Bush is surging, but he may be short on Viagra to sustain his surge

What lies behind the surge? Does Bush really believe 20,000 extra troops will make a difference? (Remember, peaceful New York city has 45,000 cops.) But let's give him the benefit of the doubt. Let's imagine he's not that stupid. Then why is he surging? There are three possible scenarios.

1. He's surging because when it doesn't work out, say six months down the line, he can say he tried everything, he did his best, and now it's time to gracefully retire -- what is now being called the "blame and run" strategy. In other words, blame the Iraqis (the victims) and leave.
2. He's surging because he wants to keep the war going beyond his presidency, so a Democratic president is landed with getting out, and then he can say the Democrats were defeated, and not him.
3. He's surging because he wants to prepare us for an even bigger surge -- an attack on Iraq.

If possibility 1 is the case, everything will work out the way more than half the country wants it.
If 2 is the case, things may or may not work out that well for the Dems (they would still have a good chance of pinning the blame on the GOP even if they're the ones presiding over our defeat).
If 3 is the case, boy, are we in deep doodoo. It would be crazy to attack Iran, but we all know Bush is crazy enough to do it. I for one am holding my breath.


1. A Risky Game of Risk -- by MAUREEN DOWD/NY Times

I feel good about the new war with Iran.

How can you not have confidence in the crackerjack team that brought you Operation Iraqi Freedom, which foundered and led to Operation Together Forward, which stumbled and led to Operation Together Forward II, which collapsed and was replaced by The New Way Forward, the Surge now being launched even though nobody’s together and everything’s going backward?

I say, bring it on. If a pre-emptive war in Iraq doesn’t work, why not try a pre-emptive war on Iran in Iraq?

Although Tony Snow dismissed the idea of war with Iran as an “urban legend” yesterday, Condi Rice revealed to New York Times reporters that President Bush acted months ago to parry Iran’s ambitions, issuing orders for a military campaign against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces sneaking into Iraq. Using diplomatic passports, the agents have been smuggling in sophisticated bomb-making components and infrared trigger devices, which could be used to blow up American soldiers.

The move against Iran allows the president and Dick Cheney — who was, natch, militating for the Surge — to blow off, once more, the Iraq Study Group and Congress, to push back rather than make up.

James Baker and Lee Hamilton had recommended playing nice with the mad mullahs, which even they acknowledged was a long shot, given that the Bush administration can offer them little except acquiescence in their nuclear weapons program, which is not going to happen.

Joe Biden, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned Condi on Thursday that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to pursue the networks over the border into Iran or Syria. On Friday, Bob Gates assured the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Iranians they target won’t be in Iran.

We’re trying to stanch a self-inflicted wound: our failed occupation gave Iran the opening in Iraq we’re now trying to shut down.

The White House had to admit this week what has been obvious to everybody else for eons, including a list of lame assumptions they embraced during the first few years of the occupation: “Majority of Iraqis will support the coalition and Iraqi efforts to build a democratic state” has now been supplanted by “Iraqis increasingly disillusioned with coalition efforts.”

It’s a remarkable moment, W. standing nearly alone, deserted by more and more Republicans, generals and Americans, risking it all on a weak reed like Prime Minister Maliki.

It’s impossible to know what W. was really thinking as he stiffly delivered his fantasy scheme in the White House library. The whole capital was fraught, but the president may simply have been musing to himself: “I’m hungry ... I wonder what time the game starts on ESPN? ...Has anybody read all these books?”

W. always acts like he’s upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn’t surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of “The Game of Global Domination.”

Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it’s almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you’re surrounded by enemies.

His gamesmanship extended to sports — he loved going into overtime and demanding that points be played over because he wasn’t quite ready.

As Graydon Carter recollects in the new Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for the magazine about W. that made this point: “Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn’t lose. He’ll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him.”

W.’s best friend when he was a teenager in Houston, Doug Hannah, told Ms. Sheehy: “If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15.”

