Author: Helena

What have the Bushites done to US national power?

So as you may all have gathered, I’m deeply into a bit of Realist thinking this week. This is all part of the intellectual work that is mulching down into Ch.6 of my current book project. But since the final text itself will have to be the merest digest of all my thinking, I thought I would share with you this fine table I made today, for which I have now figured the book won’t in the end have room. (You’ll see, though, that it is all still written in the kind of past-simple tense that I have to use for a book that won’t be in readers’ hands before next spring. This, even though many of the processes it describes are still ongoing.)

One of my aims here is to chart the ways in which the actions of the Bush administration in the international arena– reckless? criminal? immoral?– have considerably set back the true interests of the US citizenry (in contradistinction, as I shall explain in greater length in Ch.7, to the interests of the handful of big US corporations whose interests have driven most of the administration’s actions to date.)

So I made this little table that you see below, in which I teased apart what has happened to each of the main elements of “national power” during the Bushite era. In most of these dimensions, as you can see, there was an actual– sometimes precipitous– decline. Not all of these decreases were caused by the Bushites’ own actions (or, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, inactions); but most of them were.

But in addition something else was happening at a broader level– and once again, this was largely the result of the Bushites’ own actions. And this was a significant decline in both the actual and the perceived utility of raw military power (see line 3.) In other words, in the world of 2007-2020, the other, non-military elements of national power will almost certainly come to count for considerably more, relative to military power, than they have until now.

In a way this is a quite foreseeable result of one of the main phenomena of the present age: the sheer interconnectedness and transparency-to-each-other of nearly all the different parts of the world. And that phenomenon is surely going only to increase, not decrease, as the years go by.

Another thing I was doing with this table was trying to tease out what “soft power” actually means these days. I broke it out into four different dimensions here. What do any of the rest of you think about that scheme?

Okay, here it is:

The fate of the basic elements of US national power under the
Bush administration


by Helena Cobban for ‘Just World News’

Element of
national power 		The US
situation at the end of 2000 		The US
situation by fall 2007
1.  Economic performance Very strong, both relatively and
absolutely. 		Still very strong absolutely,
but noticeably less strong in the “relative” stakes.  The amount
of US government and private debt held by foreigners had increased
greatly.  Of the federal government’s external creditors, Japan
and China held first and second place.
2.  Human resources Our skill-set was strong but our
numbers were nowhere near those of China or India! 		The skill-set was still strong–
though many other countries had been catching up.  The EU’s
expansion had meanwhile increased its (very well-educated) population
to more than 50% greater than ours.
3.  Military power Unassailable, and either
respected or feared by all others around the world. 		Significantly dented, since
Washington by then held almost nothing in reserve for contingencies;
but otherwise still unmatched in technical and power-projection
capacity.  However, the usefulness
of raw military force as a factor that, on its own, can
realize important strategic objectives came under strong new
questioning after Israel’s experience in Lebanon and our country’s, in
Iraq.
4.  “Soft” power:
4-a.  Appeal of US ideals
and culture 		Our ideals were widely shared
and even more widely respected.  Our culture was generally (though
not everywhere) considered appealing 		Both our ideals and the
sincerity with which our leaders held them were strongly questioned by
many people around the world.  The violence and hypersexualized
nature of our culture had become widely commented on and reviled.
4-b. Recognition and
appreciation of US achievements 		The US had a strong reputation
as a competent, “can-do” nation that had put a man on the moon, helped
topple the Soviet empire through largely peaceful means, and provided a
decent life and good opportunities for its own people.		 The gross incompetence that our
country demonstrated in  rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, and in
our national response to Hurricane Katrina, shocked even many of the
US’s staunchest friends around the world.  Actions undertaken by
US government and non-governmental bodies that did provide good, solid
services to others went largely unrecognized.
4-c.  Perceived
truthfulness of US leaders 		President Clinton’s affair with
Monica Lewinsky raised some eyebrows around the world. (It also
generated laddish smirks from many men).  But that episode did
little to dent a broad perception of US leaders as more open and
truthful than most of their counterparts around the world. 		The ideological zeal with which
Bush was seen as bending the evidence regarding Saddam’s WMDs and links
to Al-Qaeda generated a very broad international questioning both
of  his truthfulness, and of the integrity of a national political
system seen as having failed to hold him to adequate account at any
stage along the way to, or since, the invasion of Iraq.
4-d.  Reputation of US
leaders as fairminded  upholders of global norms. 		Many around the world were
mystified and concerned that the US had stayed out of so many global
treaties in the 1990s– and also, that our agricultural and other
subsidies seemed to violate strong norms on fair trading.  But
many non-US people were still prepared to cut us some slack on these
issues because of our strength on factors 4a, 4-b, and 4-c. 		The Bush administration’s
decisions (i) to invade Iraq in the absence of any compelling casus belli and then (ii) to commit
so many serious jus in bello
infractions there, in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere shocked
nearly all those around the world who had hitherto seen Washington as a
broadly status quo-preserving power that at least stuck by the existing
rules and norms of international behavior.  The Bushites almost
completely shredded this dimension of the US’s soft power.  It
might take his successors a long time to reconstitute it.

