Earlier today, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley publicly admitted that in Iraq, “obviously, as I think everyone would agree and as the President has said, things are not proceeding well or fast enough…”
You have to know the Bushites are worried. Extremely worried.
The above link goes to the White House transcript of what they call a “press gaggle”, that was given by Hadley and White House press person Tony Snow-job, to reporters flying with Bush to Estonia for a NATO gathering. From there, he’ll be proceeding to Jordan, to meet Iraqi “Prime Minister” Nouri al-Maliki. Cheney and Condi Rice are also burning a lot of jet fuel over the Middle East these days as they try to get a few last-minute (lame?) ducks in a row to prevent a complete catastrophe spiraling out of control in Iraq.
(Where today, incidentally, a major oil refinery in Kirkuk got set ablaze by mortars and a US plane was downed in Anbar province— and numerous other tragedies befell the country’s long-suffering people.)
If you have a few minutes, go read the rest of that “press gaggle” transcript. I think in the future it’ll be a seminal text in Bushology. Including this classic exchange:
- Q I have a question… What kind of mood is the President in right now about all these different problems around the world?
MR. HADLEY: You know him — he’s a very resilient guy. And, look, it’s a new Middle East that is emerging. And I think he sees it as a real opportunity, but also challenges. And it is both of those. And the task he’s given for himself and for the rest of us is how to take advantage of these opportunities to advance the war on terror, advance the freedom agenda, and, over time, bring real stability to that part of the region…
Ohmigod. Does he think we’re complete idiots??
And meanwhile, from the other side of the world– Australia– here’s another indicator of how worried Bush and all his supporters ought rightly to be, right now. That PDF doc I linked to there is the text of a lecture given Monday at Sydney’s”Lowy Institute for International Policy” by Robert O’Neill, an experienced and impeccably credentialed guru on strategic affairs who was the Director of the IISS in London back when I joined it in the mid-1980s. After that, he held the Chichele Chair of the History of War at Oxford for many years.
O’Neill, as I remember him from the couple of times I met him, is a charming and fairly laid-back Australian guy. So when he starts distributing his speeches with underlinings, you have to know that he’s trying to make sure he gets his point across.
This is the opening to his lecture (all the underlinings in the excerpts that follow are from the original text there):
- We stand at a very testing time in terms of shaping our security environment. I do not want to be overly pessimistic. We and our forebears have come through worse situations and gone on to great periods of prosperity, relative peace and cultural achievement. But for us at this time, that happy end is by no means assured…
Are you paying attention yet?
So first, he talks about some of the lessons he learned while serving as an intelligence officer with the Australian forces fighting in Vietnam. And he lists five sound, very realistic lessons about the nuts and bolts of “counter-insurgency” that he learned there.
Then this:
- Fast forward to Iraq in 2006 – is it a familiar picture? Iraq is an even worse problem than Vietnam. It is not a unified nation state like Vietnam but an artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921 to kill two birds with the one stone: holding down an Arab revolt while finding a place for Prince Feisal whom the French had ejected from Syria. Iraq has been held together by force ever since, ready to fly apart once the grip of that force was broken. In 2002 it was clear to me that the main problem in invading Iraq would be the insurgency and chaos phase that would follow the toppling of Saddam. When I put the point then to relevant friends in the United States who supported the pending invasion of Iraq, it was dismissed. “We will do the heavy lifting and get rid of Saddam. The allies can handle the occupation.” Of course toppling Saddam was not the “heavy lifting”. So the coalition went to war with little understanding of what they were about, a flawed strategy and no policy in place for responding to what was bound to follow – a formidable insurgency. The invasion went in with a US force much smaller than that of General Westmoreland in Vietnam, who himself had faced a much smaller problem. As for allied forces in the invasion of Iraq, they were hopelessly short of the strength needed to mount a counter-insurgency campaign.