Even if it was clear who was winning, W. wanted to go further to see what would happen. It was a technique that worked well in Tallahassee in 2000, but not so well in Tikrit.

Word is that even as they Surge, the Bush team is already working on Plan C, or as they will no doubt call it, The New, New Way Forward II.


2. Inside Baghdad's civil war: 'The jihad now is against the Shias, not the Americans'
As 20,000 more US troops head for Iraq, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the only correspondent reporting regularly from behind the country's sectarian battle lines, reveals how the Sunni insurgency has changed
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/Guardian

One morning a few weeks ago I sat in a car talking to Rami, a thick-necked former Republican Guard commando who now procures arms for his fellow Sunni insurgents.

Rami was explaining how the insurgency had changed since the first heady days after the US invasion. "I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood. Until the last few months, the insurgency got by with weapons and ammunition looted from former Iraqi army depots. But now that Sunnis were besieged in their neighbourhoods and fighting daily clashes with the better-equipped Shia ministry of interior forces, they needed new sources of weapons and money.

He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.

These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. "We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country." But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. "Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment."

The box of 700 bullets that Rami buys for $450 today would have cost between $150 and $175 a year ago. The price of a Kalashnikov has risen from $300 to $400 in the same period. The inflation in arms prices reflects Iraq's plunge toward civil war but, largely unnoticed by the outside world, the Sunni insurgency has also changed. The conflict into which 20,000 more American troops will be catapulted over the next few weeks is very different to the one their comrades experienced even a year ago.

In Baghdad in late October I called a Sunni insurgent I had known for more than a year. He was the mid-level commander of a small cell, active against the Americans in Sunni villages north of Baghdad. Sectarian frontlines had been hardening in the city for months - it took us 45 minutes of haggling to agree on a meeting place which we could both get to safely. We met in a rundown workers' cafe.

Kidnapped

"Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad," Abu Omar told me in a low voice. He had been on the Americans' wanted list for three years but I had never seen him so anxious; he had trimmed his beard in the close-cropped Shia style and kept looking towards the door. His brother had been kidnapped a few days before, he told me, and he believed he was next on a Shia militia's list. He had fled his home in the north of the city and was staying with relatives in a Sunni stronghold in west Baghdad.

He was more despondent than angry. "We Sunni are to blame," he said. "In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: 'This is not jihad. You can't kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?' "

Then he said: "I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming."

This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.

Another insurgent commander told me: "At the beginning al-Qaida had the money and the organisation, and we had nothing." But this alliance soon dragged the insurgents and then the whole Sunni community into confrontation with the Shia militias as al-Qaida and other extremists massacred thousands of Shia civilians. Insurgent commanders such as Abu Omar soon found themselves outnumbered and outgunned, fighting organised militias backed by the Shia-dominated security forces.

A week after our conversation, Abu Omar invited me to a meeting with insurgent commanders. I was asked to wait in the reception room of a certain Sunni political party. A taxi driver took me to a house in a Sunni neighbourhood that had recently been abandoned by a Shia family. The driver came in with me - he was also a commander.

The house had been abandoned in a hurry, cardboard boxes were stacked by the door, some of the furniture was covered with white cloths and a few cheap paintings were piled against a wall. The property had been expropriated by the local Sunni mujahideen and we sat on sofas in a dusty reception room.

Abu Omar had been meeting commanders of groups with names like the Fury Brigade, the Battalions of the 1920 Revolution, the Islamic Army and the Mujahideen Army, to discuss options they had for fighting both an insurgency against the Americans and an escalating civil war with the Shia.

Abu Omar had proposed encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the army and the police to redress the sectarian balance. He suggested giving the Americans a ceasefire, in an attempt to stop ministry of interior commandos' raids on his area. Al-Qaida had said no to all these measures; now he wanted other Iraqi insurgent commanders to support him.