Update, Thursday morning: I think that for completeness the table should include a line for “National unity”. Also, I think that item 4-d here should really come higher in the listing of soft power attributes since it includes the key attribute of international legitimacy.

Visser on the British exit from Basra

Reidar Visser yesterday sent out an informative email note that
drew on his long and close study of the politics of, in particular,
Basra and the surrounding regions of southern Iraq to assess the
implications of Britain’s  final withdrawal of the remainder of
its forces from downtown  Basra and their  redployment
(concentration) back to the bigger base near Basra airport that is now
the Brits’ only military base inside Iraq.  (Can full British
withdrawal be far behind, I wonder?)

Anyway, I asked Reidar’s permission to publish this on JWN.  He
explained that the note “is part of
an experiment
that was launched in January 2007 featuring occasional e-mail updates
exclusively for historiae.org
subscribers.”  So if you want to read the whole thing, you have to
go there and subscribe.  The good news: I don’t think you actually
have to pay him anything, or give him any personal details apart from
your email address in order to do so.   So maybe y’all should
head on over and do that….

Meantime, here are the excerpts that he has kindly agreed I can use
here, along with a few of my own comments.  He has also said he
will welcome yours, so chip on in.

Local Reactions to the British
Withdrawal from
Basra: Sadrists Claim Victory

By Reidar Visser (www.historiae.org)

4 September 2007

Perhaps the most
important aspect of the recent British withdrawal from the urban centre
of Basra to a base near the city’s airport is the reaction from local
political forces. So far, the loudest response has come from the
Sadrists, who publicly claim that their armed campaign led to the
British withdrawal.

…  [T]he
recent pullout itself was a largely symbolic affair:
the British ceased exercising effective control of Basra a long time
ago.

Also Western
commentators – particularly in the United States – have suggested that
the Basra pullout represents “British defeat”. However, that judgment
rather exaggerates the differences between “gangland Basra” and what is
construed as the more “pacific” central parts of Iraq. The main
difference between the US and the British approach does not relate to
militia power as such, but rather to the extent to which there has been
an attempt to manipulate the political games in which the militias take
part.

In the south, the
British have largely maintained a neutral
position, with a variety of armed factions coexisting in some kind of
uneasy equilibrium, and with a diverse range of political forces
gaining power…
In the rest of Iraq, US forces have largely allied themselves with
Kurdish and ISCI parties and their militias (technically “integrated”
in the security forces and the Iraqi army), and have supported these
groups in their efforts to suppress internal dissent. Ideologically,
this has been presented as an effort to build a “moderate” base; in
practice it has involved giving consent to much highhandedness by local
authorities. Thus, repression and militia rule are not absent from the
US-controlled parts of Iraq, but they take on a more orderly form than
in
the far south.

(I would add in here that in the
US-controlled parts of the country the US forces have also found
themselves having to deal with the whole range of Sunni groups, a
factor that has made their task even more complicated than that faced
by the brits in the south.  And of course,it was the over-all
policy pursued by the US in Iraq since 2003 that gave birth to and then
increased those problems…  Actually, I question whether it’s
correct at all to describe any stark contrast between “gangland Basra”
and the more “pacific” environment further north, in general. 
Baghdad, the triangle south of it, Diyala Province, and many other
areas are currently far from pacific.  The only, demographically
relatively small “island” of peaceableness in the US-held,
majority-Arab part of Iraq is a portion of Anbar Province– the only
part of the whole country that was deemed safe enough for Bush’s recent
extremely “flying” visit. And who knows how long the current balance in
that portion of Anbar will even last?  ~HC)

… Over the coming
months, both the position of the Sadrists and the further development
of militia relations in Basra will be crucial. There is some indication
that relations between Fadila (which remains in control of the
governorate despite a vote of no confidence) and Sadrists have improved
slightly during the summer… On the
other hand, ISCI has in the past been skilful in forestalling alliances
between its two main competitors in Basra, and, moreover, could now
benefit from the handover to Iraqi government forces.

Westminster-centric
analyses of the British withdrawal have pondered whether the timing was
linked to the Labour Party’s upcoming annual conference. (I am shocked! shocked! by this
siuggestion. ~HC)  The more
important question is who will be Basra’s governor three months from
now. It would be a setback to the image of the Iraqi army as a “neutral
player” if the first thing to happen after the British withdrawal were
the ouster of Fadila and the fall of one of the last bastions of
resistance to ISCI rule in the Shiite parts of Iraq.