The Coalition launched the war without enough troops, US or allied, to do the job and without a strategy, force structure and the necessary civil capabilities for meeting the main challenge. Having blundered into a hornets’ nest, the intervening force and its allies in Iraq have taken a hammering. The fate of our Iraqi allies, and their civil population, like that of our Vietnamese partners in the 1970s, is perhaps the saddest aspect of the war. Initially Coalition forces had little idea of how to fight an insurgency. The sense of all five of the points that I mentioned a few minutes ago was ignored or violated…
A few pages later, we come to this assessment, bleak indeed for the Bushites and all other “western” hegemonists:
- Given the result of the recent US elections, we need to think hard about the consequences of possible defeat in Iraq. To elaborate on what I said earlier, that conflict can be won only by a much more effective coalition effort, requiring a major increase in US and allied troop numbers in Iraq, substantial improvements in training and operational methods, and a much stronger civil reconstruction effort. This is not likely to happen. The probable outcomes are either a sudden descent into chaos as Coalition forces are withdrawn, or a protracted civil war, overlain with an insurgency against remaining coalition forces.
In the event of chaos, effective government in Iraq will cease for at least some years during which terrorist groups will be able to concentrate, re-build, flourish and reach out to other targets utside Iraq. Enemy forces will be heartened; recruiting will rise; funds and weapons will pour in; pressure will be exerted on regional governments friendly to the West; more young men and women who are willing to commit suicide to harm Western and Israeli interests will become available; and the oil price will rise to new heights. Defeat in Iraq will be a serious blow to the public standing of the United States and will invite other challenges to its authority…
Iran will read a message of encouragement for its intransigence in dealing with the West. It will almost certainly go ahead to produce nuclear weapons. It will exercise an overshadowing influence in Iraq, Syria, the Arab Gulf states and Israel. The lesson of US failure in Iraq will be read (perhaps wrongly) as US unwillingness to attempt regime-change in Iran. The North Koreans will probably draw similar conclusions, although with less justification than in the case of Iran because North Korea is nowhere near as strong a state. Nuclear weapons proliferation will become more difficult to control with the threat of intervention against the proliferators dismissed…
And here is O’Neill’s final take on the US’s situation today:
- It has huge capacities for good around the world. But it is also sailing through uncharted waters and in recent years has been in heavy seas. We Australians, as one of America’s serious allies, have a responsibility to help the US through this difficult passage. We can do this in many ways through diplomacy, economic co-operation and military commitments. We also have an obligation, when we see our senior partner about to make a mistake, to speak out and warn of the consequences, and even offer some suggestions on how to reach our common goals more effectively.
As I look into the future I can see some very undesirable outcomes, but we are not in their grip yet. With a major effort intellectually, politically, commercially and militarily, we might just avoid them and come through into the more peaceful upland that we hoped for so much at the end of the Cold War and then failed to find. The great challenge for leaders and analysts in the decades ahead will be to find ways of building cohesion and co-operation, not division and destruction. We must not let the War on Terror destroy the world order from which we derive so much benefit and protection.
Note the way he put that. It is not “terror” that he is accusing of threatening to destroy the world order– but the “War on Terror.” From a man of O’Neill’s strong pro-western leanings, these are strong words indeed.
Bob O’Neill seems very worried. I think that from his perspective he is right to be. I am worried, too, because I know that before there is any chance of any kind of US withdrawal being organized from Iraq– orderly or chaotic– tens of thousands more Iraqis will die, and the whole conflagration may spread to other, very vulnerable parts of the region.
