… but perhaps not for the reasons many people have suggested as it whizzes its way around the blogosphere [via Chicago Boyz].

U.S. Army Task Force Regulators 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment Staff Sgt. Fred Hampton, of Lexington, Ky., kneels on a knee to talk with a young Iraqi boy at the future site of Regular 6 Park in the Thawra 1 section of the Sadr City District of Baghdad on June 20. Photo: Tech Sgt. Cohen Young, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.

Most responses focus on the hope, trust and fraternity displayed by the fact that the boy has his feet planted on Sgt. Hampton’s boot, viz:

A couple of people pointed out the sand is pretty damned hot during an Iraqi July, and this would seem to be a reasonable explanation for the boy’s posture. Fair play to the soldier for allowing him to do this, and I agree that this is not a bad shot of the US army engaging with the community, etc.

But, has noone else thought to ask the question: why hasn’t the soldier shouldered his weapon? Or is it standard operating procedure to talk to children like this? Strictly from a body language perspective this is hardly a display of openness. The same applies to the child: his left arm appears to be crossed across his body too. Anyone with kids will tell you this is a classic display of shyness. Perhaps that’s why the weapon remains raised - the kid’s left hand is not visible, tucked inside his T-shirt as it is.

If a picture speaks a thousand words, this one does more than represent “the highest ideals of our country and our guys, and the hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people. This is why we fight.“

The Register’s subbies generally peddle a pretty good line in hyper-witty headlines, but the standfirst from this article by Lewis Page is exceptional:

Land Warrior wearable war-smartphone survives Iraq baptism

Txt-happy grunts in virtual-keyboard iPhone bitchslap

The world’s first unit of digitally networked foot soldiers returns from combat in Iraq this week. Reports have it that the American troops’ controversial “Land Warrior” wearable-node technology has changed in both role and configuration during its 15-month baptism of fire. Indications are that the equipment - slated for disposal by army chiefs just last year - has done well enough that it will now live on.

Read the rest here.

I have two new posts up at CTLab Review:

Mahmoud al-Massad at the Frontline Club - a review of al-Massad’s acclaimed documentary Recycle, in which he returns to Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and attempts to find out what makes a terrorist.

Monumentalising Defeat - a brief look at Christophe Abrassart’s photographic essay on the WWII Atlantik Wall.

Mike Innes has also been busy, and has has his legal hat on this weekend:

Khadr v. U.S. (D.C. Cir. June 20, 2008) - The D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge Sentelle, has dismissed a petition by Omar Khadr asking the Court to address certain procedural issues relating to Khadr’s war crime trial before a military commission at GTMO. The opinion relies on language in the Military Commissions Act providing that the D.C. Circuit’s jurisdiction in this context comes into play only after a final judgment by the commission that has been approved by the Convening Authority and after all aother MCA appeal options are complete.

Constitutional Cartography & the Parsing of Terrorist Space - I’ve been reporting on the Opinio Juris Insta-Symposium (OPJIS) on the Boumediene Case in dribs and drabs as I stumble through the wealth of offerings from various contributors [Mike's piece is also cross-posted at Small Wars Journal, where it sits nicely next to a companion article by Robert Lamb on Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens]

Benjamin Wittes on Law and the Long War - The smash book of the season… reviews and commentary on Benjamin Wittes’ new book Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, 2008) have been popping up all over. Mike takes a look at them.

Joseph Stiglitz has recently been much in the news, with the February 2008 publication of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (with Linda Bilmes). On Friday 13 June, Stiglitz was in London at the Frontline Club, in conversation with Stephanie Flanders, Economics Editor of the BBC.

Read the rest of my article at Complex Terrain Lab.

Update: Some feeds may have a broken link - use this one if that’s the case.

