Think Progress

“Numbers” Negroponte

More on Ambassador John Negroponte’s shifty explanation of Iraqi security forces that Jon Baskin touched on earlier:

On Jan. 12, the State Department released its Weekly Iraq Status Update, which states on page 5 that Iraq’s army consists of precisely 4,159 individuals. That was the report referenced by Sen. Joseph Biden during his questioning of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. You might think the U.S. ambassador to Iraq would be familiar with the report’s contents before appearing on national television, particularly considering the report is easily accessible online. Of course, you’d be wrong:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Joe Biden, Delaware Democrat, said this week in Washington that there are only 4,000 fully trained and capable Iraqi soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces. Is that accurate?

AMB. NEGROPONTE: Well, I think that really understates the accomplishments of the Iraqi army and police forces. They’ve had a number of successes in the past several months in Najaf, in Samarra, in eastern Baghdad. There are some 75 or 80 Iraqi battalions that are currently trained and operating, so I think that that 4,000 figure understates the progress that has been made by Iraq’s armed forces in the past six months.

Negroponte manages to dodge Russert’s simple question — “Is that accurate?” — in four different ways.

First, Negroponte mentions “Iraqi army and police forces.” Iraqi police currently number more than 50,000; Russert asked only about the soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces (i.e., the army). Negroponte then plays up the recent “accomplishments” and “successes” of the Iraqi forces, implying Russert had questioned the soldiers’ competence; he actually asked about the pace at which the U.S. is training new forces. Next Negroponte mentions Iraqi successes in places like Najaf and Samarra, actually referring to the Iraqi National Guard (not the army or the police), which was used heavily in those operations. Finally, Negroponte claims the number used by Russert — which is, to repeat, released by the State Department and updated weekly — “understates the progress that has been made by Iraq’s armed forces in the past six months.”

John Negroponte: wildly ignorant, or a shameless spinmeister?

Losing That War, Too

On 9/10/01, Donald Rumsfeld called a news conference to discuss his number one priority as defense secretary: he declared “war on the Pentagon bureaucracy.” A few excerpts from that speech:

“Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business. Let’s make no mistake: The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of some urgency. In fact, it could be said that it’s a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s….

“Waste drains resources from training and tanks, from infrastructure and intelligence, from helicopters and housing. Outdated systems crush ideas that could save a life. Redundant processes prevent us from adapting to evolving threats with the speed and agility that today’s world demands…The men and women of this department…know the taxpayers deserve better….

“Let me conclude with this note. Some may ask, defensively so, will this war on bureaucracy succeed where others have failed?…this effort will succeed because it must.”

A new GAO report shows that Rumsfeld’s effort has not succeeded. The report indicates that, three years after Rumsfeld’s speech, the Pentagon is the U.S. department most prone to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement, “raising concerns about the effectiveness of many of its programs.” The Department of Defense accounts for eight of the 25 federal programs, functions or offices that appear on the GAO’s 2005 “high-risk” list.

Areas of concern include financial and contract management, the personnel security clearance program, management of military bases and other infrastructure, and modernization of computer systems, the report found.

Heads in the Sand

Society has a selective memory when it comes to history. Or perhaps some events just have more eye-popping names. For example, the influenza pandemic that ripped around the globe in just one year (1918-1919) killed more people than four years of the infamous Bubonic Plague. Responsible for the deaths of between 20 million and 40 million people, “La Grippe” took more lives than World War I. And while it may not have yet received much mainstream notice, the candidate most likely to cause the next global flu pandemic is waiting in the wings, so to speak.

The warnings about avian flu have been building, but little attention has been paid by the mass media. Back in January 2004, the World Health Organization threw its weight behind fears of avian flu. Though WHO pointed towards the Southeast Asia region as potentially under a “serious threat,” it was only a few months later that Ottawa “ordered the slaughter of 80 per cent of the farm poultry in B.C. in an attempt to contain an outbreak of avian flu.”

Though “experts agree that another influenza pandemic is inevitable,” President Bush has yet to address the issue. Considering his handling of this past year’s flu shot shortage, citizens are understandably wary about how he will handle this growing threat, for which we have no vaccine, even though it could potentially kill 70 million people. When the new secretary of Health and Human Services comes into his position, it is imperative that bio-preparedness be on the list of priorities, just as the outgoing secretary realized in hindsight that it should have been on his own.

