Urgently needed: Big shift in U.S. policies in Iraq

I’m guessing the U.S. military leadership has finally understood the scope
of the problems their people face in Iraq, and the stunning depth of the
failure of Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the man appointed by the suits in
the Pentagon to run the “political” side of the occupation?

On the ground, the military has reportedly pulled out of Sadr City–just
a mile or so from the Green Zone!– and is suing for a ceasefire in Fallujah.
Meanwhile the quasi-puppet IGC is collapsing and there are many, many
reports of U.S.-“trained” Iraqi security units defecting en masse to the
insurgents.

Evidently, a massive, top-level shift in the politics of running this
occupation is the only thing that can save the 120,000 highly over-exposed
and over-stretched American troops in Iraq from a total and humiliating disaster.

(Yes, it is already a disaster that they have killed as many Iraqis as they
have in this past week, and have lost as much political support on the ground–and
internationally–as they have. But at least, the losses of U.S. troops
are still not at this point massive.)

So, about this urgently needed shift in the politics of running the occupation
…



The NYT’s Douglas Jehl and Warren Hoge have an interesting and revealing

story
on this topic today. I respect the work of these Washington-based reporters
quite a lot. But their story is interesting mainly because what it
“reveals” about the thinking of mainstream people in the diplomatic/foreign-affairs
world indicates that most of those people are still looking at completely
the wrong questions.

For example, Jehl and Hoge quote Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.N., Munir
Akram, as commentating weightily on what kind of a “sovereign” (heh-heh)
Iraqi body should be taking over power after the near-sacrosanct June 30
deadline. Akram, they write,

    said he believed that Mr. Brahimi was
    exploring three options– turning over sovereignty on June 30 to the existing
    25-member Iraqi Governing Council, giving power to an expanded council that
    would add members to become more broadly representative than the present
    one, or calling a meeting of tribal leaders like the loya jirga gathering
    in Kabul last year…

Well, we (and Amb. Akram) don’t actually know if that is what Lakhdar Brahimi
has been discussing over these past days as he dodges bullets, mortar attacks
etc during his visit to Iraq.

Up near the top of their story, Jehl and Hodge report this:

    senior Bush administration officials said the United States was relying
    increasingly on the United Nations to put an international stamp on efforts
    to resolve differences among Iraqis on the makeup of an interim government.

    “In view of the violence, I think the wisdom of that approach has
    been validated,” a senior State Department official said of an effort that
    is counting heavily on a United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, to win agreement
    from Iraqis on a transfer plan.

So what, I hear you ask, is wrong with these approaches, as reported?

Firstly, that leak from the “senior administration officials” clearly reveals
a mindset in which these officials are still thinking of Lakhdar
as simply one other foreign contractor working for the occupation authorities.
True, that kind of was what his role was in Afghanistan– but there,
the occupation and the war venture that preceded it both had a fairly robust
imprimatur from the United Nations (who are, after all, Lakhdar’s true employers.)

In Afghanistan it was–quite appropriately– the Security Council that defined
Lakhdar’s role. In Iraq, if he plays any continuing role anything close
to the one the Bushies seek for him, it will once again be the Security Council,
not the Bush administration, that defines what that role will be. And
of course, the Security Council has never, as a body, had anything like the
same level of support for the U.S.-led occupation regime in Iraq that it’s
had for the U.S.-led occupation regime in Afghanistan.

So if the Bushies want Lakhdar Brahimi or any other U.N. functionary to
pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them in Iraq at this point,
that will certainly require a completely new Security Council resolution.
And guess what. Though the French, Russians, and other Security
Council members certainly share the general desire for a return to peace,
security, and true national sovereignty inside Iraq, they don’t necessarily
have any reason to kowtow to Washington’s preferences regarding this process.
So there will necessarily have to be some hard international bargaining
before this new mandate for a U.N. political mission in Iraq can be agreed
by the SC.

Which brings me to my second point: the idiocy of all this huffing and puffing
over what the “formula” for constituting a so-called “sovereign” Iraqi governing
body will be from July 1 on. As I noted
here
, just a week ago, for all the spin about “a return to Iraqi sovereignty”
on June 30, the Bushies have never had any real intention to hand back
into Iraqi hands any of the real attributes of national sovereignty on that
day.

So the question of which Iraqi hands the totally empty, meaningless
symbolism of maybe an Iraqi flag or two will land in come July 1 is really
almost completely meaningless.

(And of course, it’s even more meaningless–nay, Kafka-esque!–given that
the IGC is now rapidly falling apart, and so are the U.S.-“trained” Iraqi
forces that would be nominally under its command.)