— end of Visser text

Okay,
here’s my (HC) one major remaining
comment on this. I saw a slightly twittish British officer on the BBC
tonight assuring viewers that the redeployment to the airport area was
“not a defeat”.  Of course he had to say that.  They all do! 
Just like Ronald Reagan, as he pulled the US Marines out of Beirut in
February 1984 under the rubric of a “redeployment offshore”… Or Ehud
Barak pulling the Israeli troops out of Lebanon in 2000…

Well, at least on all those occasions the withdrawal redeployment
was carried out in good order and without casualties.  The British
withdrawal from Basra and, I think, the US Marines’ withdrawal from
Beirut were also both, unlike the Israelis as they slunk out of Lebanon
that time, accompanied by short ceremonies of “handover” of the
relevant area to the relevant governmental forces.  I certainly
saw a short newsclip of a slightly perfunctory-looking handover
ceremony in Basra on yesterday’s TV news: the whole decolonizing thing:
the Union Jack comes down, the national flag goes up, there is a bit of
saluting, and out the colonial forces roll…

Of course all of that– not just the handover ceremony but also the
withdrawal in good order, in general– requires some measure of
pre-negotiation to achieve in any minimally assured way.  That is
what the post-Rabin generation of Israeli leaders have all hated. 
Barak would slink out Lebanon, and Sharon out of Gaza… But they were
darned if they would negotiate, or be seen as negotiating, those troop
withdrawals with anyone.

So how, I wonder will the US approach the question of planning its
upcoming troop pullouts, even if only partial ones, from Iraq? 
Will there be negotiations and little handover ceremonies here and
there?  I do believe they’ve tried that in many places, and the
whole idea has probably lost a lot of its luster by now…

Anyway, Washington– and both political parties therein– will most
likely be eager to avoid any suggestion that this is a “defeat”. 
Will they be able to pull off that feat of legerdemain?  I highly
doubt it.

Also, how the heck will they actually get out of the country? 
Even harder to do so if the Brits are no longer in Basra.

Anyway, big thanks to Reidar for letting  me use so much of his
piece here.  (In the parts I left out, you can learn some really
interesting further details of the political situation in the Basra
region.)

This just in! ‘Century’ mysteriously loses 93 years!

Sometimes, it seems hard to remember that 1997 was only ten years ago. It feels as if such a lot has happened since then! Indeed, sometimes it feels that all of world history is going through a big time-warp these days, a great celestial laundry machine that’s tumbling us all over each other with increasing rapidity.
It was in 1997 that Bill Kristol and a bunch of his uber-militaristic and neocon allies in US politics established their ‘Project for a New American Century‘. Check out the names of those who signed its founding declaration, at the bottom of this web-page. There they all are: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, a smarter member of the Bush clan than George W., Elliott Abrams, Scooter Libby, Zal Khalilzad, Paul Wolfowitz, Steve Rosen, etc etc…
Within less than four years of signing that, those men– okay, not including Jeb Bush, but instead, his more pliable brother– were catapulted onto the very apex of the US power machine. As of 2001 they had an unprecedented opportunity to bring into being their goal of a “New American Century.”
They over-reached, didn’t they.
That “exemplary” (shock! awe!) invasion of Iraq was their fatal over-reach.
Without that over-reach, but with smart stewarding of the US’s many assets in global politics, US domination of the world system could most likely have continued with little effective challenge for a further few decades– though almost certainly not for a full ten of them.
I’ve been reading the fascinating representation that Michael Pillsbury published in this 2000 book, of the views that Chinese strategic thinkers expressed in the late 1990s on relations among the world’s leading powers. Pillsbury wrote that one respected senior Chinese analyst, Yang Dazhou, wrote in 1997 that he foresaw the US as maintaining its superpower status “for at least three decades”– though this view was challenged by other senior analysts, who saw US decline as more inevitable and more rapid than portrayed by Yang.
(Can anyone refer me to good writing in English on the more recent assessments of global power balances produced by Chinese analysts?)
… Actually, I wish I could find out more about that term for a “superpower” in Chinese, as attributed to Yang there. For my part, I don’t foresee the US becoming “just one more ordinary power” in the world any time soon… But I do believe that the status of being the world’s unique “Uberpower“, that Josef Joffe rightly attributed to the US in the post-Cold War era, is the one that is right now– thanks in great part to the PNACers’ bloody and destructive over-reach in Iraq– coming to an end.
What will replace it? Well, we are evidently at a very important historic juncture. The invasion of Iraq has been a horrendous, cataclysmic tragedy for nearly all the people of that country (and for a relatively small number of American families.) But the course of events there also has the capacity to teach everyone in the world– and most particularly the US citizenry– a few important lessons:

