W’s Iraq debacle unfolds

Swish, swish, swish… Can you hear it? That, friends, is the sound of our president’s chickens coming home to roost in Iraq.
I know I’ve said before that I get no pleasure from seeing this terrible–and quite avoidable–tragedy unfolding there. It will mean more families in the US and in the “coalition” countries hearing that dreaded knock on the door. It will mean many more Iraqi families hearing news of the death of a loved one. It will mean more people returning to their homes broken in body and spirit. It will mean –most likely–more political and social disruption yet to come, in Iraq and in neighboring countries. More grief, more pain, more suffering to come.
And it didn’t have to be like this.
Last night, at a seder in Washington DC with some politically active (and very anti-Bush) friends, we raised our glasses to “Next year in the White House”. That, it seems to me, is the only way at this point for the people responsible for this debacle to get anything like what they deserve for their lying, their scheming, and their war-mongering.
As I think I pointed out the last time things went downhill badly in Iraq for the US forces–last November–I had foreseen so much of this happening. One of my main points of comparison is what happened to the Israelis after their quite “voluntary” attempt to launch regime-change-by-force: in Lebanon, 1982. See this portion of a JWN post written March 21, 2003 (or the whole post there, if you want to: it’s in ‘Archives’, for some technical reason.) Or this one, from May 20, 2003.
None of this is rocket science. It just takes a basic understanding of the fact that most people in the world don’t like to have their countries remade by foreign occupation armies. I don’t know why that should be so hard for some people to understand.
But now, we are where are. More and more cities in Iraq are being taken over by–their own people! USA Today scooped the biggies by reporting that “about 24,000” of the US troops who were supposed to rotate home over the next few weeks would have to stay on, instead. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for picking that up.) The brass and the suits in the DoD are each, separately, rushing big-time to pursue a policy of CYA… And the Prez has been… playing baseball.
Hey, Dick Cheney! Isn’t it time you had someone go in there and re-program young Junior?
There is only one even half-way plausible way for our Prez to get his backside out of this mess…


It is to eat however much crow it takes to try to persuade the U.N. Security Council to get in there and take some control of the process. It’s true that many U.N. bureaucrats are extremely disinclined to do that–for any number of reasons. But at the end of the day, the U.N. and its bureaucrats are the servants of the people who run the Security Council… and we all know who they are.
A major new S.C. resolution on the subject is, of course, absolutely necessary. The politics of getting it passed will not be easy. Too bad the Prez has been so busy making enemies all around the world with his hubristic smirking, childish nicknames, and don’t-mess-with-Texas “attitude”.
Next week, Tony Blair will be visiting Washington. Patrick Tyler is reporting in the NYT today that the top British diplos in Iraq have been quite angered by Paul Bremer’s management style:

    British officials say that … [they] believe that the Coalition Provisional Authority under Mr. Bremer has become too “politicized,” meaning that events are orchestrated and information controlled with the American political agenda uppermost in mind.
    Diplomats who have served in Iraq say they are concerned that the occupation authority has not done enough to reach out to the Shiite leaders over the last 12 months, or to include Iraqis more broadly in the critical areas of security and national reconstruction strategy…
    Mr. Blair, who has a close relationship with Mr. Bush, publicly avoids any hint of criticism of American policy. Whether the prime minister shares some of the views that are being expressed by these seasoned diplomats was unclear.
    The departing British envoy in Baghdad, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, had expressed concerns to his colleagues about Mr. Bremer’s style in running postwar Iraq, particularly in closely controlling decision-making with minimal input from Iraqis and other voices, including Sir Jeremy’s, said officials who declined to be identified…

Before going to Iraq, Greenstock was Her Majesty’s Ambassador to the U.N., where he dealt closely with Iraq-related issues for a number of years. So he has probably felt all along that he knew much more about what needed doing there than Baghdad fashion maven and expert language twister Paul Bremer.
I’m hoping that Blair and anyone else who can speak to Bush these days–and who knows his backside from his elbow in the realm of foreign affairs, if you see what I mean–will be urging him, hard, to do whatever it takes to get a workable U.N. mandate in there.
Meanwhile, all of us U.S. voters here who want to start to hold the man and his cronies accountable for the tragic mess they have brought down onto the world know what we need to do… This will be the new, authentic global “coalition”: the coalition to beat George W. Bush. Let’s give him the Aznar option! (Defeated Spanish President Jose-Maria Aznar will soon, today’s WaPo reported, be taking up a research fellowship at Georgetown University.)