'Do politics'

A heated discussion was raging. One of the men, with a very thin moustache, a huge belly and a red kuffiya wrapped around his shoulder, held a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. I asked him what his objectives were. "We are fighting to liberate our country from the occupations of the Americans and their Iranian-Shia stooges."

"My brother, I disagree," said Abu Omar. "Look, the Americans are trying to talk to us Sunnis and we need to show them that we can do politics. We need to use the Americans to fight the Shia."

He looked nervously at them: suggestions of talking to the Americans could easily have him labelled as traitor. "Where is the jihad and the mujahideen?" he continued. "Baghdad has become a Shia town. Our brothers are being slaughtered every day! Where are these al-Qaida heroes? One neighbourhood after another will be lost if we don't work on a strategy."

The taxi driver commander, who sat cross-legged on a sofa, joined in: "If the Americans leave we will be slaughtered." A big-bellied man waved his hands dismissively: "We will massacre the Shia and show them who are the Sunnis! They couldn't have done anything without the Americans' support."

When the meeting was over the taxi driver went out to check the road, then the rest followed. "Don't look up, we could be monitored, Shia spies are everywhere," said the big man. The next day the taxi driver was arrested.

By December Abu Omar's worst fears were being realised. The Sunnis had become squeezed into a corner fighting two sides at the same time. But by then he had disappeared; his body was never found.

Baghdad was now divided: frontlines partitioned neighbourhoods into Shia and Sunni, thousands of families had been forced out of their homes. After each large-scale bomb attack on Shia civilians, scores of mutilated bodies of Sunnis were found in the streets. Patrolling militias and checkpoints meant that men with Sunni names dared not venture far outside their neighbourhoods, while certain Sunni areas came under the complete control of insurgent groups the Shura Council of the Mujahideen and the Islamic Army. The Sunni vigilante self-defence groups took shape as reserve units under the control of these insurgent groups.

Like Abu Omar before him, Abu Aisha, a mid-level Sunni commander, had come to understand that the threat from the Shia was perhaps greater than his need to fight the occupying Americans. Abu Aisha fought in Baghdad's western Sunni suburbs, he was a former NCO in the Iraqi army and followed an extreme form of Islam known as Salafism.

Jamming

Deep lines criss-crossed his narrow forehead and his eyes half closed when he tried to answer a question He seemed to evaluate every answer before he spoke. He claimed involvement in dozens of attacks on US and Iraqi troops, mostly IEDs (bombs) but also ambushes and execution of alleged Shia spies. "We have stopped using remote controls to detonate IEDs," he volunteered halfway through our conversation. "Only wires work now because the Americans are jamming the signals."

On his mobile phone he proudly showed me grainy images of dead bodies lying in the street, their hands tied behind their backs . He claimed they were Shia agents and that he had killed them. "There is a new jihad now," he said, echoing Abu Omar's warning. "The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans."

In Ramadi there was still jihad against the Americans because there were no Shia to fight, but in Baghdad his group only attacked the Americans if they were with Shia army forces or were coming to arrest someone.

"We have been deceived by the jihadi Arabs," he admitted, in reference to al-Qaida and foreign fighters. "They had an international agenda and we implemented it. But now all the leadership of the jihad in Iraq are Iraqis."

Abu Aisha went on to describe how the Sunnis were reorganising. After Sunni families had been expelled from mixed areas throughout Baghdad, his area in the western suburbs was prepared to defend itself against any militia attack.

"Ameriya, Jihad, Ghazaliyah," he listed, "all these areas are becoming part of the new Islamic state of Iraq, each with an emir in charge." Increasingly the Iraqi insurgency is moving away from its cellular structure and becoming organised according to neighbourhood. Local defence committees have intertwined into the insurgent movement.

"Each group is in charge of a specific street," Abu Aisha said. "We have defence lines, trenches and booby traps. When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight."