    1. Military power, however technically hyper-advanced, can never be relied on as sufficient, on its own, to assure the achievement of strategic goals. Other elements of power including diplomatic/political smarts and international legitimacy, are equally or even more important.
    2. Thank goodness that, in the re-ordering of inter-national power balances that will certainly follow the US debacle in Iraq, we already do have two rules-based and generally well-trusted mechanisms of international coordination to help the people of the world navigate their way through these changes. These are (a) the UN, and its norms and institutions, and (b) the world economic system, ditto. If we didn’t have these two broad and already tested systems of international coordination in place, then imagine how damaging and violent the jostling among the world’s big powers could be during the transition into which the world’s peoples are now entering!
    3. The limitations on the utility of military force, as revealed most sharply in Iraq, are a helpfully instructive footnote to the more general situation that has existed since 1945 (or at least, since 1949), namely that in the era of nuclear weapons war among the great powers has become unthinkable. (This relates to #2 above, too.) True, Iraq was not at any point a “great” power. But what we have seen there is that war by a great power against even an already long-weakened medium power has proven counter-productive for the great (“Uber!”) power in question. Therefore, possession of great military power is revealed as not such an important component of “national” power as it has generally until now been thought to be…

And thus, while the US political class has been spending just about all its time, and vast amounts of our national budget, futzing around trying to figure out what to do about the actually unwinnable (and only barely salvageable) US situation in Iraq, the “soft power” that our country was once able to project around with great confidence around the world has eroded almost completely, and the Japanese, Chinese, Brits have become major props of our national debt…
As of June 30, 2007 Japan held $612.3 billion of our national debt, China $405.1 billion, and the UK $190.1 billion. The total amount of the US debt held by the public– that is, not by other US government trust funds, like the Social Security trust Fund– at that point was $4,943 billion. So China, for example, was holding 8.2% of that…
This past couple of weeks I’ve been doing some intriguing reading of Realist writers– Joffe, Brzezinski, Kishore Mahbubani– and some hard thinking on these issues, too. I have maintained for a few years now that there is no real contradiction between well-informed and principled Realist thinking on international affairs, and being a Quaker pacifist. I’d be happy to explain this more sometime, but don’t have time to now. My main point here, though, is to note that the whole wrenchingly ghastly experience of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq really does underline the fact that, in the globally interconnected and still informed-by-Hiroshima world of the 21st century, raw military power as such has far, far less utility than might have been thought earlier.
Yes, we still have to explain some of these things a lot more effectively to members of our political elite here, in both the big political parties– as well as to members of the MSM commentatoriat.
But at the very least, surely everyone can see that the destructive, arrogantly unilateralist uber-militarism that was the hallmark of the PNACers who captured our government in 2001 has failed?
Hallelujah.

Athleticism and older women

I took a day off from bookwriting today to run in the Charlottesville Women’s Four-miler. Nowadays, they have these snazzy little chips you tie into your shoelaces that record something near to your actual time– I think they trigger as you cross the Start line and as you cross the Finish line. This annual race has grown so large I didn’t even cross the Start line till the clock showed 0:55.
So here are the results. I came in #802 out of 2,240 women who finished the race. My chip-time was 41:24. In the 50-54 age group I came in 68th out of 217 women (i.e., just at the one-third point.)
Since I am 54 this year, that means I’m in the oldest age-cohort in the group. It also means next year I’ll be in the 55-59’s.
So here are two slightly depressing aspects of this:
(1) I am definitely slowing down. In 2005 I clocked 40:13— and they didn’t have the chip-timing system in place then! (So I still fondly hang onto the idea that “actually”, I came in under 40 minutes??)
(2) My feet hurt horribly after today’s race. They’ve been hurting quite a lot recently, especially at the start of my usual three-mile run. But today, for much of the day since the early morning race I’ve been hobbling around like an old lady.
Okay, no more whining. I am still incredibly lucky to have great health and mobility. I’ve sometimes thought how unprecedented it is to have such huge cohorts of older– and generally wiser?– women still surviving in the rich countries these days, as opposed to the proportion (or, of course, number) of women who would have survived in good health to these ages in earlier centuries.
I delivered and raised three incredible children. I didn’t die in childbirth. And though raising them while working was extremely tiring and stressful at times, I survived that with health and sanity more or less intact. (A huge bouquet to fellow-parent Bill-the-spouse for that.)
… And then, going out this morning to the stunning beauty of sunrise over the Virginia Piedmont and seeing 2,200 other healthy women all out there too– huge numbers of them my age or older, and many of them with supportive spouses and kids in tow– that was a great experience.
I had my own little dream there. Wouldn’t it have been great if we could have taken all that sheer womanpower running on up to DC to encircle the Pentagon and tell the Bush people to just bring the soldiers home?
Well, my experience in life has taught me that not all women are as antiwar as we might like. (Condi Rice!!! Maggie Thatcher!!! Jeane Kirkpatrick!!! etc.) But still, I really do think there is a gender tilt in bellophilia/bellophobia. I think that having large numbers of healthy, well-educated older women is going to be good for US democracy and for the restoration of US values of fairness and caring, over the years ahead.
Okay, back to the book. (And an Advil or two?)

Sri Lanka: Asia’s Darfur?

