The American Conservative

Pat Lang explores some of the ramifications of Bush’s last –it might seem his only– good deed:  rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran’s nuclear reactor.  There’s been very  little about this in the mainstream press– though it’s the kind of major incident that history often  turns on.  Lang’s key point: we have a defense treaty with Iraq which allows and obligates us to defend Iraqi airspace. Would we defend it against Israeli overflights?

Upon news their company is being booted out of Baghdad by Iraqi officials who have denied the private security company an operating license there, Blackwater Worldwide executives said the North Carolina-based contractor is well on its way to making $1 billion in annual revenues over the next year or two anyway. And while their guards — and aircraft — are prepared to be out of that country within 72 hours if forced to, no one has formally asked them to leave, including the U.S State Department, which is dependent on the approximately 1,000 private security men there to keep its diplomats safe.

By refusing to court this operation any longer, Iraqi officials are demonstrating that they have some standards. And pride. And an interest in showing the people they are not going to allow those accused of gunning down and blowing up its innocent citizens in the public square, in broad daylight, to remain there to profit from the foreign invasion-turned-occupation-turned-the-ginormous diplomatic encampment that is now the US Embassy in the center of Baghdad any longer.

Five Blackwater security guards have pled not guilty in federal court here in the US on charges they killed 17 unarmed Iraqis in Nisoor Square in Baghdad in 2007. The guards say they have proof in radio recordings that they were being fired upon.

No matter the outcome of the trial, Blackwater guards have been accused of numerous other violent acts against Iraqis over the course of the war, including murder. Their reputation speaks as much to the ugliness of for-profit war as it does about the militarization of our own country, which has greatly fostered the likes of Blackwater and similar contractors throughout the years.

As the AP reported just this evening:

The private security firm, which trained some 25,000 civilians, law enforcement and military personnel last year, continues to expand even as its future in Iraq becomes less promising. Blackwater has a fleet of 76 aircraft, and almost all of them are deployed in hot spots in places like Afghanistan and West Africa.

On Thursday, three international teams were at the company’s compound in North Carolina going through classes: Authorities from Yemen flipped through four-inch binders as they learned how to identify the components of an explosive by looking at X-rays. A group from the country of Georgia was practicing SWAT techniques in a makeshift building, taking instructions through a translator from a Blackwater official.

A Canadian team was also on site, along with a number of other law enforcement, Coast Guard and civilians who kicked up burning rubber on a driving track and rattled off rounds on shooting ranges. Members of the Army and Navy were practicing their driving skills in Blackwater’s mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles.

“When you first hear Blackwater, you automatically, instantly think about the overseas stuff,” said Jim Sierawski, Blackwater’s vice president for training. “That overshadows the training center. Here, we’ve been on a steady incline every year.”

Be assured that even in the deepest, bleakest times of recession, the militarization of this country will go on unimpeded. Iraq can now do what it likes — we’re clearly glad to have ‘em.

The Washington Post declares on its New Year’s front page that the U.S government has turned into a pumpkin in Baghdad’s fortified “Green Zone.” In “As Clock Strikes 12, U.S. Hands Iraq Control of Green Zone,” the paper splashes a lot of color around about “the walls of the majestic Republican Palace” being “stripped bare,” the vaults that once cradled American cash and documents “gone” and the “salsa night” dances and pool parties just a haunting echo of the zone’s west-imbued past.

The handover is a sign of the shrinking footprint and influence of the United States in a country where it has lost thousands of lives and spent billions of dollars. For many Iraqis, the handover represents a significant step forward in their gradual reassertion of dominion over their own affairs.

“On January 1, we are going to control this,” Adnan Karim, 22, an Iraqi soldier manning a checkpoint at one of the entrances to the Green Zone, said, beaming. “The U.S. will be here just as observers. It’s a matter of pride.”

That would — as WaPo puts it — be a “significant step forward,” if that were true. But as the story tells in the jump, it is the Americans who will be maintaining a significant influence in the Zone. To be sure, “Iraqi flags have sprung up along the Green Zone’s mazelike entry points,” but it is Red, White and Blue that will be manning those security checkpoints, according to the report:

“[Americans] will remain in charge of issuing badges that grant varying levels of access into the area. They said they will not immediately dismantle a vast security apparatus that includes hundreds of Peruvian and Ugandan guards, body-scanning machines, bomb-sniffing dogs and surveillance cameras.

and

The long-term plan, which could change if security deteriorates, is to maintain a handful of heavily secured American compounds but gradually open other areas to traffic.

