Month: July 2004

Sometimes I wonder whether one morning I woke up in some alternate universe, because reading this sort of thing, I wonder whether the world has gone nuts, or just me to think this is a really BAD IDEA:

Cash has become the US military’s first line of defense in some parts of Iraq, where US soldiers are distributing money to encourage goodwill and to counter their enemies’ offers of money to unemployed Iraqis willing to attack Americans, according to officers here.

Even patrol leaders now carry envelopes of cash to spend in their areas. The money comes from brigade commanders, who get as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a month to distribute for local rehabilitation and emergency welfare projects through the Commanders Emergency Response Program.

There are few restrictions on the expenditures, and officers acknowledge they consider the money another weapon. The targets at which it is aimed are the restless legions of unemployed Iraqi men, many of them former soldiers, policemen, and low-level members of the Ba’ath Party of ousted president Saddam Hussein. They were put out of work when the US administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, ordered a de-Ba’athification of Iraq. US soldiers say those men are vulnerable to entreaties to carry out an attack on the Americans for pay.

So instead of using that money to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure or as small business startup funding, they just hand it out to people on the street? No tracking, no checking, no way to determine whether the money isn’t going to buy more guns, more explosives? Obviously they’re aware of that potential for abuse, so the article goes on to quote a couple of officers who have been giving their cash out to rebuild swimming pools and buy soccer uniforms. But still….

Even FDR didn’t hand out cash to Americans to fight the Great Depression; he created jobs programs instead. Huge public works projects. Why aren’t we doing that in Iraq? Is it because all the projects involving real jobs have been contracted to Halliburton?

This kind of thing literally makes my stomach hurt.

The DNC allowed bloggers into the convention and it made waves – some good, some bad. Much of the convention blogging hasn’t been terribly interesting so far, but Tom Tomorrow has a good account of his day’s activities, mostly trailing around with Michael Moore. Worth a read.

In a not unexpected move, an internal Army investigation has resulted in a whole lot of nothing – except for 94 reported cases of abuse and “at least” three dozen deaths.

Maybe I’m naive – I admit I know nothing about how jails are run – but I have a very hard time understanding how 36 people can die in custody and it can all be attributed to “unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, and in some cases coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate supervision and leadership.”

Other points that seem to indicate that this report is a bunch of hogwash – Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the Army’s inspector general, seems to have decided to ignore some critical areas, such as the so-called ‘ghost prisons’.

Mikolashek said he found “no evidence” of so-called ghost detainees, prisoners kept off the books by U.S. forces and hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But he said he was not disputing either Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report on Abu Ghraib that exposed and criticized the practice, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi prisoner held for more than seven months without notifying the ICRC.

“We did not go back and do a post mortem on that particular issue,” Mikolashek said.

As I said, none of this is unexpected. And given the proximity of the 9/11 commission’s report, this one is going to be buried.