Glenn Kessler of the Post dishes up the front-page enterprise, detailing some of the problems delaying the construction of the new, massive U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Deadlines have been missed and contractors such as First Kuwait General Trade and Contracting Co. have performed substandard work, he writes. When the U.S. embassy in Baghdad cabled their concerns over safety issues and work on a guardhouse over the open embassy system, it earned them a "stinging response" from James L. Golden, the managing director for the State Department's Overseas Buildings Operations, which supervises construction of the new embassy. Golden said the complaints should have been kept in-house, where it would be "difficult for anyone else in the government to gauge progress," Kessler notes. He defended First Kuwait and accused the embassy and KBR of lying to cover up their own errors. He dismissed the charges in the embassy's cable as without merit. The $592 million embassy complex, which will include 21 buildings and be the largest U.S. embassy in the world, is scheduled to be completed in the fall, but delays likely will blow that plan. No one would from the embassy or State would talk to Kessler in depth, so he's basing it mainly from the 23-paragraph cable that mixes outrage and bureaucratese. The embassy is now saying things are fine (sure, after they've been caught out) and that the problem with the guard house won't spill over to the embassy as a whole. In all, the saga of the embassy guard house is Iraq's reconstruction in a nutshell: foreign companies, finger-pointing, buck-passing, incompetence and ass-covering... all resulting in cost overruns and delays and a deterioration in security.
Meanwhile, the Monitor does what it does best: provide thoughtful analysis the day after the news breaks. Scott Peterson and Nicholas Blanford dig into the U.S.'s claims earlier this week that Iran was using Hezbollah to train militias in Iraq. They attempt to answer the crucial question of why the U.S. went public with these charges now, and where and to whom might they be trying to apply pressure. The duo hint that the real target of Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner's accusations isn't Iran, but Hezbollah and its efforts to hamstring the government of Lebanon, a key U.S. ally. The arrest of a Hezbollah operative, "in intelligence terms, has a limited shelf life that has already expired, because they will alter their operational security," says Magnus Ranstorp, an expert at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College in Stockholm. But by name-checking Ali Musa Daqduq as a Party of God agent in Iraq, the U.S. hopes to inflict a "small piercing of (Hizbullah's) armor," which is "probably more valuable (to the US) in the political sense." The story makes clear that there's probably no direct linkage between Iran's Quds force, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shi'ite militia groups and their deadly roadside bombs. It's murky world of family and religious ties where information, more than men and materiel, is passed back and forth. And this nugget is particularly interesting:
There are many sources for enhanced roadside bombs. Some of the explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) copy previous Hizbullah ones, though notes that Saddam Hussein sent a military intelligence team to Lebanon in 1995 to learn about Hizbullah's use of the bombs. US and British forces routinely find EFP workshops in central and southern Iraq.
The most deadly EFPs might come from vestigial knowledge among former elements of Saddam's army -- which included many Shi'ites in the rank and file. But a real question remains: if the U.S. is pushing back primarily against Hezbollah, what has developed in Lebanon recently to warrant this renewed pushback?
James Risen of The New York Times reports a front-page takeout on the difficulties contractors returning from Iraq are facing. No great surprise, they're suffering many of the combat-related stress issues as returning G.I.s. The difference is that contractors don't have access to the Veterans Administration health care system and their problems are often undertreated or misdiagnosed -- or simply ignored. This is another story in the burgeoning genre of contractor-related coverage all with the same theme: there is a shadow war and a shadow army in Iraq and it's been hidden from public view. Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times did a massive takeout on contractors in Iraq, which now outnumber the number of U.S. troops -- although most "contractors" are actually Iraqis hired for local jobs, not mercenaries -- which IraqSlogger covered. Risen reports that while contract workers who are wounded or disabled in a war zone are treated in military hospitals in Iraq and Germany, once they're home, they're not eligible for care in the military or V.A. system -- unless they're veterans presumably. (Many of the hired guns among the contractors are ex-military.) The insurance the contractors do have usually doesn't cover PTSD and they often have to litigate to get covered. AIG, which provides coverage for several of the big contractors in Iraq, has paid only about half of the claims dealing with PTSD, challenging the rest because the company's medical experts disagreed with the diagnosis. Like a terrorist, the Iraq war seems to make little distinction between civilians and soldiers when it comes to the traumas they experience.
