Author: Helena

My piece in the CSM on ending the Iraqi & Afghan wars

Here it is in today’s paper. (It’s also archived here.)
The headline is good (if not terribly snappy… but then, who needs snappy?): The U.N. can end these wars: It alone has enough clout to bring about peace in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the body of the piece I write:

    [V]ictory in Iraq and Afghanistan … will depend on defeating or defanging antigovernment insurgencies and helping midwife a governing system that:

      • Enjoys domestic political “legitimacy,” that is, it has the support of the vast majority of the country’s citizens,
      • Is sustainably able to deliver public security and other basic services to citizens throughout the whole country, and
      • Has the tools to resolve in nonviolent ways the still-unresolved and yet-to-emerge conflicts among its citizens.

    What we don’t want is a replay of what happened in Vietnam, where the US declared “victory” but then withdrew humiliatingly, under fire, leaving the victors free to enact brutal retribution against our former allies.
    Only one body can provide the leadership that’s needed to defeat the insurgencies in both Iraq and – over a longer time frame – Afghanistan. That is the United Nations. Though it’s far from a perfect institution, only the UN has the vital quality of worldwide legitimacy that allows it to mobilize global resources and expertise and make the tough decisions required in these two countries.
    Regarding Iraq, we need to ask the UN to urgently convene two negotiating forums. One would sort out the thorny political dilemmas that remain inside the country. The other would bring together Iraq, all its neighbors, the US, and perhaps also the Arab League to agree on a plan for the drawdown – or total withdrawal – of US forces in a way that will not result in Iraq’s neighbors moving in to exploit the resulting vacuum.
    Americans have a similar need for a greatly increased UN leadership in Afghanistan…

Anyway, go read the whole thing and tell me what you think.

The Gates Doctrine: US as Globo-Cop

Yesterday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a ‘National Defense Strategy’ document (PDF of the text here), that provides what Gates describes as in the Foreword as a “blueprint to succeed in the years to come.”
This blueprint is based very centrally on Donald Rumsfeld’s view of the US being engaged in a “Long War.”
Short version: Rejoice, ye defense contractors far and near! Your gravy train continues!
The nature of the “Long War” as spelled out on pages 7-9 of the 29-page document (pp.12-14 of the PDF). It relies totally on the administration’s currently favored (and operationally and ideologically quite empty) concept that our opponents can be categorized simply as “violent extremists.” Here’s how this “Long War:” section of the document starts:

    For the foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S. We must defeat violent extremism as a threat to our way of life as a free and open society and foster an environment inhospitable to violent extremists and all those who support them. We face an extended series of campaigns to defeat violent extremist groups, presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates. [But possibly in the future led by others? Make no mistake, this “Long War” can be stretched out forever!] In concert with others, we seek to reduce support for violent extremism and encourage moderate voices, offering a positive alternative to the extremists’ vision for the future. Victory requires us to apply all elements of national power in partnership with old allies and new partners. Iraq and Afghanistan remain the central fronts in the struggle, but we cannot lose sight of the implications of fighting a long-term, episodic, multi-front, and multi-dimensional conflict [boy, with each of those sonorous adjectives I’m seeing dollar signs light up in the defense contractors’ eyes!] more complex and diverse than the Cold War confrontation with communism. Success in Iraq and Afghanistan is crucial to winning this conflict, but it alone will not bring victory. [More $$!] We face a clash of arms, a war of ideas, and an assistance effort that will require patience and innovation. In concert with our partners, we must maintain a long-term commitment to undermining and reducing the sources of support for extremist groups, and to countering the ideological totalitarian messages they build upon.
    We face a global struggle…

Well, I wish I had the time to do one of my tabulated annotations on the whole of this text. But alas, I don’t.
Noteworthy in Gates’s description of the LW, however, are the following features:
1. He nowhere claims that this LW is explicitly one to be waged against Islamist extremists. This is excellent. Likewise, though he likens the LW to the US’s earlier global campaigns against fascism and communism and refers to the”totalitarian ideological message of terrorist groups,” nowhere does he use the terrible, hate-propagating term “Islamofascism.” In general, his refusal to name the “violent extremists” as being explicitly “Islamist extremists” is a welcome move… There is, however, a sort of nudge-nudge “we all really know who we’re talking about” aspect to this section. Especially when he says that the VE’s are “presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates.”
But if the term really is a neutral, scientific one– that is, that the members of the VE category includes everyone who is both “violent” and “extremist” (whatever the latter term actually means)– then should we not include in it other, non-Islamist actors like, for example, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka; the Ethiopian government that wilfully and with full US support invaded Somalia in 2006 and has maintained a brutal occupation there ever since; or those ideologically motivated Jewish settlers in the West Bank area who most certainly fit into the category of VEs? From many perspectives, could we not also include in the category the US government itself, which has certainly, over the past seven years, used the greatest amount of violence used by any actor in the international system and has done so in the name of an ideology that the majority of people around the world might well describe as “extremist”?
“Extremist” is, at the end of the day, essentially either a category chock-full of everybody you happen to disagree with, or an empty and quite meaningless category. One thing’s for certain, it is nearly always a highly subjective category.
Perhaps one possible, non-subjective meaning that could be ascribed to it is that an “extremist” is an actor who refuses to sit down and negotiate his political differences with others, preferring instead to use violence. That is the only even vaguely helpful and objective definition I can think of for this term. (In which case, the qualifier “violent” becomes more or less redundant. Okay, well maybe the VEs are the ones who not only prefer to use violence over negotiation but who also do use it.
So where does that leave the US, an actor that in late 2001 and again in early 2003 wilfully and knowingly turned away from the many nonviolent means of conflict resolution available to it and instead used massive violence against its opponents?
H’mmm.
2. Gates is also, in this document, explicitly asserting the US’s intention to be the world’s completely dominant globo-cop, that is, to roam around the world waging “counter-insurgency” on a truly global scale.
This is how he introduces the concept of the US’s “global responsibilities”, right at the beginning of the document:

    A core responsibility of the U.S. Government is to protect the American people – in the words of the framers of our Constitution, to “provide for the common defense.” For more than 230 years, the U.S. Armed Forces have served as a bulwark of liberty, opportunity, and prosperity at home. Beyond our shores, America shoulders additional responsibilities on behalf of the world…

