Copyright 2002 Army Times Publishing Co.
All Rights Reserved
Navy Times

October 28, 2002 Monday

SECTION: NEWSLINES; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 602 words

HEADLINE: Constellation battle group readies to leave early; Whether it's deploying for war with Iraq remains uncertain

BYLINE: By William H. McMichael; Times staff writer, Navy

BODY:
The carrier Constellation and its battle group could deploy as soon as early November, setting the stage for possibly positioning three carrier groups to launch a mid-December strike on Iraq.

The Constellation originally was scheduled to deploy next year, according to unofficial sources.

Officials are not confirming the Constellation's deployment date and deny it's leaving early for war, but acknowledge the carrier will be "ready to deploy" when it completes its two-week joint task force exercise that began Oct. 17.

To bring the trio of carriers together, the Navy also would have to extend at least one and perhaps both of the carriers now deployed overseas. But if the Bush administration decides to launch the long-anticipated attack, the Constellation may find itself near the Middle East with the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

Those ships, along with the Nassau amphibious ready group and the 2,200-strong 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, most recently in Kosovo, could join the Belleau Wood ARG and the 11th MEU. That would provide a powerful naval and amphibious strike capability for Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command.

To pull it off, the Norfolk, Va.-based carrier George Washington, due home around Dec. 20 to meet the Navy's normal six-month deployment limit, would have to be extended on station. It would sail from the Mediterranean to join the Everett, Wash.-based Abraham Lincoln, now in the Arabian Sea but due to leave around that time to return home by Jan. 20.

The Belleau Wood, due back on the West Coast in mid-December, also would have to be extended.

Those ships would be joined by the San Diego-based Constellation, which is due to relieve the Lincoln. If it leaves in early November, the carrier could join the other warships in early December following the standard four-week Pacific/Indian Ocean transit.

The Constellation group and Carrier Air Wing Two began final pre-deployment training - the two-week joint task force exercise - off the California coast Oct. 17. The training focus, according to spokeswoman Cmdr. Jacquie Yost, is on anti-submarine warfare, maritime and leadership interception operations and strike warfare.

The carrier could be ready to deploy quickly following the training because the crew already conducted its preparation for overseas movement, Yost said. The "POM" period typically takes place the month following the JTFX.

"Once they successfully complete the JTFX and commander, 3rd Fleet, has certified them, they'll be ready to deploy," Yost said. She would not give a deployment date.

Carriers typically spend 18 months at home before beginning deployments, but the war on terrorism shaved that significantly. The Constellation, which returned from its most recent deployment in September 2001, wasn't due to deploy until February 2003.

While some speculated that the Constellation's deployment was moved up in anticipation of a strike on Iraq, Yost said that wasn't the case. The Navy is catching up with last year's requirement that two carriers be in the North Arabian Sea during the first months of Operation Enduring Freedom, which forced carriers to trim their time back home, she said.

"If the question is, are they leaving early based on an 18-month IDTC cycle, the answer is yes," she said. "But their deployment date has been set for 9 to 11 months. People should not perceive that they've received orders to report to the Gulf now, or that there's any impending action.

"Of course, once they're there, they're available to perform any taskings they receive," Yost said.

NOTES: 1 COLOR PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: June 18, 2004

Periscope Daily Defense News Capsules

December 30, 2002

SECTION: Pg. 0

IAC-ACC-NO: 95953882

LENGTH: 304 words

HEADLINE: USA - RUMSFELD SIGNS ORDER INCREASING FORCES NEAR IRAQ DEC 30/REU.

AUTHOR-ABSTRACT:
THIS IS THE FULL TEXT: COPYRIGHT 2002 United Communications Group

BODY:
REUTERS -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has authorized the movement of thousands of additional U.S. troops, two more aircraft carrier battle groups and dozens of strike fighters to the Persian Gulf in early January to prepare for a possible attack on Iraq, Reuters reports, citing U.S. officials.

The order will bring the number of U.S. personnel near Iraq to at least 100,000 troops and is seen as a clear signal that the White House is intent on ending Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, U.S. officials said.

Five wings of Air Force strike jets, heavy bombers and unmanned aerial vehicles will head to the Gulf along with thousands of Marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

The 1st and 3rd Brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne Division and the 17,500 Marines of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force have been put on notice to prepare for deployment to Kuwait. The 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division is already there.