    The revived and very violent civil war in Sri Lanka is another world event that seems to have slipped off the scope of most of the US mainstream media. For that reason, I am glad I am able to publish the following, very disturbing account of the situation there. ~HC

SAVING ASIA’S DARFUR
by Rageen Joseph and Prashanth Parameswaran
“Either help us, or give us poison so we can kill ourselves,” cry aging Tamil mothers in war-torn Northern Sri Lanka. “The only difference between us and dead people is that we are breathing,” claims an internally displaced man in the East.
These and other similar stories have been reported both through direct conversations and stories broadcast by the BBC Tamil language service. Civilians have grown weary of the violence between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, but that cannot prevent it.
Since 1983, over 70,000 people have been killed; virtually the total population in the North and East has been displaced over the last two decades with thousands missing. Meanwhile, the international community has offered only minor mediation. Outside pressure and increased international monitoring is required to restore basic rights for Tamil civilians. With more than 5000 killed since December 2005, and disappearances, extra-judicial executions, and unlawful killings occurring every day, the violence has been getting more extreme.
In Vauniya, a government-controlled area in the North, armed and masked Sri Lankan soldiers spread fear and intimidation, demanding identity cards from Tamils at gunpoint. At night in government controlled areas, the Karuna group and other paramilitaries enter houses, holding randomly selected families at knifepoint while they rob, brutalize, and sometimes kill family members. In the past, civilians have been able to live through periods of violence without being brutalized, but recently both sides have assaulted the civilian population as part of their psychological warfare.
In the rebel-controlled Vanni region, people expect shelling and aerial bombardment without warning, while economic embargo leaves many without food and medicine. Without allowing civil dissent, the Tigers forcibly recruit one member from each Tamil family to join the armed struggle, a retired government employee reports. Temporary safety is found only in refugee camps. They provide food and some protection from attack, but no one can stay there for more than a few days. Some are soon sent back into conflict zones.
In East Batticaloa, school children go unconscious when the government forces use nearby playground to launch rockets and other artillery. At a hospital close to this launch site, patients collapse from the fear caused by the violent shaking of the buildings. Sometimes, rockets fall into civilian areas killing many people. In refugee camps in the North and East, shelter is a plastic sheet on the burning hot sand. Thousands of aid workers have withdrawn due to the violence and insufficient supplies.
More than 27 aid workers were killed in Sri Lanka since April 2006. On June 1, 2007, two Red Cross workers were abducted from Sri Lanka’s main railway station in Colombo and executed miles away. This happened despite government checkpoints in every block. Following recent Tamil Tigers bombing in Colombo, Sri Lankan government expelled hundreds of Tamils from the capital city until they were stopped by the Supreme Court. According to Sir. John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Co-ordination, Sri Lanka has become the most dangerous place on earth for humanitarian workers. He has called on the government to probe civil war abuses and consider an international rights monitoring mission.
Monitoring and mediation are stymied by Sri Lankan government officials trumpeting national sovereignty, but a state’s sovereignty flows from the ability to protect citizens. Legitimacy is lost when human rights violations are committed with tacit state approval. No matter which party committed the atrocities against Tamil civilians, the government is responsible to prosecute the perpetrators, a former Sri Lankan foreign minister has stated.
A mission to provide international monitoring has been proposed by EU nations, local and international human rights groups, and senior UN officials. The effort would be coordinated by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. This mission would supersede the government’s Commission of Inquiry – which has not prosecuted anyone.
The appointment of a US or UN special envoy to Sri Lanka would demonstrate genuine concern. Many nations have advocated this, and 38 lawmakers in the Sri Lanka Caucus of the U.S. Congress, urged this action in a letter to President Bush in February. The Sri Lankan government has opposed the measure, so diplomatic pressure is needed. The May 2007 visit to Sri Lanka by Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Boucher was not enough. Continuing events show his visit changed nothing. Recently, Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group warned that the situation in Sri Lanka is deteriorating to that extent where large-scale atrocities – Cambodia-style, Rwanda-style, Srebrenica–style, Kosovo-style– have occurred. Mr. Evans said “…Sri Lanka is anything but a Responsibility to Protect (R2P). So it is an R2P situation which demands preventive action by the wider international community to ensure that further deterioration does not occur.”
Under the Leahy Law, the U.S. is prohibited from providing aid to any foreign military personnel engaged in human rights abuse. Yet, the US government continues to train Sri Lankan troops, disregarding human rights violations. To add to the problem, the Bush administration signed a military cooperation agreement with the Sri Lankan government in March 2007.
Lost in the international humanitarian inaction is the voice of Tamil civilians. Whether in refugee camps, government areas or rebel territory, civilians can find no relief from this war. Despite the conflict, people deserve basic rights. If the world does not hear their cries, Sri Lanka becomes not only the Asian Darfur but it forces Sri Lanka Tamils into virtual servitude as a permanently dominated, oppressed, and exploited minority without political rights of self-determination.
—————————————–
Rageen Joseph is a recent graduate from University of Virginia and a humanitarian worker in Sri Lanka involved in several relief programs.
Prashanth Parameswaran is a senior at the University of Virginia. He is a columnist for the school newspaper and an editor of several research journals.

