Musical (deck-)chairs in Bush’s running of Iraq policy

The Bushists have been leaking news of a fairly large number of upcoming personnel changes, amny of which have to do with the implementation of their Iraq policy. In the BBC‘s account of these, they will be:

* Adm William Fallon to replace Gen John Abizaid as head of Central Command for Iraq and Afghanistan
* Lt Gen David Petraeus to take over from Gen George Casey as the leading ground commander in Iraq
* US ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad to replace John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN
* Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Pakistan, to replace Mr Khalilzad in Baghdad
[And] On Friday, Mr Bush confirmed he had named retired Vice Admiral and intelligence official Michael McConnell to replace John Negroponte who has been appointed deputy secretary of state.

In addition, Harriet Miers has announced her decision to step down as White House counsel.
To me, the most significant of these is the naming– for the first time ever– of an admiral to head Centcom. This makes it look far more likely that the focus of operations of this gigantic, multi-service “regional command” in the coming weeks and months will be on a strategically sensitive zone in its area of operations that has a large coast-line.
Iran, anyone? Pakistan?
(Or perhaps Fallon’s main job will be to organize the flotilla of small boats needed to execute a Dunkirk-style withdrawal-under-fire from that tiny piece of Shatt-estuary where Iraq debouches into the Gulf? Nah, I don’t think so.)
For some reason Juan Cole, who has never spent much time in Washington, felt moved to pen this breathless appreciation for the “new” personnel:

These are competent professionals who know what they are doing… I wish these seasoned professionals well. They know what they are getting into, and it is an index of their courage and dedication that they are willing to risk their lives in an effort that the American public has largely written off as a costly failure…

Of course, if Zal Khalilzad is going to be so wonderful at the UN, how come he wasn’t terribly successful inside Iraq? (And another question about Zal. Should we presume he’ll be sworn into his new job on a Koran? What will our IslamophobicRep. Virgil Goode– also, like Zal, a very conservative Republican– have to say about that? Especially since Zal falls into the category to which Goode takes particularly strong exception: Muslim Americans who are also immigrants… )
Oh well, Virgil Goode is really small potatoes in this whole story, I know.
Meanwhile, back to Washington: Dan Froomkin of Washingtonpost.com, who understands the relationships within the nation’s policymaking elite a whole lot better than Juan Cole does, gives Bush’s present round of personnel changes this, rather different reading:

I see a possible theme: A purge of the unbelievers.
Harriet Miers, a longtime companion of the president but never a true believer in Vice President Cheney’s views of a nearly unrestrained executive branch, is out as White House counsel — likely to be replaced by someone in the more ferocious model of Cheney chief of staff David S. Addington.
Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalizad, considered by Cheney to be too soft on the Sunnis, is kicked upstairs to the United Nations, to be replaced by Ryan Crocker, who presumably does not share his squeamishness.
John Negroponte, not alarmist enough about the Iranian nuclear threat in his role as Director of National Intelligence, is shifted over to the State Department, the Bush administration’s safehouse for the insufficiently neocon. Cheney, who likes to pick his own intelligence, thank you, personally intervenes to get his old friend Mike McConnell to take Negroponte’s job.
And George Casey and John Abizaid — the generals who so loyally served as cheerleaders for the White House’s “stay the course” approach during the mid-term election campaigns — are jettisoned for having shown a little backbone in their opposition to Cheney and Bush’s politically-motivated insistence on throwing more troops into the Iraqi conflagration.

In my view, having yet another such large round of personnel changes also falls into the meta-narrative of a tired, confused, hacked-out administration desperately shuffling the deck-chairs on the Titanic one more “last” time before– well, before who knows what?
I have recently been working my way through reading Thomas Ricks’s recent book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks, who’s the WaPo’s chief Pentagon correspondent, goes into searing detail on the incompetence and internal disarray in the Bushists’ handling of every single stage of the Iraq imbroglio. Of course, I’ve read his waPo pieces on many of these incidents before. (He discloses a lot more of his material along the way, in the form of good, straightforward reporting, than Bob Woodward has done for a long time.) But Ricks has also done a good, basic job of pulling all these vignettes together in the book and starting to apply some higher-level analysis to them.
One big theme that comes through the book is how the instability in terms of personnel and entire groups of personnel that marked all aspects of the US administration of Iraq served– and to this day still serves– to compound the mistakes and incompetence displayed by the US national command authorities at the highest level.
On a parallel note, one of the main things that came through my reading of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial was the continuing administrative chaos in just the Washington end of things… To the extent that the various “players” in DC, distrusting each other and everything they were hearing from the field inside Iraq, would have to very frequently either undertake “fact-finding” trips of their own to Iraq, or find a trusted sidekick to do that for them. At times, it seems they were all criss-crossing with each other as they darted in and out of Baghdad airport. And distrusting each other quite a lot, it seemed. Ricks also makes a big point about the debilitating effect of the fragmentation of command at the military level.
… And so it goes on. I have no reason to believe that this latest round of personnel changes will have any great effect on either (a) the content of a policy that still seems to to be in a strong “state of denial” about the depth of the strategic setback the Bushists have already walked into inside Iraq, or (b) the incompetent administration of that policy, relying as it has to a quite unprecedented and extremely counter-productive degree on “market-based approaches”, pure ideology, and recklessness, rather than any model of sound, conservative strategic planning.
Watch for icebergs ahead.