A few days later Rami was telling me about the Sunni insurgents in his north Baghdad area. A network of barricades and small berms blocked the streets around the car in which we sat talking. A convoy of two cars with four men inside whizzed past. "Ah, they are brothers on a mission," Rami said.

Like every man of fighting age, Rami was required to take part in his local vigilante group, guarding the neighbourhood at night or conducting raids or mortar attacks on neighbouring Shia areas.

But he paid $30 a week to a local commander and was exempted.

According to Rami and other commanders, funding for the insurgents comes from three sources. Each family in the street pays a levy, around $8, to the local group. "And when they go through lots of ammunition because of clashes," Rami said, "they pay an extra $5." Then there are donations from rich Sunni businessmen, financiers and wealthier insurgent groups. A third source of funding was "ghaniama", loot which is rapidly becoming the main fuel of the sectarian war

'A business'

"Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition.

"It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same.

"Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k."

·Names have been changed in this report.


3. He’s in the Bunker Now -- by FRANK RICH

PRESIDENT BUSH always had one asset he could fall back on: the self-confidence of a born salesman. Like Harold Hill in “The Music Man,” he knew how to roll out a new product, however deceptive or useless, with conviction and stagecraft. What the world saw on Wednesday night was a defeated Willy Loman who looked as broken as his war. His flop sweat was palpable even if you turned down the sound to deflect despair-inducing phrases like “Prime Minister Maliki has pledged ...” and “Secretary Rice will leave for the region. ...”

Mr. Bush seemed to know his product was snake oil, and his White House handlers did too. In the past, they made a fetish of situating their star in telegenic settings, from aircraft carriers to Ellis Island . Or they placed him against Orwellian backdrops shrieking “Plan for Victory." But this time even the audio stuttered, as if in solidarity with Baghdad’s continuing electricity blackout , and the Oval Office was ditched, lest it summon up memories of all those past presidential sightings of light at the end of the Iraqi tunnel. Mr. Bush was banished to the White House library, where the backdrop was acres of books, to signify the studiousness of his rethinking of the “way forward.”

"I’m not going to be rushed," the president said a month ago when talking about his many policy consultations. He wasn’t kidding. His ostentatious deep thinking started after Election Day, once he realized that firing Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t be enough to co-opt the Iraq Study Group. He was thinking so hard that he abandoned his initial plan to announce a strategy before Christmas .

The war, however, refused to take a timeout for the holiday festivities in Crawford. The American death toll in Iraq , which hovered around 2,840 on Election Day, was nearing 3,020 by Wednesday night.

And these additional lives were sacrificed to what end? All the reviews and thinking and postponing produced a policy that, as a former top Bush aide summed it up for The Daily News, is nothing more than " repackaged stay-the-course dressed up to make it look more palatable ." The repackaging was half-hearted as well. Not for nothing did the “way forward,” a rubric the president used at least 27 times in December, end up on the cutting-room floor. The tossing of new American troops into Baghdad, a ploy that backfired in Operation Together Forward last year, is too transparently the way backward.

“Victory” also received short shrift, downsized by the president to the paltry goal of getting “closer to success.” The “benchmarks” he cited were so vague that they’d be a disgrace to No Child Left Behind. And no wonder: in November, Mr. Bush couldn’t even get our devoted ally, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, to show up for dinner at their summit in Amman, let alone induce him to root out Shiite militias. The most muscle the former Mr. Bring-’Em-On could muster in Wednesday’s speech was this: “If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people.” Since that support vanished long ago, it’s hard to imagine an emptier threat or a more naked confession of American impotence, all the more pathetic in a speech rattling sabers against Syria and Iran.

Mr. Bush’s own support from the American people is not coming back. His “new” Iraq policy is also in defiance of Iraqi public opinion , the Joint Chiefs , the Baker-Hamilton grandees, and Mr. Maliki, who six weeks ago asked for a lower American profile in Iraq . Which leaves you wondering exactly who is still in the bunker with the president besides the first lady and Barney.