Bush fiddles, world warms, China ‘rises’

The work on my current book project has been going generally well. When I’m working on a big project like this, the writing I do when I’m writing sometimes feels fairly difficult. But the writing I do when I’m not (visibly) writing is sometimes eye-poppingly impossible. I’m not just talking about writer’s block; I figured how to write my way out of that a long time ago. I’m not even talking about the occasional moments of existential dread or complete self-doubt. (When in doubt, eat chocolate, I say.) … No, I’m talking about the time it takes to just let the impact, shape, and meta-narrative of the work settle itself down inside me and then reveal itself to me.
Sometimes this process feels frustratingly slow. But there’s no real alternative I’ve found yet to just– at the point that this needs to happen– letting it do so. I’ve now written five of the book’s six chapters. By having done so, I think I’ve finally figured out what the book is about. Now I’m sitting with these chapters. I’ve re-read them and can see several biggish ways in which some of them need to be revised. Sometime tomorrow or Friday I need to start (re-)writing the whole book, all six chapters of it, in some order or another.
I think I’m on track. Ommm.

Rights situation of Iraqis continues to deteriorate

I almost cannot believe the level of brazen disregard or outright, racist disdain that Bush administration spokespeople and their supporters show towards the situation in which the people of Iraq are forced to live (or die.) Every day we hear crowing from the Bushites about how “the surge is working”, or “Petraeus is succeeding in ‘flipping’ the Sunnis”, or whatever. But what you don’t hear at all from them are the grim facts about the situation of Iraq’s people.
Reporters in the MSM should be actively asking the administration’s spinmeisters how on earth they can claim signs of “progress” in Iraq, in light of developments like those being continually reported by those international agencies that do care what happens to real people in Iraq.
Like this, report from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, yesterday:

    an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis are have been uprooted from their homes, with the monthly rate of displacement climbing to over 60,000 people compared to 50,000 previously, according to UNHCR and the Iraqi Red Crescent…
    More than 2 million Iraqis are displaced inside Iraq, with over 1 million displaced since the February 2006 Samarra bombings. While most of the security incidents happen in the centre and south of the country, the displaced are not confined to these regions. In the north, there are more than 780,000 displaced Iraqis, over 650,000 in the centre of the country, and 790,000 in the south. Many are barely surviving in makeshift camps, inaccessible to aid workers for security reasons.
    Syria, which has generously kept its borders open to fleeing Iraqis, estimates that more than 1.4 million Iraqis are now in the country. Jordan estimates that some 500,000-750,000 Iraqis are in the country. The number of Iraqi asylum seekers in Europe in the first half of 2007 rose to nearly 20,000 – the same number received during all of 2006…

Or this, from the ICRC today:

    With the daily violence currently inflicted on the lives of Iraqis, tens of bodies are found every day, while countless persons go missing. While some of the bodies found can be identified, others cannot. According to official sources in Iraq, from 2006 until June 2007 some 20,000 bodies were brought to the Medical-Legal Institute in Baghdad (MLI). Almost 50 per cent of these bodies were unidentified and brought to morgues throughout the country. When unclaimed, they were buried in cemeteries. Since 2003, according to some sources, 4,000 unidentified bodies have been buried in special cemeteries in Najaf and Kerbala.
    For an Iraqi family, the process of looking for a missing person may prove to be extremely complicated or even very dangerous, and sometimes impossible. One of the main factors is the current security situation. Today, it is well known that moving in certain areas in Iraq can be life-threatening. Therefore, families cannot move freely asking for the whereabouts of their missing relatives. They try to go through private channels such as individuals or charity organizations. The second step would be looking in hospitals, before inquiring at the MLI, knowing that Baghdad suffers today from the worst security conditions…

And then, there are the swelling numbers of Iraqis who have been detained by the US forces themselves, under the surge. This recent news report says the number has gone up from 16,000 in February to 24,500 today.
The writer there, the NYT’s Thom Shanker, adds these details:

    Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody are Sunni Arabs… with the other detainees being Shiite Muslims, the officers say.
    Of the Sunni detainees, about 1,800 claim allegiance to a group that calls itself Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, military officers said. Another 6,000 identify themselves as takfiris [= “excommunicators”], meaning Muslims who believe that some other Muslims are not true believers. Such extremists view Shiite Muslims as heretics.
    Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order – a movement that drew from former Baath party members and security officials who served under Saddam – and has become religious and ideological.

