green light to do whatever we needed to do to win this thing so we have that going for us. Two, and my opinion only, this battle is going to have far reaching effects on not only the war here in Iraq but in the overall war on terrorism. We have to be very precise in our application of combat power. We cannot kill a lot of innocent folks (though they are few and far between in Fallujah). There will be no shock and awe. There will be plenty of bloodshed at the lowest levels. This battle is the Marine Corps' Belleau Wood for this war. 2/1 and 1/5 will be leading the way. We have to find a way to kill the bad guys only. The Fallujahans are fired up and ready for a fight (or so they think). A lot of terrorists and foreign fighters are holed up in Fallujah. It has been a sanctuary for them. If they have not left town they are going to die. I'm hoping they stay and fight.

This way we won't have to track them down one by one.

This battle is going to be talked about for a long time. The Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying. The Marines are fired up. I'm nervous for them though because I know how much is riding on this fight (the war in Iraq, the view of the war at home, the length of the war on terror and the reputation of the Marine Corps to name a few). However, every time I've been nervous during my career about the outcome of events when young Marines were involved they have ALWAYS exceeded my expectations. I'm praying this is one of those times.

How to account for president Bush's resilient polling numbers? It's the war, stupid. And guess what? All of you who thought that press conference was a disaster were, ahem, WRONG. Whatever the headlines, the domination of the debate by national security can only benefit the president unless Kerry can out-hawk him. Kerry's "Sister Souljah" moment must come when he denounces the anti-war left. Without that moment, he'll lose.

What Bjorn gets right that the left doesn’t understand and the right has yet to embrace is that the key to sensible environmentalism is getting priorities right. With limited financial and political resources to address problems we can’t attack all problems in the same way at the same time; so we need to be smart about what problems we do tackle and in what order. The problem with Kyoto isn’t that it can’t be ratified (which it can’t) or that it won’t work (which it won’t) or that it’s too costly (which it is) or that the science doesn’t justify it (which it doesn’t). It’s that there are for more substantive and pressing ecological problems (overfishing and lack of potable water, to name just two) that deserve immediate attention and that we can actually do something about.

I have never been much impressed by the "clash of civilizations" theory advanced nearly a decade ago by American scholar Samuel P Huntington...a somewhat forced theory concocted as an answer to the "end of history" theory advanced at the time by another American scholar, Francis Fukuyama...

...Fukuyama's theory consecrated the victory of liberalism: what he meant by the end of history was not that history itself had come to an end but that conflicts over how to interpret the course of events had come to an end with the unchallenged victory of one specific ideology, liberalism...

...The main argument used to validate Huntington's theory is that he was the first to predict that civilisations will eventually come to clash, ten years before this became evident in the eyes of most observers. This was interpreted as proof that his theory is credible and should be taken seriously...

...Huntington argued the case for the inevitable clash of civilisations from the standpoint of Western civilisation, one can even say from the standpoint of the religions of that civilisation, namely, Christianity (with its different subdivisions) and Judaism, which together make up what is generally referred to as the Judeo- Christian mainstream civilisation...

...this has introduced an inconsistency: how to reconcile Huntington's statement that a clash between the West and Islam is inevitable, and then adopt the West's theory of ever-growing globalisation, side-by-side with ever-deeper clashes between civilisations?.

And yet there are facts that cannot be denied and which clearly indicate that a clash of civilisations is not merely a figment of Huntington's imagination...

...The Arab-Muslim dimension in the "clash of civilisations" theory is gaining ground in large part because of the rise of terrorism and because the perpetrators of terrorist acts often invoke Islam to justify actions that are reprehensible in the eyes of the international community. Unresolved conflict situations in the Middle East are facing us with an impasse: despair over the inability of the international community to come up with a viable political settlement induces the protagonists to commit acts of violence which they see as a lesser evil than succumbing to an untenable state of affairs, but which are actually counterproductive. We have no choice but to recognise that there is a need for an all-out condemnation of terrorism. But it also seems there is a similar need to go on tolerating, and even perhaps encouraging, such acts secretly, on the grounds that tolerating them is less costly than paying the price of condemning them outright. This duality in behaviour is an expression of weakness, not of strength. It leads to the further escalation of mutual violence, and makes moving out of the vicious cycle all the more difficult...

...we must also require the stronger parties to engage in some genuine self-criticism of their own and to admit that the terrorist acts perpetrated by their opponents is a consequence of frustration, despair and total loss of hope in anything constructive. Despair has reached the point where suicide bombers see death as preferable to life...

...It is futile in the age of globalisation to build security fences, however high they may be -- whether actual walls made of concrete, of electronic spying devices or of instruments of psychological warfare. Globalisation implies the very opposite of erecting separation barriers. That is the essence of Huntington's inner contradiction. And it has been established that the products of the globalisation market, including WMD, rarely remain the exclusive possession of one contending party alone...

As Spain pulls its troops out of Iraq, the body of a Spanish policeman killed when Islamic terrorists blew themselves up has been pulled from its grave and set on fire:

The coffin and body of special agent Francisco Javier Torronteras were pulled from the tomb in Madrid Sur cemetery in Carabanchel and pushed 1,000 yards in a wheelbarrow before being doused with petrol and set alight.

The body was found with a pick driven into its head and a spade dug into its chest.

The interior ministry said the act of desecration could have been part of "an Islamic rite of revenge".

It shouldn’t be difficult to find the culprits. Just scope out the burns wards. These idiots don’t have particularly advanced fire skills.

KING: The story that Mr. Woodward has about the promise to lower the oil prices by the election. Your government has denied has.

WOODWARD: That's not my story. What I say in the book is that the Saudis, and maybe you looked at this section of the book, Ambassador, that the Saudis hoped to keep oil prices low during the period for -- before the election, because of its impact on the economy. That's what I say.

BIN SULTAN: I think the way that Bob said it now is accurate. We hoped that the oil prices will stay low, because that's good for America's economy, but more important, it's good for our economy and the international economy, and this is not -- nothing unusual. President Clinton asked us to keep the prices down in the year 2000. In fact, I can go back to 1979, President Carter asked us to keep the prices down to avoid the malaise. So yes, it's in our interests and in America's interests to keep the prices down.