All Stick and No Carrot Makes Diplomacy Go AWOL

They say that you catch more flies with honey than with threatening rhetoric. Both Iran and South Korea, two of the three “axis of evil” countries Bush named in his 2002 State of the Union address, have expressed unwillingness to talk with Washington because of its hostile policy and confrontational attitude.

After weeks of the Bush administration and its neoconservative cronies hinting at strikes on Iran, an Iranian cabinet secretary has fired back, “We have said that if anyone wants to talk to us in a threatening language, we will adopt the same tone.” Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, who also acts as an Iranian government spokesman, has stated his government’s unwillingness to negotiate with the Americans is in large part due to the continual threats and demeaning manner in which the Bush administration has treated Iran. (Meanwhile, the European Union, which has been actually using the diplomatic approach, is making significant headway with Iran.)

Last year, North Korea put a grinding halt to the seemingly productive six-party talks, citing the United States’ “hostile policy” as the reason, and claiming that the success of the talks will depend on Bush’s foreign policy. Already seven months into a standstill, some diplomats are worried that the deadlock will lead to the failure of the negotiations. And though Bush points to nuclear proliferation as the single most serious threat to national security, the White House has set no deadline for resuming the talks.

This is not a call for coddling dangerous leaders, but there needs to be recognition that “Do it or else” cannot continue to be implemented as a one-size-fits-all policy.

From Bad to Worse

The Congressional Budget Office just released its latest projections on the federal budget. Things aren’t looking good. The CBO projects the federal government will rack up “$855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015,” and $365 billion this year alone. But that doesn’t even begin to describe the scope of our budget problem. Through a combination of Bush administration trickery and legal technicalities, the CBO numbers don’t include:

1. The $80 billion Bush just requested for Iraq and Afghanistan (including, as Atrios notes, an astounding $1.5 billion for a U.S. embassy in Iraq).

2. Assumes no spending on Iraq or Afghanistan over the next 10 years. This omission reduces the deficit by as much as $1.4 trillion.

3. Bush’s $2 trillion Social Security privatization scheme.

4. $2.5 trillion over ten years to make Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, a stated priority.

Here is the really scary part: even with all this chicanery, Bush still doesn’t meet his promise of cutting the actual deficit in half by 2009.

The Cost of Accuracy

On 9/16/02, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay estimated the Iraq war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.

White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels responded quickly, assuring reporters the war would cost between “$50 billion to $60 billion” and that Lindsay’s projection was “very, very high.”

After that, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied on Daniels’s estimate.

Yesterday, the Bush administration announced it would ask Congress to approve about $80 billion in extra defense spending this year, most of it for operations in Iraq. That will bump the overall cost of the war above $180 billion.

So, Lindsay was right and Daniels was wrong. Where are they now?

Daniels is the governor of Indiana, thanks in part to President Bush’s energetic campaigning for “my man Mitch.”

Lindsay? He was fired a long time ago.

A Number of Explanations

In recent days, high level officials in the administration have made it clear that not only have we fallen far short of our goals on troop training in Iraq, but also that they have literally no idea how many troops are actually trained.

For purposes of review, here’s Donald Rumsfeld last September:

RUMSFELD: We have gone from zero to 95,000 Iraqis that are fully trained, fully equipped, providing their own security. They’ll be up to about 145,000 Iraqis by the end of this year, fully trained, fully equipped. There are some another [sic] 50,000 of them that are not fully trained or fully equipped yet but that have been recruited and are capable of doing some things.

Now, from Meet the Press on Sunday:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Joe Biden, Delaware Democrat, said this week in Washington that there are only 4,000 fully trained and capable Iraqi soldiers in the Iraqi armed forces. Is that accurate?

U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ, JOHN NEGROPONTE: Well, I think that really understates the accomplishments of the Iraqi army and police forces. They’ve had a number of successes in the past several months in Najaf, in Samarra, in eastern Baghdad. There are some 75 or 80 Iraqi battalions that are currently trained and operating, so I think that that 4,000 figure understates the progress that has been made by Iraq’s armed forces in the past six months.

