Greg,
You were a strong advocate of using military intervention to accomplish foreign policy goals and jumped with glee on the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Bush bandwagon. Now that you feel like a mark that has been hoodwinked by a charming carny at the local sideshow appearing in town, I have to ask you: How does it feel to be made such an utter fool of?
Do you really think that somehow getting Rumsfeld to resign will restore your former dignity when you look in the mirror? Why not just accept responsibilty for your foolish ways. You made a disastrous blunder being such a hawk and now you have finally seen the error of your ways.
Once in a posting, you alluded to an ex-soldier, who wrote an oped piece in the NYT about his complicit involvement in the torture of a suspected terrorist. Your lead was: Another American hater. As a Vietnam veteran, I saw his piece as a cautionary tale. There but for the grace of God go I.
You have to get beyond the "off with their heads" horse hockey, particularily nailing the scalp of Rummy inside your teepee, and start exploring how we can salvage this debacle and find a way out of this international dilemma. Just admit that you were taken in by all the neocon wet-dreams of a cakewalk and get on with your life.

Posted by: George A. Hoffman at September 22, 2006 01:20 AM | Permalink to this comment

right.

So could we avoid having Rumsfeld and Bush lead us into another costly and unnecessary debacle in Iran?

You can tell they're gearing up for it. And you know Rove is all in favor of it.

But it's the same horribly flawed strategy, the same willful ignorance of what air-strikes can and cannot do, and the same bad news for America's power and standing in the world.

So--Greg--can you use whatever influence you have, to tell the insiders in Washington not to let Bush have his war with Iran?

Maybe it will have to be done someday, but not now, not with this team.

We have learned, to our cost, that expecting George Bush to do anything effective on the world stage is sending a boy to do a man's job.

Unless wiser heads prevail, he's going to screw it up in Iran, too.

The airstrikes will make some headlines. Whatever nuclear program they have will survive--degraded a bit, but reconstitutable. And Ahmedinejad will be in power for decades.

Posted by: kid bitzer at September 22, 2006 01:23 AM | Permalink to this comment

my reference to the soldier as another america hater was meant sarcastically, as the post you reference makes manifestly clear (note the approving "amen" at the end, for instance). for avoidance of doubt, i had further elaborated in a comment to that post, and people like Jim Henley were kind enough to watch my back too. it is disingenuous in the extreme for any regular reader of this blog to have read my comment "another america hater" without understanding i meant it hugely sarcastically.

i have blogged constructive foreign policy suggestions in this space not infrequently, i hope. my focus on rumsfeld is b/c i feel that a new SecDef is a key component to helping salvage iraq, not just intra-beltway navel gazing 'horse hockey', as you put it.

Posted by: greg at September 22, 2006 01:27 AM | Permalink to this comment

Greg, replacing Rumsfeld won't do any good.

In fact, at this point, nothing will do any good.

Not only would we need to be rid of the entire current Administration, but "helping [to] salvage Iraq," by your own estimates would require more troops on the ground than we have ready and equipped to send, AND would require a longer commitment than is possible.

"Salvaging Iraq" also requires ignoring the fact that the civil war isn't going to happen in some vague future, some indefinite set of "Friedmans" from now, but is happening now.

Yes, we broke Iraq.

Yes, we bear the moral responsibility for that.

But, no, we can't fulfill that responsibility by sending more of our soldiers there. All we'll accomplish is getting more of our own boys and girls killed, maimed, and psychologically scarred.

If there were justice to be had, it would involve the architects of the war standing trial.

But that's never going to happen.

We'll have to settle for living with the stain, and living with the fallout.

As other commenters have said, about the only constructive thing we can do at this point is prevent another dishonorable, destructive, disastrous and criminal act - by preventing war with Iran.

If you have any ideas how to do that, we'd like to hear them.

Posted by: CaseyL at September 22, 2006 02:08 AM | Permalink to this comment

I think Casey said it best. Not only are the incompetent and criminal bamboozlers still in power, but they are about to do it again.

Not even considering what cost it would incur, they really want to attack Iran. Who will pay for that? Certainly not them, or our generation.

How are these people still in power?

Posted by: Dan at September 22, 2006 02:15 AM | Permalink to this comment

If their real goal is to funnel billions of dollars a month to Republican front companies, both Iraq and Afghanistan are tremdous successes.

Why shouldn't they try to expand into Iran?

I despise Bush & Co., but I admire them in a way, too.

They saw correctly how gullible and bloodthirty Americans really are.

