Remember Iraq?

Published on Tuesday, September 30, 2008 by Salon.com

Remember Iraq?

The drop in violence has made the war an afterthought — and allowed

McCain to claim we’re “winning.” Here’s why we’re not — and we can’t.

by Gary Kamiya

With Congress rejecting the $700 billion bailout package, the Dow falling 700 points and the U.S. economy on the edge of a cliff, no one is paying much attention to Iraq. Money talks, and incomprehensible and endless wars walk. From a purely financial perspective, that dismissive attitude makes no sense. The Iraq war has already cost almost $700 billion, and as Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes have argued, its total cost, factoring in huge back-end costs like disability payments, could end up exceeding $3 trillion. As Tom Engelhardt and Chalmers Johnson point out on TomDispatch, the money we’ve poured and are continuing to pour down the bottomless pit of Iraq, to the tune of $10 billion a month, could have bailed us out many times over.

But of course, the Iraq war is about a lot more than money. It’s about the 146,000 U.S. troops still stationed there, and their families. It’s about the stability of the Middle East, and our vital national interest in ensuring that it does not explode. It’s about the overall direction of our foreign policy. It’s about how America is perceived throughout the world. And it’s about the fate of Iraq itself, a nation that our invasion devastated and that we owe our best efforts to rebuild.

Along with fixing our economy, then, what we should do about Iraq is the most important issue facing the country. And the choices offered by the two presidential candidates could not be more different. John McCain will continue the same policies as George W. Bush. He insists that Iraq remains “the central front in the war on terror,” claims that the surge was a decisive turning point and that we are now winning the war, and warns that if America elects Barack Obama, we will lose, with catastrophic consequences. Obama argues that the war was a mistake to begin with, that it led us to “take our eye off the ball” and allow Osama bin Laden to escape and al-Qaida to regroup, and that it has strengthened Iran. He says that if elected he will withdraw American troops in stages over a 16-month period.

The first presidential debate highlighted these clear differences between Obama and McCain. But, unfortunately, Obama did not really challenge McCain’s central claim that we are “winning” in Iraq. There are good political reasons why he didn’t: The fact that he opposed a war that McCain ardently supported, and that most Americans have long turned against, allowed him to win the debate without venturing onto that dangerous terrain. But as a result, McCain’s exaggerated claims about the surge, and his larger claim that we are winning in Iraq, have gone unrefuted. And what is actually happening in Iraq bears no resemblance to McCain’s triumphant vision.

George W. Bush has defined “victory” in Iraq as a unified, democratic and stable country. McCain echoed this definition in the debate, saying that Iraq will be “a stable ally in the region and a fledgling democracy.” Yet McCain never explained just how Iraq is going to become unified, democratic or stable, let alone a U.S. ally — and Obama did not demand that he do so. McCain was lucky he didn’t, because there is no answer.

McCain’s entire position on Iraq boils down to two words: the surge. According to McCain, Gen. Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactic worked to perfection, and after years of failed approaches, victory is now within our grasp. McCain endlessly attacks Obama for not supporting the surge, painting his rival as a craven defeatist who, as McCain’s top foreign policy advisor put it, “would rather lose a war that we are winning than lose an election by alienating his base.”

The media has largely bought into this rosy view of the surge. Violence has fallen sharply in Iraq and U.S. casualties are down, and the media and the U.S. public have tacitly accepted both that the surge was largely responsible for these laudable outcomes and, to a lesser degree, that the underlying situation in Iraq has fundamentally improved. Unfortunately, neither claim is true.

First, the surge was not primarily responsible for the drop in sectarian violence in Iraq. It played a role, but was far less important than the simple, grim fact that the Shiite militias in Baghdad had already succeeded in ethnically cleansing the city. This was established by a team of UCLA geographers who analyzed night-light signatures in the city. They found that night lights in Sunni neighborhoods declined dramatically just before the February 2007 surge and never came back. “Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and the study’s lead author, told Science Daily. “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left … The surge really seems to have been a case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.”

The UCLA scientists’ findings are supported by Shiite expert Juan Cole, who argues that the surge actually helped the Shiite militias to ethnically cleanse Baghdad by disarming Sunnis. “Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods,” Cole argues.