This is truly mind-boggling. “On behalf of the world”??? When, pray, did “the world” ever ask the US to “shoulder” these responsibilities?
Answer: Never.
Back in January 2007, I wrote a few things on JWN and elsewhere about the conceptual (and also practical) difficulties of the military of a democratic nation mounting counter-insurgency — COIN, in the jargon– campaigns “on behalf of” the governments of other countries elsewhere. You can find some of that writing here and here.
One of the main points I was making there was that, “For a foreign power to use forceful means to affect the political outcome within any given country/society causes a direct clash with the principles of democracy, of sovereignty, and of a respect for basic human rights…”
How much greater is this clash when the intervening country proposes to do its globo-copping on a truly global scale?
After reading Gates’s document I was interested in finding out how “global” the US military has already become. So I looked through my copy of the IISS’s Military Balance 2008 and found out the following:

    a. The US has active military personnel stationed in no fewer than 162 of the world’s countries and territories. Nearly all those in this listing (pp. 38-46 of the MilBal) are nation-states. Some five or six are seas or oceans in which the various US fleets operate, and a few more are non-state territories like Greenland or Ascension Island. But over 150 are nation-states.
    b. Just in the A’s, the US has forces in eleven nation-states, from Albania to Azerbaijan.
    c. In the Middle East, the US has military personnel in the following countries– in addition to those in Iraq:

      Algeria: 10
      Bahrain: 1,319
      Djibouti: 2,038
      Egypt: 288 just for Egypt and 288 as peacekeepers in Sinai
      Israel: 50
      Jordan: 19
      Lebanon: 3
      Morocco: 13
      Oman: 37
      Qatar: 512
      Saudi Arabia: 274
      Syria: 8 (?)
      Tunisia: 15
      UAE: 87

    d. In 2008 the US has 1.498 million people in its active-duty military and 1.083 million it its reserves. This gives the the largest standing army in the world in terms of manpower, except for that of China which has 2.105 million people in its standing army (but only 800 million in its reserves.)
    e. In 2006, the US’s defense spending was $535.9 billion, easily the largest amount of any country in the world. China, with four times the US’s population, spent “only” $121.9 billion on military spending in 2006 (calculated using PPP$.) Worldwide defense spending was listed as $1,297.8 billion. So our country bore (“shouldered”, as per Gates?) 41.3 percent of global defense expenditures.

Here’s the funny thing. Since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US has had neither any sizeable military enemies nor any military competitors.
What is the point of all this wasteful– and quite frequently, also actively counter-productive– defense spending we’re doing?
Now we learn! We’re doing it so we can be Globo-cop!
But guess what? The other six billion of the people never once elected us to this position…

Joost Hiltermann on Iraq’s refugees

Yesterday, I went to a thought-provoking discussion at the Carnegie Endowment in which the International Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann presented and discussed ICG’s recent report on the continuing crisis of Iraq’s refugees and IDPs.
Joost is a serious analyst, with considerable experience of documenting and analyzing developments in Iraq. In the presentation, he described the crisis in stark terms, noting that there are now signs of malnutrition emerging among Iraqi refugees in Syria. “We have also seen the evaporation of the Iraqi middle class,” he said, “especially the civil service.”
I imagine Carnegie will be posting the audio record of the event on their website sometime soon. If so, you’ll be able to find it here. It isn’t there yet.
Hiltermann described the political situation inside Iraq as still “very fragile.” He noted, crucially, that “You cannot have any serious advance at the political level inside the country until there is a serious engagement [by the US] with Iran.” He warned that if the US exits Iraq without getting internal political reconciliation in the country, the result could well be a new wave of refugees out of the country– “But this time those seeking to flee may well be stopped at the borders [by the countries they’re trying to flee to], and you would see big tent encampments emerging there at the borders.”
After he spoke, Michel Gabaudan, who’s the UNHCR’s regional representative for the United States and the Caribbean, made a few remarks. He said that from UNHCR’s perspective the treatment that the Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have received from those host governments has improved over the past 18 months, with the numbers of detentions and deportations of refugees going down markedly in both places. “Those who should be noted for their deportations should be the European countries,” he said. He added that those deported by EU countries had often been sent back to Iraq, but finding themselves unable to return to their homes they would end up as IDPs elsewhere in the country.
Gabaudan also, later, noted that some western countries– and he singled out Germany– had been discriminating against the Muslims among the refugees and giving preferential treatment to the Christians. He described that as a very worrying practice that could further stoke sectarian sensitivities and tensions among Iraqis.
Earlier, Joost Hiltermann had spelled out the fact that in Syria, there was a noticeable lack of sectarian tensions and sensitivities among the Iraqi refugees, though they include Iraqis from all the country’s different religious groups. (In Jordan, the government has worked very hard to keep out Iraqi Shiites, though a number of them have managed to take up residence there.)
Actually, as the report itself spells out, calculating the true numbers of refugees in the countries of refuge– especially Jordan– has proven frustratingly difficult.
Here’s what the report says about the size and duration of the problem (pp.3, 4):

    Syria is said to have welcomed around 1.5 million although some Western observers believe the number to be much lower. Similar discrepancies exist concerning Jordan, where the government uses a much higher figure for planning and operational purposes than an independent research institute arrived at [later stated as being government:450,000-500,000 versus Norwegian research institute:161,000.] According to UNHCR, between 20,000 and 50,000 Iraqis live in Lebanon; Lebanese authorities claim there are 60,000 to 100,000. Some 70,000 Iraqis reportedly live in Egypt and roughly 57,000 in Iran…
    Statistical variations and uncertainties aside, the number clearly is huge and represents one of the world’s largest conflict-induced displacements of people. The most significant outflow occurred after the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, which plunged Iraq further into a bloody blend of sectarian conflict, insurgency warfare and criminality. From then on, the number of Iraqis fleeing insecurity, violence and persecution skyrocketed. As of November 2007, over 70 per cent of the Iraqis in Syria had been there for less than a year; in Jordan, 77 per cent of Iraqis arrived between 2003 and 2007, with most coming after 2006.

