US Secdef Robert Gates, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, was trying to re-package Bush’s outrageous “surge” plan in what looked like a frenzied attempt to tamp down the criticisms it has incurred from lawmakers of both parties. In today’s WaPo, Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson described Gates’s testimony there thus:
- If the plan works, the United States could begin drawing down troop levels by the end of the year, Gates said. If the Iraqi government does not deliver troops and political and economic support, he said, the United States could withhold many of the 21,500 additional troops Bush has ordered to secure the most violent parts of Iraq.
Oops, maybe not such a strong commitment from Gates to the “surge” after all?
But honestly, at this stage in the tangled decisionmaking of this Keystone Cops of an administration, who knows?
(The Senate ASC also got a nuanced little message from Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the brass in the Pentagon do not want to get dragged into any military adventures against Iran. Pace, those same reporters write,
- assured members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that there are no plans to take military operations into Iran, clarifying remarks Bush made on Wednesday in announcing the new Iraq package.
“From a military standpoint,” Pace said while responding to questions, there is “no need to cross the Iranian border.”
Let’s hope that position stands firm, eh? Also, as I’ve written before a number of times– e.g. here, last September– the US military really should agitate very hard indeed at this point for military-to-military hotlines and other deconfliction mechanisms with Teheran. Right along the length of the Iraq-Iran border, along the whole of the Iranian coastline onto the Gulf, and also along Iran’s border with Afghanistan, the two militaries face each other eyeball to eyeball. A confrontation or provocation could flare up at any point– by the intent of the national command authorities on either side, through the intent of infiltrators into the forces on one side or the other, or completely “inadventently.” That’s why the highest levels of the militaries need to have a way to communicate clearly and authoritatively with each other.)
Anyway, this post was not meant, primarily, to be about that. It’s about the present Keystone Cops-ish disarray in the highest levels of the US strategic/military decisionmaking strata over this whole question of Bush’s much-ballyhooed “surge.”
The more one hears from people like Gates, the more unclear the point of this “surge” seems to be…
So okay, let’s go back to early August last year: Israel. By then it was abundantly clear to the national leaders that the “knockout blow” against Hizbullah that their strategically illiterate chief of staff had promised them in Lebanon had not worked… With 100-200 Hizbullah rockets raining down daily on communities in northern Israel that were either completely unprepared for such a barrage or seemed paralyzed by it, PM Olmert was coming under increasingly open criticism from his public… His political capital was washing out from under his feet from hour to hour… I can imagine Olmert– a national leader with very little experience of his own either in the military or in military-strategic decisionmaking– tearing his hair out (if he had much left to tear, okay), in desperation, and imploring his chief of staff to “Do something! Do something! Quick!”
So what Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, came up with was to add to his previous (by now, quite evidently failed) military plan in Lebanon the previously unplanned addition of– a quickly-thrown-together ground force surge. What’s more, that surge– like the one presently being discussed in Washington– also involved around 20,000 additional troops.
Didn’t make any sense for the IDF. Won’t make sense for the US in Iraq.
Olmert’s reckless insistence back in August that the ill-prepared Israeli ground forces mount that last-minute “surge” into Lebanon cost Israel the lives of some 36 or more soldiers. It notably did not succeed in improving Israel’s position on the battlefield in south Lebanon. Instead, the widely-disseminated reporting of the wounded Israeli units streaming back over the border into Israel with their casualties further pummelled an Israeli posture of strategic deterrence that had already been considerably weakened by the events of the previous 30 days. Some members of those units returned home and immediately joined in a broad campaign of criticism and reproach against Olmert, Halutz, and the rest of the reckless leadership that had thrown their units thus cavalierly into the caldron of war… And at the domestic political level, Olmert has never really recovered since.
Bottom line on Olmert’s surge: not good for Israel’s strategic deterrence, and not good for Olmert’s political standing.
So now, here we have Bush and his team, launching an eery replay of many of those very same moves. Go back and read some of the reporting from Israel that I cited in this JWN post on August 6. Especially at the portion subtitled “Note 2: Disarray and splits in Israeli decisionmaking”.