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ROUNDUPS
Joshua Partlow of the Post reports the grim news that while civilian deaths in Iraq may be down overall, the number of bodies found on the streets of Baghdad has risen 45 percent since January, before the surge started. June saw 453 unidentified corpses found in the capital, according to morgue data from the Health Ministry. January saw 321 corpses found, with the numbers rising sharply in the last two months after a decline from January to April. And while there has been a drop in the mass-casualty car-bombings, the increase in found bodies is a metric of the sectarian strife, Partlow writes. Gen. David Petraeus called the killing "the cancer" that never stops. "It's a cycle of violence that must be broken," he said. Petraeus gives some justification for why Al Qaeda in Iraq, a small but violent part of the overall insurgency, is considered "public enemy number one." Petraeus said the violence perpetrated by Al Qaeda in Iraq becomes the justification for the violence done by Shi'ite militias and extremists. And from there, the revenge cycle snowballs.
Alissa Rubin of the Times gets down to business quickly with her roundup, noting that assassinations, car bombs and roadside bombs claimed the lives at at least 46 Iraqis yesterday. Two Iraqi television reporters for a Sunni Arab party were killed in separate incidents. A woman, her sister and her 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter were attacked in a market near Saydia, a Sunni Arab neighborhood. The woman and her daughter were killed, while her son and her sister survived. The father of the family was killed a few weeks ago, so it sounds like someone was trying to finish the job. Another woman was shot and killed allegedly because she offered policemen food and water occasionally. A car bomb went off in Tikrit, killing seven people and wounding 17. Another car bomb hit a police checkpoint in Anbar, killing 15 people. The Muslim Scholars Assocition, a Sunni group, issued a fatwa saying the Iraqi oil law reported out of cabinet yesterday was haram, but Rubin says "it was difficult to determine the reason behind the ruling." Ayman al-Zawahiri, the No. 2 in al Qaeda, released an 86-minute videotape calling on all Muslims to support the Islamic insurgents in Iraq. Among all this, the U.S. embassy held a "subdued" Independence Day celebration.
IRAQ AND THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR
In probably the least surprising news of the day, President Bush used the Independence Day holiday to defend the Iraq war while the New York Times makes a surprising comparison Iraq and the Revolutionary War.
"Our first Independence Day celebration took place in a midst of a war -- a bloody and difficult struggle that would not end for six more years before America finally secured her freedom," he said to an audience of Air National Guard members, according to Jim Rutenberg of the Times. "Like those early patriots, you're fighting a new and unprecedented war -- pledging your lives and honor to defend our freedom and way of life." Tim Craig of the Post adds that Bush didn't exactly promise much to look forward to: The Iraq war will "will require more patience, more courage and more sacrifice." This kind of speech is old hat for Bush by now, as the Times notes, and from the reporting it sounds like he rolled out the same old talking points we've heard many times before. Fighting for freedom and way of life? Check. Terrorist following us home if we leave Iraq? Gotcha. Today's armed forces fighting for the same cause as the patriots of yore? Yep. Ok, see you next year!
The Times, however, throws in a little zinger on the artificial tying of Iraq to the holiday with a contributed op-ed by Michael Rose, a retired British Army general who commanded the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1995. Why, yes, the Iraq war is like the Revolutionary War, he writes, but playing the role of Britain's King George III will be George W. Bush and playing the role of the insurgents will be George Washington's Continental Army. Rose argues that the British made many of the same mistakes then the U.S. is doing now: King George "attempted to fight a conventional war against insurgents, and sent far too few troops across the Atlantic to accomplish the mission." Hm. Sounds familiar. Although the British quickly took Baghdad and Tikrit -- oops, sorry, I meant New York and Philadelphia -- they failed to shift to a counterinsurgency strategy. They never managed to seal the colonies' borders. The upside is that once the British got their butts kicked out of the colonies, it freed them up to concentrate on more important things, like India and the Industrial Revolution. When Rose reveals at the end that the United States should learn the lesson that tactical defeat can be turned to an empire-building win is hardly a surprise, but he fails to note that the U.S. doesn't have a subcontinent to covet nor a commercial revolution on the horizon.
In other coverage
WALL STREET JOURNAL
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