Posted by: monkyboy at September 22, 2006 03:29 AM | Permalink to this comment

Obviously, you can't expect to do *every possible goal* unless you have a force that can do everything, and that's expensive. But the idea of doing war with mobile special forces that call in airstrikes has a place.

Where it failed in these two wars is that we decided we were saving the local populations from bad governments. What if we were fighting a nation whose population supported a bad government? Then we could move in and destroy the military, and destroy the armories and military capital plant and dual-use capital plant, and then just leave.

Without installing a US-friendly government, we might have to do it all over again. But installing US-friendly governments looks like it's harder than it used to be, particularly when the public is against us.

What we can do instead is just tear the place up. Kill a big fraction of the military, and destroy the planes and tanks and trucks and bases. Destroy the bridges and tunnels. destroy the water works and power plants -- all of which are of course dual use. Destroy every cement plant. Every large factory, all of which are of course dual-use. Every hospital. Presumably when you invaded they were a threat. When you pull out they are not a threat, and won't be a conventional military threat for years. And when they look like they might become a threat soon you can do it again.

This approach is no good when you want to rescue nations. But when you just want to destroy them it looks pretty workable. Rusmfeld insisted there would be no occupation, reconstruction, or nation-building in iraq. Somehow we wound up trying that anyway. But if we'd done it Rummy's way, it would have worked. Iraq would not be a WMD threat. Iraq would not be a jihadi threat. Iraq would be a basket case.

So, does it only work on third world nations? Does it only work on third world nations that have been under sanctions for years? I hate to think we're transforming our land forces into something that depends on a gimmick that only works sometimes. And we've seen that we don't always want to just destroy our enemies, and it looks like that's what this method is mainly good for.

But our two test cases don't show that it doesn't work. They only show that it doesn't always match up well with our victory conditions.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 22, 2006 04:16 AM | Permalink to this comment

Echoing the above comments. Bush has essentially said that he's content to leave Iraq to his hapless successor -- along with all the other whirlwinds he's sown. Shirking responsibility for his fuck-ups is the only course the man-child knows. The important thing, the truly vital thing, is to stop the same gang of criminals from launching a worse disaster in Iran. That will be the end of our shambling republic. If you think public discourse is bad now, imagine the demagoguery when oil soars beyond $100/barrel.

Somebody needs to ask some simple questions, over and over again, until the mediocrities who work for the national media organs start paying attention: 1) How exactly is an Iranian nuclear weapon worse than the Pakistani one that we've essentially agreed to accept? And how exactly is Iran, with a military budget roughly one percent of ours, a threat to America (not Israel, America). Maybe then the supposed opposition party will find the courage to really oppose.

Posted by: sglover at September 22, 2006 04:46 AM | Permalink to this comment

But if we'd done it Rummy's way, it would have worked. Iraq would not be a WMD threat.

It wasn't to begin with.

Iraq would not be a jihadi threat. Iraq would be a basket case.

Ah. Like the "basket case" of Taliban Afghanistan.

You're an idiot.

Posted by: sglover at September 22, 2006 04:50 AM | Permalink to this comment

One could make a case that Rumsfeld's doctrine, faithfully applied without compromise, might have worked better than the policy followed in Afghanistan (especially) or Iraq.

For this to happen American forces would have had to be withdrawn within months of the Taliban's fall, when there was no enemy pressure. Afghanistan would either have sorted itself out, or fallen back into a civil war. The one thing it would have been least likely to do is invite al Qaeda to resume the activities that led to the invasion in the first place. Similarly in Iraq the Americans could have announced in June 2003 that having won the war they would now withdraw, returning to Iraqis the responsibility to govern their own country. Since the former dictator and his vas security apparatus were still functioning at that time it is less easy to believe that this would have worked out well for Iraq, but future challenges to the United States after it had swept through the country and departed might have been deterred.

I'm not saying I believe this. There are reasons, some of them good ones, why in either case declaring victory and withdrawing before have to deal with insurgencies and nation building would have been politically impossible. I suppose I'm just pointing out that the current vogue for pronouncing doctrines and later debunking them is not a particularly constructive thing. Even doctrines not promulgated in response to public relations emergencies are only general guides to action; in the real world any doctrine about anything is going to be departed from to some degree, often on the spur of the moment in a manner wholly improvised. Debunkers like this one then proceed to tear down the doctrine by pointing out all the ways that what was actually done did not work -- though empirically there is little way to ascertain whether the reasons it did not work were due to the doctrine's flaws, its execution, flaws in the concept or execution of actions representing departures from the doctrine, or something else entirely.