On a related note, I have been trying to take some time to further flesh out my analysis of the “Namibia Option” for a UN-covered, orderly US withdrawal from Iraq… But it still needs a bit more time, and as I work on it I have been having this increasingly strong and sinking feeling that any prospect of an orderly US withdrawal from Iraq is becoming increasingly unlikely with each day that passes. So it feels like a bit of a futile exercise. But still, I do want to get it done…
Afterthought: Oh, this wasn’t meant to be an afterthought but I forgot to put it in the first time around… I just wanted to note that while I don’t agree with Bob O’Neill’s view that Iraq is solely an “artificial creation of the British Empire in 1921”, still, he does signal an extremely significant point there, which is one I’m also confronting as I look at the “Namibia option”. Namely that whereas in Vietnam, or Namibia, the nationalist side basically had one single, dominant organization with centralized decision-making, however ragged it may sometimes have been, in Iraq you very evidently don’t have that kind of nationalist organizational integrity and unity of command. This considerably complicates matters for everyone concerned: the various– and often brutally competing– “nationalist” forces themselves, the occupying forces, and the above all the poor bloody civilians who in Iraq have become caught up in the middle of all this, so horrendously.
In calmer circumstances, this is precisely the kind of complex political picture that some form of democratic process, including a nationwide election, should be able to regulate. But in Iraq you have a situation in which (1) the conditions nowadays look extremely unsuited to the holding of any further elections, and (2) the whole concept of “elections” and “democracy” has probably become seriously tainted by the terrible abuse of the practice under the auspices of the US occupation.
Plus, inside Iraq, the UN enjoys nothing like the political support that it enjoyed in Namibia in the 1980s. (Because of the nefarious role the UN was forced to play during the 1990s, in enforcing the US-UK-imposed sanctions regime against the Iraqi people and their institutions.)
Truly an extremely tangled web. Maybe all we can do at this point is get down on our knees and pray???
Helena
The British have done orderly withdrawals from a lot of places.
The key aspect seems to be to have a clear understanding of who is going to take over after they leave and the announcement of when they are going. This gnerally leads to a ceasefire.
The mechanics vary. However in general they arrange not to have to withdraw under fire.
There is an implicit understanding of both these aspects in yesterday’s announcement.
http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/pdf/meeting_transcripts/271106browne.pdf
Helena
If you really want food for thought try Richard Lugar on the next phase of Armageddon by Numbers.
http://lugar.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm?id=266087
When I worked in the Southern California aerospace industry, we used to call this kind of peripatetic activity: “moving-target management.” The late, great historian Barbara Tuchman called it “working the levers” so as to give an appearance of purposeful activity when in fact perfectly paralyzed by self-inflicted, wooden-headed folly. I thought of writing a little verse about it, but then realized that I already had. So here, suitably edited where appropriate, I offer:
“Deputy Dubya’s Sneak Public Relations”
In Baghdad, our ambassador
So-called: the Afghan Hound
Had vetoed the Iraqi choice,
To throw his weight around
So now for their Prime Minister
Iraq has got our guy
Whose lack of credibility
Makes Colin Powell sigh
George summoned on short notice
This “leader” he had picked
Then as the world watched, mortified,
George Bush’s boots he licked
George looked him in the eyeball
To see the inner man
Then saw what he had come to see:
The planning of a plan!
They plan to play mechanic
They’ve planned the script and scene
They plan to work the levers of
Their Rube Goldberg machine
They plan on repetition
The public mind to sway
They plan to say they have a plan
Three hundred times a day
George slept on 9/11
Then saw his great big chance:
He’d cover up for failure by
Concocting a romance!
He had no plan for “victory”
He barely had a prayer
Still, if he could not fight them “here”
He’d fight them “over there”
So now Iraq means “over there”
A place where George can fight
The “terrorism” he creates
‘Cause he can’t get things right
Deep in the Green Zone Castle
Surrounded by high walls
George makes his visit unannounced
Which shows he has no …
Why not do that “flypaper” thing,
Just like those troops of his?
Why not attract some “flies” to show
The genius that he is?