U.S. Military Hoped for Virtually Unlimited Freedom of Action in Iraq:
Drafting of U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement Began Nearly Five Years Ago

Documents recently obtained by the National Security Archive through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the Bush administration began codifying its demands for a long-term U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement in late 2003. Popular protest at the time and an increasingly violent armed resistance had forced the administration to seek both an “Iraqi face” for the occupation, and a mechanism intended to legitimate a long-term military presence.  Perhaps reflecting sensitivity to Iraqi and U.S. public opposition, the heavily redacted documents do not reveal much of the detail of what U.S. military and government entities hoped to obtain in terms of Iraqi acquiescence.  At the same time, there is little in the available text to indicate U.S. forces were initially willing to grant any significant limits to their ability to conduct operations in and around Iraq.

I saw Joseph Stiglitz speak last night (more of which later) and the newly declassified documents tend to support his implied criticisms of the regime with respect to single-source contracts and the effective ‘licence to print money’ awarded major contractors like Halliburton. Phrases such as “Contractors and Iraqis employed by the coalition must be immune from legal process for acts performed in official capacity” must surely raise any eyebrow or two, and go some way to explaining the institutional ambivalence to PMCs and others. Just two elements of documents suggesting the U.S. effectively intended to treat Iraq as their own.

The BBC reports it has uncovered evidence of massive financial misconduct involving U.S. contractors and Iraqi ministries to the tune of $23bn (£11.75bn). The full story is to be revealed in a Panorama documentary tonight at 2100 GMT. In the meantime, here’s a taster:

A BBC investigation estimates that around $23bn (£11.75bn) may have been lost, stolen or just not properly accounted for in Iraq.

For the first time, the extent to which some private contractors have profited from the conflict and rebuilding has been researched by the BBC’s Panorama using US and Iraqi government sources.

A US gagging order is preventing discussion of the allegations. The order applies to 70 court cases against some of the top US companies. While George Bush remains in the White House, it is unlikely the gagging orders will be lifted. To date, no major US contractor faces trial for fraud or mismanagement in Iraq.

The president’s Democrat opponents are keeping up the pressure over war profiteering in Iraq. Henry Waxman who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said: “The money that’s gone into waste, fraud and abuse under these contracts is just so outrageous, its egregious. “It may well turn out to be the largest war profiteering in history.”

In the run-up to the invasion one of the most senior officials in charge of procurement in the Pentagon objected to a contract potentially worth seven billion that was given to Halliburton, a Texan company, which used to be run by Dick Cheney before he became vice-president.

Unusually only Halliburton got to bid - and won.

The search for the missing billions also led the programme to a house in Acton in West London where Hazem Shalaan lived until he was appointed to the new Iraqi government as minister of defence in 2004.

He and his associates siphoned an estimated $1.2 billion out of the ministry. They bought old military equipment from Poland but claimed for top class weapons. Meanwhile they diverted money into their own accounts.

Judge Radhi al-Radhi of Iraq’s Commission for Public Integrity investigated. He said: “I believe these people are criminals. They failed to rebuild the Ministry of Defence , and as a result the violence and the bloodshed went on and on - the murder of Iraqis and foreigners continues and they bear responsibility.”

Mr Shalaan was sentenced to two jail terms but he fled the country. He said he was innocent and that it was all a plot against him by pro-Iranian MPs in the government. There is an Interpol arrest out for him but he is on the run - using a private jet to move around the globe. He stills owns commercial properties in the Marble Arch area of London.

Update: Marc Lynch covers this much better, and took part in early workshops with Laipson. He broadly agrees with her findings.

Yesterday saw the publication of a new report from bipartisan thinktank The Century Foundation:

In a new report from The Century Foundation, former National Intelligence Council vice-chair Ellen Laipson argues that the United States needs to move quickly to reset its Iraq policy goals, arguing that U.S. strategic goals in the Middle East region require a change in Iraq policy regardless of how Iraq’s internal political scenario plays out.

“The time for social engineering is over,” Laipson writes in her report, America and the Emerging Iraqi Reality: New Goals, No Illusions, which The Century Foundation released on Monday, June 9. “Events in Iraq will be determined by powerful currents within Iraqi society and politics that are less and less susceptible to outside manipulation or influence.”