It's all about winning the argument more than anything else. Remarkable how important winning the argument, even if only by the verdict of people who already agree with you, has become in our intellectual life.

Posted by: Zathras at September 22, 2006 05:54 AM | Permalink to this comment

There may be some of that, Zathras.

But for the ruling class, being able to continue an obviously disastrous course is a sign of their power, too.

Who cares what the little people think, we can do what we want!

Posted by: monkyboy at September 22, 2006 06:35 AM | Permalink to this comment

Zathras,

if the intent of the Bush administration was indeed simply the removal of Saddam from power, then I can see the sensibility of your argument. But, I can't seem to get over the fact that the Bush administration immediately began the construction of the largest embassy in the world right in Baghdad, and worked on the wording in the constitution so that oil companies could not be nationalized in Iraq......the whole issue of oil really stinks up America's politics towards Iraq. I don't think Bush was ever intending to ever remove America's presence from Iraq, ever. Not with the second largest oil reserve in the world. Why chance or risk this huge find for oil corporations to the hands of another possible dictator in the future?

Posted by: Dan at September 22, 2006 11:48 AM | Permalink to this comment

actually, it's not about winning arguments. Not for me, anyhow.

It's about trying to save my country from another disastrous war that leaves our enemies stronger and our country weaker.

Which is what Afghanistan and Iraq have done. And what any Bush-led war with Iran will do.

I'm happy losing arguments. It's losing our army, losing our allies, and losing our moral compass that I hate.

As well as losing Afghanistan to the Taliban, losing Iraq to the Iranians, and all of the other losses Bush has presided over.

Posted by: kid bitzer at September 22, 2006 02:35 PM | Permalink to this comment

Each was predicated on unrealistic notions of what could be achieved by force, and each dismissed the importance of international legitimacy.

I don't know that Rumsfeld had an "unrealistic notion of what could be achieved by force"; rather, it appears ot me, that Rumsfeld had an unrealistic notion of what should be achieved by force. Rumsfeld beleives that the role of the military is fight wars and get rid of a threat, not keep the peace -- and that securing and rebuilding the targeted nation and finding a replacement for the deposed regime is someone else's job.

Its not really a bad concept --- provided that you have "someone else" available to do the other job. The problem, of course, is that there is no "someone else." Lacking that key component, Rumsfeld is simply the Underpants Gnome of international relations.

1) Bomb the crap out of perceived threats
2) ???????
3) World domination

Posted by: p.lukasiak at September 22, 2006 02:47 PM | Permalink to this comment

"Iraq would not be a jihadi threat. Iraq would be a basket case."

Ah. Like the "basket case" of Taliban Afghanistan.

You're an idiot.

Think about it. Afghanistan is in no way a threat to the USA, and never was. We invaded afghanistan because they sassed us after 9/11.

Iraq was never a threat to the USA. We invaded iraq because Bush wanted to.

We talk like it's a terrible, terrible thing that terrorists could hide out in afghanistan or waziristan. This is stupid. Terrorists who hide in a place that has no banks and no electricty and no indoor plumbing are not a threat to us. If they go someplace where they become a threat to us --france, say -- then we need the french government to help us get them. While they're hiding in mongolia or sinkiang or bantustan they don't matter.

Iraq was a pretty-much modern nation, developing fast, with lots of engineers and technicians and construction workers building stuff -- until we got sanctions imposed. It could have recovered if sanctions were removed. But after we trashed the place they'd have a hard time recovering. Destroy the bridges and they need ferryboats until they can build new bridges -- but the ferryboats are destroyed too. They need gasoline but the ports they import gasoline through are trashed. Etc. We could have gone a long way toward turning iraq into another irrelevant waziristan.

World public opinion would have been hard on us. And there was the oil, which could finance a recovery unless somebody else took it. And our own humanitarian impulses would have gotten in the way. And in the long run there would be a lot of hard feelings that might cause us a lot of trouble down the road.

But Rumsfeld's military transformation isn't completely useless. It can beat armies. And then it can destroy infrastructure. Whenever those are the goals it may be very effective, provided we don't run into an enemy who has workable defenses against it.

Just because it turned out to be inappropriate the first two times we wanted it, doesn't mean it will always be the wrong tool for the job.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 22, 2006 02:51 PM | Permalink to this comment

I don't think Bush was ever intending to ever remove America's presence from Iraq, ever. Not with the second largest oil reserve in the world.

I want to point out again that we don't know what iraq's oil reserves are.

Saddam told us what they were. Are we going to believe Saddam?

