Retired General Raps Rep. Baird’s War Stance
VANCOUVER — Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard presided over an anti-war rally Thursday night that sometimes took on the trappings of a spiritual revival.
No one shouted “amen,” but Gard’s criticisms of U.S. Rep. Brian Baird’s support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq yielded several “yeahs.” And Gard’s condemnation of the president drew a standing ovation.
Gard appeared in the Fort Vancouver High School auditorium where Baird, D-Wash., faced about 550 anti-war activists three weeks ago.
Baird encountered an audience angry that he had reversed course on his vote in 2002 to oppose authorizing the president to invade Iraq. After a fact-finding trip to Iraq and the Middle East in August, Baird supported an extended stay for troops in Iraq and praised the leadership there of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
Since then, Baird has been pummeled nationally for his stance, particularly by MoveOn.org, which rallied its members to attend Thursday’s event.
About 260 people came to hear Gard, who served as an assistant to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War. Also speaking was former U.S. Rep. Tom Andrews, a Maine Democrat who once served on the House Armed Services Committee.
“Your district, like it or not, is in the national spotlight,” said Andrews, national director of Win Without War, which co-sponsored the event with MoveOn.org. “You have a huge responsibility to pay attention to this issue.”
Gard accused the U.S. military, in the past year, of altering its manner of reporting combat statistics to skew a perception of success for the troop increase.
“Even with the surge, we simply don’t have enough troops to cover a limited number of sectors” in Baghdad, Gard said.
He cited several polls showing that Iraqis don’t want U.S. troops in their country and questioning how effective the extra troops are.
Gard wrote an open letter to Baird that appeared in full-page ads Wednesday in The Columbian in Vancouver and The Olympian, the two largest newspapers in Baird’s 3rd Congressional District.
Earlier Thursday, Baird disputed any comparison to Vietnam, which Gard drew in his published letter.
“We have a very unique situation and a very different situation,” in Iraq, Baird said. “It confuses rather than clarifies the situation.”
The differences between Vietnam and Iraq, he said, include the cultures, the history of U.S. involvement in the conflicts, and “an era of satellite television. . . . There are many, many other factors.”
Baird added that he did not hear from Gard before Thursday’s event.
“He’s not obliged to,” Baird said, “but it might have been nice.”
© 2007 Oregon Live LLC
A friendly suggestion to the Washington State Green Party:
Take him out. Run somebody against Rep. Baird.
Better yet, put up a Dimm challenger in the primaries. Don’t even let the traitor onto the ballot!
First things first!
OLYMPIA MOVEMENT FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE
OLYMPIA RESIDENTS TO CHALLENGE CONGRESSMAN BRIAN BAIRD’S SUPPORT FOR BUSH’S WAR IN IRAQ
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2007
7PM
CAPITAL HIGH SCHOOL
2707 CONGER AVE.
Contact Dr. Larry Mosqueda, 360-280-6198, lmosqueda@comcast.net or
Dr. Peter Bohmer, 360-480-3756, peterbohmer@yahoo.com
Congressman Brian Baird recently returned from a two-day trip to Iraq and he announced that he now supports the surge and that he is opposed to setting a deadline for the return of US troops. Just as he did when he met his constituents in Vancouver and Longview, he will be challenged in a civil but firm manner as he now backs a policy of continued illegal and immoral war and genocide in Iraq. He has stated that he feels we have a “moral” obligation to stay in Iraq because there may be a massacre when we leave, ignoring the continuing massacre that is US/Bush policy. According to The Lancet, Britain’s premier medical journal, over 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths have occurred since Bush began this phase of the war. Over 1,000,000 deaths occurred during the Sanctions period of the 1990s, in addition to the hundreds of thousands killed in the first gulf war. Baird now wants to continue the genocide.
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In relation to Baird’s position in an open letter from retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard said that keeping troops in Iraq is “an unacceptable risk…..”
….”We ignore this lesson not only at our nation’s peril but also in destroying the lives of many young and brave soldiers. It is unconscionable to keep them in harm’s way in Iraq when we know that their presence there is a cause celebre for recruiting insurgents and that it inflames and prolongs a civil war that only Iraqis can bring to an end.”
Gard is the former president of the National Defense University and was assistant secretary to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967, when McNamara warned President Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam was not winnable.
Seattle Post Intelligencer 9/19/07 and The Olympian 9/19/07
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Dr. Steve Niva, a professor of Middle East studies and international politics at The Evergreen State College in Olympia has written in the Tacoma News Tribune 9/7/07:
….(Baird) says that his trip to Iraq convinced him that “the situation has at long last begun to change substantially for the better,” and “our troops and the Iraqi people themselves, deserve our continued support and more time to succeed.” It would be great if that were the case, but unfortunately Baird has mistaken a snow job for the real thing.
Baird did not see the full reality of Iraq on his trip. By all accounts, the brief and tightly controlled codels (short for congressional delegations) are shown only what the Pentagon and the Bush administration want them to see, which includes Potemkin village-like displays of security progress and soldiers who plead with them not to let war have been in vain.
“Spin city” is how Rep. James Moran, D-Va., described his recent trip to Baghdad as part of a congressional delegation….”
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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted in two recent articles how someone like Baird is taken in by someone like Gen. Petraeus
Time to Take a Stand – New York Times 9/7/07
By PAUL KRUGMAN
“….Here’s what will definitely happen when Gen. David Petraeus testifies before Congress next week: he’ll assert that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq — as long as you don’t count Sunnis killed by Sunnis, Shiites killed by Shiites, Iraqis killed by car bombs and people shot in the front of the head.