In the report, Joost and his ICG colleagues have done a generally good job of sifting through the statistics and assessing a number of policy options regarding the refugees. However, after reading the report carefully, I come away with a frustrating feeling that though it is titled Failed Responsibility: Iraqi refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, still, nowhere in it did they assess the question of responsibility for this problem in anything like a rigorous enough way.
That is, nowhere do they actually spell out the specific responsibility under international law of the occupying and/or UN mandatory power in Iraq for assuring conditions of public security throughout the whole country, a responsibility that the US– which is indeed the power in question– has quite notably and thoroughly failed to live up to. Instead, the report treats the US as, more or less, just another member of “the international community.” Washington’s record on dealing with the refugee crisis (though notably not its record on having caused or occasioned it) is dealt with in Chapter VII of the report, at which point the report implicitly contrasts the relative “generosity” of the US financial contribution to refugee aid with the relative parsimony of the EU and Arab countries.
The report does state, very blandly (p.32) that “Most donor countries believe the U.S. should shoulder the lion’s share of the financial burden.” But it does not give the reasons that other governments adduce for this judgment– and far less does it align the ICG in any way with that judgment.
But if US policy failings have indeed been responsible, in one way or another, for the collapse of public security in Iraq that has motivated the flight of so many millions of Iraqis from their home communities, then how can the displacement crisis be addressed unless US policies– and indeed, the whole US role– inside Iraq are radically changed?
Why does the ICG report say nothing about this question? Why do they spend just about all of their pages criticizing the governments of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and the US-installed “government” of Iraq, without anywhere addressing the responsibility of the occupying/mandatory power?
In introducing Hiltermann, Carnegie President Jessica Mathews described the report as an exemplary piece of analysis of the complex intersection of humanitarian and political concerns. Actually, I don’t think it addressed the crucial political dimension of the crisis nearly sufficiently.
Toward the end of the Q&A portion of yesterday’s discussion, Joost voiced the decidedly depressing expectation that “We probably won’t see any significant returns of the refugees to their homeplaces within the next ten years.”
Afterwards, I went up and chatted with him a bit, and got him to confirm that that meant he did not see any significant breakthrough in the intra-Iraqi peacemaking within that time period.
I was horrified. “But Joost!” I protested, “of course there are ways to get a good, durable settlement inside Iraq in a much shorter amount of time than ten years! Look at all the work all of us have been doing providing guidelines for how that could be done. Yes, I realize it would also require a fair peacemaking process in which all of Iraq’s neighbors could be involved, including Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but that is possible too.”
“Yes,” he said. “Maybe we could see how it could be done. But I don’t see the political will to do it.”
Well, maybe it’s true that we don’t yet have the political will– primarily, here in the US, but also elsewhere– to do what needs to be done to allow for real reconciliation and conflict termination within and around Iraq. But I think we should still all work really hard for that outcome. Political currents can change, and can change fairly rapidly in the present era.
Maybe I’m just an optimist by nature. But I do strongly sense that the tide here in the US has been turning pretty rapidly toward significantly decreasing the amount of control our country seeks to hang onto in Iraq. This is a great shift in the right direction. So let’s try to push it as far and as fast as it will go. Ten more years of chaos and fratricidal conflict inside Iraq, and ten more years of the massive displacement of so many millions of Iraqis from their homes, is a situation quite too horrible to contemplate.

Defining ‘winning’

I’ve been writing quite a bit recently about war and its unwinnability. I’ve been thinking a lot more about this, and I want to clarify that in those writings I was referring primarily to wars being won or not won in the traditional military sense of “winning”– that is, that the victorious country is able to either destroy or defeat (that is an important distinction, right there) the armed forces of the opposing side and thereby to impose its own political will on the defeated country.
It is that “thereby” that seems increasingly– or perhaps in some cases, completely– unattainable these days.
Destruction– yes, that has certainly occurred. In Iraq in 2003, the Saddam-era armed forces were first defeated and then completely disbanded. In Lebanon in 2006, the Israelis were never able to destroy Hizbullah– but they were able to sow massive amounts of destruction on the country’s vital infrastructure, including on an entire, quite sizeable chunk of the South Beirut Dahiya.
But despite* that level of destruction, Israel was unable to defeat Hizbullah– which it had sought to achieve by imposing its will on the government of Lebanon, and forcing Beirut to crack down on Hizbullah.
And in Iraq in and since 2003, even though the US was able to defeat and enitrely disband the Saddam-era armies it has still been incapable of imposing its will on the Baghdad government.
So traditional, military kinds of victory have not been attainable in these two cases.
That’s why I want to shift the policy discussion to a different, much richer and more human-centered definition of “victory”. This is one that would flow quite naturally from the principles of human security, which include, crucially, the two principles that:

    1. True security in the modern age is people-centered, rather than addressing the needs/desires of nation states to defend their territory against aggression from outside (or from competing national claims to the same terrain,) and
    2. The human security of all the peoples of the world is interdependent: increasing the human security of any one group of people increases the human security of all others; and decreasing the human security of any one group decreases the security of all others. That is, unlike in the traditional, “nation-state” model of security, human security is a matter of win-win synergies, rather than a zero-sum game.

Therefore, to “win” in human-security terms in Iraq or Afghanistan would involve looking primarily at the human security situation of the Iraqi and Afghan peoples, and certainly not at the narrow national interests of any outsiders. And if the human security situation of the peoples of those two countries can be significantly and durably improved, then that helps increase the true security of everyone else, from close neighbors to people in distant countries like Europe or the United States.

    (By the way, I wanted to provide a link here to the 2003 final report of the UN’s “Commission on Human Security.” But it looks as though someone forgot to renew the Commission’s domain name, http://www.humansecurity-chs.org/, so you can’t find it there any more. Can anyone tell me where else this report might be lodged and thus available to the web-prowling public?… Update August 1: Thanks to commenter Charles Cameron who told us that the text has been archived here. It’s a pretty large PDF file. Ch. 1 strikes me as particularly crucial, since it lays out the theoretical approach of HS.)

—
* Although I wrote “despite” that level of destruction, it also seems clear to me that, in the case of Lebanon 2006, it was precisely because of the level of destruction that the IDF sowed throughout Lebanon that Israel was unable to impose its political goals on Beirut. In other words, the “Shock and Awe” aspects of Israel’s attack proved actively counter-productive…