When we took Baghdad the Oil Ministry was the only place we defended. No doubt we immediately sent in experts to find out what the iraqi government really thought their reserves were, as opposed to what they announced. Immediately after that, all of a sudden Bush started running the occupation on the cheap.

Has anyone outside the US government seen the captured documents? I don't know that they haven't, but I haven't ever heard that they have.

Do we really have any reason whatsoever to think that iraq has the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world? Saddam said so, and the US government hasn't corrected the record since. Is that sufficient cause to believe it?

Posted by: J Thomas at September 22, 2006 03:02 PM | Permalink to this comment

Replacing Rumsfeld in 2005 would have had the potential for an impact. Now, it's just a nice suggestion... no. It just "feels" like a nice suggestion.

Posted by: Chris at September 22, 2006 05:27 PM | Permalink to this comment

J. Thomas,

It seems, if you go digging, you'll find that the assessment is correct, that Iraq does have the second largest oil field in the world.

Petrologists were allowed in Iraq to verify the oil reserves.

Posted by: Dan at September 22, 2006 06:29 PM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, I was very excited to see your claim. I wanted to find out.

But you gave the wrong link. The one you presented shows two 2003 estimates, one expansive based on no data, the other giving iraq half the reserves of russia based on a lot of data but still with a lot of guesswork.

Please, I'd very much like to see the report you intended to link to.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 22, 2006 07:05 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

Okay, I have more credible sources for you to prove that Iraq has 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

International Energy Outlook from the Department of Energy. That is a table for this piece that goes in detail on oil reserves worldwide.

The Energy Information Administration shows the latest oil reserves numbers by country, including every single country in the world that has proven oil reserves. Iraq is stated to have 115 billion barrels.

The CRS Report for Congress also cites the 155 billion barrels as their number for Iraq's proven oil reserves.

I normally am not fully trusting of any government document while these Republicans are in power, but I have no reason to doubt these numbers.

Posted by: Dan at September 22, 2006 08:26 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

I made a comment showing three references to the sources, but it is being held for approval.

If you want to find the info, go to Firstgov.gov and do a search for "iraq proven oil reserves."

Posted by: Dan at September 22, 2006 08:29 PM | Permalink to this comment

I want to point out again that we don't know what iraq's oil reserves are. Saddam told us what they were. Are we going to believe Saddam?

Iraq may well have exaggerated its reserves claims.....but then again, so have many (if not most) OPEC nations, because production quotas were based on remaining reserves. So, whenever anyone wanted a bigger slice of the OPEC production pie, they increased their claimed reserves....

What we DO know is that prior to 1991, Iraq had a buttload of oil that was verified -- more than enough to make greedy people realize that control of that oil would make them rich as Crosus. It doesn't really matter if Iraq has the second (or third, or forth) largest oil reserves in the world, all that matters is that there is more than enough oil to be exploited by Bush oil company buddies to make it worth their while to encourage an invasion of Iraq.....

Posted by: p.lukasiak at September 22, 2006 09:29 PM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, I'm kind of at a loss here.

Your first link explained why nobody outside the iraqi government new what iraq's reserves were in 2003. They recommended we have geologists find out and publish the results. Precisely what I wanted.k But in May 2003 when the report was published there hadn't been time to do that.

Your other three links are also not the right ones. The first reports the DOE's estimate -- they're the guys who don't know much. There's nothing there to say how the numbers were found except they come from an Oil and Gas Journal paper.

The second is another DOE table that has a footnote saying it repeats foreign governments' lies about their reserves instead of making any independent estimate, as a convenience to readers.

The third quotes the same number but gives no clue how the number was found.

I normally am not fully trusting of any government document while these Republicans are in power, but I have no reason to doubt these numbers.

On the other hand, I see no reason to give them any credibility whatsoever until I get some idea whether they came from independent audits.

First we have Saddam's lies. Then we have US study of Saddam's private records, which as far as I know haven't been released. If we depended on the secret iraqi data we'd do better than their public lies, but still we'd only know what they thought they knew. Have we sent in geologists to check? Somebody who can do it right? Very likely the violence is so bad that we haven't tried. Or maybe we did it early on. I haven't heard. I get the strong impression that you haven't heard either.

I don't trust these bozos to know when they're lying.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 22, 2006 11:00 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

these verifiable estimates come from before 1991. trust them as you wish. from my understanding of oil fields, most of what we know in any location is really just estimated. Frankly, 115 billion barrels of verifiable oil in Iraq sounds about right, give or take a few billion barrels. I don't really care if their real amount is 50 billion or 500 billion. The point of this diversion is that Iraq has oil that is a boon for American and British oil companies. Whether it is the second largest field in the world, or the fifth is not important.