Joining Cole and the UCLA team is one of the best field reporters in Iraq, Nir Rosen, author of an important piece, “The Myth of the Surge,” which appeared in Rolling Stone. Rosen points out that another key factor behind the cessation of violence is that U.S. troops began bribing their former deadly enemies, Sunni insurgents, to cooperate. (The Sunnis had turned against al-Qaida because of its brutal tactics — a key factor in the decline of terrorist attacks in Iraq that the surge had nothing to do with.) But these Sunnis, called “the Awakening” or “Sons of Iraq,” will be off the U.S. payroll on October 1, and Rosen paints a grim picture of what is likely to happen next. “There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.”

The final reason for the cessation of violence was the stand-down by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which is lying low. That stand-down, which can be reversed at any time, was brokered by — Iran. But Iran is playing all sides: It supports both Maliki and Sadr. The U.S. simply cannot compete in this kind of deep game, at which Iran has excelled for centuries, without diplomatic engagement. But for McCain, that is anathema.

Insofar as the surge helped to contribute to lowered levels of violence in Iraq, it is to be commended. And there is no doubt that Gen. Petraeus’ adoption of classic counterinsurgency doctrine, which mandates moving troops out of secure bases and closer to the people, was a significant improvement over previous tactics. But as the above should make clear, the surge was not the main reason for the reduction of violence — which remains at terrifyingly high levels. In any case, the mere reduction of sectarian violence does not prove that the U.S. is “winning.” Even the Bush administration has acknowledged that the critical issue in Iraq is political reconciliation. And the sad reality is that there has been no political reconciliation in Iraq, that there are no indications it is on the horizon and that there is no reason to believe that the continued presence of U.S. troops will help bring it about.

As analyst Peter Galbraith points out in an excellent piece in the New York Review of Books, the salient fact about Iraq is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government is allied with Iran, wants to create a Shiite Islamic state and will never integrate the Sunni Awakening forces into the Iraqi Army, because it correctly sees them as threatening the current regime’s existence. Its rapprochement with the Kurds, the only group that supports the U.S., is fragile and could collapse at any time, with the fate of the disputed, oil-rich city of Kirkuk likely to be the trigger.

Galbraith sums up the situation thus: “George W. Bush has put the United States on the side of undemocratic Iraqis who are Iran’s allies. John McCain would continue the same approach. It is hard to understand how this can be called a success — or a path to victory.”

Most critically, the Maliki regime wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq — on the same 16-month timetable as the one Obama has proposed. The Iraqi people also want the U.S. out. The U.S. simply lacks the power to oppose this demand, and McCain’s bluster about staying in Iraq until “victory” is absurd in the face of it.

McCain’s talk of “victory” is not just logically false, it is morally obscene. Our unprovoked invasion destroyed Iraq. Up to a million Iraqis may have died. The infrastructure is dreadful, far worse than in Saddam’s time. Most of Iraq’s doctors have fled or been killed. Vast numbers of Iraqis have been forced into exile, and few have dared to return. The sectarian war our invasion let loose has ripped the country apart. Iraq remains one of the most dangerous and violence-torn countries in the world. (On Sunday, five bomb attacks in Baghdad killed at least 27 people.)

What do we do confronted with this situation? What do we owe the Iraqi people? What do we owe ourselves? What is in our national interest? And with our economy melting down, how long can we spend $10 billion a month waiting to decide?

There are no easy answers to these questions. But we cannot hide them behind cheap talk of “victory” and incoherent fear-mongering. We will have to hope that in January we will get a new administration, one not deluded by empty slogans and neoconservative ideology. And they will then have to begin the difficult process of figuring out how to responsibly extricate ourselves and the Iraqi people from the nightmare we created.

Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.
Gary Kamiya is a writer at large for Salon.

California’s Natural Beauty

I remember the beauty of California growing up as a kid.  When we first moved to Los Altos Hills in 1966 it truly was like Walton’s Mountain.  I remember spending long hours on my horse and riding a trail that would take us to the top of the mountain.  In Spring the flowers were blooming and the smell was so wonderful.  Many Saturdays us girls would pack a lunch and ride up to the top of the mountain and just pretend we were living back in the 1800′s because the place still looked the same.

Now the Bay area is all built up and the orchards have all gone to housing developments. I wonder if the youth today know the joy of being able to go to the creek and go fishing and all the wonderful things we kids did in the 60′s. I know the place we rode our horse to is long gone and young people will never know the beauty of being able to go back in time to what the place looked like in the 1800′s.

I remember the first time my dad took me river rafting on the Stanislaus River. I spent time in the area that his article is written about.  Beautiful country but of course this was close to 30 years ago before they built a dam on that beautiful river.  My dad wanted us to make a last run before it was to late to enjoy the beauty of the natural river.  We stayed in Angel’s Camp. It is a really nice area where this piece is written about.