Curiously, the report barely mentions the Vatican-sized U.S Embassy compound that is already thriving inside the walls: “U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and his staff recently finished moving into a newly built embassy compound, made up of pale-orange buildings with small, bulletproof windows. The compound is expected to cost at least $736 million, and its construction was marred by delays and budget overruns.”

But the high price tag is not only the result of gross cost overruns — as in all construction projects here, and especially in post-war Iraq — but because the the embassy is so huge and the scope of it grew significantly over the course of its construction. In fact, with its 27 buildings on 104-acres of land in the Iraq’s capital city, it is a most significant footprint, and not in the market for shrinking. As i wrote in June ’07 when Secretary of State Rice was asking for more money for the near-finished project:

Due for completion in September, the $592 million campus is surrounded by concrete blast walls and features green grass gardens, palm-lined avenues and volleyball and basketball courts. Available to embassy employees are a PX, commissary, cinema, retail and shopping areas, restaurants, schools, a fire station, power and water treatment plants as well as telecommunications and wastewater treatment facilities.

The new 104-acre embassy complex has been called a “city within a city” in the heart of Baghdad, resting in the area now referred to as the fortified Green Zone. As designed now, the 619 blast-proof apartments may not be enough to accommodate some of the estimated 4,000 regular employees, contractors and local Iraqis working for the embassy, plus congressional and other diplomatic visitors who visit the capital on a regular basis.

The media, as usual, is taking the Bush Administration’s lead on the Iraq issue, that it is close to becoming a “non-story,” despite the fact that practically the same number of U.S forces were in Iraq as last New Year’s Day, and the ink is still drying on this so-called “status of forces agreement” of which varying interpretations of our commitment to leave that country and when have been floating around all month. Even this story about the Green Zone leaves the true state of things ambiguous. Who really is in charge?

But don’t expect much more in ’09 — The New York Times reported only Sunday that the three network news organizations have stopped putting full-time correspondents into Iraq and are instead moving on to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Just where the new administration wants to be. The war, it would seem, has been declared “over.” Or in the spirit of those insipid New Year lists, Afghanistan: In/Iraq: Out. But in the case of the Green Zone, the Americans, despite the media’s declarations, are not “out,” not yet.

Among other incredulous assertions made by Rich Lowry on NBC’s Meet the Press today — which include that it was really the fault of the western liberal that post-invasion Iraq was such a catastrophic mess — he attempts to bolster the growing meme that as a wartime president, a passionate wartime president, one of George Bush’s greatest achievements was to prevent another attack on American soil. There has been much made over this in the post-election political climate. In fact, it is a favorite trope utilized by Veep Dick Cheney, who like the ghost of Jacob Marley, is constantly rattling around this claim as the unforgiving chains of near-history threaten to bind him forever — and he knows it.

To be sure, barring the still-unsolved anthrax incidents post-9/11, there hasn’t been another terrorist attack on American soil. What does that mean? It means that the whole of local, state and federal power has been marshaled on an unprecedented level to create a domestic security infrastructure that has, until this moment, deterred foreign attacks. In plain terms, we have made it undesirable, if not impossible, for terrorism to occur today on the scale of September 11, 2001. As taxpayers, we have spent billions of dollars, and given up many of our civil liberties. We have surrendered to humiliating security procedures and no doubt will have to endure more as the government invents new procedures to make security more convenient for them, while more invasive for us. It will not end, and the whole of this new domestic “homeland” security will have to be maintained, whatever the cost, well beyond the outgoing administration.