Posted by: Dan at September 23, 2006 04:14 AM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, for your thinking the amount isn't important. For mine it is.

We don't know how much Saddam lied about his reserves. And we don't know how much he pumped. He was cheating on sanctions, and we don't know how much. We don't know how much iraqi oil the kuwaitis pumped out with their slant-drilling. On the other hand we don't know how much extra reserves there might be for new technology that wasn't around in 1991.

Before and during the war the Bush administration was claiming that iraq wouldn't need us to pay for reconstruction, once the oil was flowing that would pay for the reconstruction and for the war. They were saying we'd quickly get to 6 mbd and there would be jobs and riches for all iraqis so they wouldn't feel like fighting. Independent oil experts said it would take $20 billion+ to refurbish iraq's ancient oil-pumping infrastructure. The Bushies said that would be no problem, oil companies would pay it up front to get the oil flowing.

If they'd been right about that they probably wouldn't have needed an occupation plan. Drop the sanctions, rebuild the oil industry (lots of high-paying jobs for iraqis) pump 6 mbd at high prices, we could throw money around there. No Saddam, everybody feels rich, no problem.

They were talking that way right up until they got the Oil Ministry records. Then all of a sudden they started talking like it was going to be a long haul and it would take sacrifices. They tried to sell the deal to international oil companies and nobody wanted it. There's no money to improve the oil infrastructure, and once somebody started bombing pipelines there's been barely enough money to keep repairing them. That promise that there was so much oil that iraq would be rich, had just evaporated.

I think they believed it. And then somehow it didn't happen. Is the oil really there? If so, all they have to do is get the seed money and stop the violence, and they'll be sitting pretty. They have the choice between fighting and killing for a long time to decide who gets it all, or sharing it and getting the riches now. All they have to do is get us out of there, and make a deal. Lots of death and destruction and the survivors camp out in the ruins, versus everybody sits back and rakes in the dough.

But if there isn't enough oil to justify modernising, then the oil is just one more thing to take into account while they fight. That's how they're acting, and it's how we're acting.

Think about it. For less than it costs us to keep the army parked there for 3 months, we could have fixed up the oil industry and doubled production. The investment would have paid for itself in less than a year. Less than 6 months at today's prices. Why didn't we do it? Was it sheer incompetence or did we find out it wasn't worth trying?

http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/oped/a46n50d02.htm

Here is a 2003 article by someone who ought to know what he's talking about. He claimed iraq could produce 10 mbd by 2010. But so far it just isn't happening, oil production is stagnant or declining. The author pointed out that iraqi oil experts were in short supply and they shouldn't be fired just because they were Ba'athists. That could be part of it. And iraq has had trouble getting the money to pay for improvements. And of course the violence has slowed things down. Was this article the real thing, or was it disinformation? I don't see how to tell.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 23, 2006 07:14 AM | Permalink to this comment

But if there isn't enough oil to justify modernising, then the oil is just one more thing to take into account while they fight. That's how they're acting, and it's how we're acting.

its not a question of whether there is enough oil in Iraq to justify modernization --- its a question of whether the infrastructure could be secured. (like there is no question of whether there is enough Caspian Sea oil to justify a pipeline through Afghanistan -- we know there is, but the pipeline can't be secured.) Iraq's pipelines couldn't be secured -- those pipelines were among the first targets of the insurgency, and plans to secure the pipelines has a fantastical quality to them. Absent a reliable means of moving oil from the well to the marketplace, no one is going to invest heavily in new infrastructure.

Nor is it a question of "Saddam can't be trusted" or "Saddam cheated". Massive oil deposits in the billions and billions of barrels were verified in Iraq prior to 1991 -- and (IIRC) prior to the invasion France had a deal with Iraq that would have provided a massive investment in Iraq's oil infrastructure pending the lifting of sanctions --- they wouldn't have guaranteed that investment unless they knew the oil was there to justify it. And Saddam could only have "cheated" so much -- not enough to make more than a dent in his proven reserves.

Saddam was thought to be a threat because he had oil.... that's the bottom line, and your approach to this question has descended well beyond rationally based skepticism to deliberate obtuseness.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at September 23, 2006 02:45 PM | Permalink to this comment

P Lukasiak, you have a point. It makes sense that iraq ought to have enough oil to be worth an invasion and occupation, if only things settle down enough to extract it.