According to Laipson’s report, elections in both Iraq and the United States over the next eighteen months could significantly change the landscape for U.S. policy toward Iraq. In the United States, Iraq could well be one of the most important issues on voters’ minds when they make their choice in the presidential contest. The campaigns have raised expectations that major changes may be in the offing, even if the clarity of campaign aspirations may need to bend somewhat to the harsh realities of troop deployments, funding needs, and potential destabilization from changing course too.

Iraqis too will be asked to register their choices in provincial elections in fall 2008 and in national elections in December 2009. A new U.S. administration could find itself dealing with different Iraqi political leaders than those collaborating with President Bush, possibly taking more stringent positions on the U.S. military presence in the country, among other issues.

…

In short, writes Laipson, it is time to plan for a transition to a more modest and realistic relationship with Iraq. The United States has important stakes in Iraq, she acknowledges, but Washington needs to shift its focus from trying to be the impresario of Iraq’s reinvention to being a supportive friend of a country passing through a critical and extended transition.

Full report available as a .pdf here.

A new RAND report, An Argument for Documenting Casualties: Violence Against Iraqi Civilians 2006 by Katharine Hall and Dale Stahl is likely to reopen the debate on the quantification of civilian deaths in Iraq:

Protecting the civilian population is one of the central tenets of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Until very recently, however, the U.S. military has not had a formal system for documenting the level of violence directed against Iraqi civilians. Therefore, other groups (such as nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations, and Iraqi ministries) have filled the vacuum in reporting, relying on media accounts, surveys, death certificates, and other open-source information to generate datasets of varying transparency and quality. The resulting statistics have generated widespread debate over sources, methods, and political biases. This study examines available open-source data on Iraqi civilian fatalities and assesses problems associated with previous collection and analysis efforts. The authors present a more robust RAND Corporation Iraqi civilian violence dataset from which they derive new observations about trends in targeting and weapons in 2006. RAND’s dataset reveals that the majority of attacks in the year 2006 against civilians were directed against individuals without any identifiable affiliation, and that most attacks were carried out using firearms (rather than via improvised explosive devices or suicide attacks). These findings lead to a proposed framework for future civilian fatality data-collection efforts in Iraq and beyond.

The other groups to which they refer of course include the infamous Lancet reports (latest version) and the Iraq Body Count website, both of which generated considerable controversy when published. If we recall, The Lancet put the approximate total number of Iraqi civilian casualties between March 2003 and June 2006 at 655,000 based on a hotly disputed cluster sample survey. The IBC total ranges from 75,000 to 82,000 over the period February 2003-October 2007, using data derived principally from media reports. Suffice to say, the last year in the RAND study, 2006, was a bloody one indeed, corroborated by United Nations and Iraqi government figures. And the RAND total? Well, you’ll just have to download the report to find out …

Small Wars Journal alerted us to a Charlie Rose interview with our Insurgency Research Group colleague Colonel H.R. McMaster (soon to be General). SWJ has a short YouTube video but I’ve tracked down the full, hour-long version, which also includes an interview with Philip Bobbitt, plugging his new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. Bobbitt will be launching the UK edition of Terror and Consent at the London International Institute for Strategic Studies tonight, which I’m unfortunately going to miss.

I’ve had a few problems getting this video to stream consistently, but it may just be my connection today. If anyone finds an alternative source please let me know.

This is an alarming anecdote from Tom Englehardt’s reading of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez’s Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story:

Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in Battle. It’s April 6, 2004. L Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the president’s colonial viceroy in Baghdad, and Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the president, then-secretary of state Colin Powell and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq’s Shi’ite south, the US military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,” the general reports him saying. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shi’ite city of Najaf. Muqtada himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell’s “total victory”, the US military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the US presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of Muqtada: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone,” he insisted to his top advisors. “At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.”

Not long after that, the president “launched” what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as “a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army].” Here then is that “pep talk”. While you read it, try to imagine anything like it coming out of the mouth of any other American president, or anything not like it coming out of the mouth of any evil enemy leader in the films of the president’s - and my own - childhood:

“Kick ass!” [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell’s tough talk. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mindset. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

Shit.

Update: Anonymous informs me that Tom posted this at TomDispatch yesterday.