I have been scrying all the best news reports I can find regarding what can credibly be known about the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Based on past journalistic performance, this account by the WaPo’s Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks is probably as good as any. It tracks fairly well with this one by the LA Times’s Paul Richter.
The ISG is due to present its report in public on Wednesday, Dec, 6. Group co-chairs Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton apparently set great stock by having the group emerge with a single set of recommendations. Maybe that’s the reason the recommendations as reported (leaked, really) so far don’t go nearly far enough.
What seems to be known about the recommendations is that they are extremely cautious on the issue of troop withdrawals; and I’ve also seen no mention yet of the ISG pushing for a significant shift of responsibility and authority towards the UN, which I still think is a sine qua non for finessing the tricky politics and diplomacy of an orderly US withdrawal.
The boldest thing that does still seem to be in the report is some kind of a recommendation that the administration needs to talk directly with Syria and Iran, about Iraq. Baker and Ricks’s article did not make this sound like a firm recommendation. They wrote only, “Among other things, the commission considered proposals to reach out to Iran and Syria and to convene a regional conference to bring all of Iraq’s neighbors into the process of stabilizing the country.”
Richter and the NYT’s David Sanger, by contrast, described the talk-to-Syria-&-Iran recommendation as more of a done deal (at the ISG level). Richter even wrote, “Although the report’s prescription for a troop drawdown attracted attention this week, the 10 panel members consider a recommendation for a new diplomatic offensive, including talks with Iran and Syria, to be its most important.”
Regarding the military dimensions of the ISG ‘s recommendations, Baker and Ricks wrote that the ISG,
- plans to recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis…
The call to pull out combat brigades by early 2008 would be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable, predicated on the assumption that circumstances on the ground would permit it, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the commission’s report will not be released until next week. But panel members concluded that it is vital to set a target to put pressure on Iraqi leaders to do more to assume responsibility for the security of their country.
(They note that, “The choice of early 2008 as a goal could also, intentionally or not, change the nature of the debate over the war at the height of the U.S. presidential primary season.”)
They give these further details of the military plan:
- Pulling out combat units would not mean the end of the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, which could continue in a different form for years. The withdrawal would be partially offset by an influx of advisers, trainers and embedded troops. The number of such troops now stands at roughly 5,000 and should be quadrupled to about 20,000, the group’s plan says, according to a source. The commission envisions leaving at least several thousand quick-strike U.S. combat soldiers to protect all those other American troops.
Although it was not clear how many U.S. troops would be left in Iraq by 2008, some people knowledgeable about the commission’s deliberations have said that it might be possible to reduce the force of 140,000 to half by then. “There’ll still be a presence there that will be significant just because of the nature of embedded forces,” said one of the sources familiar with the commission’s report.
This military plan looks to me to be doomed to failure– primarily because neither the ISG nor the government that it is seeking to advise has any kind of realistic plan for transforming the currently destructive imbroglio of dysfunctional political relations among the players inside Iraq (including the multiple Iraqi parties along with, of course, the US occupiers) into a more constructive and workable set of relations.
The idea that the role of US military “advisers” is a completely a-political, technical role seems to be a completely unexamined assumption there and in much of the current US discussion on this issue. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Being deeply entangled– or as they now cutely phrase it, “embedded”– with Iraqi troops down to the small-unit level ensures a deepler entanglement of vulnerable US soldiers in the heart of Iraqi politics than ever before. This, at a time when core issues of authority, legitimacy, and political power inside Iraq are still being deeply, and very violently, contested… Which is a way of saying, yes, that Iraq is already in a civil war.
So the ISG is proposing “embedding” US soldiers as advisors with precisely which set of participants in this civil war? Perhaps all of them?
What an ignorant, fundamentally a-historical idea this is. (Sorry, Jim and Lee, I just needed to get that off my chest.)