And given that, it makes sense that nobody but the USA wants the USA to keep control of that oil. Everybody who thinks they can depend on some gratitude from any of the local players is likely to support one or more of them against us.

And in the short run, it isn't just insurgents who'd want the pipelines shut down. Anybody who speculates in oil futures might pay well to get them shut down at particular times.

Still, I'd very much like to see some sort of professional estimate about how much oil there is there and where it is. And what I'm finding is mostly the same old estimates tossed around, recycled from old estimates, back to Saddam. There's no obvious reason why the new numbers should be secret if they're reasonably compatible with the old estimates, but I haven't found any link to them.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 23, 2006 03:40 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

while Saddam was an evil man, what reason did he have to fudge his oil numbers back in the 80s? Just because someone is evil, doesn't mean that everything that comes out of their mouths is a lie. you need to give the guy some credit. he ran a pretty stable country for a dictator. schools were working and people had jobs. I'm glad he's been taken out, as he was an evil dictator, but not everything about Saddam was evil. Be a reasonable debator here, J Thomas.

Those oil numbers remain what they are because no one questions them with verifiable evidence to the contrary. If you can provide evidence to the contrary, other than conspiratorial secret documents, well, I can't take your word that Iraq's oil supply is anything but an estimated 115 billion barrels of verifiable oil fields.

Posted by: Dan at September 23, 2006 05:04 PM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, your latest argument seems spectacularly weak -- if I understand correctly, you argue that even though Saddam was a liar, it is possible that he told the truth about his oil. That is it? You argue that the numbers might possibly be true?

Well, sure. Lots of things might possibly be true.

He had working schools, therefore, we should trust his numbers without verification?

I think that J. Thomas was looking for something a bit better than "it might possibly be these numbers-- we really have no idea, but at least we don't have direct evidence they're false."

I think that the reasonable person is not afraid to question "please just take this on faith' claims, especially if they are quoted from the mouths of known liars...

It is hardly reasonable to attack him personally (calling him unreasonable) for not being willing to just take it on faith.

Posted by: alqubar at September 23, 2006 11:07 PM | Permalink to this comment

Dan, the way OPEC works, is the more reserves a country claims to have the more clout they have in the organisation. Particularly, the more reserves you claim to have, the higher the quota you're officially allowed to pump this year. And OPEC doesn't do any verification. (Of course, the more you pump now, the sooner you'll run out and so you won't benefit from the later times when the price is higher. It's a trade-off.)

This is widely regarded as incentive for all OPEC members to inflate their reserves. Anybody who wants money now instead of saving oil to sell high later, is likely to inflate their estimates of their reserves.

I have no evidence whether Saddam did that. But the US government does have evidence, they have the Oil Ministry records. And they've had 3 years to do independent testing. The methodology has improved so much since Saddam went under sanctions -- a lot of it could be done by little crews that could come into a place by helicopter and take their readings quickly while special forces protect them, and then move on. And a lot of it could be done from protected locations. like, do slant drilling to test areas you don't want to get too close to.

We could have a much better idea of iraq's reserves than we did 3 years ago. The US government probably *does* have a much better idea. I don't want to say they're keeping it a secret. Maybe they've published it and I just haven't noticed. I'd be very interested to hear whether they have, and what their claims are if so.

Or why they haven't published it if not.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 24, 2006 12:12 AM | Permalink to this comment

Or why they haven't published it if not.

Just a guess, but the Bush regime probably sees an advantage of some sort in not disclosing precisely where the reserves are, and how large each one is.

For instance, lets say that based on Saddam's numbers, everyone believes that a particular area in "Iraqi Kurdistan" contains massive reserves --- but the US knows otherwise. The US can leverage this knowledge -- telling one side or the other that there really isn't a lot of oil there, and that they can "concede" that area in exchange for another area where there really is a lot of oil.

Or it could be something more politically sinister -- like wanting to control the knowledge in order to reward friends (and punish enemies).... If a French company is working with Saddam's numbers, and a US company is working with the real numbers, guess who is in a better position when it comes time to bid on the right to exploit an oil field?

Or it might just be that the Bush regime is so obsessed with secrecy that it doesn't want the information getting out; in other words, the answer to "why don't they release the information" is "just because."

Posted by: p.lukasiak at September 24, 2006 09:01 AM | Permalink to this comment

What I'm trying to get at is that it doesn't really matter how much oil Iraq actually has. Personally I don't really care, even though in the end will affect me because I drive a car. There are issues of far greater concern right now than whether or not our government is keeping secret any real verifiable information regarding the oil fields in Iraq. I do believe in my heart, and I'd still like to be proven wrong, but the overriding reason for the war in Iraq was oil, and would have been anyways if the oil fields had only 50 billion barrels or 500 billion barrels.