Navy Times January 20, 2003 Monday

Copyright 2003 Army Times Publishing Co.
All Rights Reserved
Navy Times

January 20, 2003 Monday

SECTION: NEWSLINES; Pg. 12

LENGTH: 743 words

HEADLINE: Reserves on alert, DoD mum on numbers; Chief weapons inspector: Iraq is cooperating

BYLINE: By Vince Crawley; Times staff writer, Jill DiPasquale, Times Staff

BODY:
As U.S. combat units converge near the borders of Iraq, thousands of reservists say they're being alerted to mobilize for a possible war.

But Pentagon officials caution that not every alert notification results in a call-up, and not every branch of service alerts its units before mobilization.

"The flow of forces to the region continues," Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told reporters Jan. 7. "You've seen a few units depart for the gulf and can expect that deliberate force flow to continue."

At the same briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld refused to disclose the numbers of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf or U.S. Central Command region.

"We're not going to disclose from this platform individual deployments, numbers and so forth," Rumsfeld told reporters. "We're not going to talk about it."

In the 1990-91 confrontation with Iraq, the Pentagon routinely told the public how many service members were in the Persian Gulf region, although specific locations were never discussed.

The Bush administration says its tough military stance toward Iraq has forced Baghdad to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. President Bush insists his adversary, Saddam Hussein, is a dangerous tyrant bent on developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 9 that his teams had found "no smoking gun" in Iraq. Bowing to U.S. and international pressure, Iraq allowed weapons inspectors to return on Thanksgiving week after a four-year absence.

Blix told reporters in New York that Iraqi officials are cooperating with inspectors and allowing full access to suspected sites. On the other hand, Iraq's massive list of its weapons programs - thousands of pages long - has "not helped very much" to answer long-standing questions about programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, he said.

"The Iraqis could have answered them, so we are not satisfied," Blix said. He is scheduled to update the Security Council again Jan. 27, but he cautioned that this would be an interim report, not a final assessment.

On Jan. 7, the CIA released an unclassified arms-proliferation report to Congress saying Iraq has "engaged in extensive concealment efforts" for years.

"Without U.N.-mandated inspectors in Iraq, assessing the current state of Iraq's WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and missile programs is difficult," the report said.

Although Rumsfeld is mum on deployment details, other official sources, such as the Pentagon's own in-house news service, acknowledge a massive deployment to the Gulf region. These include 16,500 soldiers from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, home-based in Georgia, and 3,500 sailors and Marines with the Tarawa Amphibious Ready Group, which left San Diego on Jan. 6.

More than 4,000 Army Reserve and National Guard members were mobilized Jan. 8, following a call-up of similar scale in December. Most are providing security on Air Force bases in the United States, but other units - such as two Florida National Guard infantry battalions with 500 soldiers apiece - are heading overseas, Pentagon officials said.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress and Bush authorized the call-up of as many as 1 million reservists for up to 24 months. The call-ups peaked at nearly 90,000 early last year and gradually declined to slightly more than 50,000 in December. However, the numbers began climbing again in recent weeks and stood at 56,695 on Jan. 8.

Army Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking, a Defense Department spokesman, said not all units receive pre-deployment-alert orders, and not all alerted units end up getting mobilization orders.

For example, he said, Navy reserve units traditionally don't receive alert orders. On the other hand, an Air Force fighter unit could be alerted and deploy its aircraft into combat in a matter of days. A less mobile Army field artillery outfit might receive a one-month alert, then spend another month mobilizing and deploying.

Stoneking also said it's unclear whether a pre-war call-up would be obvious to the public. For more than a year now, units and individuals have been receiving call-up orders while others return home, and many units are on separate timetables. Some units specifically assist other units in deploying and so would be called up early. Other units, such as mortuary affairs teams, might be called up relatively late in the process.

W says: "no decision was made to go to war by July 2002...no decision was made by 2002..."

His invited author said:

Woodward said he found that the administration quietly shifted money around to pay for early preparations for war in Iraq, without the approval of Congress. He said those preparations included building landing strips and addressing other military needs in Kuwait.

The money, about $700 million, was taken in July 2002 from a budget item that had been approved for the war in Afghanistan, Woodward wrote.

"Some people are going to look at that document called the Constitution, which says that no money will be drawn from the Treasury unless appropriated by Congress," Woodward says in his CBS interview.