Bolani on the fulcrum of the US-Iraqi balance

It was an interesting performance this morning, to see Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani do some deft diplomatic footwork– while visiting Washington– to stay atop the fulcrum of the Washington-Baghdad political balance that, as I noted here recently, has tipped significantly in Baghdad’s favor in recent weeks.
Bolani was giving a presentation at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He had been sent (brought?) to Washington primarily to work at nailing down the details of the Iraq-US SOFA and MOU, and he entered the conference room at USIP with his Pentagon handlers colleagues clearly in evidence.
He had a soft-spoken, fairly engaging affect. You could see why, back in June 2006, he was chosen– by some combination of the US occupation authorities and the elected-majority Iraqi UIA coalition– to take over the ultra-sensitive job of Minister of the Interior, that is, to be in charge of all the Iraqi internal police, security, and intelligence forces that are not explicitly under the Defense Ministry. His main personal qualification seemed at the time to be his skill as an emollient diplomat– chosen as he was after his predecessor gained renown for having heavily politicized the Iraqi Police and stuffed it full of still-intact units of the Kurdish and Shiite (especially SCIRI) militias.
It is clear from all the reports I’ve read and heard that that situation is far from ended. But Bolani has been able– thus far– to put a good emollient face on the matter.
At USIP this morning, his skills as a diplomat were on full display. Notably, he filled up most of the time allotted to him with fairly meaningless managerial mumbo-jumbo, made repeated mention of a number of “loved in the US” buzzwords like “rule of law”, “specialized training opportunities”, etc, etc– and he completely avoided giving a clear answer to any of the key questions that were asked him.
All in all, an adroit performance. Next stop for this practised contortionist: Cirque Du Soleil?
It was fascinating to watch him pirouetting with such finesse atop the fulcrum of the Baghdad-Washington balance. We all recall that just ten days ago, as Barack Obama was about to reach Baghdad, Bolani’s boss, PM Maliki, gave him a great political gift by saying he thought that Obama’s timeline for a withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq was about right. But Barack Obama is not the US President yet, and may never be it. The present President is someone who’s still adamantly opposed to any fixed (as opposed to “horizon-related”) timetable for any portion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Bolani and his boss need to keep some kind of a working relationship– for now– with the guy who is currently Commander in Chief of those 147,000 US troops in Iraq, completely dominating the country’s broad-brush security environment and its financial (and financial payoffs) system.
So, given how much raw military power the US exercises over Iraq, it was quite notable the degree to which Bolani demurred from saying anything that could be understood as expressing support for Bush’s or the GOP’s position in the GOP-Democratic dispute over Iraq.
He didn’t express clearcut support for Obama’s position, either. (Hey, the guy’s not stupid; and he’s in Washington.)
That’s the point. He didn’t say anything clear-cut on matters of importance, at all.
I see that Marc Lynch has blogged the event as, essentially, lacking any newsworthiness. But in the circumstances, I think it was the lack of a ‘story’, in conventional news terms, that was itself, precisely the story.
Here’s how Bolani danced on some of the pinheads that were presented him.
Michael Gordon of the NYT asked him explicitly, “What would the effects be if all the US combat brigades left within 21 months?”
In answering, Bolani said something like:

    Today we are looking at the transitional phase… The phase that will enable our police force to do its job and confront the challenges of the earlier era… The measures that have been taken in coordination with the coalition have been important in strengthening the capabilities of our state.

Well, it sounded like a clear, if slightly veiled, “buzz off” to me. A ‘buzz off” couched in a few emollient phrases about how it has been the coalition’s efforts that have gotten Iraqis to the point where they can stand on their own two feet.
M. Gordon pressed the question again. Bolani then– quite understandably– asked where the heck the “21 months” timeframe had come from anyway; and Gordon gave a response that pointed strongly to 23 months, to me. (I.e., supposing an Obama victory in November, then 16 months from January.)
Bolani then once again deflected the question, saying that “The objective is to strengthen the rule of law and this will enable us to confront all challenges, blah-blah-blah… ”
Asked about the current MOU/SOFA negotiations, he said,

    We have teams working hard on this, to foster and enhance what’s already been achieved. The environment is moving in the right direction to fulfill the needs of both sides.

He was asked whether, in light of the continuing incidents in which US forces have been killing Iraqi civilians, he thinks the US troops should have immunity under the final MOU/SOFA agreements. He said,

    We do have now have a growing experience of discussing such matters, with the aim of reaching the needed balance between the needs of our citizens and the need to have good cooperation between the Iraqi and coalition forces. We have a team working on this issue right now.

In all cases: no “story.”
But altogether: yes, the story.

Americans and distress abroad: The vital “Who” question?

One thing I’ve noticed again and again and again is the– in many ways admirable– instinct of many Americans to think that they (we) and/or the US government has to “do” something about every reported incident of distress or dysfunction overseas.
In Iraq, this morphs easily into the so-called “Pottery Barn” rule… That our government broke it so therefore our government should fix it.
(Hey guys, ever stop to think that precisely because our government’s track record in Iraq is so abysmal, that probably makes our government uniquely unqualified to take any kind of a lead role in the fixing that very evidently needs to be done in Iraq? Pay reparations to Iraqis to let them fix it themselves– yes… But that’s a different manner.)
Or take Afghanistan: The whole official discussion in Washington DC right now is over how many additional US troops are needed to “fix” Afghanistan. This is a specific, and specifically militarized, version of the “Who” question.
Rejoinder #1 to this: Military force is centrally not what’s needed in order to “fix”/heal Afghanistan’s chronically traumatized society and governance system. Any country’s troops operating in a military way inside Afghanistan are most likely only to make things worse.
Rejoinder #2: America’s means of “intervention” are overwhlemingly the tools of military intervention. (See point 1 above.) But even when Washington deploys “reconstruction teams” or whatever, why would anyone assume that they have anything special to contribute to the complex tasks of social and political rebuilding in Afghanistan? The idea that “the west” can build or rebuild societies in distinctly non-western environments is incredibly 19th century. But hullo! That’s two centuries back from today.
Or take Zimbabwe, just for another recent example. In the aftermath of the recent fiasco of the Mugabe-stolen election, many American commentators earnestly asked “What should Washington do about Mugabe?”
Why should anyone think that Washington, as such, should do anything in particular to help “save” Zimbabwe’s people? Why not leave it to those of his neighbors who have a very much greater stake in trying to restore stability to the country… and who seem to be doing a not bad job of crafting a political path forward among Zimbabweans?
… As I’ve written a little in my Re-engage book, many Americans have this great urge to rush around the world trying to “help” or “save” people in distress elsewhere. But they seldom take the time that is required to look coolly at the effects of our own country’s policies on vulnerable societies elsewhere, to look at the sheer harm our country inflicts on those societies, and to engage in the campaigns that are needed here at home to change those policies and thus end the harm that our government’s policies inflict.
This is so much less “romantic” than traveling overseas as saviors to try to “save” or “help” people in distressed countries… But it is a whole lot more necessary.
Two harm-inflicting policies we need to change, for starters:

    1. Our country’s maintenance of, and use of, an enormously bloated military capability that’s deployed all around the world; and
    2. The subsidies we continue to shovel into the pockets of US farmers, and disproportionately into the pockets of rich US farmers– subsidies that have (a) wrecked the livelihoods of millions of small farmers in low-income countries overseas, and (b) more recently, wrecked the “Doha round” of trade talks.

