September 11: Ripples from the Bush Disaster

The story of how Bush quickly ignored al Qaeda and Afghanistan to focus on Iraq is now well known. As Dick Cheney pointed out, Afghanistan didn't have any good bombing targets while Iraq had plenty. The attack on September 11 was lost in the endless war in Iraq that quickly went off the rails because Rumsfeld refused to send enough troops, Bush refused to use the Iraqi army to restore order, weapons depots were ignored in the rush to Baghdad, money was thrown around an billions were "lost" in the wave of violence and corruption following the "taking" of Baghdad, and the ideologues were so in love with Ahmed Chalabi that nobody really considered who would run Iraq after Saddam Hussein was toppled. Well, we now know the answer: Iran.

The problems from Bush's naive "the march into Baghdad will be a piece of cake" and "mission accomplished" claims keep being revealed. From Thomas E. Ricks' blog The Best Defense, I was directed to an article by David Ignatius in the Washington Post that documents the unraveling in Iraq:

The head of the U.S.-trained Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) has quit in a long-running quarrel with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- depriving that country of a key leader in the fight against sectarian terrorism.

Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the head of Iraqi intelligence since 2004, resigned this month because of what he viewed as Maliki's attempts to undermine his service and allow Iranian spies to operate freely. The CIA, which has worked closely with Shahwani since he went into exile in the 1990s and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars training the INIS, was apparently caught by surprise by his departure.

The chaotic conditions in Iraq that triggered Shahwani's resignation are illustrated by several recent events -- each of which suggests that without the backstop of U.S. support, Iraqi authorities are now desperately vulnerable to pressure, especially from neighboring Iran.

An early warning was the brazen July 28 robbery of the state-run Rafidain Bank in central Baghdad, apparently by members of an Iraqi security force. Gunmen broke into the bank and stole about 5.6 billion Iraqi dinars, or roughly $5 million. After a battle that left eight dead, the robbers fled to a newspaper run by Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of the country's vice presidents.

Abdul Mahdi, once an American favorite, has admitted that one of the robbers was a member of his security detail but denied personal involvement, according to Iraqi news reports. Some of the money has been recovered, but the rest is believed to be in Iran, along with some members of the robbery team.

A second concern for Shahwani has been threats against his service's roughly 6,000 members. Maliki's government has issued arrest warrants against 180 Iraqi intelligence officers for alleged crimes that, according to Shahwani's camp, are really political reprisals for doing their jobs. Since the INIS was formally created in 2004, 290 of its officers have been killed, many targeted by Iranian intelligence operatives.

With Shahwani's resignation, the intelligence service is commanded by Gen. Zuheir Fadel, a former pilot in Saddam Hussein's air force. But some of Fadel's key officers are said to be fleeing for safety in Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- fearing that they will be targets of Iranian hit teams if they remain in Iraq.

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Who's to blame for the carnage? In today's Iraq, that's open to sectarian conspiracy theories. Maliki's Shiite-led government last weekend broadcast the alleged confession of a Sunni Baathist named Wisam Ali Khazim Ibrahim, who said the truck-bombing plot had been hatched in Syria and that he had paid security guards $10,000 to pass through checkpoints.

But forensic evidence points to a possible Iranian role, according to an Iraqi intelligence source who is close to Shahwani. He said that signatures of the C-4 explosive residues that have been found at the bomb sites are similar to those of Iranian-made explosives that have been captured in Kut, Nasiriyah, Basra and other Iraqi cities since 2006.

Iran's links with Maliki are so close, said this Iraqi intelligence source, that the prime minister uses an Iranian jet with an Iranian crew for his official travel. The Iranians are said to have sent Maliki an offer to help his Dawa Party win at least 49 seats in January's parliamentary elections if Maliki will make changes in his government that Iran wants.

As security unravels in Iraq, U.S. forces there are mostly bystanders. Even in the areas where al-Qaeda operatives remain potent, such as Mosul, the Americans have little control. Sunni terrorists who are arrested are quickly released by the Iraqis in exchange for bribes of up to $100,000, according to an Iraqi source.

Wars are always started by fools who think they will be simple, quick, and easy. The inevitably are complicated, long, and difficult. Think of the hotheads in the US South who decided they didn't want to negotiate with Lincoln and the new Congress and chose a "quick" war to establish their independence. Four years later, the country was devastated, they lost everything they thought they were fighting for, and it took a century to recover from the damages. Hardly worth it.

The ridiculous stunt of Bush flying into the air craft carrier Abraham Lincoln to stand under the "Mission Accomplished" banner in May 2003 is a sad joke. Bush's war of "choice" in Iraq has killed 4300 Americans (and a total of 4600 coalition death). Losing 1.5 times as many in your "retaliation" as were killed in the original attack is pathetic.

As the above article demonstrates, Bush opened a can of worms and nobody has yet been able to get the worms to volunteer to crawl back into the can. Bush was a disaster in Iraq, with Katrina, with deficits that gave over a trillion dollars to the rich that is needed now to restore the economy, and with a "deregulation" ideology that created the financial mess that has led to worldwide recession. What a disaster!