I know enough about oil field technology to know that all numbers regarding size of oil fields are always estimates in any case. As this article from BBCNews shows.

Maybe, to answer your consipratorial charge, the US Administration does not want to release the actual size because of pressure from Saudi Arabia, not to reveal the actual size. I think though that all nations are pretty suspect in the accuracy of their information.

Posted by: Dan at September 24, 2006 10:44 AM | Permalink to this comment

I do believe in my heart, and I'd still like to be proven wrong, but the overriding reason for the war in Iraq was oil, and would have been anyways if the oil fields had only 50 billion barrels or 500 billion barrels.

You may be right. Guessing what this administration thinks is like predicting which way a cat will jump. But if they were somehow reasonable, it would matter a lot to them whether it was 50 billion or 500 billion barrels. And I suspect it did matter. The way Bush behaved looks to me a lot like a CEO who does this big acquisition and then when he gets a look at the real books he finds out it's a lemon. So he pretends nothing is wrong, and he minimises further investment in it, he does just enough to keep it from sinking this quarter and hopes the stockholders won't notice.

If iraq has 50 billion recoverable barrels they can pump at the current rate and in 50 years it will be gone. Double the rate and it's gone in 25 years. If they have 500 billion they can sell 10 times as much and it will still last 50 years. That makes it worth spending a lot on the oil industry. If we were serious about iraqi oil we would have started revamping it when we first won. Lots of money for iraqis to do the work. They sell more oil and the money comes in, people get rich, poor people think about getting rich instead of revolting. But we didn't do it. We asked oil companies to invest, and they didn't want to. This was before there was much violence. It would have taken $20 billion to fix things up, and we didn't. Now it's costing us $10 billion a month to fight there.

Anyway, my main point is that people keep repeating the claim that iraq has the 2nd largest oil reserves in the world. And we mostly don't know what iraq's oil reserves are.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 24, 2006 02:38 PM | Permalink to this comment

Here's a thought.

Rumsfeld is so spring/summer 2006. The issue is far more dire now. It looks like we're going to have a force of 140,000 - 150,000 in Iraq for, uh, forever. That is clearly crap strategy. Looks like an NIE came out in April telling us we're in a terrorist-breeding mess... but we still heard from Bush and Cheney the most cynical optimism.

Now the rub: see, you and the blog-warriors advocated this mess. You have a special responsibility, insofar as your blog, to actually post something with GUTS.

Call for the president to resign. Call for something as drastic as the situation.

Posted by: Chris at September 24, 2006 06:44 PM | Permalink to this comment

J. Thomas has it right, I think. The US has the capacity, twice demonstrated recently, to go into hostile states and simply eradicate as much or as little of the government and its infrastructure as is thought necessary. 'Like a hanging in the morning' this has the effect of 'concentrating the mind wonderfully' - the mind of potentially hostile governments, that is.

It is, it seems to me, an extension of the successful Israeli tactic (of pinpointing attacks on Hamas *leaders*) into the strategic area. It is folly to fall for this tosh of 'nation building' and imposing on different cultures that which you find acceptable but which they might not. Or at least, it's folly unless you are prepared to do what we, the Brits, did in India and stay there for several centuries. In that case it is essential to pick some local bastards to run the place on the sensible grounds that at least they are *our* bastards!

But Thomas is right, it's even better, if you have the capability, to just go in fast and exit fast leaving a calling card that spells out what will occur if there is any more trouble.

Posted by: David Duff at September 24, 2006 08:04 PM | Permalink to this comment

> In that case it is essential to pick some local bastards to run the place on the sensible grounds that at least they are *our* bastards!

Well, that is why we trained the Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan (many of them, not just the ones we now call al-quaida). Reagan may have been mentally absent, but I believe Bush Sr was involved in that -- shipping hundreds of thousands of weapons to them, and training them on how to fight back against an occupying western country.

Also, that is why we supported Saddam and helped him build chemical weapons.

That is also why we supported brutal dictatorships in Iran, and continue to do so in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Those are all our bastards.

Well, ok, maybe we don't pick very good ones, but hey, we're new to imperialism, and not very good at it.

Posted by: powerman at September 26, 2006 09:32 AM | Permalink to this comment

Powerman: "Those are all our bastards."
In that case, my question is were we (the USA) their mothers or their fathers?