It’s a very short list led by John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and neo-conservative dead-enders like William Kristol and Frederick Kagan, who congregate at The Weekly Standard and the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington think tank. The one notable new recruit is Rudy Giuliani, who likened taming Baghdad to “reducing crime in New York” without noticing that even after the escalation there will be fewer American troops patrolling Baghdad than uniformed police officers in insurgency-free New York City.

Mr. Kagan, a military historian, was sent by the White House to sell its policy to Senate Republicans. It was he, Mr. Kristol and the retired Gen. Jack Keane who have most prominently pushed for this escalation and who published studies and editorials credited with defining it. Given that these unelected hawks are some of the same great thinkers who promoted the Iraq fiasco in the first place, it is hard to imagine why this White House continues to listen to them. Or maybe not that hard. In a typical op-ed article, headlined “Stay the Course, Mr. President!,” Mr. Kagan wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 2005: " Despite what you may have read, the military situation in Iraq today is positive ."

Yet Mr. Bush doesn’t even have the courage of his own disastrous convictions: he’s not properly executing the policy these guys sold him. In The Washington Post on Dec. 27, Mr. Kagan and General Keane wrote that escalation could only succeed “with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops” — a figure that has also been cited by Mr. McCain. (Mr. Kagan put the figure at 50,000 to 80,000 in a Weekly Standard article three weeks earlier. Whatever.) By any of these neocons’ standards, the Bush escalation of some 20,000 is too little, not to mention way too late.

The discrepancy between the policy that Mr. Bush nominally endorses and the one he actually ordered up crystallizes the cynicism of this entire war. If you really believe, as the president continues to put it, that Iraq is the central front in “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” then you should be in favor of having many more troops than we’ve ever had in Iraq. As T. X. Hammes, an insurgency expert and a former marine, told USA Today , that doesn’t now mean a “dribble” (as he ridicules the “surge”) but a total of 300,000 armed coalition forces over a minimum of four years.

But that would mean asking Americans for sacrifice, not giving us tax cuts. Mr. Bush has never asked for sacrifice and still doesn’t. If his words sound like bargain-basement Churchill, his actions have been cheaper still. The president’s resolutely undermanned war plan indicated from Day 1 that he knew in his heart of hearts that Iraq was not the central front in the war against 9/11 jihadism he had claimed it to be, only the reckless detour that it actually was. Yet the war’s cheerleaders, neocon and otherwise, disingenuously blamed our low troop strength almost exclusively on Mr. Rumsfeld.

Now that the defense secretary is gone, what are they to do? For whatever reason, you did not hear Mr. Kagan, General Keane or Mr. McCain speak out against Mr. Bush’s plan even though it’s insufficient by their own reckoning — just a repackaged continuance of the same “Whac-A-Mole” half-measures that Mr. McCain has long deplored. Surely the senator knows that, as his loosey-goosey endorsement attests. (On Friday, he called the Bush plan “the best chance of success” while simultaneously going on record that “a small, short surge would be the worst of all worlds.” )

The question now is how to minimize the damage before countless more Americans and Iraqis are slaughtered to serve the president’s endgame of passing his defeat on to the next president. The Democrats can have all the hearings they want, but they are unlikely to take draconian action (cutting off funding) that would make them, rather than Mr. Bush, politically vulnerable to blame for losing Iraq.

I have long felt that it will be up to Mr. Bush’s own party to ring down the curtain on his failed policy, and after the 2006 midterms, that is more true than ever. The lame-duck president, having lost both houses of Congress and at least one war (Afghanistan awaits), has nothing left to lose. That is far from true of his party.