California is known as the golden state.  Its natural beauty is truly amazing.  I don’t have a lot of happy memories and try not to go back to California very much, but when I think of the natural beauty I very much feel lucky that I got to live in a place that had such natural beauty. I lived the first years of my life one block from the ocean and the views were wonderful. I learned to swim in the Santa Monica Bay. We enjoyed some of the most wonderful sailing. In 1966 we moved from Southern CA to the Bay Area where it had its own beauty.

This article reminded me of some happy memories I had with my dad and river rafting or even going to see the big redwood forests.  I was just thinking yesterday of the times we sailed and enjoyed the boating of Southern California where I was born.  Going Sking in the Winter at Lake Tahoe.  The horse shows I competed in during the Summer. Driving along the Coast or going to the Mountains, I was blessed to enjoy such beauty.

Maybe someday I will forget all the pain and will come to the place where I will only remember the good times and  not dislike California so much.  I don’t talk about it much but yes, I was born in California and I guess that makes me a California native.  Maybe as children we see the place of where evil and terrible things happen to us as part of the place and things where nice things happen we like better.  Massachusetts didn’t carry as much pain for me so I have always loved Massachusetts better.  Maybe this will be the time as I am sorting out the feelings of my past that I will finally come to see that California is not the cause of the rape, but bad people were.  California wasn’t the reason the next door neighbor on the day I buried my dad made a sexual pass toward me but he was a dirty old man.  After that happen I went back to Massachusetts as fast as I can and just wanted out.

I guess with everything we have good and bad.  Maybe I can forget the bad things that happen to me in California and only think of the good times.  I hope so.

I hope you enjoy this article as much as I did.  It just reminded me of happy times I spent with my dad in California.I had many happy times with my dad in Massachusetts too. Massachusetts always felt more like home, but I think it has to do with bad things happen to me in California. Anyway, I am going to try and work through that emotional issue.

Life, death and spring

April in the Sierra foothills is the cruelest month — and the most beautiful.

By Gary Kamiya

Apr. 22, 2008 | The stench hit us right after we climbed up the dug-out steps in the bank, by the bend in the stream where the mountain lion and I surprised each other four years ago. It had to be something pretty big. I walked through the little meadow toward the lake, gingerly following my nose. After 30 yards or so I saw it. A small, delicate white skull, like an overgrown rodent’s, with a surprisingly thick spine, 2 or 3 feet long. Nothing else — no body or legs. A deer. Almost all the flesh was gone, but there was still enough left to raise a powerful stink. We walked on through the young grass, where in a few weeks the lupine and sweet pea would cover the ground with their exuberant bluish-purple and pink and white blossoms.

I’d driven with my mother up to our family ranch in the Sierra foothills to join my brother, uncle, cousin and some other clan members for a work weekend. We were going to clear brush along the edge of the big meadow, hauling out fallen wood, clearing pine needles and debris and cutting down the cedars and yellow pines that were crowding a magnificent avenue of oaks. If weather permitted, we were going to ignite the piles of brush that were evenly spaced out in the meadow. We were looking forward to this atavistic ritual, heaping branches onto the pyres, consuming last year’s dead matter, leaning on our McLeods and watching the orange tongues twisting and leaping upward in the cool April air.

But mostly I was looking for spring.

San Francisco, where I live, doesn’t really have seasons. Yes, we have an Indian summer in September and October, a week or two of 80 degree days that overheats our delicate constitutions and causes all the fans in the hardware stores to immediately disappear. It rains a lot in the winter months. And around the time school gets out in June, the summer fog starts rolling in, a giant cotton-candy wave breaking in slow motion over Twin Peaks at 4 p.m. But aside from those minor markers, the seasons are pretty indistinguishable. Most Februaries I can sunbathe on my deck, and I frequently shiver in July. The temperature rarely goes below 50 in the day, or above 70. This city belongs to the sea, not the land, and the sea’s seasons are inscrutable.

And I don’t really see the signs of spring that are there. When you live in a city, the world is blocked from view. Too many buildings, too many people, too many street lights changing mechanically, too many thoughts changing just as mechanically. Even the moon, that harbinger of mystery, feels like an impostor.

You can exist without spring, but it cramps your soul. It’s good to have a place where you can go to watch the world get old and young, live and die. Mine is the ranch.