One of the several big failures of nerve of the ISG was that it resisted all calls that it recommend that the Bushites publicly declare a deadline for the completion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Heck, I haven’t even seen any mention of the idea that the President should a public declaration that “the US has no lasting claim upon the territory or resources of Iraq and no intention of maintaining a long-term military presence there.”
- And talking of the presidential declarations made by Bush, I have to say the one he made yesterday, in which he smirkingly disparaged the idea that “there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq” to be one of the most wrongheaded he’s made for a long time now. It’s right up there “bring ’em on!”
He doesn’t want a “graceful exit”? What does he think the alternative is: No exit at all? No, Mr. George W. Bush, the alternative to a “graceful” (or, as I prefer to describe it, “orderly”) US exit from Iraq is a disorderly, perhaps even catastrophically chaotic US exit.
So please stop disparaging the idea of a graceful exit. If there’s a catastrophe in Iraq in the months ahead and the death-rates for US service members suddenly spiral out of control, you’ll wish desperately that you had never been so dismissive of it. Attaining any kind of an orderly exit will be harder to do (and exact a higher political cost from the US) with each week that you continue to delay it.
Anyway, as noted above, the report of the ISG when it is finally released looks set to be a big disappointment. The only possible silver lining there is that, though they seem to have ditched nearly all the other principles of good sense in their recommendations– in the interests of playing to a political lowest-common-denominator on Capitol Hill that is Democratic as much as it is Republican– at least it looks as though there’s a good chance the ISG will be sticking firm with the recommendation to talk to Iran and Syria.
That is no small matter. Indeed, it will be a particularly important position for these politically well-connected and widely respected public figures to hold onto, at a time when the broad campaign to continue demonizing Iran and Syria– and possibly even launching a military attack against one or both of them– still continues. Once Baker, Hamilton, and their colleagues all say in unison that the US should be talking to Iran and Syria that should, I believe, change the framework of the debate over that issue inside this country.
Let’s hope so.
But then, we need to go back to pushing even harder for a full and speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (If the drivers who came by our intersection at the peace demo yesterday are anything to judge by, that demand is still out there, and now being more strongly and angrily expressed by the US public than ever. Get with the program, Dems!)
The recommendations of the ISG may be a disappointment, but they look to be consistent with what Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group has been saying repeatedly in his column at the openDemocracy web site. As he writes in his latest article, strategic considerations rule out a full US withdrawal:
“But beyond this is a core strategic reality, and an argument that has been frequently made in this series of columns (if largely hidden from view in Washington). The massive fossil-fuel reserves in the Persian Gulf region make this the most important part of the world for Washington outside the continental United States; and Iraq really is a cornerstone of US security policy in the region. … A complete military withdrawal from Iraq remains highly unlikely; and, if it did ever happen, it would be a foreign-policy disaster for the United States of historic proportions – far more so than Vietnam.”
Dear Helena,
The ISG Report and this entire charlatan-style noise by Baker et al. is all a huge farce.
– Major withdrawal of up to 50% of the troops by spring 2008? And even that, contingent upon good conditions on the ground? How is that different from what Cheney is saying now?
– To think that there exists a real line that separates the White House (Cheney, Bush, the whole crowd) from the ISG is a pleasant delusion. It is like saying that Baker is allowed to say/do anything without checking with Bush Sr. Or saying that the latter doesn’t talk with his son. This good-cop/bad-cop routine is all for public consumption.
– The whole “talk with Iran and Syria” nonsense is just as phoney as the rest of the show. The US and Israel having been working quite hard to blow at the Arab paranoia regarding Iran. The “shuttle diplomacy” of the past week has been along these lines. The US puppets in the region have been doing and saying what they were told. Recent squeals from the Emir of Kuwait, the 2 Abdullahs, Mubarak, and the Saad Hariri puppet arrangement in Beirut, have all been in one direction: Iran is a big scary nuclear power in our back yard, so please help us fight them. It is hard to believe it will actually come to a war, but by whipping up such sentiments, the flame will keep on burning and consuming. There will be no raproachment with Iran in the forseeable future. This is all the new act of the media show. [On this, Juan Cole has a nice summary today.]