Even conservatives like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Norm Coleman of Minnesota started backing away from Iraq last week. Mr. Brownback is running for president in 2008, and Mr. Coleman faces a tough re-election fight. But Republicans not in direct electoral jeopardy ( George Voinovich of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) are also starting to waver. It’s another Vietnam-Watergate era flashback. It wasn’t Democrats or the press that forced Richard Nixon’s abdication in 1974; it was dwindling Republican support. Though he had vowed to fight his way through a Senate trial, Nixon folded once he lost the patriarchal leader of his party’s right wing.

That leader was Barry Goldwater , who had been one of Nixon’s most loyal and aggressive defenders until he finally realized he’d been lied to once too often. If John McCain won’t play the role his Arizona predecessor once did, we must hope that John Warner or some patriot like him will, for the good of the country, answer the call of conscience. A dangerous president must be saved from himself, so that the American kids he’s about to hurl into the hell of Baghdad can be saved along with him.


4. Losing Iraq, One Truckload at a Time -- by LUIS CARLOS MONTALVAN/NY Times

Fort Benning, Ga.

IN 1901, Gen. Leonard Wood, the American governor of occupied Cuba, wrote an incensed letter to President William McKinley after discovering deep corruption in the island’s postal service. “We have gone into Cuba to give these people an example of good government,” Wood insisted. “These thefts in the post office are so far the only blot on our record. Our honor as a nation demands that we bring the thieves to trial.” He gave his commander in chief an ultimatum: “If it is embarrassing to you to have me persist in this matter, I will resign.”

About the only difference between Cuba then and Iraq today is that Wood’s intervention resulted in the jailing of the culprits. The level of corruption in the Iraq Security Forces is staggering. The Iraq Study Group found that $5 billion to $7 billion is lost annually to different types of corruption, and yet “there are still no examples of senior officials who have been brought before a court and convicted of corruption charges.” The result: “Economic development is hobbled by insecurity, corruption, lack of investment, dilapidated infrastructure and uncertainty.”

Yet of the study group’s 79 recommendations, only two are much relevant to this problem, and no anticorruption milestones to be achieved were set forth. Having served in Iraq, I find this very disappointing. While I can’t of course speak officially for the Pentagon, I can describe what I saw and give my own thoughts on how to improve things.

The most prominent forms of corruption I saw were Iraqi commanders pocketing the paychecks of nonexistent troops in the Iraqi Army and officers in the police forces, and customs officials abetting the smuggling of oil and precious rebuilding supplies across Iraq’s porous borders.

These are vast problems, but some relatively simple solutions could tamp them down considerably.

The greatest amount of corruption in the Iraq military and police forces occurs when payrolls are handed out at the unit level. Because the country doesn’t have a functioning banking system that would allow easy money transfers to private accounts, military and security commanders receive large sums of cash every payroll period based on the number and rank of soldiers on their personnel rosters. The endemic problem is that commanders frequently put nonexistent soldiers and security personnel — dubbed “ghosts” by American overseers — on their rosters and pocket their salaries.

It is difficult to overstate how deeply these ghosts hurt the war effort. Most obviously, we have no idea how much of this money is being siphoned off to support tribal and ethnic fighting, and even the insurgency itself.

Also, because hundreds and thousands of ghosts exist at all echelons, many military and police units in the field do not have nearly as many men at arms as they seem to have on paper. Thus the units are often assigned tasks for which they do not have necessary manpower. And when American or other coalition forces are asked to “partner” with Iraqi troops, we have often found that there simply aren’t enough bodies to conduct training and missions.

American officials have long been aware of this problem. “The number of trained and equipped security forces does not provide a complete picture of their capabilities and may overstate the number of forces on duty,” was the finding of the Government Accountability Office’s “Stabilizing Iraq” report last fall. “For example, Ministry of Interior data include police who are absent without leave.”

Those of us on the ground discovered this the hard way. When I was with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Nineveh Province in 2005, we tried for months to get the names of all Iraqi security personnel in our sector on the payrolls of the Ministries of Interior and Defense. We were curious because when we tried to assess the effectiveness of the Iraqi Border Police brigade in Sinjar, on the Syrian border, we were told by Iraqi commanders that at least 300 officers were “performing guard duties in Mosul.” Mosul is more than 100 miles inside Iraq, so border troops had no business there, if indeed they existed at all.