Actually, I disagree. The figures he gives “indicate” nothing of the kind. They indicate only that some 37.4% of the Sunni detainees are either Qaeda supporters or takfiris. They tell us nothing about the remaining 62.6% of them.
Shanker tells us that of the US-held detainees, “about 800” are juveniles. That is cause for huge concern.
We need to remember that the term “detainee” refers to people who have not been convicted of any crime, but are merely behing held “on suspicion”, or because a jealous neighbor has turned them in, or whatever. Shanker says the average length of time they are held is one year, though the very low figure he gives on releases so far this year seems to contradict that. (Perhaps math is not his strong point?)
He also has this additional detail:

    According to statistics supplied by the headquarters of Task Force 134, the American military unit in command of detention operations in Iraq, there are about 280 detainees from countries other than Iraq. Of those, 55 are identified as Egyptian, 53 as Syrian, 37 as Saudi Arabian, 28 as Jordanian and 24 as Sudanese.

280 foreigners is just over one percent of the total. An interestingly low figure.
Anyway, my main point here is to note that none of the reports I have seen in the humanitarian-affairs media recently gives any indication that the surge has brought any improvement to the lives of ordinary Iraqis. Just the opposite.
Isn’t that the key “metric” that the US electorate and media ought to be focusing on?
Otherwise, what is the surge for? Just the personal vanity of one stubborn and rather ignorant US president?

Planning a thoroughly modern coup

Iraqslogger has a great piece that reproduces the text of a contract signed between Ayad (Iyad) Allawi and Robert Blackwill, in the latter’s capacity as head of a DC lobbying firm.
Allawi undertakes to pay Blackwill’s firm $50,000 a month for, in the first instance, six months starting August 1. In return Blackwill’s firm, BRG, will “provide strategic counsel and representation for an on behalf of Dr. Ayad Allawi before the US Government, Congress, media and others.”
Blackwill was the Bush administration’s envoy to Iraq in 2004, when longtime CIA protege Allawi was briefly PM there.
Last Saturday, BRG scored its first hit for Allawi when it succeeded in placing an anti-Maliki article, allegedly “written” by him, in the WaPo.
The contract featured on Iraqslogger is defined as running from August 1. But it was only signed– by both parties– on Monday (August 20). I guess that Allawi, a canny operator in the Washington scene for a long time, wanted to make sure that BRG would do something concrete for him before he signed it.
I’m still trying to figure out who’s ripping off whom in all this.
Where does Allawi get $300,000 to drop on these “lobbying” services?
(Silly question, Helena. Look at the amount of our US taxpayer “aid” that went missing in Iraq during Allawi’s premiership.)
Why does Bob Blackwill, who had a long career with the US State Department, not have enough retirement funds stashed away that he feels he needs to sleaze around making money doing such underhanded things?
(Answer: Of course he has plenty of retirement $$. But always wanting “more money! more money!” is the all-American way of life! Isn’t it?)
Excuse me while I go and have a bath. Even writing about this stuff makes me feel unclean.

Bush, Vietnam, and genocide in Cambodia

So what would that well-known Vietnam war-evader George Bush have wanted the US actually to do in Vietnam rather than withdraw when it did??
That excellent question was raised by a very good friend of mine this evening after we watched the TV news item about Bush’s appearance today at the annual convention of the “Veterans of Foreign Wars” organization, and the way Bush brought into his speech there strong “warning” that a too-hasty US withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences for Iraqis and others in the Middle East just as bad, or perhaps worse, than the “consequences” that he claimed resulted from the US’s too-hasty withdrawal from Vietnam…
Bush was explicitly picking up there on the argument to that effect that recently retired Pentagon official Peter Rodman and liberal uber-hawk Will Shawcross made here earlier this summer.
Bush said:

    Recently, two men who were on the opposite sides of the debate over the Vietnam War came together to write an article. One was a member of President Nixon’s foreign policy team, and the other was a fierce critic of the Nixon administration’s policies. Together they wrote that the consequences of an American defeat in Iraq would be disastrous.
    Here’s what they said: “Defeat would produce an explosion of euphoria among all the forces of Islamist extremism, throwing the entire Middle East into even greater upheaval. The likely human and strategic costs are appalling to contemplate. Perhaps that is why so much of the current debate seeks to ignore these consequences.” I believe these men are right.

He acknowledged– how could he avoid doing so?– that Vietnam ” is a complex and painful subject for many Americans.” He also did not, for that audience of veterans, say anything about his own semi-service in those years in the Texas Slackers’ Air National Guard.
He said,

    The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech. So I’m going to limit myself to one argument that has particular significance today. Then as now, people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end.
    The argument that America’s presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, “The Quiet American.” It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism — and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.”
    After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people…
    The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
    Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There’s no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like “boat people,” “re-education camps,” and “killing fields.”