The Administration connected a bunch of unrelated dots to get into Iraq. Mainstream Media supplied the crayons. So let's try our own:

1. Bush/Blair agree to war mid-year 2002
2. They have no concrete evidence. Saddam hasn't attacked neighbors, no WMD proof. (Bush even acknowledges evidence is weak and turns to he of Sept. 11 failure Tenet for sound "slam dunk" evidence.
3. They fix evidence around policy - ignore CIA memos on faulty African uranium and mobile bio labs, forget that Condi and Powell in 2001 said Saddam was kept in his box
4. Drop nuclear threat hints, "smoking gun in form of a mushroom cloud, imminent threat, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
5. shift $700 million and 10,000 special ops from Afghanistan to Iraq months before getting Congress approval for war (But don't use it to ensure our troops are equipped with enough armor or armored vehicles - their parents can supply that)
6. Ramp up bombings of Iraq in summer of 2002 hoping to coax Saddam into military fight.
7. Bush lies about going to UN for second Security Council vote.
8. Rely heavily on Chalabi. Don't feel bad Bush Administration, the NYT used the same source
9. pull UN inspectors out of Iraq before they can finish job so you can still scare Americans into thinking Saddam was a threat to US. If they finished, there would be no justification, right?
10. MOST IMPORTANT – Ignore Condi and Powell Jan. 2001 assessments of Iraq as threat. We know now they were lying in 2002/03. Clinton and the UN kept Saddam WMD free.

My theory now is that Americans, including the mainstream media, have adopted the Bush Administration's shame. Admitting you're wrong now would be a reflection on your intelligence. Better to ignore all the evidence that THEY (I've was against invasion from day 1) were duped.

Oh yeah, repeatedly say we liberated those people. Yeah, as many as 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been liberated from life.
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In the March 31, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, with the invasion just under way, Richard N. Haass, then the State Department's director of policy planning, said that in early July 2002 he asked Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, whether it made sense to put Iraq at the center of the agenda, with a global campaign against terrorism already under way. "And she said, essentially, that that decision's been made, don't waste your breath," he said then.

Tony Blair privately promised George Bush he would not budge in his support for "regime change" in Iraq more than a year before the invasion.

The Prime Minister was also told by an adviser he would have to "wrongfoot" Saddam Hussein into providing an excuse to go to war, and that Mr Bush had no answer to the question of "what happens the morning after".

An extraordinary cache of leaked documents this weekend forced Mr Blair to deny that the planning for post-invasion Iraq had been inadequate. Amid a deteriorating security situation in the country, Mr Blair blamed terrorists for trying to stop the creation of a stable and democratic Iraq. But the leak also lays bare the gulf between what Mr Blair and his aides said in public about Iraq and their private discussions with the White House.

On the eve of Mr Blair's visit to Mr Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, in March 2002, for example, Mr Blair's official spokesman dismissed suggestions that he was going for a "council of war". The leaks show, however, that Sir David Manning, his foreign policy adviser, had already assured Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush's National Security Adviser, that Mr Blair was fully signed up to toppling Saddam.

In a memo to the Prime Minister dated 14 March 2002, Sir David says he told Ms Rice "you would not budge in your support for regime change". Four days later, Downing Street received a despatch from the then British ambassador to the US, Sir Christopher Meyer, detailing how he repeated the commitment to Paul Wolfowitz, the US Deputy Defence Secretary. The ambassador added that Mr Blair would need a "cover" for any military action. "I then went through the need to wrongfoot Saddam on the inspectors and the UN Security Council resolutions."

Taken with the Joint Intelligence Committee's warning at the same time that intelligence on Iraqi WMD was "sporadic and patchy", the account appears to prove the charge that Mr Blair's use of the issue was purely tactical.

The question of Iraqi WMD comes back sharply into focus next week with the final report of the Iraq Survey Group. An early draft of the report said to be circulating in Washington concludes that the regime was working on only small amounts of biological and chemical agents probably for use in assassinations.

Equally embarrassing are leaked documents showing that Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, repeatedly warned Mr Blair that the US was failing to answer the "big questions" about what would happen after Saddam was overthrown.

On 25 March 2002, in a private note to the Prime Minister, Mr Straw detailed the difficulties he faced in winning over his own MPs and the public. "What will this action achieve?" he asked. "There seems a larger hole in this than anything." The US, he said, had failed to answer the question of how "there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better".

A recent briefing paper marked "Secret UK eyes only", and also leaked this weekend, warned that Iraq could "revert to type", with "coup succeeding coup" if Saddam was replaced with another Sunni "strongman".

Mr Blair's political opponents claim he acted in bad faith. Calling the documents "the crown jewels", Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said they were "devastating". He said regime change was illegal, even though there were brutal dictators in the world.

