In my constant effort to find new and insightful information about Iraq, I recently stumbled across another journalist who clearly knows his stuff and is reporting on important issues. As I struggle to keep informed, I'm finding it's often easier to track specific reporters rather than general news outlets, so I've added Ken Silverstein to my list, and you should too.
Here's a discussion of how Bush administration officials continue to interfere with reality-based intelligence assessments of the situation in Iraq. I guess if you don't allow analysts to use the words "civil war" then it must not exist -- and when I was at DoD, I took part in meetings that devolved from discussions about the realities on the ground into fights over whether analysts would be "allowed" to use the phrase "civil war" in our analysis.
What do you call the situation in Iraq right now? asked one person familiar with the situation. The analysts know that it's a civil war, but there's a feeling at the top that [using that term] will complicate matters. Negroponte, said another source regarding the potential impact of a pessimistic assessment, doesn't want the president to have to deal with that.One can see the results of this kind of brilliant approach by reading about Bayan Jabr, a profoundly bad guy who was until recently the head of Iraq's much-maligned Ministry of Interior and is now Finance Minister. The U.S. essentially has two broad avenues: we can either embrace the Shia groups in all their (deadly, militia-focused) glory and let them subdue the insurgency however they can and hope that it doesn't provoke an all-out war, or we can really push to have the militias disbanded and a responsible police force created. We can debate which is better, or more likely, or whatever, but right now we're kinda sorta doing both (or neither, depending on how you look at it), and the results speak for themselves.
Interviews and internal documents show that a number of senior CPA officials, as well as the local CIA station, became convinced that Jabr was unusually corrupt and thuggish, even by the dismal standards of postwar Iraq. [...] The story of Jabr's role in postwar Iraq reveals how American blindness, incompetence, and cynicism allowed religious sectarianism to thrive after the downfall of Saddam. Indeed, Jabr appears to be merely the most ruthless of a class of Shiite leaders who have sought to engineer Shiite dominance behind the scenes, at times with direct U.S. sponsorship.Yikes. But at least Silverstein is reporting these issues, and reporting them right.