As you can see, working on issues like these is not only not romantic– it’s also incredibly difficult! So many hundreds of thousands of our own fellow-citizens here in the US have done very nicely indeed by feeding off either the taxpayer-funded military-industrial complex or the taxpayer-funded agricultural-subsidy complex… So persuading them that our country needs to change its ways is a real– though necessary– challenge.
I guess there are two parts to this short argument I’m making here::

    1. Americans (and Europeans) need to become a lot more aware of the harms inflicted by some of our own governments’ longstanding policies, and focus primarily on ending those harms rather than trying to think how to apply band-aids of often temporary “help” to the affected communities overseas; and
    2. We should not imagine, in the often self-referential way we have imagined until now, that every single distressed community overseas needs “help” that is uniquely or even mainly American in order to heal. Often, indeed, the injection of Americans into complex situations overseas can complicate rather than aiding the reconciliation and reconstruction that need to occur.

This latter one is the vital “Who” question. Yes, Iraqis and Afghans may well need some external help to resolve their current crises of governance. But why on earth would we imagine that it’s a specifically American, or US-dominated, helping mechanism that’s needed?
As I’ve written earlier here on the blog, in the present world information environment, the question of the legitimacy of any particular actor in the international field has acquired considerable new sensitivity.
Washington doesn’t have much legitimacy as a military-intervening actor these days. Certainly not in Iraq (where, in the view of most people and governments around the world, the original invasion of 2003 never had any legitimacy.) And US/NATO “legitimacy” in Afghanistan– among Afghans– is probably decreasing very rapidly, especially after the militarized over-“kill” that the US troops there have been engaging in there in recent months.
USIP recently reported that the US/NATO forces there increased their use of airborne munitions against ground targets in Afghanistan from “5, 000 pounds of munitions per month in 2005 to an average of 80,000 pounds per month since June 2006, peaking at 168,000 pounds in December 2007. The response of most voices in the political elite– except that of Zbig Brzezinski— has been to argue for considerably beefed-up US and NATO ground forces. But why would anyone imagine that the “solution” in distant Afghanistan is primarily a military one at all– let-alone a made-by-NATO military one?

Bush’s ‘Surge’: How successful?

This, from Reuters in Baghdad today:

    Three female suicide bombers killed 28 people and wounded 92 when they blew themselves up among Shi’ites walking through the streets of Baghdad on a religious pilgrimage on Monday, Iraqi police said.
    In the northern oil city of Kirkuk a suicide bomber killed 22 people and wounded 150 at a protest against a disputed local elections law, Iraqi health and security officials said. One security official said the bomber may also have been a woman.
    The attacks mark one of the bloodiest days in Iraq in months…

At the discussions I attended Friday in Washington with a group at USIP, and also with former Iraqi PM Iyad Allawi at Carnegie, a number of those who spoke warned with great intensity that the situation in Iraq remains very difficult for Iraqis, very politically fragile, and heavy with the threat of new waves of violence. Those who did so included Charles Knight and Rend al-Rahim at USIP, and Allawi at Carnegie.
I record the latest spikes of violence with an incredibly heavy heart and no thought of schadenfreude. But they do, certainly, undercut the claims of those who have been crowing “the surge has succeeded.”
“Succeeded” for whom? Not yet at all for Iraqis, though the casualty figures among US troops are sharply reduced.
Once again I urge that instead of looking at whether Bush’s adoption of the surge “worked” or not, it would be far better to look at the costs and consequences of the fact that for 18 months now he has steadfastly refused to follow the excellent recommendations put forward by the Iraq Study Group back in December 2006.
Those recommendations– or something even more decisive than them– are just as valid and urgent today as they were back then.
But just look at the costs that have been imposed– on the Iraqis, as well as on US citizens– by Bush’s failure to undertake the transformative and very urgent diplomatic and political moves that the ISG recommended.
$180 billion of US taxpayer money… 1,110 US service-members killed… and an Iraqi casualty toll among civilians and security forces that is in the tens of thousands over the past 18 months.
To which, today, add a further 50 Iraqi civilians.

Unwinnability and war: Nuclear weapons division

Attentive JWN readers will know that recently I’ve been doing some thinking about the proposition that over recent years, foreign wars may well have become unwinnable.
Of course, once enough people become convinced that foreigns wars are unwinnable, then they also should become unwageable… and the nations of the world would have to strengthen all their other, non-military ways of resolving differences, and cut back on military spending considerably…
I note that while my own analysis of the unwinnability question is based mainly on the US’s experience in Iraq since 2003 and Israel’s in Lebanon in 2006, Bill the spouse has also suggested that the unwinnability of foreign wars can be identified much earlier than that, including back to Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Or why not his 1980 invasion of Iran, perhaps?
Be that as it may… One response I’ve received from some people to the proposition about unwinnability has been, “Well maybe so… but you’ve only been talking about non-nuclear wars… so if it’s those that are unwinnable doesn’t that just increase the incentive for states to acquire nuclear weapons?”
Well, I’ve done a bunch of thinking about nuclear weapons, too, in various contexts over the years; much of it back in the 1980s when for a few years I was a member of something called the Washington Council on Non-Proliferation. (Does that still exist? This report says not.) So I kept that “nuclear” objection to my unwinnability thesis tucked into the back of my mind. And last week, when I saw a notice that the New America Foundation was sponsoring a talk on the topic of “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima,” I hurried along there.
The presenter was Ward Wilson, an independent scholar who recently won a prize for the essay he wrote on this topic– which has also, incidentally, been published here (PDF).
And here, btw, is Wilson’s own blog post recording the event, which has a link to the video record of the discussion.
If you’re interested in nuclear weapons, or particularly in nuclear disarmament, it is definitely worthwhile watching the video that’s accessible there, which is posted on YouTube and runs 1 hour 16 mins.
Ward made a handful of extremely thought-provoking and useful arguments that basically attacked the notion that nuclear weapons have military utility.
His first argument was based on a close re-reading of the historical record of the Japanese government’s decision-making in the days leading up to and right after Truman’s use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He took on the commonly-told “story” in the US is that the use of the A-bombs (while highly regrettable etc etc) did nonetheless succeed in persuading the Japanese government to issue a speedy notice of surrender— and thereby also saved the lives of the thousands of US servicemen who could otherwise have been expected to die in a continuation of the island-hopping advance toward Tokyo. Ward’s conclusion, using the Japanese record, is that it was Russia’s entry into the war in Asia, which happened a few days after the bombing of Hiroshima, that was far more important in persuading– or as he says, “coercing”– the Japan authorities to surrender.
He used another line of argument, too, one based on a number of technical military considerations. What was aimed at with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said, was city destruction, with the aim that seeing the destruction of entire cities would so “shock” (and perhaps also “awe”?) Japan’s national command authorities that they would immediately capitulate and sue for surrender. But, he argued, Japan had already seen worse destruction of cities in the weeks preceding Hiroshima, achieved through the US firebombing of cities. And moreover, throughout history, he argued, the destruction of cities has not been strategically decisive.
(I hope readers here are seeing the connections and parallels with my own writing about the Israeli bombing of Beirut, etc.)
Regarding the military utility of nuclear weapons, he said,

    Basically, there are two problems with nuclear weapons: they are too big, and they leave poison wherever they are used.