Posted by: David All at September 26, 2006 10:08 PM | Permalink to this comment

David,

No, they're only our bastards, they're not our true off-spring. That is to say, we bear responsibility for arming and training them to make them good terrorists, but we are not their parents -- we do not bear the primary responsibility of teaching them the ethics and morality that govern their wider aims.

Ok, here I'm being serious for a bit. If we give them explosives so they can murder both troops and civilians of advanced western armies (Soviet and US), we carry the partial responsibility of enabling this terrorism. But that does not absolve them of the primary moral responsibility of committing these acts, nor does it absolve their parents, their teachers, their religious leaders, of teaching and believing in ways of action and struggle that include terrorism.

Posted by: powerman at September 28, 2006 03:59 PM | Permalink to this comment

we carry the partial responsibility of enabling this terrorism. But that does not absolve them of the primary moral responsibility of committing these acts,

Why are you doing moral equivalence between us and terrorists?

I'll say this again. Imagiine you're running a restaurant. The sanitation inspector comes in and finds 50,000 cockroaches. You say "It isn't primarily my fault. It's mostly the cockroaches' fault."

You'd be correct. If the cockroaches had the decency not to breed in your dirty kitchen then there wouldn't be a problem. But it's a stupid excuse.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 28, 2006 06:59 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas, you are throwing the word "stupid" at what I said, and yet, you are complaining that I analogize insurgents using terrorist attacks as humans, and then you analogize them as cockroaches.

I think it is more misuided to analogize them as cockroaches, and better to do as I did, and consider them human, and therefore morally culpable for their actions.

I only used the foolish term "terrorist" to conform with the popular practice; in reality, I think it is a weakness and a semantic failing, used to dismiss humanity and confuse tactics with aims.

Calling people cockroaches is a bit depressing (among other reasons, because it recalls Hutu power radio, and the consequences there).

Posted by: powerman at September 28, 2006 11:15 PM | Permalink to this comment

Powerman, until you're ready to discuss morality with the terrorists and try to persuade them to change their behavior, you accomplish nothing better than propaganda to blame things on them.

The point of moral argument is to create moral behavior. You can only do that with people you're discussing morality with. So long as we aren't talking to terrorists, our moral discussion can only be about our responsibility, not about their responsibility.

We -- we, and our elected representatives and their minions -- have responsibility to get the results we want. People who want to thwart us have no responsibility to get results we want.

If youi claim moral equivalence between us and terrorists, then it's time to negotiate with them and work out a deal. Tell them what's wrong with what they're doing and get them to promise they'll cut it out. But if you say they aren't susceptible to moral arguments then they aren't part of the moral discourse any more than cockroaches are. Then the question is what are we -- as moral people -- willing to do or not do about them.

So, just suppose we agree that terrorists are immoral people who do immoral things, so it's OK for us to do any immoral thing we want to them. (I claim that's an immoral arrgument, but a lot of people agree with it so let's consider it.) So if we want to treat a terrorist real bad, we better first establish in a legal court that he actually is a terrorist. If we do immoral things to people because we say they're terrorists and we don't prove it first, what does that make us?

"Hey, you used cluster bombs on a town full of civiilians! That's a warcrime!" "No it isn't, first we called them were terrorists. That makes it OK." Oh, yeah, you're right. It isn't a warcrime to indiscriminately kill civilians if they're terrorist civilians. And of course we'll take your word they were terrorists."

"Hey, you grabbed a liberal newspaper editor, an american citizen, you secretly kept him in a secret prison, you tortured him, and then you killed him. That was wrong." "No, that was right. I secretly said he was a terrorist sympathiser first, that's all it takes to make it right." "Oh, thanks. I didn't know you said the magic words first." "No problem. You weren't supposed to know. You weren't even supposed to know we had him. Now tell us how you found out. Unless you reveal all your sources you'll be a terrorist sympathiser."

See, if you can't get a terrorist to understand about morality then he's some sort of animal, not fit to stand trial. We have legal ways to deal with people like that. But it needs to be established by a court that he's that way first. You don't just take a citizen and secretly accuse him of being an amoral terrorist and do immoral things to him. That's wrong. It doesn't matter what terrorists do, that's still wrong.

If we're moral, we don't just do immoral things to other people whenever we catch them doing immoral things first. People who do that sort of thing are hardly any more moral than somebody who does immoral things first when he's never ever in his life seen an immoral thing done before. People who give up their morality just because somebody else did, are morally equivalent to terrorists.

HTH.

Posted by: J Thomas at September 29, 2006 07:26 PM | Permalink to this comment