– The reason no one announces that the US does not have its imperial eyes on Iraq for the long term and will not have intentions to maintain a massive military base there is simple: it is not so. The only major construction projects going on in the country are the three multi-billion dollar mega-bases being built. The airbase they are building is purported to be the largest US airbase off US soil. Reports from Rosen, Cockburn, and many more and several recent first-hand accounts from Iraqi bloggers say that the projects are proceeding like a steam-roller. All of these, and much more that we don’t know, to leave in a year or two? You must be kidding.
– No one knows what will happen, but IMHO there are only two possible outcomes. If they succeed, which seems unlikely now but the tide may always turn, Iraq will be a client state like Saudi, Jordan, Turkey … If they don’t, it will be an airlift scenario, a la Saigon. There will be no “graceful exit”.
Let us revisit this same post in June 01, 2007, six months from now, and see how it all turned out. I marked my calendar 🙂 !
With all the times waiting for their reports and with all those Damin_Tank personal with all the leakage of some of thoughts of BSG, more over GWB asked for the delay of the report all this US propaganda is designed for main goals:
1- Chewing the time and let the public in US and outside waiting for something interesting but I knew from start this just of matter lengthen the chaos and earn more time for longer occupation in Iraq….
2- To cover up the real issues and the basics facts of this occupation which is more than officials in US UK and around the world even the majority of Iraqi voted that US should leave Iraq NOW, as long as US Troop on the ground the situation in Iraq worsens more.
So what we see from the report of Baker-Hamilton group is Giving Birth of RAT
“We are trying to bring democracy to Iraq in particular because a pro-Western government enjoying legitimacy and popular support would have been the most enduring means of securing our interests there.”
-Charles Krauthammer
How many contradictions, hypocrisies, delusions and human tragedies are embedded in this one short sentence?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113001159.html
Ever since my desultory days in the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent (Vietnam 1970-1972), I have thought of the United States Government the Lunatic Leviathan, because no matter what its own stated views of itself and its motives, the actual policies adopted by it reek of rampant schizophrenia and what George Orwell called “Nationalism,” i.e., “power hunger tempered by self-deception.” As only the most egregious example now under consideration: If the United States Government really considered the Middle East a strategic asset and Iraq a “cornerstone” of that strategy, then how in the hell could the American government outsource the “study” of such an “important” (dare I even say, “vital”) interest to a claque of retread Washington political hacks with virtually no knowledge of the Middle East among them. Other than perhaps Jim Baker himself, I doubt seriously if any in that ass-covering committee could locate Iraq on a map. Sandra Day O’Connor? Vernon Jordon? Aw, for crying out loud! Somebody please give me a break!
Only one “Exit Strategy” concerns these people: namely, that of the pampered pack of political parasites who call themselves America’s “foreign policy elite.” The majority of these people have frequently advocated completely counter-productive policies in the Middle East (including the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq along with the unthinking, kneejerk subsidizing of Israel’s Zionist aparthied aggrandizement). They have done these illogical things primarily because Iraq, like Vietnam before it, represents nothing to these people but a domestic political football, what Barbara Tuchman called “intimidation [of the relatively powerless Emmanuel Goldstein ‘liberals’] by the rabid right at home.”
I claim that these worthless worms of the “George W. Bush Quagmire-Hand-off Group” have “accomplished” nothing but a vaguely-alluded-to “Vietnamization” stall not even honestly called “Iraqification” — as Paul Wolfowitz actually termed it years ago in Congressional testimony. “Vietnamization,” may I remind everyone, had another less euphemistic name: “Yellowing the Corpses.” Iraqification has a similar one: “Browning the Bodies.” Do I have to remind everyone that the intended foreign corpses in these racist, paternalistic scams do not in the least plan to cooperate in haplessly supplying the skin coloration disguising America’s obscure — even to Americans — foreign policy objectives?
Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, they — like the Vietnamese before them — will only obtain their independence (and control over their own natural resources) from America by fighting America and its on-again-off-again proxy-puppets. Since the Crusades died in the twelfth century and colonialism died in the twentieth, I suspect that the current American colonial crusade will fail utterly due to Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle succumbing to the Law of Diminishing Returns. Someday, though, American foreign policy “elites” may forget Deputy Dubya Bush’s infantile ego, cut the apron strings to its indigent infant Israel, and even remember Donald Rumsfeld’s dictum that “nobody would go to war for oil when they can far more easily and cheaply just buy this ‘fungible’ commodity from whomever puts it up for sale in the market place.” For once the senile old bastard spoke truly!
The Lunatic Leviathan is loose again and running amok. It doesn’t have a brain. It doesn’t think “strategically.” It only responds to atavistic emotional imperatives and the “nationalism” (or, “power hunger tempered by self-deception”) rampant among its so-called and self-styled “foreign policy elites” who have now screwed the pooch at high noon in Central Park after brazenly summoning a crowd to watch them triumphantly groom a poodle — so to speak. They look stupid. They look reckless. They look incompetent. They look like the Russian Romanovs in 1917. And they know it.
“Very immorality of invading a sovereign nation, killing upward to 650,000 of its citizens, poisoning its land, water, and air with depleted uranium for the next few billion years does not enter into the equation.”
“It was a “civil war” cooked up in Israel, an idea unleashed like a contagion in the Pentagon by Israel First neocons who schemed and plotted as analysts for Bibi Netanyahu, a primary Likud Jabotinskyite, dedicated to ethnic cleansing.”
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=682
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/20/AR2006112000965.html
“A parallel set of proposals is being developed by the Iraq Study Group (ISG) from consultations with hundreds of high-ranking current and former officials, military officers, foreign governments and academics. The ISG’s intent is to provide the president with a bi-partisan set of recommendations.
But both miss an element critical for success — Iraqi participation. There has been almost no involvement or incorporation of the views of Iraqis since the beginning of this war, with the exception of those leaders who were hand-picked by the administration.
Independent Iraqi groups and initiatives such as the Progressive Government Plan, the Mecca Declaration, and the Brussels Tribunal have been mostly ignored by the media and policy makers.
These Iraqi-led efforts, prepared by civic and social leaders, call for immediate change in five areas: involvement and sign-off by those most affected by the war — the people of Iraq; complete withdrawal of all foreign troops and military bases; preservation of the integrity of the Iraq state — no partitioning of the country; international funding and participation in reconstruction; and the independent investigation and prosecution of crimes. ”
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/692/35963
The knaves (but not fools) over at The Weekly Standard are well aware that they won this hand:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13021&R=EF1216F4E
Despite efforts to make it appear otherwise, then, the real recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is “stay the course.” For this we waited nine months?
Happy days.
I think the peak oil impending energy crisis does need to be factored in to get the complete picture of US policy in Iraq. As usual, Americans are the last to know, other nations are already preparing for peak oil prices and shortages, even Britain has a comprehensive energy policy.
From what I have read, the energy crisis was known (but not talked about to the public of course) in some US Gov’t circles as early as the 1970’s, well-accepted by the 1990’s. Bush Senior, Junior, Cheney and Rice are all oil company executives. US intentions in Iraq simply can’t NOT be about oil at some level.
Of course, there are other players with other motives mixed into the brew, and that is what makes it not clear what we are doing there, or how we can go about getting out. I think there’s something to be said for all of the postings on this thread, as well as Helena’s piece.
I opposed the war from the start, I didn’t believe for a nanosecond the official reasons for attacking Iraq. I saw two true motives for the US attack: First, oil. Second, Israel. I haven’t changed my ideas on that yet, although from time to time I reverse those priorities.