He drew a great comparison with chariots, which he depicted as kind of the “shock and awe” weapons of their day. He said that, while they may have “shocked and awed” the peasants of the societies where they were used (while also, I might add, amply expressing and feeding the grandiosity of the military leaders who raced around in them) still, their actual military utility was extremely low.
To illustrate this, he showed a bas-relief of a charioteer trying to use a bow and arrow as he rode into battle. The guy, using a bow and arrow to be able to project his ordnance against the enemy, had to use both hands to do that– and had left the reins of the chariot tied around his waist. “So essentially,” Ward said, “he was out of control.”
A great analogy.
And the reason the charioteer chose to use a bow and arrow was that he could not easily or effectively use a sword or spear against his opponents, given that having two horses pull the chariot gave it considerable width, keeping him from getting up close to the foe. (The size issue, there.)
The other great analogy that Ward used for nuclear weapons was the idea– expressed at around 53 minutes into the YouTube video– that we should think of nuclear weapons as being like hanging a bottle of nitroglycerine on a string in the family’s kitchen, as a way of “deterring” the entry or activities of burglars. “Just the idea that you are fearful as you and your family creep around the bottle hanging there doesn’t prove that it’s effective!”
Anyway, it was a great presentation; and the article and video are great, too. I am so glad I went. The only troubling thing that happened was that there was a smart, well-informed Japanese scholar in the audience, too– a woman who grew up in Hiroshima and teaches at a Japanese university, who is here in the US for the summer… And I think that Ward and the (also male) chair of the session treated her rather harshly at the end for trying to finish the entirely reasonable point she was trying to make about the US public and leaders preferring to believe that the bombing of Hiroshima had had military/strategic utility because of their reluctance to face up to the horrendous humanitarian disaster it had caused. Honestly, I can’t imagine a Holocaust survivor ever being treated in such a fashion in a public gathering; and I found their accusations that she was too “emotional” (or “passionate”) quite unwarranted.
But in general, as I said, a really helpful presentation. Ward made a whole bunch more good points there that I haven’t had time to write about here.

That USIP session on US troop presence in Iraq

I live-blogged the session just briefly here, yesterday; and Marc Lynch gave his somewhat longer– and later– “first take” on the discussion, here. We can hope that USIP’s own audio (MP3) recording of the session will be at this page on their website soon.

    (Update Tuesday: the audio is here. Video promised soon.)

The set-up of the discussion turned out to be that there were two relative outliers– Kim Kagan, a perky and very tightly scripted neocon (and ardent ‘surge’ defender) at one end of the spectrum, and Charles Knight of the Project for Defense Alternatives and the Boston-based Commonwealth Institute at the other. Holding down “the middle” were Colin Kahl of the aggressively “realist” but also blessedly paleocon “Center for a New American Security”, and– here was the surprise– Rend al-Rahim (formerly Rend Rahim Francke), who through 2002-2003 was an ardent ally of Ahmad Chalabi’s, working tirelessly in Washington to gin up support for the 2003 invasion.
I recall that on January 13, 2003, Rahim Francke told a WaPo reporter that she hoped to be “on the first US tank” going to Baghdad. By October 2005, however, she was starting to express unease with Washington’s conduct of its project in Iraq… The fact that her political sponsors in Baghdad never followed through on earlier plans to make her ambassador to Washington may have had something to do with that. (Or maybe they’d fallen out of power in the interim. I forget.) Probably, though, she would be an interesting person to interview.
As I wrote yesterday, all the panelists except Knight expressed– or reflected– the crucial judgment that the US government is politically stronger than the Iraqi government, and can therefore exert leverage over it.
The more I think about it, the more I think that judgment is flawed. It strikes me that some time over the past two months, the balance of political forces between Washington and Baghdad shifted in favor of Baghdad. This, due to a number of factors:

    1. George Bush’s presidency is anyway winding down; and in many fields of action he is acting like a lame duck a lot earlier than most two-term presidents do;
    2. The momentum of public opinion inside the US has also been shifting noticeably from a focus on Iraq to a focus on Afghanistan. This has been reflected at many levels of society. We could say that the “Dannatt moment” I’ve been writing about for 21 months has now kind of snuck up on us already. (It’s true that we all– including, certainly, me– need to do a lot more thinking about Afghanistan than simply going along with the current near-consensus that what’s needed is only “more US-NATO troops.” I see Brzezinski’s been one of the clearest thinkers on this issue, already.) But regarding the US commitment to Iraq, the arrival of the US’s “Dannatt moment” alters the political calculus between Washington and Baghdad considerably.
    3. Inside Iraq, PM Maliki– a man whose main political talent is that of pliability– seems to have made the judgment that going along with the national consensus there on the issue of US troops leaving is better for him than continuing to kowtow to Washington. This doesn’t look like a crazy judgment, given the consolidation of a new nationalist consensus within most of Iraq.

Of course, if you see Washington’s negotiating hand as being stronger, then you would think that Washington could “extract concessions” from Baghdad, or “impose conditions” on it. If you see Baghdad’s as stronger, then that calculus shifts.
Kim Kagan said things like the following:

    Whether we as US are able to fulfill our objectives in Iraq depends mainly on what we do…
    We as the US have the choice to stay and see that the post-election period is successful. [I believe she was referring to the period after Iraq’s provincial elections, which may have to be delayed till early 2009. Later in the year there will be national elections.] Or we could send the very wrong message that we aren’t in fact committed to the Iraqis’ success and we would signal to all opponents that their time is coming.
    This depends on us!
    We need to keep our forces there through the spring, at the earliest, to see if the post-election process has worked.