So maybe, yes, the Bushies should stick with the June 30/July 1 deadline
for a handover of operative, decision-making, near-“sovereign” power in Iraq.
Or maybe, given the total disaster of their own “stewardship” of Iraqi
interests during this past year of military occupation, they should do it
even sooner than that.

But if this handover is to have a hope in hell of resolving the very real
political/military crisis in Iraq, it has to be different from the one the
Bushies had planned until now in two key respects:

  1. It has to be a real handover of executive power, that includes
    a handover of responsibility for public security in the whole country that
    includes command over all existing security forces inside the country (including
    the U.S. forces still there); authority for responsible stewardship of the
    country’s national economy; and responsibility for organizing nationwide
    elections to a constitution-writing body at the earliest possible date
  2. It has to be a handover to the United Nations, not to any chimeric,
    local-puppet body.

Along the way there, of course the US needs to do its own reaching out to
political leaders inside Iraq. It needs to issue public statements
that it has no interest in securing longterm preferential access to military
basing rights or oil or other economic resources inside Iraq. (A
declaration to this effect would do a lot to ease deep-held Iraqi fears in
these regards– fears which have certainly been stoked by many of Bremer’s
policies until now.)

It might help even more if Bremer, Rumsfeld, Wolfie, and all the rest of
them resigned and grovelingly asked the American and Iraqi peoples for forgiveness
for all the harm they have caused so wantonly to both peoples. But
I’m not holding my breath in this latter regard: the top priority has to
be given to getting the policy turned round in the right direction
.

11 thoughts on “Urgently needed: Big shift in U.S. policies in Iraq”

  1. Helena,
    In order to fulfill their agenda of transforming Iraq into a useful client state for use as a base of U.S. Middle East economic, political and military operations, the Bushies have to accomplish three things:
    1) Gain economic control of Iraq – hence all the highly illegal changes Bremer has made by fiat to Iraq’s economic structure and laws, and hence the wholesale handover of Iraq – notably its civilian infrastructure (electricity, water, telecommunications, etc.) – to American corporations. (Interesting, isn’t it, the way the Americans immediately barred Iraqi engineers and technicians – the very engineers and technicians who designed, built and maintained Iraq’s infrastructure, and who repaired it quite rapidly and effectively after the Americans destroyed it in 1991 – from making the repairs needed to restore service? It is revealing that restoring vital civilian services – and therefore the health, safety and welfare of civilians – was not a priority at all for the Bushies. It was far more important to hand it all over to Bechtel, et al. as quickly as possible.)
    2) Gain and maintain political control of Iraq. It seems clear that the Bushies cannot allow Iraqis to have any degree of self determination at any level until they have enough control of the economy to also be able to control any government that Iraqis might elect. Hence, Garner’s early and abrupt dismissal, the cancellation and overturning of local elections, and the panic over the possibility of early national elections(by the way, I have a somewhat less benign view than you seem to of Brahimi’s role here). In the mean time, they will try to control whatever political process takes place, and try to make as many as possible of their (illegal) changes unalterable.
    It isn’t lost on many Iraqis that the cruel joke called the “Interim Constitution” is intended to be part of that process. Amusingly, it was drafted by Ahmad Chalabi’s slimy nephew, “Sam” Chalabi, working from notes provided by L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer III, signed by the all-Bremer-appointed Governed Council, and ratified by L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer III before any hint of its contents was revealed to the Iraqi people.
    3) Establish and maintain a major, permanent military presence in Iraq. Of course, in order to pull this off, they need to have a “legitimate”-looking government they can control. They HAVE tried to build something that looks like a Status of Forces agreement (along with American control of just about everything except maybe garbage collection) into the “Interim Constitution”.
    If they are forced to leave Iraq without achieving these goals, the entire enterprise will have been for nothing. So, I think they’ll continue to fight and kill and destroy and manipulate, and machinate (if that wasn’t a word, it is now), and lie and cheat and steal in order to hang on.

  2. Shirin, hi–
    I totally agree with your general point here that the stakes for the US in Iraq are very high and that the Bushies see them as such. (Profits! Bases! A pro-Israeli satrapy in Iraq!) Therefore, that they would be highly inclined to “fight and kill and destroy and manipulate, and machinate … cheat and steal in order to hang on” there.
    However, it’s an election year here in the US, and the US public is rapidly becoming increasingly spooked by the signs of death, violence, and collapse of the US position in Iraq that they (we) have seen.
    I actually wrote a column Thursday for Hayat in which I spelled out that while the US may have a big advantage in terms of balance of FORCES in Iraq, it actually has a big deficit regarding the balance of WILLS/COMMITMENT there.
    Why should American families be at all happy that their sons and daughters are gettings killed and maimed for a chaotic, cock-a-mamie, and unsuccessful policy whose major goals are to maximize Hallibutron’s profits and protect the eastern flank of an Israeli government that thumbs its nose at human rights and decent behavior? Increasingly, they are not.