Here’s what I’m afraid will happen: Democrats will look at Gen. Petraeus’s uniform and medals and fall into their usual cringe. They won’t ask hard questions out of fear that someone might accuse them of attacking the military. After the testimony, they’ll desperately try to get Republicans to agree to a resolution that politely asks President Bush to maybe, possibly, withdraw some troops, if he feels like it.
There are five things I hope Democrats in Congress will remember.
…..First, no independent assessment has concluded that violence in Iraq is down….
So how can the military be claiming otherwise? Apparently, the Pentagon has a double super secret formula that it uses to distinguish sectarian killings (bad) from other deaths (not important); according to press reports, all deaths from car bombs are excluded, and one intelligence analyst told The Washington Post that “if a bullet went through the back of the head, it’s sectarian. If it went through the front, it’s criminal.” So the number of dead is down, as long as you only count certain kinds of dead people…..
Second, Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.
I’ve written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming “tangible progress” in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt,” that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward” and that “there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security.” A year later, he declared that “there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces.”
But now two more years have passed, and the independent commission of retired military officers appointed by Congress to assess Iraqi security forces has recommended that the national police force, which is riddled with corruption and sectarian influence, be disbanded, while Iraqi military forces “will be unable to fulfill their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months.” ETC.
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September 3, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Snow Job in the Desert
By PAUL KRUGMAN
…..Until recently I assumed that the failure to find W.M.D., followed by years of false claims of progress in Iraq, would make a repeat of the snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The administration, this time relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play the Colin Powell role, has had remarkable success creating the perception that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of verifiable evidence to suggest that it is…..
Meanwhile, many news organizations have come out with misleading reports suggesting a sharp drop in U.S. casualties. The reality is that this year, as in previous years, there have been month-to-month fluctuations that tell us little: for example, July 2006 was a low-casualty month, with only 43 U.S. military fatalities, but it was also a month in which the Iraqi situation continued to deteriorate. And so far, every month of 2007 has seen more U.S. military fatalities than the same month in 2006.
What about civilian casualties? The Pentagon says they’re down, but it has neither released its numbers nor explained how they’re calculated. ….
…But, say the usual suspects, General Petraeus is a fine, upstanding officer who wouldn’t participate in a campaign of deception — apparently forgetting that they said the same thing about Mr. Powell…..
First of all, General Petraeus is now identified with the surge; if it fails, he fails. He has every incentive to find a way to keep it going, in the hope that somehow he can pull off something he can call success…..
….So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it. ETC. ETC.
We need a General revolt. Admirals, too, followed by lower ranks. It is time for people with leadership titles to actually lead in a good direction as opposed to the wrong one they keep following.
the generals will never revolt. the ranks can.
http://www.sirnosir.com
http://www.ivaw.org
Baird …… Drank the Kool Aid
‘They Live’ ….. (See The Movie)
…………. Liberal Warrior!
Baird is explicitly right, but implicitly wrong. He is explicitly right in saying that Vietnam was a very different situation from present-day Iraq. He is wrong in implying that the differences justify a prolonged US military presence in Iraq. To the contrary, the primary difference (a relatively homogeneous Vietnamese population throughout the country, versus an increasingly conflictive Iraqi population divided on religious/ethnic lines) makes abundantly clear that the continued US military occupation and dominance of Iraq will not lead to peace in the foreseeable future. The best that we can realistically look forward to, under Baird’s essentially “more of the same” US occupation of Iraq, is the possible reduction of US and Iraqi casualties to “acceptable” levels. And so long as the US military occupation continues, what casualty levels are “acceptable” will continue to be determined by the President of the United States, with no regard to the opinion of the American public, the Iraqi public or the supposedly “sovereign” government of Iraq. After we finally were driven out of Vietnam, it turned out that no “dominoes” fell and no “bloodbath” occurred (other than the subsequent one in Cambodia which our Government fomented and the Vietnamese ended) on anything like the scale that the Vietnamese people suffered under our occupation. While nobody can know the future of an Iraq which has become more factionalized and violent under US occupation, my judgment is that the withdrawal of US troops is more likely to reduce the over-all level of violence than to increase it — if not in the short term, then certainly in the longer term. In any event, the present US occupation situation is unacceptable and Baird has the burden of proving how and when continued US occupation will make a significant improvement. Clearly he (and other supporters of the US occupation) has not come close to making that case.
The question is how can a man travel only two days to Iraq, live in a tightly secured and watched citadel, have time to study a country occupied and under siege and change his mind to the cotrary of his earlier beliefs. The only way is induction through invasive methods. Probably the people in the Green Zone have access to medication that has not been released for the FDA approval yet ! They used LSD before and nobody was any the wiser for a long time.
Read the story of the 12th century Assasins. It is fascinating.
nickhart:
Sadly, you are correct. The stars were all polished by decades of group-think and conformity.
We do need another Smedley Butler, but one who will take the next step and criticize the concept of what the military really does, and that so often it is truly treason against the USA.
Tell Baird not to worry about a massacre in Iraq when we leave there won’t be anybody left in the country to massacre they either will be dead or have left to some third country.
What is Baird’s military service record?
Dr.Larry
Nice summary. Thank you.
You and others might enjoy reading this article from The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071008/kitman
posted September 20, 2007 (October 8, 2007 issue)
Olbermann Rules!
Marvin Kitman
“What the evening news shows need is less “objectivity” and more analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn’t exist and never did.”