Note in this both– as Lynch noted– the completely “imperial” insistence that the Iraqis would have no meaningful input into the decisionmaking, as well as Kagan’s resurrection of the old “just wait for one more purple finger moment” ploy to try to sell Americans on the idea of maintaining at its present level a troop deployment that is costing US taxpayers $300 million per day.
… From his very different perspective, Charles Knight then gave an excellent presentation of the basic arguments in the “Necessary Steps” report that he and a number of others issued last month, which calls on Washington to announce a firm deadline by which it will have withdrawn all its troops from Iraq, and describes what other steps need to accompany that announcement.
(Alert readers of JWN might be interested to know that, on the ‘Acknowledgments’ page of the currently available online versions of the NS report, its authors have now expressed some acknowledgment of the inspiration my work provided for them, and they’ve inserted two of my own earlier works on hoiw to withdraw from Iraq into the report’s Bibliography. That, after I called them out on their abominably exploitative treatment of me in this June 25 blog post. Now, we are all engaged in discussions of ways to move forward together in a more respectful and inclusive way.)
At yesterday’s session, Knight described some of the broad dimensions of the socio-political crisis the Iraqis are still experiencing, and the costs this has imposed on the US’s standing and capabilities all around the world.
He said,

    We need a new basis for our policy there: One that puts Iraqis at the center; and rallies the international community to our side.
    We should start by defining a realistic and short timeline for withdrawal. This is necessary in order to draw further Iraqi oppositionists into the political process there and to catalyze international support. But on its own it’s not enough.
    We need to recognize that the US presence and actions have been part of the problem in Iraq, not part of the the solution. We’ve been handicapped by being seen there as an alien power… We have also worn our sense of privilege on our sleeve there– including with the administration’s insistence, in the security negotiations, on keeping immunity from Iraqi prosecution for US citizens
    Iraqis need to take charge of their own longterm development. Yes, they might need international help but not in same US-dominated model we have used until now…

He urged the following complements to the announcement of the date for withdrawal:

    1. The formation of an International Support Group that would include Iraq, all its neighbors, the UN, the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, and other bodies… Including, as part of that, that the US must re-engage Syria and Iran in respectful diplomacy…
    2. As we demand that other states respect the principle of non-interference in Iraq’s internal affairs, the US must demonstrate the same commitment as well.

Altogether an excellent and well-argued presentation. My only quibble would be that I think it’s important to spell out that it should be the UN that is asked to convene the various negotiations that will be required– both within Iraq and among a range of international actors– if the withdrawal is to have the maximal chance of being carried out in an orderly fashion and leaving behind an Iraq in which the big political questions are well on their way to resolution.
Knight had started his time at the podium by invoking Monty Python’s iconic “And now for something completely different…” The third one up to speak was Colin Kahl, who started by saying that after hearing the earlier two speakers, he wanted to present what he called “the Goldilocks position– neither too hot, nor too cold, but somewhere in between.”
His presentation was based on a report that his outfit, the Center for a New American Security, issued last month under the title “Shaping the Iraqi Inheritance“. (I’m not sure how I feel about that imagery. I’m not quite prepared to see the US as the benign Aunty who leaves a wonderful inheritance to her niece; and nor do I think that Iraq ever in any sense “belonged” to the US, which would be the only context in which the US could “bequeath” it to the Iraqi people. On the other hand, the idea of an inheritance does strongly imply that dear old Aunty will have gone, exited, kaput, and left the scene… )
Kahl was a co-author of that report, quite possibly its principal co-author. He described the concept of “conditional engagement” that, he said, lies at the heart of their approach.
He noted (imho correctly) that, “Our presence in Iraq undermines our deterrent posture against Iran.” He added,

    The war has been devastating to both our hard power and our soft power. But we need to make sure that the way we disengage doesn’t do the same– that it doesn’t lead to a failed state, as Charles’s path would..

He defined the US’s goal in Iraq as being the achievement of ‘sustainable stability’, and helpfully noted that “the passing of a law with the name of a benchmark is not the same as achieving the benchmark!”
Indeed.
Kahl had evidently been working hard to attain the efficient, self-confident affect of an ambitious young wannabe government official. (Indeed, he said he had already served one year in the defense Department; he didn’t say under what auspices.) So he had a number of Power Point slides, most of which were– given the size of the room– completely unreadable from even halfway back in it. Anyway, if you go to the PDF text of the “Iraqi Inheritance” report, on p. 34 of the PDF (32 of the paper version) you can find one of the graphics he displayed, and on p. 44 of the PDF (42 of the paper) you can find another.
The first of those graphics is a simple 2 x 2 matrix summarizing four different policy approaches, plotting the presence or absence of conditionality exerted by the US towards Iraq against whether the basic stance is one of maintaining or ending the US’s “military engagement in Iraq”
He characterized the Bush administration’s approach as one of “unconditional engagement”, whereas he favored the stance of “conditional engagement.”
Whether the US is, actually, capable of credibly imposing political “conditions” on the Baghdad government– including being willing and able to impose sanctions for Baghdad’s failure to meet the conditions– is where I disagree with Kahl.
Here was an interesting point, though. At the end of his presentation, he admitted that the whole goal of being able to impose (and enforce) the US’s “conditions” on Baghdad might not be attainable. He said, “If the ‘conditional’ part of it doesn’t work, then we could go back to what Charles advocates. But that would have to be as Plan B, not Plan A.”
Interesting.
My suggestion to Kahl: Bag your Plan A because it’s not workable. Just deal with developing the very best Plan B that you can. And no, the “fixed timetable for a full withdrawal” approach would not lead unstoppably to state failure in Iraq, as you claimed. There are many, many ways to minimize the probability of that outcome, as I and others have demonstrated. So that accusation you voiced against Charles Knight was an ill-considered cheap shot.
(Anyway, talking of state failure in Iraq, what was the result of Bremerism there? Iraqis have now proven that they can– with great difficulty– overcome the effects of the complete and deliberate destruction of their state’s governing institutions that was achieved by Viceroy Bremer. So why on earth would Colin Kahl or anyone else think they would be prepared to lapse easily back into a situation of state failure once again?)
So if you have time, go look at the second one of those graphics in the PDF of the CNAS report. It nicely sums up the excessively managerialist (i.e. imperialistic, ‘technocratic’) approach that is Kahl’s Plan A.
He also said things like this:

    Most Iraqi leaders want some form of US ‘overwatch’. But most don’t want a continuing US presence, except the Kurdish leaders.

Unclear what the exact bottom line from that remark is?
And this:

    The Iraqi want a lot of things from us, including military and diplomatic help… But we should extract a price for these things.