It lies a shade under 4,000 feet in Calaveras County, which means “skulls” and which an unknown journalist, writing under the peculiar, Mississippi-redolent pseudonym “Mark Twain,” made famous when he penned a story about a celebrated jumping frog that some wag stuffed full of birdshot. Calaveras is gold country, but the ranch is too high for prospecting. The property was a double homestead spread, 320 acres, first worked in 1882 by a driven German-American pioneer and his wife who together cleared 25 forested acres for a meadow, using a mule team to pull the stumps out of the ground. He then erected an astonishingly grandiloquent structure at the edge of the meadow, a 55-foot-high asymmetrical barn that may still be the tallest building in the county. The hay from the meadow wouldn’t even fill a fifth of this vast structure. He must have built it so high just because he could. The German is long gone but his barn still stands, a great gray monument to his sublime orneriness.

One infamous day, we almost lost the whole place. On Sept. 10, 2001, a devastating forest fire roared up out of the Stanislaus River canyon to the east. When the flames crowned the trees on the other side of the ridge and were visible from the meadow, my mother and my uncles simultaneously decided to tell the firemen, “Save the barn before the houses.” Hundreds of firemen from all over the state made their stand, fighting tree to tree on the steep ridge. The meadow looked like a war zone, filled with dozens of fire trucks. We were the last line of defense for the town of Arnold. The battle wasn’t won until bombers swept in low and dumped borate on the inferno. It was the last day the big planes could have saved us: The next day all civil aviation in the United States was grounded. My uncle’s partner called from New York the next day early in the morning. First she asked, “Is the ranch still there?” Then she said, “Turn on your television.”

My grandparents bought the ranch in 1943 for next to nothing. Land in the middle of nowhere wasn’t worth anything then. It comprises a long, narrow valley watered by a creek and most of the two ridges on each side. It lies in what naturalists call the Yellow Pine Forest, also known as the Mixed Coniferous Forest or the Transition Zone, located between the oak woodland of the lower foothills and the higher lodgepole-red fir forest. Yellow pine (also known as Ponderosa) is the dominant tree. Incense cedar, white fir and John Muir’s favorite conifer, the sugar pine, the tallest pine in the world, share the woods with slender-trunked maples and stands of dogwoods, which in May dress up in dazzling white. The royalty of our trees, though, are the black oaks. They are greatly outnumbered by conifers at this elevation, but if the world keeps getting hotter and drier, they will become the dominant species. And if there are any human beings left on the earth then, they will probably enjoy them.

The German also planted 20 or so acres of apple trees in three orchards. The old trees still bear fruit, rare and delicious varietals — King Davids and Spitzenbergs and Winter Bananas and Black Johns — but they are rapidly dying off. My grandfather, a truck driver who later opened the first gas station in Angel’s Camp, maintained the ranch as a gentleman farmer, pruning and irrigating and harvesting. But he died 24 years ago, none of the rest of us have time or inclination, and anyway the trees are nearing the end. Every year, snow in the winter and ravenous climbing bears in the fall crack a few more big branches off the old trees. Their gnarled remaining limbs look like twisted gray hands outstretched to the sky, waving a very long goodbye.

The day we left San Francisco for the ranch was scorching hot for April, and the unseasonable heat carried through the Central Valley and all the way through the oak foothills to the ranch. But the winter rains and snows were not long past, and everything was still green, that deep, fragile green that you wish could last forever, but that fades almost as you look at it.

April is unpredictable, edgy — the turning month. The apple trees had barely begun to leaf out, the ferns had not yet started their scarily fast growth, and only a few modest wildflowers had begun to appear — five-spots and red-flowered gooseberries and tiny exquisite white stars that none of us knew the names of. We plunged into the creek-side trail that my cousin, my uncle Bob and I hacked out of the woods a dozen years ago. Winter had been here and left chaos and destruction, and no one had cleaned up after it. Black-tongued trilliums and crimson snow plants, eerie post-winter arrivals, had pushed through the pine needles. A big yellow pine had fallen across the trail and an even larger cedar had fallen below the spillway of the big lake. Chain-saw work. All of the big trees on this steep bank were in danger, more of them falling every year as erosion exposed their roots.

Years ago Bob had put up a wooden bench by a gentle bend downstream on the creek, a place where he could sit and take in the Sierra summer before heading back to Manhattan and his life as a college professor. Then he found out he had pancreatic cancer and died a few weeks later. The winter after his death, a cedar by the stream came down and smashed right through the center of the bench. Bob’s ashes and my aunt Wendy’s are buried on the ranch, along with their parents’. When my time comes, mine will join them.