  3. Helena,
    Yes, you are right. The fact that it is an election year may be the factor that can save Iraq from the grips of the neocon agenda.
    What troubles would follow from a Bushite retreat may not be pretty, but many Iraqis feel right now that if it means, finally, true independence, they will go through it.
    Last night a Palestinian fellow reminded me of something that just about all Arabs know. He pointed out that if one wants to invade and subjugate a Middle Eastern country, Iraq is absolutely the worst possible choice. Iraqis – and not just Arab Iraqis – are considered uniquely hard people that way. Despite all the nonsense talk in the West about Iraq really being three countries and not one, Iraqis are the most proud and nationalistic people in the Middle East, and do not accept bowing down to outside powers for very long.
    And if Iraqis can go down in history as being the people who defeated George Bush and his rapacious regime, that will certainly be cause for even more national pride.

  5. Theologicus,
    In any case, as you probably realize power was not what was going to be transferred.

  6. Shirin.
    Yes. Transfer talk was obviously just propaganda.
    We have seen the future, but does it work:
    Rules of Engagement
    By ROBERT FISK
    April 10 / 12, 2004
    … Not a single American journalist has investigated the links between the Israeli army’s “rules of engagement”–so blithely handed over to US forces on Sharon’s orders–and the behaviour of the US military in Iraq. The destruction of houses of “suspects”, the wholesale detention of thousands of Iraqis without trial, the cordoning off of “hostile” villages with razor wire, the bombardment of civilian areas by Apache helicopter gunships and tanks on the hunt for “terrorists” are all part of the Israeli military lexicon.
    In besieging cities–when they were taking casualties or the number of civilians killed was becoming too shameful to sustain–the Israeli army would call a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations”. They did this 11 times after they surrounded Beirut in 1982. And yesterday, the American army declared a “unilateral suspension of offensive operations” around Fallujah.
    Not a word on this mysterious parallel by America’s reporters, no questions about the even more mysterious use of identical language. And in the coming days, we shall–perhaps–find out how many of the estimated 300 dead of Fallujah were Sunni gunmen and how many were women and children. Following Israel’s rules is going to lead the Americans into the same disaster those rules have led the Israelis.

  7. How right you are Helena. This war is all about protecting Sharon and making money for Hallibutron [sic]. There was a mega-conspiracy using WMDs as a pretext. However, the neoconazis and the Elders of Zion forgot the most important part – arranging for the WMDs to be found. D’oh!!!
    Perhaps there were better ways of making money for Halliburton than spending HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS on waging a war in Iraq. Perhaps Halliburton has been called to assist in the reconstruction because it actually knows something about the region and is more reliable than former Baathist engineers and not because Cheney once worked there (but will not make 1c personally from any Halliburton contracts).
    As for Zelikow, again you remove the context of his quotes. What he said (in 2002, when there was a general consensus that Iraq possessed biological, chemical and possibly nuclear weapons) was that if these weapons were to be used on Israel (either directly or indirectly via proxies such as Hamas or Hizballah), Israel could well respond in a major way that would create massive regional instability. QED, the idea was not to protect Israel qua Israel, but rather, to protect the world (and foremost the US) from the fallout of a full-scale regional conflict in the Middle East.
    Finally, Zelikow was a member of the PFIAB (an advisory body) and in his speech made clear that this was his opinion (not necessarily Rummy’s). Whether or not it was taken into account by the Bush administration at all as a factor (let alone a determining factor) has never been established.
    It is possible to argue that the war in Iraq is unjustified without creating fictitious conspiracy theories to ‘prove’ it. Hell, don’t let the facts (or insignificant things like evidence) get in the way of a good story.
    Helena, I’m sure that I will not be missed, but this is the last post that I will ever make in your shitty blog. I have come to the belated conclusion that you are not merely misguided or even just malevolent… you are a nutcase conspiracist of the highest order.

  8. Helena, for what it’s worth, I want to offer a dissenting point of view to Lewis’ comment above. I believe your posts offer an intelligent and thoughtful perspective on events in the Middle East and especially in Iraq at the moment. I’m not really sure what Lewis sees in your posts that suggest to him nuttiness or conspriracy. Perhaps he/she would like to come back for one more comment to let the rest of us in on what he/she’s reading that we aren’t.

  9. Methinks Lewis projects a bit too much. One less paranoid nutcase in the comments section, whew!

  10. It is possible to argue that the war in Iraq is unjustified without creating fictitious conspiracy theories to ‘prove’ it.
    I protest. There was nothing fictional about helena’s conspiracy theory. It was a perfectly good, straightforward, nonfictional conspiracy theory.

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