Similarly, in South Baghdad, we American advisers assigned to the Fourth Brigade of the Sixth Iraqi Army Division had little luck getting a clear read of the brigade’s strength. Iraqi commanders repeatedly told us that many of their men were “elsewhere, performing security duties for the Ministry of Defense.” The advisers found personnel discrepancies as high as 30 percent in any given unit.

How can we bust the ghosts? Every soldier, police officer and government official is assigned a national identification number for bookkeeping, but so far it has been far too easy for corrupt officials to get numbers for nonexistent people. A better idea would be a universal national identification card for all government and military employees that includes the holder’s photograph and fingerprints.

Such cards should be required for any Iraqi to receive his paycheck. Both the distribution of the cards and the payroll-distribution sites should be jointly overseen by coalition and Iraqi officials. There is no reason such a system could not be in place by the end of the year.

It would also help if American advisers embedded with security forces were charged with ensuring that all Iraqis are actually on duty with their assigned units. Should Iraqi commanders refuse to cooperate with their audits, we must insist that the Iraqi government fire them.

The second major source of corruption I witnessed is what I call the “reverse Ho Chi Minh Trails” that facilitate smuggling of Iraqi oil and other resources out of the country. A United States interagency panel reported in November that oil smuggling abetted by corrupt Iraqi customs officials is netting the insurgents $100 million a year, helping to make them financially self-sustaining.

Because most of Iraq is landlocked, almost all goods going in and out pass through 14 land “ports of entry.” Smuggling has always been a part of Iraqi life, and was even more so during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, because he encouraged it to counteract the embargo on Iraqi oil. Yet, almost immediately after the 2003 invasion, former customs officials from the regime resumed their duties at the ports of entry.

Later that year, we in the Third Armored Cavalry were given responsibility for the Syrian, Jordanian and Saudi Arabian borders along Anbar Province. In addition to helping create the new Iraqi Border Police force, we set about reforming the customs checkpoints.

At first, this was successful: for example, the border police battalion we trained at Walid, near the conjunction of the Syrian and Jordanian borders, uncovered many attempts to smuggle out large quantities of food, fuel, industrial parts and other goods. Hundreds of smugglers were arrested.

Unfortunately, we left Anbar in early 2004 and corrupt officials in Baghdad soon took away the border police’s oversight authority on the grounds that it wasn’t their “jurisdictional role to conduct operations that were assigned exclusively to customs officials.” American advisers at the national level failed to do anything about this, and things quickly reverted to the corrupt status quo.

The situation at Walid was hardly unique. In 2005 I returned to Iraq with the Third Armored Cavalry, this time to Nineveh Province, to cover the northern section of the border between Iraq and Syria. It soon became clear that the region’s port of entry, at Rabiya, was a hotbed of corruption. Not only were customs officials apparently turning a blind eye to smuggling, but they seemed to be directly engaged in it.

And little has changed: last month the American special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, reported that the pipelines in the area have been blown up, so the only way to export oil is by road. He noted, “That leaves it vulnerable to smuggling as truckers sell their cargoes on the black market.”

How can we shut down this black market? First, we must insist that the Iraqi government replace the customs workers at the 14 land border crossings with a new set of at least 1,400 elite officials jointly selected and vetted by the Iraqi ministries and the coalition forces.

We should supplement this new force with teams of American advisers — soldiers, police officers, customs officials and the like — to ensure that the Iraqis are prepared to do their jobs. And we should create an anticorruption task force of coalition officers with the power to periodically review systemic issues like the Iraqis’ recruitment methods, policies governing potential ethical problems and records of internal discipline.