Mr Blair said yesterday that Mr Straw's minute did not warn of chaos that would ensue in Iraq. "What it warned of was this: it's very important that we don't replace one dictator, Saddam Hussein, with another. I totally agree with that."

Independent on Sunday (London), September 19, 2004,

Its from: TITLE: Review Essay Symposium: Philip Allott's Eunomia and The Health of Nations Thinking Another World: 'This Cannot Be How the World Was Meant to Be'An event to mark the retirement of Professor Philip Allott, Professor of International Public Law, University of Cambridge, 28-29 May 2004

I try (and some people here may resist this very strongly) to summarise idealism in just a few pages, under the rubric 'The Great Tradition of Philosophy'. The main point, the great secret of it all, is 'self perfecting'. All our societies, because of the Greeks, have gone into this mode of frenzied progress. Every day everything is different, everything has to be improved-the health service, transport, everything constantly.

But that is not the view that most societies took for most of human history. For most of the history of the world most people have not wanted to change everything. People said to Alexander the Great: 'Why do you want to take over the world? You're terribly rich, why do you want everything? Do you want everything? Do you want to own all the snows and mountains? It is mad'. And that was said to Alexander the Great, not to George W. Bush.

Then, as noted in the final part of the paper, what is actually happening by way of the transformation of international society is the globalising of the particular social form called democracy-capitalism. Though democracy-capitalism produces the goods, nevertheless it contains a very odd thing. Susan Marks has written that democracy-capitalism, because of its theory, which is a naturalistic theory of the general will in the market, is a demoralising theory. It is the idea that decisions are taken by systems and values are processed through systems. So democracy-capitalism has, after a fashion, co-opted philosophy. You cannot transcend it with anything because it produces the goods and it processes ideas. The general will in the market processes ideas: you do not need anything else. It is a difficult matter to transcend democracycapitalism through philosophy, but the trouble with democracy-capitalism is that, in classical Greek terms, it is a proposition about the good life. Obviously it produces a better life for many people, but also it produces a bad life. We all know that our societies are full of horrors; demoralisation, degeneration of the human spirit, vulgarity and filth and all the rest of it-selfishness and unhappiness and misery, all within the good life of democracy-capitalism. While there have been hundreds of critiques of democracy-capitalism, I do not recall anyone having said that democracy-capitalism produces as much of the bad life as it produces of the good life. But I believe that to be true-what is being globalised, all over the world, is the offer of this extraordinary poisoned chalice.

EJIL 2005.16(255)
Susan Marks: On the problem of political culture or professionalisation, i.e., separating the person from the role, one of the best things I have read recently is an article by the father of the young man who got beheaded not long ago in Iraq. He starts off by saying: 'People often ask me why I blame George Bush rather than only the men who did it'. He then goes on to describe how he believes that the one who wielded the knife would have felt his son's breath on his hand and in that moment he-the killer-would not have liked what he was doing; he would not have recognised himself in what he was doing, just for that fleeting moment. By contrast, the father says, George Bush does not have that experience; policy-makers do not have that experience; they are not internally conflicted in that way. He ends by saying: 'More than my son's killers, I blame those who make the policies that cause death'.

EJIL 2005.16(255)

this forum topic and linking the articles that are referred to.
It's nice to have another OC Democrat in the group. There are a few of us here, now.

The articles you cite show what we have known all along. The Invasion of Iraq was planned well ahead of time, long before the Bush Administration admitted to this plan. The reasons for this action were both real, desire for regime change and fabricated, as in the WMD that were never found.
Your last post shows an unfortunate reality that occurs not only in politics, but also the business and academic worlds. I am more familiar with academia, so I will parallel that field.
Administrators, the very people who set policies and rules in our schools are often the ones who are the farthest removed from the realities of the classroom. To my surprise I have found out that many administrators, yes, even principals today, have had very little if any classroom instruction experience. I always believed that was a prerequisite to an adminstrative position in education. My question is, how can one understand a situation well enough to be qualified to set rules and policies affecting it, if they have had little or no experience in the field, themselves? I'm referring to classroom teaching. The " Ivory Tower" CEOs and many policy makers in business parallel this in their field.How many of them actually worked in entry level positions in their companies? It's frustrating and infuriating, as the people most qualified to speak on policy are often the ones least able to do so.

So it is also in politics, where the hypocrisy is the perhaps the most heinous.
We have has many Presidents of the US serve in the military but often the policy is set by men who are far removed from the battlefield and the reality of that immediate danger.

Thank you for posting this, and again, Welcome!