Repuglicans ran Congress, too
This meant they got to say
How they “supported troops” but gave
Themselves a raise in pay
They made a valiant effort
They sought to pass the buck
So at a doughnut rolling ’round
They took a flying …
Frustrated “over there,” George planned
To move around and roam
Conducting all-out war against
His critics back at home
He planned to show activity
He planned to have a plan
Then focused on some floating straws
Like any drowning man
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2006
Sorry to be somewhat off topic. But I don’t remember to have read about it here and it seems like an important, although tragic news, about which the mainstream US media don’t really inform the public.
On Friday 3th of November, a US citizen imolated himself in Chicago, in order to protest against the Iraq war. But the US media made a blackout over the story which was only mentionned in the back pages of a local newspaper and on a single local radio. You have to wonder when you compare it to the wide echo of other imolations (for instance that of Jan Palach in Tchekoslovaquia at the time of the Praha spring. You can find more info about this tragic act of protest at Indymedia.
Here is Malachi Ritscher’s own obituary. It appeared on his own website. And here is more about Malachi Ritscher’s history. Finally, you’ll find other links here.
Looking back a bit upon another, unfinished malignant opus: “Fernano Po, U.S.A.” (the saga of post-linguistic primitivism) it seems only fair to keep a little perspective on this long-running American War on Iraq. After all, as I believe Frances Fitzgerald said somewhere in “Fire in the Lake”: once any war has gone on long enough it can only begin and continue to repeat itself. So, in the new, post-electoral spirit of bipartisanship, I offer:
“Boobie Official Mendacity”
The characters in government
Will change from time to time
As fashion colors change from green
To slightly lemon-lime
But lying never changes, like
The meter of this rhyme
The former Clinton government
Once wanted to inflict
The normal needless bombing on
A country it had picked
Because its petty potentate
Our boots had never licked
It seems that of the suspects whom
We normally accuse
One stood apart in infamy
Thus him we would abuse
Because he could not stop us so
That made him great to use
Inspectors roamed across his land
Discovering not much
Of mass-destructive weaponry,
And gas, and germs, and such
Thus did Saddam Hussein refuse
To come through in the clutch
So in frustration Bubba Bill
Turned Madam Albright loose
To use up some “diplomacy”
Much like a hangman’s noose
To threaten peace with war until
War seemed our only use
A decade’s worth of sanctions failed
To bring the tyrant down
But only starved his children which
Caused few of us to frown
If hungry Arab kids can’t swim
We say: “Then let them drown”
“We think the price is worth it,” said
Ms Albright in her way
Yet glib and airy phrases left
No food upon the tray
Just surly scorn for diplomats
Who never have to pay
But still those damned inspectors caused
Our President to pout:
To bomb might make them hostages
Which could extend the bout
To something more than half a round
And not the hoped-for rout
This Bubba Bill could not abide:
So he asked the UN
To have its people leave and tell
Him where and how and when
So he could blame their absence on
Saddam and all his men
To pull off this duplicity
He needed lies to spout
And so he took the muzzle off
Of Madam Albright’s snout
So she could lie and say Saddam
Had forthwith “kicked them out”
And so with the inspectors gone
And nothing more to say
The bomber pilots got to fly
Three miles above harm’s way
And blitz some helpless cities
Just to earn their monthly pay
Just so with Boobie Bumbler George
Who also wanted in
To knock about the whipping boy
And all his clan and kin
Yet once again inspectors proved
An obstacle to spin
They’d gone ahead and done their jobs
And found no smoking gun
Which vexed another President
Who so much needed one
To validate more lies and his
Vendetta left undone
“He tried to kill my daddy!” swore
The vengeful Boobie Bush
“I know because the CIA
Has searched the Hindu Kush;
And found out lots of things, so now
I say shove comes to push”
So Boobie George told the UN
That its men hadn’t found
What Boobie George and Dick and Don
Knew lay somewhere around
Someplace where only they could see
On undiscovered ground
And Boobie Condoleeza Rice
And Colin Powell, too,
Proved once again that Black folks lie
Just like the White ones do
Repeating what no one believed
Exactly right on cue
With summer coming on so soon
And springtime cool so short
The bombing had to start at once
Lest hot weather abort
Mad plans to land upon a ship
Sent steaming back to port
And so once more the snoops and hounds
Packed up and left Iraq
The UN wished to take no part
In Bush’s planned attack
Yet still the obvious and bald
Required a little slack
To cover for their rush to war
The Bush Bunch needed spin
They claimed they had no choice because
They wanted so to win
And bad Saddam had not allowed
Inspectors to come in
Thus here we have a sorry tale
Of two groups sworn to tell
No truth if they could help it
And they could, so what the hell?
