Progress Illinois

While the evening news is being dominated by the AIG bonus controversy tonight, it's important to remember that today marked the six-year anniversary of the Iraq war, a conflict that has claimed over 4,250 American lives -- including 154 from Illinois -- and left over 31,000 wounded.

Talking Points Memo compiled a timeline of images starting with the initial invasion in 2003 while Time provided a diary from one photojournalist who has been shooting in the country since the war began.  Together, the galleries make for quite a journey (one that will hopefully end soon).

Speaking of which, the Chicago chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War is holding an "End The War" benefit tomorrow night with musical guests Mucca Pazza.  You can find more details here.

The war in Iraq has internally and externally displaced an estimated 5 million people, the largest relocation in the Middle East since 1948. It's both a massive humanitarian and political problem and it's received scant attention in the United States -- ironic, as it was our unilateral military invasion that caused the problem in the first place. This is partly intentional; until very recently, the Bush administration’s response to the displacement crisis has been to ignore it at all costs. Between the start of the war and 2007, the U.S. resettled a mere 466 refugees into the United States. I surmised why more action wasn't taken in an In These Times piece earlier this year:

Admitting that the embattled nation is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis disrupts the narrative that Iraq is stable and the war is winnable. Allowing people from the Arab world to emigrate freely could also brand the GOP as soft on terrorism, a political liability among the party’s conservative base, especially in an election year.

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In an episode that filmed last week and aired yesterday morning, GOP Rep. Mark Kirk and Democratic challenger Dan Seals appeared separately on NBC 5's City Desk.  Host Carol Marin immediately asked Kirk why he refused to directly debate Seals on the program.  Kirk first tried to deflect the question, then stated, "Actually it would have been fine with me."  Watch it:

But while Kirk suggested it somehow wasn't his decision, the Seals campaign made clear yesterday that they were more than willing to debate the GOP incumbent on NBC 5's airwaves. 

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Here's a ringing endorsement for the ongoing war in Iraq. Despite describing itself as the "largest Iraq and Afghanistan veterans organization in America," Vets For Freedom (VFF) had some trouble scaring up like-minded folks to rally at the vice presidential candidates debate in St. Louis tomorrow night. So they decided to offer some local frat boys money to pose as war supporters.

The Huffington Post reports:

In an email obtained by the Huffington Post, Vets for Freedom field staffer Laura Meyer offered a fraternity at St. Louis University a "sizable donation" -- plus free lunch -- if it could use their pledges to demonstrate outside the VP debate.

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According to John McCain, the decision to increase troop levels in Iraq has been an unmitigated success, responsible for all that is wonderful about life there today. Even though President Bush didn't deploy additional forces until 2007, McCain's definition of the "surge" -- which now apparently encompasses our entire counterinsurgency strategy -- was already working by 2006, easing violence in Iraq's Anbar Province. How can anyone, including Barack Obama, claim this isn't an obvious testament to McCain's prescience and foreign policy superiority?

Steve Chapman gives a nice rebuttal to this nonsense in today's Tribune, explaining that McCain's argument only holds up if one defines "success" by a very narrow metric -- namely, a decrease to pre-surge levels of Iraqi and American deaths:

The troop escalation has not been the complete failure Obama suggested it would be, but it has fallen far short of the triumph claimed by Republicans. The level of violence, though down from the very worst months of the war, remains at levels comparable with 2005, which were considered awful at the time.

Iraqi civilians died at a higher rate in the first four months of this year than in the same period of 2005. The number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces is about the same. Here is McCain's definition of success: returning to a pace of bloodshed that was once regarded as intolerable.

What's more, such reductions in violence can't be attributed solely to the increase in troops. One has to also factor in the decision of Sunni militias to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and other mixed neighborhoods, and Muqtada al-Sadr's cease fire. All contributed to the current situation, and lumping them together under the "surge" label is disingenuous to say the least.

And what about political reconciliation, one of the primary goals of the troop increase? Former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi says little has been accomplished.

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It's great that the Tribune's Swamp blog is publicizing John McCain's latest lie about Iraq, in which he falsely credits America's troop surge for the "awakening" of Sunnis in Anbar province. As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann noted last night, the Anbar Awakening in fact began long before the troop increase.

But rather than directly address McCain's revision of history, the Tribune's Mark Silva decided instead to report on MSNBC's segment about McCain's lie. Indeed, Silva refers to Olbermann's statement that McCain got "the basic timeline and history of the surge entirely wrong'' as an "assertion."  And check out the headline:

Why the quotation marks? This isn't a he-said/she-said debate. McCain is wrong -- plain and simple -- and the Tribune should say so in its own words.

Below are a few links laying out why McCain's claim is flat false.

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Over the weekend, Chicago Public Radio's Chip Mitchell caught up with Jason, a 33-year-old former Marine from Wisconsin who served in Iraq. During the past four years, the veteran has lived on the streets in and around Chicago's Greektown, a life he thought unimaginable when he signed up to fight. After his discharge, he wasn’t mentally prepared to work and because his parents were gone and his marriage had fallen apart, he had no safety net:

JASON: I’m on food stamps, man. I have to live out of soup kitchens. I have to panhandle. I have to ask people for leftovers to eat.