This looks remarkably similar to the way that Gates is now trying to re-fashion and/or re-package Bush’s absurd and esclatory orders to undertake a “surge” in Iraq… and that Gen Pace is also trying to re-fashion and/or re-package what Cheney and Bush might have been pushing toward, regarding a huge escalation against Iran.
With this difference. Gates and Pace may both have many faults and weaknesses. But at least both men have considerably more experience in strategy and strategic decisionmaking than their counterparts in Israel had last August.
However, the US (like Israel) is a country in which the political echelon, quite rightly, remains in command of even the highest levels of the military. So we, the concerned citizenry of the US, cannot simply leave it to Robert Gates and Peter Pace to rein in the mad adventurism of the President. We have to continue– working at the grassroots as well as with and through our representatives in Congress– to keep the pressure up, politically, on Bush to reverse his disastrous course in Iraq.
My lord, I wish we had a decent parliamentary system here! If we did have one, the elections of last November would not have left this dangerously crazy Presidential-Veep team in control.
Helena,
“the US (like Israel) is a country in which the political echelon, quite rightly, remains in command of even the highest levels of the military.”
Are you sure that is true about Israel? I don’t know who said this quote “Israel is a military with a nation, not a nation with a military.” [Paraphrase, not exact quote]
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/809800.html
Imagine if we could even vote for the things that we consider most important to us, in terms of international security, foreign policy, our approach to other countries- this country would probably be on a much better path.
Instead we get a president who, even when he loses control of the House and Senate, still insists that he will disregard them both and push ahead with what he thinks is the morally right decision. The main obstacle to peace in Iraq and the wider region is the delusion and self-righteousness of Bush, and it’s funny to think that one former alcoholic who believes he is literally guided by God is leading the rest of us into a pool of blood.
“From a military standpoint,” Pace said while responding to questions, there is “no need to cross the Iranian border.”
I think people like Pace must chose their words in such briefings very deliberately. “No need” can always be reconciled with “the need arose when …”. A need is a temporal state, since by definition necessities are fluid.
As you state further down, there are known and established mechanisms, by which adversarial states who have opposing forces stationed close to one another, systematically avoid “woops” catastrophes. None of those has been put in place with Iran although Iran faces US forces on 3/4 of it’s boundries (maybe even the North – Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan are US allies on the GWOT aren’t they?). I can hardly imagine that this is a simple oversight.
Hail the NYT, the great cheerleader of the military-industrial-neocon-Likud complex !
“The decision to increase the American military presence in Iraq is being greeted with a blend of optimism and anxiety among American soldiers and their families, those most directly affected by the change … there seems far more support than outrage, more cheer than cheerlessness, and a hope that maybe this will do it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/us/14troops.html?ei=5094&en=303a5a1873fda18d&hp=&ex=1168750800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
I find it hard to believe that Gates goes from wise, august, sagacious elder statesman to Bush’s Dog in just a couple of months. Perhaps we are witnessing a Kabuki Dance in which the small surge into the least violent time of year is pronounced very quickly as a “success”, justifying in the mind of the
Republican base an early withdrawal?
Bob, your fantasies are touching in their desperate optimism, but not a bit reassuring.
As I just noted in another thread, in Bush we are dealing with a person who is virtually a textbook sociopath. Further, he is that most dangerous of sociopaths, one with enormous power and very few restraints, particularly now that he is in the last half of his last term as the most powerful person in the world. As we have seen very clearly, he surrounds himself with compliant, sycophants and cronies, and when someone stands in his way, he merely screams “off with his head”, and finds a more willing minion.
Sociopaths are simply unable to admit to being wrong, and are incapable of compassion, empathy, or remorse. It is simply not within their ability. Everything they do and say is is ultimately for some self-serving purpose.
One of the standard features of sociopathic personality disorder is, by the way, habitual lying. Sociopaths, in fact, often appear to lie just for the sake of lying even when there is nothing in particular at stake. Therefore, you simply cannot believe a single word Bush says. Is his lipless mouth moving? Then he is lying, and anyone around him who prefers to have his head continue sitting on his shoulders will not challenge his veracity.