The ranch exists on the boundary of wilderness and the familiar, and you make your negotiations between them. Walking down to the big lake, I saw a familiar form slowly rouse itself on the bank and creak arthritically into the air, at first barely able to get moving, but with each ponderous flap of its heavy wings gaining disconcerting chunks of altitude and speed. We rushed down to the water and got there just in time to see it in full flight, our great blue heron, now soaring high above the far end of the lake. Two herons used to live on the lake. Years ago one of them vanished and never returned, and for a couple of years the remaining heron was rarely seen. When he began to return regularly, it felt like a benediction.

Not for the frogs, though. For them, he’s Heron the Impaler. He stands motionless in the shallow water, waiting for a frog to come within reach, and then strikes with incredible speed, driving his heavy pointed beak right through the frog’s body. He then leaves the indigestible bits on the raft for us to clean up.

It’s the Great Chain of Killing. We love the fat bullfrogs that the heron kills. They’re musical croakers, an indicator species and a link with the romance of Mark Twain. But these old friends are the implacable destroyers of our equally beloved orange and blue dragonflies. And the dragonflies are like mini Apache gunships, swerving with insane precision to devour the tiny insects that dance above the surface of the lake. In the Sierra foothills, you begin to see that beauty is just a surface effect — below it, jaws are always about to snap shut.

One animal stands at the top of the killing chain: the mountain lion. One afternoon in August I was walking along the creek-side trail when I heard a crunching noise. I looked up to see an enormous male mountain lion staring right at me, about 20 yards away on the other side of the stream. These supreme predators are normally soundless, but I was coming from upwind and walking quietly, and he was thirsty and had to make his way through a maze of fallen branches to drink, and even he couldn’t avoid breaking some branches. We stared at each other for a second or two. For the first time in my life I was put emphatically and finally in my species place. If this 250-pound predator, so muscular, lethal and coiled that he might as well have weighed 400, decided he wanted to take me, there would be nothing I could do about it.

The experience was so alien, so unfathomable, that it was hard to believe it even while it was happening. We stared at each other. Then he turned and bounded with massive hydraulic power up the bank, knocking aside little trees and disappearing in seconds. With shaking hands, I went looking for the biggest stick I could find. It was not a relaxing walk back to the cabin.

The heron settled into one of his favorite perches, a large cedar tree. If the trees at the ranch seem exceptionally tall, it’s probably because their cousins next door are the biggest ones on earth. If you climb up to the top of the valley where it narrows and bear off to the left, in a mile or so you come to the rarely used back gate of Big Trees State Park, one of 75 groves, all on the gentle western face of the Sierra, where the Sequoia gigantea, the world’s largest living things, are found. A hunter stumbled upon the Calaveras Grove in 1852 while chasing a wounded bear. News of the stupendous trees spread, and entrepreneurs soon arrived, eager to make money off the “vegetable monsters.”

They decided to cut one of the largest sequoias down, strip off its bark, and ship it to the east for exhibition. A 19th century writer described how five men attacked the tree for 22 days, “until at last, the noble monarch of the forest was forced to tremble, and then to fall, after braving ‘the battle and the breeze,’ for nearly three thousand years.” He then cheerfully reported that the resulting stump “easily accommodates 32 dancers.” An appalled John Muir remarked that removing the bark of the big trees to spread their fame was “as sensible a scheme as skinning our great men would be to prove their greatness.”

We didn’t skin any big trees, but we killed a lot of fledgling ones. We spent our days clearing brush and small trees away from the oaks, snipping the little ones off with compound shears, cutting the big ones down with a chain saw and pulling the tiny ones right out of the ground.

One day we tried to burn, but the wind was too strong. The flames jumped the perimeter and started making for the next brush pile. My uncle and I had to attack the outlying flames with our McLeods, smashing the burning grass down hard with the flat, heavy heads of our tools in the instant we had before the superheated gusts of wind forced us to back off. We would no sooner kill one hot spot than another would spring up. I got my eyebrows singed. For a minute there was a whiff of panic in the air.

The day we left, the snow still lay in patches on the far side of the meadow, but it would soon be gone. My cousin had cut through the fallen trees blocking the trail with the chain saw. The stream was running, but we needed one more good rain. The velvety grass was getting longer. In a few weeks the cold knife edge of spring, having only just come, would be gone.

The night before we left, we heard Canadian geese at dusk, barking and snuffling like dogs, and saw them circling the lake before flying away.

On the last day, I walked through the little meadow where we’d seen the deer. The smell was gone. I went over to look at the spot where it had been lying and there was nothing. Something had taken it away.

 

– By Gary Kamiya