Read that carefully. First of all, none of those was really a new phenomenon, or even, really, a new term.
Second, the terms of the Paris Peace Accords were that, after the “decent interval”, the North Vietnamese could have the whole of Vietnam and exercise sovereignty within it. Maybe Nixon and Kissinger should have driven a harder negotiating bargain that would have included some guarantees for the welfare of those previous collaborators who were “left behind.” But they didn’t. And actually, though thousands of former Vietnamese collaborators with the US forces did suffer from “re-education” etc, that suffering was of a completely different order of magnitude to what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s.
So what could a longer-lasting US presence in Vietnam have done to prevent the Cambodian genocide?
One can make a very strong case indeed that it had been the US’s previous actions in Southeast Asia– and principally, the horrendous aerial bombardments that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed against the country from their bases in Vietnam and elsewhere– that fatally weakened Sihanouk, empowered the Khmer Rouge, traumataized/brutalized untold thousands of Cambodians, and thereby set the stage for the genocide that followed.
And in the end, it was the army of united Vietnam that ended the genocide, by marching in to Phnom Penh and toppling the Khmer Rouge regime.
So again, as my friend asked: What would George W. Bush have done differently, if he had been president in Nixon’s place and had kept the US troops in Vietnam for even longer, that could have prevented the Cambodian genocide?
Bush didn’t tell us that. Instead, he used the speech to try to wrap himself in some of the glory of General Douglas Macarthur and thus present himself as a wise and idealistic– if sometimes sadly misunderstood– wartime leader of the nation.
(One final note: Rove may be gone from the White House. But the Bushite spinmeisters are seeming a lot more agile these days than the Democrats. Too bad that Bush seems so easily able to use this whole “aura of war” business to out-maneuver them. One thing it shows is that they all, except Kucinich, seem really unwilling to stand up and present any kind of a compelling alternative to the whole testosterone-soaked “bellophilia syndrome”. Instead, they’re all just playing along with it, desperately trying to present themselves as “just as tough as Bush” on war/peace issues. Sad. Very sad indeed.)
Update/correction, Fri. evening: Add Bill Richardson to the list of clear thinkers on Iraq among the Democratic Party hopefuls. That makes two.

The ‘Seven Soldiers’ wisdom on Iraq

This book-writing business really is pretty intense. But I just wanted to dash over here to the blog to note a couple of important things that have been going on:
1. War critique by seven smart serving soldiers.
This great article came out in last Sunday’s NYT. I know Scott Delicious-ed it. But it needs much more attention. It is a very smart and well-informed criticism of the whole current war effort, signed by seven serving members of the fairly elite, special-ops-y 82d Airborne.
Taking on the hard-spun optimism expressed recently by Washington desk-jockeys Micael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, these serving grunts write this:

    VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
    … it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
    Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful….
    Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
    At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably…
    We need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
    Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
    We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

There has been some curiosity regarding the identity of these soldiers. Here’s what I noticed: Four are described as sergeants, two as staff sergeants, and one, Buddhika Jayamaha, as an “Army specialist.” But it is Jayamaha who has his name listed first. Clearly, this must have been by the agreement of the other six– but he is the lowest-ranking one of them all. Clearly, he must have played a leadership role in drafting the text and bringing the other six to agreement around it.
So who is Buddhika Jayamaha?
Was Sourcewatch onto something when they tagged this? It’s the contents page for a hefty, v. expensive two-volume work that was published in March, on “Civil Wars of the World”… and the chapter on Sri Lanka was co-authored by a Buddhika Jayamaha.
So maybe BJ really is quite a bit of a specialist on civil wars and insurgencies. Quite possibly of Sri Lankan origin himself? And then for whatever reason he went and enlisted in the 82nd Airborne where he (1) went to Iraq, (2) survived the tell the tale, (3) developed his own, very well-informed understanding of what was going on there, and (4) was able to persuade six sergeants in the 82nd to sign an article that featured– we might presume– mainly his own analysis?
Anyway, I would like to note that the “Seven soldiers” description of the situation seems to me to have a lot more ground-truth to it than the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece published in the NYT exactly three weeks earlier, under the title “A war we just might win”
Btw, regarding O’Hanlon and Pollack, George Packer blogged this a couple of days after their piece appeared:

    I talked to Pollack yesterday. In answer to some of the questions I raised: he spoke with very few Iraqis and could independently confirm very little of what he heard from American officials. In eight days he travelled to half a dozen cities—that’s not much time in each. The evidence that four or five Iraqi Army divisions, with most of their bad commanders weeded out, are now capable of holding, for example, Mosul and Tal Afar, came from American military sources. Pollack found that U.S. officers sounded much more realistic than on his previous trip, in late 2005. He gauged their reliability in answers they gave to questions that he asked “offline,” after a briefing—there was a minimum of happy talk, but also a minimum of dire gloom. The improvements in security, he said, are “relative,” which is a heavy qualification, given the extreme violence of 2006 and early 2007. And it’s far from clear that progress anywhere is sustainable. Everywhere he went, the line Pollack heard was that the central government in Baghdad is broken and the only solutions that can work are local ones.
    It was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win” (a bad headline, and not the authors’). That tone was misplaced, and it is already being used by an Administration that has always thought tactically and will grasp any shred of support, regardless of the facts, to win the short-term argument…

And the second thing I was going to blog about? I’m afraid y’all are going to have to wait… Back to the book factory for me.