Years ago I noted the similarities between George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein. Those similarities have become crystal clear over time. I absolutely do believe that if the restraint of law removed, George Bush would do more than merely fire those who oppose him.
And by the way, for what it is worth I strongly believe that Condi Rice comes from the same mold. She, too, appears to be a sociopath. How else could she bring herself to refer to the devastation of Lebanon as “birth pangs”, or openly shop for overpriced designer shoes with apparently complete unconcern for the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who were at that very moment suffering and dying in what is probably the worst natural disaster in the country’s history?
Bob, I got so absorbed in my psychological analysis of Bush that I missed making my point entirely. My point is that if Gates had even a remote hint of a clue, then he must have known going in what he would be dealing with, and he must have realized that if he wanted to keep his head on his shoulders, figuratively at least, he would have to go along with Bush’s pathological program whether it made sense to him or not.
“if Gates had even a remote hint of a clue, then he must have known going in what he would be dealing with”
This gig is worth a ton of money to him in just a couple of years. He might possibly have been thinking about that.
Who loves ya baby?
“But if Arab officials are frustrated by Rice, their Israeli counterparts enjoy working with her: One Israeli official speaking off the record said: ‘She’s an amazing, eloquent and elegant lady, but she can be as tough as nails. She knows what she wants when she goes into a meeting. She’s decided beforehand what’s possible and what isn’t.’ Daniel Ayalon, ex-Israeli ambassador to Washington, who has been friends with Rice for 10 years, adds, ‘She has gravitas. She’s grown into this job in a magnificent way. She has toughness and grit.'”
Wow, now the Israelis love her ? – and this after they humiliated the hell out of her last summer. (as I blogged then — when she proved herself the most shameless SOS in US history….)
But Gates is the biggest puzzle for me so now. After all, wasn’t he one of the key players in the Baker-Hamilton Commission report (til he was replaced last minute by Larry Eagleburger) Key point of BHCR was for US to internationalize the strategy – to work with Iraq’s neighbors, as we did with Afghanistan’s.
Bush has taken the opposite approach – to try to shift the focus/blame to the neighbors (but not the Sunni ones) as part of the problem, not the solution. More divide and rule nonsense.
Too bad nobody asked him about this key contradiction….
Gates too was a co-top supporter of a recent and rather good Council on Foreign Relations report with cautiously creative ideas for dealing with Iran….
So what happened? Did Gates lose his main advisors in going to DOD? Can he think for himself? Or are we now witnessing the “Gates of Hell”? (sorry) I rather thought he looked profoundly uncomfortable.
Funny how the tables have turned…. We now pin our hopes for “reason” on Gates, the man who just missed being hauled into Court over Iran-contra (in the battle with Conned-u-sleazy Rice and arch neocon and convict Elliot Abrams and his “regime change” under hand tactics out of NSC).
Beam me up.
Sigh. Maybe John C. is right again.
Israeli precedent for the “surge”?
Writing in the Sunday NY Times, Nicholas Kristof has a more apt precedent for the surge: Gerald Ford…yes that Gerald Ford.
explains Kristoff:
The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S forces to stabilize Saigon. A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Israeli precedent for the “surge”?
Writing in the Sunday NY Times, Nicholas Kristof has a more apt precedent for the surge: Gerald Ford…yes that Gerald Ford.
explains Kristoff:
The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S forces to stabilize Saigon. A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Israeli precedent for the “surge”?
Writing in the Sunday NY Times, Nicholas Kristof has a more apt precedent for the surge: Gerald Ford…yes that Gerald Ford.
explains Kristoff:
The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S forces to stabilize Saigon. A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
sorry for the triple post.
Truesdell
I get double and tripple posts if I forget to fill in the security number
It givs me an error message but pots the thing anyway.
Is this your experience?
I filled in the security number and still got an error message…this happened twice…the third time it went through but then I saw that the first two also went through…this has never happened to me before so I write it off as an aberration…sorta like when our dear friend Salah has kind words for Iran.
here goes…fingers crossed….