Truth - Al Franken [115]
A friend of Chalabi’s described the marriage of convenience thus: “Ahmed has brains but no guns. The Sadris have the guns but not the brains.”
In Iraq’s January 2005 elections, with the backing of al-Sadr, Chalabi did well enough to claim a powerful position as a deputy prime minister. From there, he resumed his long-standing project of enriching and empowering the family of Ahmed Chalabi. One nephew was given the finance ministry. Another is in charge of the prosecution of Saddam Hussein. For himself, he kept the oil ministry, which is considered the “it” ministry by Iraqis in the know.
Chalabi’s current projects include lobbying for the release from prison of hundreds of violent followers of al-Sadr, and attempting to fire the judge who issued the warrant for al-Sadr’s arrest. Yes, things are looking up for Ahmed Chalabi. Proof that in Iraq you can’t keep a good man down. Or, for that matter, a very bad one.
If Paul Wolfowitz didn’t care enough about U.S. troops to know how many had died in his war, you can just imagine how little he cared about the number of dead Iraqis.
No one knows how many civilians have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. The fuzziness of the estimates (from 25,000 to over 100,000) gives you some idea of the priority that the administration has given to the protection of Iraqi lives. If you want to win hearts and minds, the first thing you should do is protect people’s chests and heads.
In this area, as in so many others, the Pentagon’s political leadership has let down our soldiers. Some civilian casualties are inevitable. But without a system for keeping track of them, much less compensating their families or, better yet, systematically trying to minimize casualties, it fell to individual soldiers to try to do what they could. There has been imaginative and effective work done by soldiers and Marines acting on their own initiative. So often in Iraq, success on the ground has been the work of a single soldier or group of soldiers, not executing a grand plan—there are none of those—but deciding independently to rebuild a school, mediate a feud, or distribute food and medicine.
Civilian casualties, as much as anything else, fuel the insurgency. The administration’s approach has been to ignore them. It’s another example of the administration pretending a problem doesn’t exist, rather than solving it. In the fall of 2004, when a Johns Hopkins study estimated that 100,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, the White House spokesman offered up this bland rehash of administration boilerplate:
REPORTER: The administration has said in the past that it doesn’t do body counts, but do you consider one hundred thousand to be in the ballpark of the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the war?
MCCLELLAN: I don’t know of any specific estimates on the civilians. I know that the United States military goes out of its way to minimize the loss of Iraqi civilian life. And what we’re working to achieve in Iraq is an important cause that will make America more secure.
REPORTER: Just to follow up: Does the President have an estimate before him on the number of Iraqis killed?
MCCLELLAN: I’m not aware of any precise estimate or estimate of that nature.
It’s disgusting to be indifferent to human suffering, but to do such a lousy job of pretending that you care is just stupid. When the American military did solve Iraq’s chronic parking problem once and for all, not by turning Najaf into a parking lot, as Rush Limbaugh had suggested, but by blasting Fallujah into