Why? Google up today’s news and it tells you everything. The headlines for December 28, 2008:

“Israel tanks mass near Gaza as jets pound Hamas”

“US: 14 students die in bombing at Afghan school”

“Tensions Rise as Pakistan Moves to Redeploy Troops”

“Car Bombs Kills at Least 30 in Pakistan”

“Car Bomb Kills 2, Wounds 4 in Iraq”

ADD: “Baghdad Car Bombing Kills at Least 22, Injures More Than 50″

“Violent protests at Israeli Embassy in London”

“Across the Middle East, Thousands Protest Israeli Assaults”

Conditions on the world stage are more fragile, more unpredictable, more out of our control than after the 9/11 attacks that precipitated the siege mentality here at home and two U.S military invasions abroad. The Bush Administration has failed in its promise to help make the world a safer place, a freer place for oppressed individuals and those threatened by political violence. While Rich Lowry brags on Bush’s behalf that the “surge” in Iraq was a “highly courageous act,” successfully thwarting al Qaeda, he conveniently ignores that al Qaeda never existed in Iraq until the U.S invaded, and is now thriving through bastardized groups in the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa.

But that is beside the point — which is our safety at home came at a very high cost. A cost that will turn into endless annual payments until conditions abroad change. Bush not only failed to achieve the required change, he made it worse. We may have prevented more deaths on “American soil,” but as citizens of the world, we have taken many hits since 9/11. As leaders of “the free world,” the Bush Administration has done little to encourage human rights among the dictators who continue to be counted as allies, and the number of people who want to ultimately do us harm has not diminished.

So, we continue to “go shopping,” as a country under siege. Today’s headlines indicate nothing has changed. The worst we can do now is ignore the aftershocks of the Bush Administration’s mistakes and allow its fading courtier class, including the likes of Rich Lowry, to rewrite history — or worse, continuously misrepresent our current crises — for their own partisan benefit.

The five Blackwater security guards accused of the gruesome murder of 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in September 2007 — including a mother and infant whose bodies were reportedly fused together in the burning hull of their car — will finally face justice. They turned themselves in this morning to authorities in Utah. Only one of the guards lives in Utah, but word is their lawyers felt the men would get a more sympathetic jury there. A fight over venue with federal prosecutors is expected.

[UPDATE : A federal judge has since ruled that the guards cannot be tried in friendly Utah, rather the case will be heard in Washington D.C]

In Iraq, they are hailing an end to the arrogant swagger of what became — unfairly or not — the prototypical American private security man. Not only are these the first serious federal charges to be brought against American contractors (two preliminary investigations of the incident by the FBI and military have reportedly found the Blackwater guards were not fired upon like they claim, that in fact, the civilians were unarmed), but under the new Status of Forces Agreement, such contractors will no longer have the so-called “immunity” they’ve enjoyed since the war began. Hired mostly now by State Department diplomats who need the physical cover to get from place to place, private security services like Blackwater have largely become a symbol for our debased reputation among the Iraqi people.

In an interview I conducted in late 2007 for “Hired Guns,” a TAC report on the subject of private security contractors in Iraq, I talked to U.S servicemen on and off the record about how the cowboy antics of the private goons — everything from barreling through town in their Humvees without a care for who was in the way, to firing indiscriminately on civilian cars in traffic — put everyone at risk, even U.S military who oftentimes found themselves the brunt of Iraqi anger and humiliation.

“They (private security)don’t have to explain themselves. We’ve all witnessed them shooting up cars, and then they just drive off in their SUVs, wearing their ballcaps, sunglasses, and full beards. If we shot up a car, we couldn’t leave the scene for two days,” (Ret.) Marine Sgt. Nick Benas, who served in Iraq from July 2004 to March 2005, told me at the time.

“I feel that many of the contractors here have no respect for the locals and are doing a great deal of harm to our reputation,” an Army lieutenant stationed in Afghanistan e-mailed to me.

For Iraqis thousands of miles away, the prosecution of the Blackwater Five signifies a justice they were unsure our government was even capable of. To us, it is one of many lessons, and perhaps a glimmer of hope too, that our government isn’t all about covering its behind when push comes to shove, and when unchecked power turns to murder.

Another from the file of “Why Army Recruitment Is The Suckiest Job On Earth,” or “How Defense Contractors Are The Only Ones Making Money Today” comes this latest charge against Kellogg, Brown and Root, the former subsidiary of Halliburton, reaper of billions in the War on Terror.