Again, I’m not sure he sees the balance of political power question there quite correctly…
So that then brings us to Rend Rahim’s presentation. She announced her policy preference upfront: “I find myself in large agreement with Kahl’s view.”
And from then on, you saw the intriguing sight of this very controlled, and quite intelligent woman agonizing in public over how best to articulate both her diagnosis of the situation and her policy prescriptions. The POV from which she was speaking seemed very ambiguous. On a large number of occasions she spoke about “we”, in a context where she seemed to be referring to the actions of the Bush administration., But she is not a US government official, and I’m not even sure if she’s a US citizen. Maybe she was referring to the “we” of all those– Iraqis and Americans–who had conspired together to work for, and then implemented, the invasion of Iraq? Unclear.
On other occasions, she seemed to be speaking more as an Iraqi.
So here, with those POV issues unresolved, is a digest of more or less what she said:

    The presence of US troops is a constant irritant; but the attitudes of the Iraqi leaders and population towards it are ery. conflicted…. We have seen a reversal, where earlier it was the Sunnis wanted us to leave and Shiites wanted us to stay, but now it’s the other way around…
    The Iraqis may do things we don’t approve of… and there might be private remonstrances from US leaders. But as Colin said, you never see any public declarations from the Bush administration about this….
    We’ve made a number of mistakes, I admit. In the rebuilding of the Iraqi army we’ve concentrated on quantity rather than quality. “We” have trained for combat but not for command and control; “we” have completely ignored the very important question of of the loyalty of the army to the state, as Colin mentioned.
    The army has to be constituted on a different basis if we are to have ‘sustainable stability’ in Iraq…
    About all the negotiations over a security agreement, I would say that Iraq is still very vulnerable as a state, and most Iraqis still see need for external alliance. The US is seen as the best partner for this.
    But trying to get this security agreement in a year that’s an election year in both the US and Iraq– whose idea was that? There are so many complex issues around that negotiation that simply can’t be discussed in Washington in an election year– and similarly, in Iraq…
    Maliki now wears the Sadrists’ nationalist mantle and he can’t take it off.
    The SOFA was presented as defining conditions for the US troops staying in Iraq– but it should have been framed as defining conditions for troops leaving Iraq. That would have been a much easier sell in both the US & Iraq…
    Now, Maliki is looking at getting out from the current UN mandate to the US-led coalition which is under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, and which obliges him to accede to the coalition’s decisions, to having it be under Chapter 6, where the coalition forces would be there at the invitation of the Iraqis… And they are talking about this being a six- or 12-month agreement from when the current resolution expires, which is on December 31
    I think an unconditional withdrawal as suggested by Charles would be very worrying. But I also disagree with Kim’s view. Yes, the situation is a lot better than it was previously. But all is not well in Iraq. There is a huge concern that all the relative stability we see is very fragile. The gains on the political level have been very small.
    The army is still made up mainly of partisan, militia-based or sectarian units (ISCI; Sahwa, etc.) There is a problem of the chain of command: who do they report to?
    The situation is even worse in police. But even in the army we still don’t have it as a national institution.
    The constitutional review undertaken last summer (’07) didn’t even address two of the most crucial issues. And even then, the recommendations the review committee made haven’t even been taken up by parliament. We still have a big problem with the constitution, a big problem with the amnesty question, a big problem with Debaaathification, and with the integration integration of the Sahwas and the ‘Sons of Iraq.’
    Regarding the latter, the original agreement was to take 20% of them into army and police. But not even that was met. And then, what about the other 80%? If they don’t feel integrated we could see a huge relapse of people back into the ranks of the insurgency.
    Also, the issue of displacement is not just a humanitarian issue but also a political question. We’ve had a serious loss of Sunnis, who have been the main group displaced; and in places like Baghdad, Diyala, etc, the political balance has been direly affected.
    There is a big problem with the independence of the judiciary…
    Finally, we have the elections coming up… What happens in the elections will depend on money, power, and access to weapons. The election season which will take up most of 2009 could be very destabilizing.
    Regarding the drawdown of the US troops, we need to have time limitations and time markers for withdrawal… But they must be tied to markers inside Iraq that ensure sustainable stability.
    Some people say “the US has no levers”… But I don’t think that’s the case: the US has many levers of influence that it can use. Remember the diplomatic gifts (especially in winning the agreement of various other governments to reschedule or cancel Iraq’s external debts) that we have given to Iraq.
    We haven’t done a good job of looking at tools to dangle carrots and so on before the Iraqi government, to establish firm conditionality…

In the Q&A period that followed, here were the most interesting points made:
Kim Kagan– perhaps sensing the US national zeitgeist and eager to find a way to remain relevant to it?– said she does see some possibility for some withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. But she stressed that this should not be before next spring and the post-provincial-election period in Iraq.
Rend al-Rahim warned more about what she described as “the real prospect of violence throughout the election year in Iraq– that is, throughout the whole of 2009– with the highest probability of this being in Anbar Province.”
Colin Kahl admitted that, “The challenge for next president will be to manage our increasing irrelevance in Iraq.”
Indeed.
And then– conceptually related to that– there was the very percipient question that the discussion’s moderator, Dan Serwer, asked, as I noted yesterday, when he pointed out that if the US imposes “conditionality”, then it should have the readiness to withhold promised political goodies from the Baghdad government if those conditions are not met…
An excellent question, that I never heard satisfactorily answered. Okay, maybe that was because I was taking advantage of USIP’s generously offered wireless internet there to live-blog the event right then.
But really, given the way I analyze the balance of forces between Baghdad and Washington these days– regarding matters Iraqi– I’m not sure there is a satisfactory answer to Serwer’s question…

Keeping a sense of humor between Baghdad’s ever-encroaching walls

McClatchy’s Iraqi staffer Laith has a great little post on the Inside Iraq blog, describing one instance of how Baghdad’s people keep their sense of humor –and therefore, their sanity and humanity– as they deal with the ever-mushrooming system of high concrete walls that the occupation authorities have been using to physically quadrillage the city.
(*Quadrillage is a fancy French-in-Algeria term for using physical barriers and stringent movement controls to “divide and rule” a subject population. Guess where the US occupiers got this “walling in” idea from, in modern times… )
Laith wrote that usually he finds the long wait to get through the gaps in the wall are frustrating in the extreme. But on the day he was writing about, this happened:

    I was only three steps away from the gap but I didn’t want to pass because I kept listening to the funny comments of the young men. A group of young men started talking as if we are in Palestine passing through the big blast wall that was made the Israeli authorities.
    Young man 1:- “how is the situation in Gaza?”
    Young man 2:-“It’s very bad. The Israeli tanks surround the city and bothering the civilians (referring to the American Humvees which we saw near the main residence area.)
    Young man 3 “I don’t know about that. I just came from Rafah and everything was fine.”
    I started laughing in pain. We make fun of our pains always but that was never the solution for the big problem of occupation. I’m afraid that one we would envy the People in Palestine because in spite of the improvement of the security situation, the Iraqi authorities insist on putting more blast walls. I’m afraid that I might wake up one day and I find an Iraqi checkpoint near my room’s door searching me every time I get in and out. I think at that time, I would be happy if I can travel to Gaza (the real Gaza in Palestine) for some peace.

I note that though I wrote above that it was the (U.S.) occupation authorities that had erected Baghdad’s wall system, Laith ascribes responsibility to the Iraqi government. That’s interesting– and probably does not bode well for the government’s popularity.