And Boobies, anyway, had grown
Accustomed to the smell
Saddam Hussein had let a host
Of spies stay at his inn
But yet it didn’t change a thing
Or mitigate his sin
Bill lied about the “kicking out”
And George the “letting in”
The Presidents who work for us
Decline to let us know
The things we need to supervise
Their fumbling tell and show
So wars begin on schedule and
The piles of bodies grow
Bill Clinton swore one type of lie;
George Bush another kind
They both had lied so much that each
Thought none would ever mind
With Boobies all so fast asleep
The bland could lead the blind
If once their lips commence to move
A lie we should suspect
And if their lips should move again
We should at once reflect
That we can — in their moving lips —
A naked lie detect
Their lying we should not expect
To bother them that much
To make them tell the truth would be
To rob them of their crutch
If they could choose, they’d lie so that
They wouldn’t loose their touch
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2005
Mr O’Neil may be a strategic guru but his own analysis justifies his pessimism as much by its own skewed vision alongside the dangers he highlights.
Eliminating cadres supporting the vietcong resistance may well, in a practical sense, be an improved operational methodology. Knowing and studying your opponent, and being flexible in tactics I think the point being made.
But how do we eliminate the cadres on our side?
Last week the Prime Minister of Australia of Australia, Mr. John Howard while visiting Vietnam, commented that he was a supporter of the American led intervention and believes still in it being ‘right’ as strategy.
I don’t know how or if his hosts responded to this.
I gather from Mr. Howards remark, despite the outcomes being completely antithetical to the Allied forces stated aims, that is, preventing a national communist government, and despite the suffering, injustice, ignominy and repudiation by his fellow citizens of that conflict, he is satisfied, even today that his anti-communist driven stance, without nuance, was the correct one to take.
Failure was not inevitable in Vietnam, political accommodation, a respect for and an understanding of the country’s historicity, support for de-colonisation, as our ally against the japanese the guerillas expected, and deserved that support.
These should have been the drivers of policy, it is not necessary to speculate on different outcomes. The results could not have been worse.
People derive different lessons from the Viet conflict.
I derived this; the balance of effort should be towards non-military tactics to ensure a military victory.
The military option, its a last resort
because it unpredictable.
Non-military tactics to be effective should:
Ensure perceptions of justice and fairness avoiding double standards and hypocrisy.
Eschew dogmatism, it is dangerous.
Understand in detail who you are dealing with.
Have respect for opponents, especially resist the psychology of demonisation.
Proffer inclusivity.
Never fail in preparedness to negotiate.
And avoiding self-defeating tactics?
Look at our own ranks first.
I believe the dangers coming are real enough. But am not optimistic about ability to prepare to deal with it.
Iraq is an artificial state created by the British empire in 1921, is O’neil prepared to admit that Israel is not only a creation of the British, but two thirds of its citizen have been imported worldwide, on the expense of its inhabitans who were evacuated by dispicable massacres and forced evacuation to neighbouring countries. Turning them into refugees and occupying their land in the name of God.
This mythical creation was excuted by the same people who are now claiming that Iraq is an artificial state.
His analysis implies that not only the state is artificially created, but its inhabitant as well.
Seems that the West have an open monopoly on the people of the East. And that has to end.
These are real people, not virtual inhabitants.
This kind of thinking has to end.