MR. RUSSERT: Where would you put the figure? What should the American people know? How many fully capable and trained Iraqi soldiers are there?

AMB. NEGROPONTE: I’d be — I’m not certain what number to put on the number trained.

From Condoleezza Rice’s confirmation hearing last Thursday:

SEN. BIDEN: Now, how many do you really think are trained that Allawi can look to and say, “I can rely on those forces”? What do you think that number is?

RICE: Senator, I have to rely on what I get from the field…We think the number right now is somewhere over 120,000. We think that, among those people, there clearly continue to be questions about on-duty time, that is, people who don’t report for duty. And so this is being looked at…

But I do want to note, Senator, that the Iraqis are making a lot of sacrifices here.

BIDEN: Well, I thank you for your answer. I think you’ll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don’t think there’s more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces. I strongly urge you to pick up the phone or go see these folks.

Note that Rice and Negroponte don’t just exaggerate, they fail to answer the questions at all. Rice hedges (”I have to rely on what I get from the field”), then vaguely exaggerates (”somewhere over 120,000″). Negroponte doesn’t even hazard a guess, admitting he’s “not certain” about numbers, then directs our attention to “progress” made in the past six months. Meanwhile, even Rice’s high estimate would place us well short of where the Secretary of Defense said we’d be — not in 2003, not early last year — but in September, three months ago.

Helpful Hints for Dick Cheney

Yesterday, Don Imus asked Vice President Dick Cheney what mistakes he’d made in planning the war in Iraq. His reply? Blame Saddam. He said, “I think the hundreds of thousands of people who were slaughtered at the time, including anybody who had the gumption to stand up and challenge [Saddam], made the situation tougher than I would have thought…I would chalk that one up as a miscalculation, where I thought things would have recovered more quickly.”

Cheney might want to think about pointing that finger a little closer to home. Here are some replies that may have been a little more honest from the Vice President:

“We didn’t send enough troops in to quell the insurgency in the first place.”
L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the administration’s coalition provisional authority, admitted in October 2004 that the United States failed to deploy enough troops to Iraq in the beginning. According to Bremer, the lack of adequate forces hampered the occupation and efforts to end the looting immediately after the ouster of Saddam Hussein. “We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness. We never had enough troops on the ground,” he said.

“We thought political allegiance was a more important job requirement than know-how and left reconstruction in the hands of inexperienced party loyalists.”
The Washington Post reported last year the $13 billion reconstruction project in Iraq was headed up by young, inexperienced politicos whose main qualification was they’d applied for jobs with the Heritage Foundation. Clueless, they were unable to get the project up and running. Today, only $2.2 billion of the funds allocated for the reconstruction of Iraq have been distributed. In September, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) called that record “beyond pitiful and embarrassing; it is now in the zone of dangerous.” Two years after the invasion, Iraqis are suffering from major food shortages and the country is producing less electricity than it was before the war. In addition, the deterioration of water and sewage systems has led to the spread of hepatitis and outbreaks of typhoid fever.

“We set up a legal framework for torture, which led to widespread abuse such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, which turned many Iraqis against us and strengthened the insurgency.”
Then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales approved a series of memos which created a framework for torture. One memo contended the president “wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.” Another said that the pain caused by an interrogation must include “injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions — in order to constitute torture.” In July 2002, he also held secret meetings to discuss just how far the U.S. could go in interrogating suspects. Far from urging restraint, Gonzales was aggressive, wondering if in fact they were going far enough.

Another One Bites the Dust

In his announcement today that he would be stepping down as FCC chairman, Michael Powell engaged in some self-congratulatory words about having “completed a ‘bold and aggressive agenda.’” Powell certainly had his own agenda (though with questionable priorities). And it certainly was both bold and aggressive. Fox Television provides a good example of just how much networks were in fear of Powell’s wielded power. A recent rebroadcast of a Family Guy cartoon “blurred a character’s posterior, even though the image was seen five years ago when the episode was originally aired.”

But in his censorship crusade, there were many duties and responsibilities that Powell never answered, let alone completed. Worse still, his championing of media consolidation came with seemingly little consideration of what happens when one agenda dominates the news. He won’t be missed.