Sixteen Indiana National Guard soldiers have sued the Houston-based defense contractor KBR, saying the company knowingly allowed them to be exposed to a toxic chemical in Iraq in 2003.

The unit is based in Tell City, Indiana. The soldiers were providing security for KBR during repairs of a water treatment plant in southern Iraq shortly after the US invasion. The suit claims the site was contaminated for six months by hexavalent chromium, “one of the most potent carcinogens” known to man. It alleges that KBR knew the plant was contaminated but concealed the danger from civilian workers and soldiers.

Civilian contractors working for KBR testified at a congressional hearing in June that they experienced symptoms of chromium exposure. The lawsuit says, “The Tell City Guardsmen were repeatedly told that there was no danger on site, even after KBR managers knew that blood testing of American civilians exposed onsite confirmed elevated chromium levels.”

The toxic chemical “can cause severe damage to the liver and kidneys, depress the immune system” and is known to cause birth defects and cancer, particularly lung cancer, the lawsuit said. The cancer can take years to develop. Some of the soldiers who served at the site now have respiratory system tumors. The suit seeks reimbursement for medical costs, monitoring for cancer and other health problems and unspecified monetary damages.

Michael Doyle, the lawyer for the soldiers, describing the alleged contamination on Democracy Now! yesterday:

This stuff—and folks may have heard about hexavalent chromium in the Erin Brockovich, where they had relatively small amounts, very serious consequences. There were bags of this stuff. And at least some of the testing showed 1.9 percent of the soil was actually sodium dichromate around this site. And despite being paid well to do a site assessment; to do this project; to make sure that the folks out there, the civilians and the soldiers, were protected; they basically just kept ignoring it.

National Guardsman Jody Aistrop described their symptoms:

The main one was the bloody nose. Your eyes would burn. You would get a rash, like on your arms or your legs. And actually, my rash just cleared up like three months ago. And it turned into lesions once I got home.

KBR says it plans to “vigorously defend” against the lawsuit, denying the “the assertion that KBR harmed troops and was responsible for an unsafe condition.”

Presented humbly in the World section of The Washington Post today, is the story of two American officers, a military doctor and a physician assistant, who have spent the last year — on their own time — scrounging about for resources to send ailing Iraqi children overseas for critical medical care still unavailable to them at home. I am no longer quick to call such stories “propaganda,” because after the total failure of our government to make good on its promises to the Iraqi people, stories like these merely highlight the compassion and humility of the individual servicemen, while further hardening the image of the impenetrable, immovable institution (which by the way has enough resources to care for 20 times the number of children if it felt it expedient to do so).

But Capt. John Knight, 36, and Capt. Jonathan Heavey, 33, have sent 12 children overseas, funded with $17,000 of their own money and contributions from family and friends. A year ago they had visited a hospital where malnourished and neglected children were being cared for — the young Iraqis had been rescued by a U.S Army civil affairs unit from an orphanage, “lying naked on the floor, surrounded by exrament.” Some had cholera. The two officers had decided to form a non-profit foundation and a website, Hope.MD, and were given permission to launch the effort “as long as they didn’t identify themselves as military officers.”

Their first “cases” included sending an 11-year-old boy, a victim of an insurgent attack, to a burn unit in the States and several legally blind children for treatment in Turkey free of charge — thanks to an American-trained ophthalmologist volunteering her time there. “Dozens” more cases are “in the pipeline.”

Statistics on the number of Iraqi doctors, medical specialists and students who have fled the country since 2003 because of the violence is staggering. One estimate found that 60 to 70 percent of Iraq’s 2,327 “registered medical specialists” took off early on. According to one figure, 176 doctors were targeted and killed during the war. Some 50 percent of medical students have left. Reports indicate that one-third of the country’s 40,000 medical doctors were forced to flee. Though the Maliki government has put on a show of “luring” these people back, the infrastructure is hardly there to accomodate them.

I can think of worse ways to start mending the wounds, literally, with the Iraqi people then to help heal their children, and to continue to help them rebuild, but it seems our time there has run out. Good Samaritans like these will only be around as long as it takes to say “exit strategy!” and then the Iraqis are on their own.