10 thoughts on “W’s Iraq debacle unfolds”

  1. I’ve been meditating on the possibility that there is no debacle in Iraq so severe that it would motivate the present administration to do that. IMO, the Bush WH did not choose this state of affairs so much as it chose the Bush WH. You could say we are watching an endgame in which the object is to adhere doggedly to the fiction that the plan of attenuated audacity, arrogance, and bullying will ultimately prevail; as our current lot of authorities see their losses mount, they will go double-or-nothing until their triumphalism is somehow vindicated.
    What I see is a group of elites who are deadly serious about winning against a rival set of elites whose track record they can only scorn. The rival set of elites is, of course, the political leaders of their source of finance capital–the executives of the EU and East Asia.

  2. Helena,
    What are your thoughts on Josh Marshall’s article?
    I don’t think he’s the only one hinting that some level of controlled chaos is the intention of the neo-con uber-hawks. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to believe that such a crazy idea can really be true.

  4. Vivion– There’s a lot in Josh M’s piece that’s quite interesting. I think he downplays the importance of three important points. First, the “strategic” impetus behind the overthrow of Saddam: namely, that Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Co. were desperate to replace reliance on Saudi bases with a whole new basing arrangement inside Iraq that they could use exactly as they desired as a forward base from which to threaten Syria, Iran, and anyplace else they chose. Second, the degree to which their entire Iraq “plan” (heh-heh-heh) depended on Chalabi’s ignorant and venal forecasts about lasting Iraqi Shi-ite devotion for the Americans and their plans being proven correct. Third, the existence of at least some meaningful disagreement within the administration.
    It was a truly massive roll of the dice when they decided to launch that quite voluntary war. I think the neocons had understood it as such. What they hadn’t understood– though the vast majority of us who have worked on analyzing the ME for our entire careers (in my case, 30 years) had tried to warn them– was that the odds against them “winning” in this extremely high-stakes poker game were next-to-nil.
    As it is, there is no way they (we) can pull out of the poker game and return comfortably to the status quo ante. There are no safe-but-occasionally-problematic bases in Saudi to which they’ll be welcomed back. (Notice how the Saudis this time aren’t actually cooperating on oil prices?) There is no way to “put back” an Iraq that is stable and doesn’t actually pose any threat to US interests.
    They have indeed “whacked this hornet’s nest.” But let’s not go overboard with demeaning zoomorphic imagery. Those are real people there in Iraq and the rest of the region, fighting to defend their real interests.
    What I’m hoping and working for is that rather than go back to any broad version of the status quo ante of US hegemonism we can use the present cicrumstances to start building the basis for a much more interdependent relationship between between the US and the rest of the world in the future.

  5. It was a truly massive roll of the dice when they decided to launch that quite voluntary war. I think the neocons had understood it as such. What they hadn’t understood– though the vast majority of us who have worked on analyzing the ME for our entire careers (in my case, 30 years) had tried to warn them– was that the odds against them “winning” in this extremely high-stakes poker game were next-to-nil.
    Helena, do you suppose that the Israeli hawks with whom the administration neocons have such close ties also knew that the odds of success in Iraq were close to nil? I know that the theory that democracy in the Arab world would solve the I/P conflict was first presented in an Israeli book. But do you think that the neocons’ Likud allies really believed that theory?
    It’s possible that Sharon & co expected that a failed invasion of Iraq would worsen relations between the US and the Arab/Muslim world. That would not be a bad thing from their point of view.

  6. No Pref–
    I know, because there’s a thick paper-trail there, that the Likudniks are very happy whenever relations between the US and Saudi or Egypt, in particular, are bad. (Gosh, if they got better, then the Prez might start listening to those two regime’s eminently sensible and extremely moderate urgings on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process! Can’t have that, can we!)
    I know, too, that they were at the forefront of those egging the Bush administration on into the war against Iraq. That is very well documented, and Zelikow’s little indiscretion of September 2002 just reconfirmed it.
    I personally have not seen any evidence that they were eager for the administration to get into bad trouble in Iraq. I put nothing past them. But there is considerable evidence that they’ve been hand-in-glove with Chalabi for some time, so they might all just have bought into his ignorant and venal etc. forecasts re a post-Saddam Iraq. And of course all those serried ranks of Israeli “experts” on Iraq like the hugely over-exposed Amatzia Baram did no better on this than anyone else in the pro-neocon ranks.
    Frankly, I think the Likudniks don’t give a toss about the welfare of the Iraqi people, one way or the other. What they did care about was cutting Iraqi Baathism down to size as a precursor to doing the same to Syrian Baathism. Did they think a majority-Shiite Mesopotamia would be fundamentally pro-Israel (because anti-Sunni)? Possibly, many of them did. Because they really are deeply, deeply ignorant about the domestic dynamics inside the Arab countries…. Like, prior to 1982 many Israelis thought the rise of Shi-ite power in Lebanon would result in a pro-Israeli order there… Quite frequently, their hatred of the Sunni Arab world leads them into deeply mistaken judgments…
    Which probably doesn’t answer your question.

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