In response to some really stupid, irrational US policy or action, whenever the US does something so obviously against its’ own interests, I put that down to the Israeli double-agents (aka “neo-cons”) in the US Gov’t administration and bureaucracy. And then I say to my long-suffering spouse: “You know, I really think we went to war against Iraq for Israel.” He doesn’t bother much over things he can’t do anything about.
The most obvious flaw in the baker group is that there are not only no arabs or muslims on it, but no one with really any middle east experience / education.
As with all Orwellian misnomers designed specifically by the American government to mislead the American people — what I like to call “Managed Mystification” — the recent rumored ruminations about “Exit Strategies” from Iraq in fact constitute “Re-Entry” schemes for staying in Iraq indefinitely under the anaesthetizing influence of whatever placebo propaganda pill the public will swallow today after gagging on the lies contained in the one they unwisely ingested yesterday.
So, perhaps the time has come to talk of cabbages and …
“Boobie Exit Strategies”
http://themisfortuneteller.blogspot.com/2006/12/boobie-exit-strategies.html
It seems clear to me that from the outset, the purpose of the ISG was not to come up with any meaningful solution or even suggestions for the Iraq situation (mess), but rather to provide political cover. Cover for the Republicans primarily, but also for the Democrats, most of whom were on board with Bush until his incopetency really bagan to show. If the reports are accurate, the ISG has come up with nothing more than a modified version of “tay the course” leavened with a modified version of a Democratic “exit strategy” and muddled them with enough gobbledy-gook and pettifogging to obscure the fact that they have , in fact, done and suggested nothing. Just a little early Christmas present for all those hanging out there with their stupidity or lack of spine to “CYA”.
Helena
Frank Rich really does deserve a prize for coining the phrase “The retreat from English” in his op ed this morning.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/opinion/03rich.html?hp
That we were fighting over “civil war” at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush’s lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.
Bush from ISG report to the Rumsfeld memo, just chewing time, wasting time and wining the time ,
Yah, time running no one cares about the disasters that Iraqis living daily in and the massacres done to them each day
“The Rumsfeld memo adds to a debate expected to gather steam when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group gives its recommendations on Wednesday.”
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-12-03T180611Z_01_COL153081_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ.xml
“if you want to rid the world of the terrorists start with your own govt. then maybe we can honestly state that we are fighting terrorism.”
Death On The Street of Iraq
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15764.htm
Just a little something this morning apropos of the mice that tried to roar and only sqeaked.
http://themisfortuneteller.blogspot.com/2006/12/walls-have-mouths.html
brenda ,
I saw two true motives for the US attack: First, oil. Second, Israel
“Two true motives for the US attack: First, Israel. Second, oil,” and “stay the course.” from 1971 when Iraq nationalised his oil till now
Henry Kissinger
“In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”
Paul Wolfowitz
“The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country’s evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel.”,
President Bush
“The terrorists…have clearly said they want a safe haven from which to launch attacks against America, a safe haven from which to topple moderate governments in the Middle East, a safe haven from which to spread their jihadist point of view, which is that there are no freedoms in the world; we will dictate to you how you think…. I can conceivably see a world in which radicals and extremists control oil. And they would say to the West: You either abandon Israel, for example, or we’re going to run the price of oil up. Or withdraw….”
President’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten,
“We need to treat them as a sovereign government. But we also need to give them the support they need to succeed because the alternative for the United States, I believe, is truly disastrous…. We could leave behind an Iraq that is a failed state, a haven for terrorism, a real threat to the United States and to the region. That’s just not an acceptable outcome.”
Best description I’ve seen yet of the ISG:
“Congressionally-mandated commission’s recommendations not binding. Group is like a Greek Chorus. It identifies the protagonists. Crystallizes the issues. Forecasts the crisis. But must in no way interfere with the action.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20061204/cm_huffpost/035505
Can you guess which character W. plays in this Greek drama? Here’s a hint: starts with “O.”