Sadly, reconstruction was never a priority, despite all the righteous talk from George Bush and Condi Rice at the beginning of the war. It soon became clear that the Bush Administration saw any attention focused on repairing the country as potentially exposing the bloody gaping sore we opened there. Monitoring too closely the often hapless reconstruction effort risked undue attention to the mistakes and calamaties — the corruption, the contractors, the lost money and the fact that the daily violence was spoiling the whole thing anyway. So it became the backwash of our misadventures and the people suffered.

Too bad. With all of the insipid, perversely-termed “listening” Karen Hughes did on her tour of the Muslim World she never heard that it is in such gestures of selflessness and sacrifice that begin the terms of reconciliation, of repair. For all the Kagans who see the end of the war at the tip of the spear, there are, thankfully, a Knight and a Heavey who understand otherwise.

The most poignant turn of the WaPo piece, however, came not in the telling of their story, but in the irony of their latest efforts. When learning that defense contractors Halliburton and Lockheed Martin had increased their revenues through the war to $22.5 billion and $41.8 billion respectively, Heavey sent letters to them, and eight other contractors, asking for help for the foundation.

Hardly Surprising, none have replied.

As the sun sets rapidly on the Bush Administration there is a growing anxiety that it will not be held fully accountable for its crimes — particularly torture. In one instance, the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are now at serious risk of being resigned to the dustbin of infamy, wholly tagged to a few “bad apples” and in isolation to any larger policy of coercive tactics, including torture, approved and pursued by the White House, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense.

It is with that frustration that writers like Mark Benjamin of Salon are attempting to yank our attention back to Abu Ghraib and the fact that only low-level tools of the Army were ever prosecuted for the systematic torture and humiliation of the Iraqi prisoners there. Even after mounting evidence, including damning White House and DoD memos approving methods such as waterboarding, claims from high-ranking officers like disgraced Gen. Janice Karpinski that her men and women had direction from higher up the food chain, and the extensive details provided by the Taguba Report, which among other things, often contradicted the administration’s claims about what it knew and when (Major Gen. Antonio Taguba was forced to retire after his 2004 report surfaced), the truth seems more elusive than ever.

So while I understand the inspiration behind Benjamin’s latest, “Sympathy for Charles Graner,” I don’t see how a semi-white wash of the guy with the camera is going to advance the cause. Sure, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and a handful of DoD, White House and CIA lawyers are running around with their livelihoods and plump speaking fees ahead of them while Graner rots in jail, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t belong there.

Benjamin travels to Graner’s family home in western Pennsylvania to talk to his parents, who describe Graner’s treatment at Fort Leavenworth — where he has been sentenced for ten years on charges of conspiracy to maltreat detainees, failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty, and maltreatment, as well as charges of assault, indecency and dereliction of duty — as “terrible.” His father goes so far as to say he shouldn’t be in prison.

But Benjamin’s story skips over a few things about this Persian Gulf War vet, former corrections officer and amateur photog. He says that Graner is the only person involved in Abu Ghraib still behind bars, and that “Lynndie England is not in jail.” He fails to mention that England, the 21-year-old pregnant lover of the 36-year-old Graner at the time of the scandal, did more than a year in prison and had his baby behind bars.

He also fails to mention that Graner had a history of abuse. His ex-wife and mother of his two young daughters (they are pictured, lovingly with Graner in the Salon spread) took out a restraining order on him in 1997 after he allegedly threatened to kill her and dragged her across the floor by her hair. As a correction officer he was accused by inmates in two separate incidents of physical abuse while shouting racial epithets and in one case, putting a razor blade in an inmate’s mashed potatoes. Read More…

In true Bush form, the administration has decided it is not going to let our elected officials actually see the draft security Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that lays out the conditions under which some 140,000 U.S troops and tens of thousands of American contractors can operate in Iraq beginning Jan.1. The agreement — contrary to the rosy picture offered by the press earlier this week — is still a source of grave tension in Iraq, evidenced by the brawl that shut down parliament yesterday.