Homelessness among veterans is not a new phenomenon. According to Mitchell's report, the VA estimates that on any given night 154,000 U.S. veterans lack shelter, most of whom served in Vietnam. And while a New York Times article from November 2007 found that just over 400 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have turned up homeless, that number will undoubtedly grow as more soldiers return from the battlefield:

Experts who work with veterans say it often takes several years after leaving military service for veterans’ accumulating problems to push them into the streets. But some aid workers say the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans appear to be turning up sooner than the Vietnam veterans did.

“We’re beginning to see, across the country, the first trickle of this generation of warriors in homeless shelters,” said Phil Landis, chairman of Veterans Village of San Diego, a residence and counseling center. “But we anticipate that it’s going to be a tsunami.”

So how is possible that someone who risked their live to serve their country could simply fall through the cracks?

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After his grandfather and uncle were arrested and detained by officials from Saddam Hussein's Baath Party in the early 1970s, Robert DeKelaita and his family decided it was time to flee Iraq. Now as an immigration lawyer who focuses on securing political asylum for displaced Iraqis, Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty Eight reports on how the Skokie-based Assyrian is helping other refugees find the stability that his family provided him.

DeKelaita speaks at length of the struggle Christian minority communities face in Iraq, a sad reality I wrote about in an In These Times feature on the Iraqi refugee crisis:

While people of all ethnic sects have been affected, Chaldean Catholics — like the Rabbans — have borne a disproportionate burden. Though Chaldeans make up only 3 percent of Iraq’s population, conservative estimates suggest that 25 percent have fled to Syria or relocated to northern Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites have bombed Chaldean-owned businesses and Christian churches in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul. And in one of the war’s most high-profile kidnappings, Chaldean archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was abducted on Feb. 29 and his body found two weeks later, half buried in a shallow grave in Mosul.

“Communities that are not protected by larger groups that have militias, like Christian communities, have been especially hit hard,” says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, whose work examines U.S. national security policy in the Middle East.

DeKelaita also speaks about his desire to leave the "gray of Chicago" and return to his homeland. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen any time in the near future. A Government Accountability Office report released today says that despite security gains in the region, "the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines."

Much like columnist Dennis Byrne, the Tribune editorial board is displeased that the recent security gains in Iraq are not being covered by the national press:

There are tremendously encouraging signs, though, that Iraq has come through the worst. The breathtaking violence that rocked the country after the U.S.-led invasion is ebbing. A government once derided as incapable of securing Iraq has an increasingly effective military. It enjoys more cooperation from the different ethnic and religious groups. Hotbeds of Sunni and Al Qaeda resistance have been defanged—and now rely on Iraqi forces to keep a relative peace. This nation's decisions about its commitment in Iraq need to acknowledge these specific realities:

Although the Tribune treated yesterday's massive bombing in Baghdad as a blip on the radar, the security gains it cites are indisputable and valuable. But while violence is down, the root causes of the war are still unresolved. As the AP notes in an article published Monday, the power struggle between Sunnis and Shiites remains fierce, political progress has lagged, and U.S. troops have suppressed violence in Baghdad in large part because rival communities are separated by a series of large blast walls. "Fear and distrust" of fellow countrymen and American forces still lurks in every quarter.

Moreover, the relative calm could break at any moment. While the Iraqi military has allowed the government to gain confidence, that support will be undermined if it doesn't deliver essential services and jobs to its citizenry and rebuild its broken infrastructure -- areas in which many of the militias have been far more effective. This will be tough to do as corruption and bureaucratic chaos have swallowed up most of the nation's windfall oil profits.

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Today's Tribune column from Dennis Byrne features another doozy of a thesis: the Iraq war will soon end in an American "victory":

[Barack Obama], his fans and much of the media haven't noticed in the heat of the presidential campaign, but the war is winding down, if not nearing its end. Fewer military and civilians killed or wounded; fewer insurgent attacks; more order and security, especially in such troubled areas as Basra and Sadr City; more reconciliation; improved quality of life, and—not the least—greater liberties.

Byrne is correct to say that violence in Iraq is down at the moment among both American troops and Iraqi civilians, an undeniably positive development. But as General David Petraeus himself said just a few short months ago, "no one" in the U.S. and Iraqi governments "feels that there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," (the stated goal of the surge) or in the provision of basic public services. And many believe Iraq's relative peace could fracture at any moment:

“Compare the situation now to six months or a year ago, and it is much better now,” said Nabil Younis, a political scientist at Baghdad University. “But most people feel the progress is not real progress. They expect something to happen any day, any hour, any minute … and everything will collapse.”

The thrust of Byrne's latest piece is far from surprising. A review of his Tribune columns over the last five years reveals that he has consistently pointed to temporary developments -- from marginal gains in security to various elections -- as evidence that the United States is making tangible progress in Iraq. Meanwhile, during the same time period, an increasing number of soldiers and civilians have died and the country has slipped further into chaos.

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