So I’m still at this conference on Iraq at the University of Kansas. I
want to put down a few more notes about what’s been going on here. I’ll
start with a few notes from what I heard John Cary, the faculty member
from the Fort Leavenworth Army Command and General Staff College say here
yesterday, that I found interesting.
He said the current level of troop deployment in Iraq is quite unsustainable.
He dismissed the idea that NATO might have any role in augmenting the force
levels. He said that maintaining “credibility” alone is not a goal
worth fighting and dying. And, asked a question about possible liberal
bias in the media, he said that in his view “the truth” lies halfway between
“the US administration fact of the day” and “the sensationalism of the Washington
Post”.
(Well, I don’t agree with his evaluation of exactly where “the truth” lies.
But it was interesting to see the broad level of daylight between his
view and that of “the US administration fact of the day”.)
Today (Saturday) at the conference, the emphasis has been on the domestic
dimensions, here in the US, of the whole Iraq war issue. Notable firstly
about this session was the willingness of more than 80 good citizens of Kansas
to turn out at 8:30 on a beautiful Saturday morning to come and take part
in the discussion here. These people– maybe 60 percent of them looking
like retirees– have been really motivated to give up their time to come
and take part.
We started off with an address by George Mason University professor James
Pfiffner on W’s decision to go to war. Jim, who revealed that
he himself spent a year in the forces in Vietnam, started off reciting two
long lists of names of people in the Bush administration: the first, of officials
who have had no combat experience, but were all “gung-ho” for the
war, and the second, of officials who have had combat experience but
were much more cautious regarding the decision to move towards war.
He said something interesting about a key advice-providing mechanisms that
the prez has that I hadn’t known before. The organization in question
is that veteran old body the PFIAB (President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board). Pfiffner said that W had significantly downgraded PFIAB’s role
in providing good, seasoned advice to him on foreign intelligence issues.
Indeed, he moved its office from the White House’s Old Executive Office
Building to the New EOB– some few hundred yards down the street, but almost
a universe away in terms of the ability to provide timely information, and
also in terms of its general prestige within the federal bureaucracy. Instead
of relying primarily on the PFIAB, Pfiffner said, the prez seemed to have
been relying much more on another body, the “Defense Policy Board.”
Not coincidentally, PFIAB is headed by that seasoned old expert Brent Scowcroft.
The DPB was headed until last year by Richard Perle. (He had
to step down as head after revelations about conflicts of interest with his
continuing connections with private contractors doing business with the DOD
and other federal agencies; but he stayed on the DPB for a while after that.)
Scowcroft, of course, has been most notable in recent times for the very
public advice he offered W in the lead-up to the war, that he not undertake
it.
Pfiffner also drew a telling comparison between W’s decision to invade Iraq
in 2003, and the way we are starting to view it now, and the CIA’s notable
after-action report after the disastrous failure of JFK’s decision to invade
Cuba in the Bay of Pigs episode. On that earlier occasion, the planners
of the Bay of Pigs invasion had simply assumed that if they launched an attack
against Castro’s Cuba with a force of 1,000 people–many of whom didn’t even
speak Spanish– that “the Cuban people would rise up and help us to overthrow
Castro”. That prediction proved as tragically unfounded as those of
the neocons that the Iraqi people would all rise up and strew the US forces
in Iraq with flowers and candy.
On the Vietnam analogy, he quoted an unnamed source as saying, “history doesn’t
repeat itself– but it does rhyme.” He then laid out a list of parallels
between Vietnam and Iraq:
(1) They both started out with a strong sense of idealism.
(2) There was a serious initial under-estimation of the troop levels
required.
(3) In each case the problems being addressed was actually primarily political,
yet was being addressed through military means. In both cases, the
major challenge was/is about the legitimacy of the local administration being
supported by the US.
(4) Each conflict turned into a guerrilla war, with the one in Vietnam
being a jungle guerrilla war and the one in Iraq being an urban guerrilla
war.
(5) In each case, the war morphed into “as test of US credibility”. (See
“Cary” above.)
In a later panel discussion, Jim Sheffield of Wichita State University
noted that a recent poll revealed that 21 percent of US citizens now consider
the war in Iraq as “the main issue” in this year’s presidential election–
while just one month previously, only 11 percent had answered in that way.
Gotta run.