Coming out of an election stupor in which many Americans were erroneously convinced that The Surge had transformed Iraq into a kind of benign third world landscape awash in wreckage but nonetheless “moving forward,” a lot of people won’t know or perhaps care, about the SOFA. They hardly know that, according to reports of journalists who have had the documents translated, that the Iraqis distrust us so much they are insisting we start getting out by June 2009, completely out by 2011 — including any “residual force” Obama was imagining during the campaign. They want limited jurisdiction to prosecute our troops and contractors for crimes and demand that our military ask permission before they arrest anyone or launch operations. Under no circumstances would the U.S allowed be to use Iraqi soil to launch attacks on another country, and permanent bases are out (somewhere, Richard Pearle is weeping).

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration continues the paternalistic approach. Elected officials charged with their constituents’ best interest have been kept entirely out of the loop. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — who Obama is apparently considering to keep on through next year — and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have been on the Hill “briefing” lawmakers in closed door sessions. Massachusetts Rep. Wiliam Delahunt told Voice of America News, “There has been no meaningful consultation with Congress during the negotiations of this agreement and the American people for all intents and purposes have been completely left out.”

Congress has been complaining about this for over a year. The Bush Administration just responds in typical fashion — by ignoring them. And by lobbing gems such as these:

The Pentagon’s spokesman, Geoff Morrell, said that American commanders were satisfied with the conditions set in the agreement, including deadlines for withdrawal and constraints on operations.

“I’m not going to get into this — the specifics of this — other than to say that how this agreement is implemented will be worked out between our commanders on the ground and the Iraqi leadership,” he said. “And both seem to be very confident that it provides the framework for them to continue to do all that still needs to be done.”

So just get back to your shopping, leave the big stuff to us. Pathetically, there is a much more open and vigorous debate going on in the Iraqi parliament about the fate of our forces. Perhaps after Jan. 20, when Congress can finally get out from the kids’ table, they can get back to doing the peoples’ business.

Perhaps Dec. 8, 2004 was the day – the point where the “military vote” started peeling off from the Republican Party, for which it had been steadfastly true in majority numbers for at least 25 years. It was the day Army Spc.Thomas Wilson asked then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?”

To which Rumsfeld replied, “As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want …”You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and it can [still] be blown up.”

The right wing talkers, true to form, turned on the young man, calling him a tool of the journalist embedded with his unit — though Wilson’s question was met by whoops and cheers from the 2,300 military men and women in Rumsfeld’s audience at the Kuwaiti staging area that day. Apparently “support the troops,” didn’t extend to those exercising the First Amendment rights they were supposedly fighting for — but no mind — the message was broadcast as clear as a reveille: you are on your own.

Since then, we’ve heard about moldy walls and neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the systematic flaws in veterans’ mental health care, the enormous backlogs at the VA, the resistance by the Pentagon to pay disability to injured service members, the 15-month deployments, the abuse by contractors putting troops in the field at risk, the petty way soldiers are treated by the military when they return (like having to pay for their damaged clothes and equipment!) and the (unsuccessful) refusal of the Bush Administration — and John McCain — to pass a veteran-supported GI Bill package, leaving Democrats like Sen. Jim Webb to take the credit when it was finally approved.

Still, discerning where the military community is at politically is a fuzzy and perhaps futile exercise at this point — mostly because the military vote (which would include present members of the Armed Forces and veterans) is so 2004 , and no one has seriously polled this dynamic voting population ahead of today’s election. According to the 2004 exit polling, 18 percent of voters had served in the military. That didn’t include the thousands of absentee ballots from overseas.

There are small signs, however, that six years at war, under an ill-defined, mismanaged foreign policy that relies on the constant, indefinite rotation of less than one-half percent of the nation’s total population has altered, however subtly, the Republican Party’s grip on the military voting culture.

For one, as of August, Barack Obama was clobbering John McCain in donations from active duty military — in fact, men and women serving abroad gave Obama nearly six times more than his opponent, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Republican Ron Paul did even better than McCain with such donations — leading one to wonder how two men who had opposed the war were generating more enthusiasm among soldiers than the man whose presidential campaign had been built around his time as a POW in Vietnam and as a singular champion of the 2007 Surge into Baghdad.

This is perhaps not entirely suprising — a poll taken almost a year ago found that only 37 percent of military and their families approved of President Bush’s policy in Iraq, a huge turnaround from just two years before, when twice as many had sided with the President on the war. Read More…