Can you hear it? Clunk, clunk, clunk. That’s the sound of the Bushies’ latest hastily-cobbled-together “plan” for post-Saddam Iraq falling apart, one major portion at a time.
The latest part of the Pentagon’s (shockingly misnamed) “plan” to collapse is the part known as a “Status of Forces Agreement”, or SOFA.
In this report in today’s NYT, Dexter Filkins tells us that:
- Iraq’s interim leaders said Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.
Interesting, huh? I wonder what it feels like for all those ignorant, manipulative, and cynical neo-cons (is there any other kind?) when they see all their treasured plans falling apart one by one by one.
I wrote about the importance of the SOFA issue twice back in January, here and here. In the second of those posts, I recalled an earlier SOFA-type agreement in the Middle East that had been concluded with a “successor regime” that notably was not regarded as politically legitimate by its own people, and that as a result collapsed catastrophically. That was the security agreement that Sharon’s government concluded with Amin Gemayyel’s government, in Lebanon.
In that earlier case, the very fact that Gemayyel had been willing to conclude such an agreement with Israel contributed to the general sense of the illegitimacy of his government. Evidently the IGC in Iraq, many of whose members have a highly realistic appraisal of their own lack of domestic legitimacy, was eager to avoid a similar fate.
For example, in Filkin’s piece, he writes:
- “We are not 100 percent accepted by the Iraqi people,” said Ghazi M. Ajil al-Yawar, a member of the Governing Council. “We have not been elected. We do not want to draft an agreement that a new government would come in and change anyway.”
The original plan–ways back in mid-November when “the latest” plan for Iraq was hatched in the Bush-Cheney White House–was for the SOFA to be concluded with the IGC by the end of March. That has now gone the way of the “original plan” to have transitional constitution ready by the end of February: royally down the toilet.
I was reading Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatowsky’s recent interview with L.A. Weekly (thanks to Juan Cole for that link)… KK evidently saw a lot, working as she did in the Pentagon’s Office for the Near East and South Asia from May 2002 until her resignation–on grounds of principle–in March 2003. She seems to be saying in this interview that the desire to get basing for US troops in Iraq was one of the main reasons for the neocons’ determined pursuit of the war against that country:
- What do you believe the real reasons were for the war?
The neoconservatives needed to do more than just topple Saddam Hussein. They wanted to put in a government friendly to the U.S., and they wanted permanent basing in Iraq. There are several reasons why they wanted to do that. None of those reasons, of course, were presented to the American people or to Congress.
Here’s another interesting part of the interview:
- So you don’t think there was a genuine interest as to whether or not there really were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
It’s not about interest. We knew. We knew from many years of both high-level surveillance and other types of shared intelligence, not to mention the information from the U.N., we knew, we knew what was left [from the Gulf War] and the viability of any of that. Bush said he didn’t know.
The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn’t have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent– a billion dollars!– by David Kay’s group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn’t find anything, they didn’t expect to find anything.
I’ll never forget a poly-sci course I audited recently (the summer before the Iraq war), taught by a neo-con, on US policies in the Middle East. What was consistently amazing was the fact that what we were being taught about national interests, motives, and strategies exactly matched what left-wing analysts had always been saying.
What is remarkable is just how many people swallowed the ever-changing “reasons” for the Iraq war… and I don’t know whether to blame the media, or simply lump them in with all of the other folks who were believing whatever they heard, no matter how ridiculous it sounded..
OK, I’m a bit bitter after sacrificing a good year of my life on anti-war work and seeing it all come to this. I will be very happily surprised if there is no civil war within the next 5 years or so. At this point, I’m just crossing my fingers, and hoping that perhaps we have finally over-extended ourselves so much economically and militarily that we will start fading as a super power, and assume a more discreet international role.
Vivion– Great as always to have yr comments (esthetic judgments and other ones)!
You say: I’m a bit bitter after after sacrificing a good year of my life on anti-war work and seeing it all come to this… I can certainly relate to the intense disappointment and sadness of the situation. But for myself, I don’t see the anti-war work I did from Sept. 11th on (okay, and before that, but you see what I mean) as a “sacrifice” but more as an “investment” in trying to build a better world for myself, my kids, and all my friends around the world…
Sure, we know it’s got to be a long-term investment. But imagine where we all and the world would be if there hadn’t been a US-plus-global anti-war movement from Sept. 11th on… For starters, the Dem Party here might still be cowering in the shadows of the Bushies’ hate- and fear-filled rhetoric instead of starting to ask the tough questions… The Bushies might have indeed won broader international support for their “preventive war” doctrine, and gone on to lead much more robust “coalition” from Baghdad to Iran, Syria, and who knows where else… Etc etc.
So I don’t feel bitter right now. I have felt really disappointed and sad, yes; and continue to feel sad at the continuing tragic fallouts from the decision to launch that quite gratuitous war. But at least (silver lining here; example of a historical dialectic at work; or whatever)– the launching of that war and the simultaneous growth of the anti-war critique and movement worldwide have put us in a good position now to start arguing that all use of force to address international problems is primitive, dangerous, and counter-productive, and to start really getting serious about building robust global institutions…
I know this is idealistic, but i don’t see it as Pollyannaish or unrealistic. I really don’t.
This is my day to glad-hand. Helena, your work here since you left for the “Near East” has been stunning good. I’d already had high standards for you but your recent work surpasses even those.
I’d long ago noticed the truth of what Vivion said about the neo-cons: their world view is just like Lenin’s, only on they’re on the other side. Since I grew up with and retain wildly divergent notions of “national interests,” I see the neo-cons as enemies general of mankind.
However, the antiwar activism I participated in has had enormous unintended benefits to me personally, and to American dissent in general. Not everyone got a fiancee out of the antiwar movement, of course, but even if I had not, it would still have been a tremendously enriching experience. (Needless to say, I still wish the war hadn’t happened, but I also think the mistrust between different sections of American society sincerely opposed to the neo-con agenda was something that really happened.)
James– that is so cool, finding a “love of your life” in the anti-war movement. Anyway, I hope that is what it turns out to be… Best of luck to you both!
(My spouse and I are 2 months shy of our 20th anniversary. Better every year!)
Btw, I couldn’t figure out what exactly you meant in writing: I also think the mistrust between different sections of American society sincerely opposed to the neo-con agenda was something that really happened. Was there a typo in there, or is it too much past my bed-time for my brain to be working properly?
Thanks. We’re honeymooning in Iran, BTW. I can hardly wait.
There are many sections of the US population who have strong feelings against the neo-conservative agenda in praxis, but which are dormant because of mutual distrust.
For example, I am trying to get Americans across the political spectrum to think about imperialism as something separate and distinct from the society in which we participate. In the past, “imperialism” has been a term used by the radical left, partly in recondite dicussions of theory, but also to express the speaker’s violent rejection of the state’s legitimacy. It became corrupted so it said much more about the speaker than it did the subject.
In this way, even I, who have a website devoted to warning Americans about imperialism, have to fight an urge to stop listening when I hear a rant about American imperialism.
In the antiwar demonstrations I was struck by the astonishing range of opinions. There were people there I was marching with whom I had once traduced in casual conversation: conservative Republicans (who had the misfortune of having adhered to their principles long after Nixon was elected); about 600 flavors of “libertarian”; and so on. I don’t want to become mawkish, but it was a really profound sort of fellowship among people who had heretofore regarded the other with immense suspicion.