When: This Friday, Sept. 7, noon to 2 pm

Where: Baird's Olympia office, 120 Union Ave (off Capital Blvd, downtown). Park on adjacent streets.

Also, tune in to KAOS, 89.3 FM today (Thursday) from noon to 1 pm, to hear a discussion with Gail Johnson, Steve Niva, and Phan Nguyen, about Baird's current Iraq position.

Last week, Congressman Brian Baird announced his position switch on the occupation of Iraq. Following a recent trip to the region (his 5th), he has gone from opposing the 'surge' to supporting it (thru next Spring).

Last week in Vancouver over 500 attended a Baird town hall meeting, the overwhelming majority were vehemenently opposed to his position switch. In Longview, hundreds attended a similar public meeting with similar results. Why didn't Brian Baird hold a public meeting in Olympia? We think we know why.

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Simply stated, Baird constantly stresses that he was opposed to the war, but having spent a few days in Iraq recently, he believes that the US is making "progress" and that the military occupation should be given another six months to change things around. He is saying this in a newspaper editorial and in several media interviews.

Below are my personal observations from listening to his extensive discussion with the Olympian editorial board. The discussion can be downloaded as MP3.

Note that even the Olympian editorial board was not convinced by Baird's arguments.

Baird is very dismissive of his anti-war constituency, whom he flippantly refers to as the "Out of Iraq" caucus [see correction below]. While hundreds of people expressed their disappointment with Baird at the recent Vancouver town hall meeting, Baird brushes them off as an irrational minority and contrasts them with a "quiet majority" that supports him for "telling the truth."

Baird insists that progress is being made in Iraq, and yet his standards of progress continue to be vague. He cites a few cases of schools and jobs being created here and there but makes no attempt to demonstrate how it represents a greater trend in Iraq as a whole.

He also mentions formerly dangerous areas that are now safer for US soldiers. When a member of the Olympian editorial board tells Baird, "But I'm looking at TV, and all I'm seeing is dead soldiers," Baird replies:

"That's part of the problem. All you're seeing is dead soldiers. What you're not seeing is -- because it's harder to show on TV -- is the area where we're not getting hit."

Although it's nice that there are places in Iraq where soldiers are relatively safer, it doesn't change the fact that soldiers are continuing to get killed at a constantly high rate, or greater than the numbers killed a year ago. His observation of one or two relatively safer regions does not correlate with the actual numbers for all of Iraq. Just because he personally did not witness any soldiers being killed does not mean Iraq is getting safer.

Also, we must question whether Baird's standards of "progress" is ever measured by the number of Iraqis killed, which has only increased. There's a difference between an Iraq that's simply safer for soldiers and an Iraq that's safer for the people who live there. Baird warns that if the US leaves, there could be "wholesale slaughter" in Iraq, as if that isn't alraeady happening with US contribution.

Baird also claims that his support for the military occupation is based on discussions he's had with leaders in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, who want the US to stay. He fails to mention the fact that these leaders were not democratically elected and do not represent their people's interests. Instead, their concern is with maintaining the status quo, suppressing dissent in their own countries, and continuing US support for their regimes. Rather than hoping that a "democracy building" project in Iraq will prevail, these leaders are counting on the US to quell true Iraqi aspirations.

Baird raises the spectre of Iran:

"I believe the Iranians present a clear danger. I'm not calling for an invasion, but I think to the extent that they are unchecked in that region, it is dangerous for our future."

What does he mean by that? It's true that Iran unchecked poses a threat to US hegemony in the Middle East, but why should the standard be US hegemony in the Middle East? Why should the standard be benchmarks imposed by the US on the Iraqi people and an Iraqi Oil Law prepared by the US and BearingPoint for the benefit of foreign oil companies? His preference can thus be stated as: An unchecked US in the Middle East is preferable to an unchecked Middle East in the Middle East.

Baird states that a US withdrawal will destabilize the Middle East. If he is truly concerned with instability in the Middle East, the solution is not further US interference in the form of military occupations and greater arms sales and unquestioning support for Israel's occupation. He should be concentrating on real solutions in the Palestine-Israel conflict.

And Steve Niva has pointed out one of the most ignorant comments that Baird has made about Iraq. Baird told the Olympian editorial board,

"What happens if a Shi'a theocracy takes over [in Iraq] and progressive independent women who are currently in the region are suddenly all forced into burqas and they can't go to school and -- and they're stoned to death for learning to read? What happens if we allow that?"

As Steve has noted, the burqa is a phenomenon specific to Afghanistan, and stoning women to death for learning to read is something more likely to happen in US-supported Saudi Arabia. So that begs the question: Is Brian Baird sure he visited Iraq?

Baird says his goal is not to withdraw from Iraq: "That's not my goal. My goal is success and security." Success and security seems to be unrelated to Iraqi aspirations. With close to a million Iraqis dead, more than a million internally displaced, and two million as external refugees, and the Iraqi government being forced to follow US "benchmarks" and hand over its oil to foreign corporations, Baird's only signs of progress are a few areas that are safer for US soldiers (without actually reducing the ongoing US military fatality rate) and some isolated and possibly temporary instances of successful reconstruction.

He pushes progress in Iraq as the norm and "chaos, death and instability" as the hypothetical outcome of withdrawal.

Last year, when I spoke to Baird about withdrawing from Iraq, he referenced the old saying, "You break it, you bought it," by which he meant that since we have destroyed Iraq so completely, it's up to us to make things better. However his analogy fails because we are breaking Iraq more and more. If we really intended to "buy it," we would be offering reparations and taking in significantly more Iraqi refugees. Instead, the US is conducting the same actions in Iraq as when we initially "broke it."

Baird is calling for six more months to see the situation in Iraq change, which is suspiciously similar to the excuses of Thomas Friedman, as documented by FAIR, who seems to call for six more months...every six months.