The Iraq Study Group concluded that “the ability of the United States to shape the outcomes is diminishing” and that “time is running out.” Those of us who have been on the ground know how true this is. Irrespective of the number and mission of United States forces sent to Iraq, winning or losing will depend in large part on our ability to, in General Wood’s phrasing, “give these people an example of good government.”

(Luis Carlos Montalvan is an Army captain.)


5. Have You No Decency Mr. President? -- by Tony Norman/ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

President Bush is fond of making comparisons between his governance of the nation during the war and Lincoln's stewardship of the republic during the Civil War.

He believes history will treat him better than his contemporaries who are, after all, bedeviled by the excruciating reality of the here-and-now.

Two nights ago while pleading with the nation to give his failed Iraq policies a chance to succeed by yet another infusion of blood and treasure, Mr. Bush assumed a haunted countenance.

Perhaps he found himself transported to Lincoln's era in a blaze of terrible insight. Perhaps he finally saw his own John Wilkes Booth lurking in the shadows of Ford's Theater waiting to ambush him.

If we're lucky, the fear in Mr. Bush's eyes was the faint glimmer of a conscience finally kicking in -- a belated but dim realization of the sacrifice he has asked the nation to assume until the next president takes the oath of office in January 2009.

He sounded unusually flat. Mr. Bush knew he was cornered between the exigencies of fate and his own hubris.

His grudging acknowledgment that "mistakes were made" is the kind of Nixonian passive construction that points to an intense desire to escape responsibility for his own policies.

At the lowest point of his presidency, Mr. Bush refuses to even fake the kind of self-criticism that other presidents have routinely resorted to in their search for redemption.

Lincoln knew all about being self-critical in public. He was a melancholic but thoughtful man who constantly weighed the implications of his decisions for both his nation in the midst of a brutal civil war and the ruthless judgment of history in its aftermath.

Lincoln is our greatest president because he told himself the truth about what his decisions meant for the country.

By comparison, Mr. Bush has yet to exhibit anything resembling deep empathy or soul-searching regarding the Iraq war.

Mr. Bush's rationale for an expansion of our military commitment is built upon the kind of abstraction that sent us searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction in the first place.

The blood spilled every day in Iraq isn't abstract. While most citizens are too polite to say it, Mr. Bush's preemptive "war against terror" killed more Americans than al-Qaida did on Sept. 11.

The best barometer of whether Mr. Bush believes his own rhetoric would be his announcement that his twin daughters have enlisted for a tour of duty in Iraq.

Say what you will about King Agamemnon's barbaric sacrifice of his daughter in Euripedes' "Iphigenia at Aulis," no one doubted his commitment to victory in the war against Troy. Can George Bush say that?

If former Sen. Rick Santorum is serious about tracking down "America's enemies" for the think tank that just hired him, he need look no further than the office of the President of the United States.

There, a feckless man with as little imagination as one can legally get away with in this life, is pushing our military into the spinning teeth of a bloody buzz saw.

In happier times, when he was able to bypass the cerebrum of the American electorate by asserting any nonsense that sounded good at the moment, Mr. Bush once articulated the importance of skepticism:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee," Mr. Bush said, not at all sure he was telling the truth even as the anecdote left his smirking lips.

"I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee," he said making one of his mid-sentence course corrections. "-- that says: Fool me once, shame on [pause] shame on you."

The president hesitated, wondering if he was about to make himself look foolish at the Nashville high school by mangling a cliche. After remembering he was in the presence of an adoring crowd, he soldiered on.

"Fool me -- you can't get fooled again," Mr. Bush said with an odd syntactical flourish.

It was an instructive moment that revealed his willingness to resort to the extremes of rhetorical hollowness to make a point while hoping nobody notices.

In a quote that has always been attributed to Mr. Lincoln, the great man once said a thing or two about belief in the eternal gullibility of the masses: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

Are you listening, Mr. President? We don't believe you. This war is over. We lost.