Author: Helena

Bushites and Iraq: Plan B and more realism?

Saturday’s NYT had an important article by David Sanger and David Cloud, who wrote:

    The Bush administration is developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year, according to senior administration officials in the midst of the internal debate.
    It is the first indication that growing political pressure is forcing the White House to turn its attention to what happens after the current troop increase runs its course.
    The concepts call for a reduction in forces that could lower troop levels by the midst of the 2008 presidential election to roughly 100,000, from about 146,000, the latest available figure, which the military reported on May 1. They would also greatly scale back the mission that President Bush set for the American military when he ordered it in January to win back control of Baghdad and Anbar Province.
    The mission would instead focus on the training of Iraqi troops and fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, while removing Americans from many of the counterinsurgency efforts inside Baghdad.

Until now, the President’s spokespeople have always steadfastly said that there is no “Plan B” in the event that the current (and still surging) troop “surge” should fail. To admit to having a Plan B, they have argued, would (1) be premature, at a time when the surge has not yet fully run its course, (2) be defeatist, and (3) give aid and comfort to “the enemy.”
However, after the Diyala attack of late April, the Mahmoudiya incident of May 12, and the even more recent pinch that the US supply lines in Iraq are experiencing, it has become painfully obvious that

    (1) The kind of widely dispersed deployment inside Iraq that a textbook counter-insurgency campaign would dictate simply cannot be maintained at a casualty level that is acceptable to the US political system;
    (2) The introduction of the further 20,000 or so troops still due to arrive in Iraq under the surge plan won’t make much significant difference at all;
    (3) There is no strategic reserve from which the Centcom commanders can draw, in order to beef up the Iraq deployment any further; and
    (4) Anyway, the kind of COIN prescribed in the latest, partially Petraeus-authored Army/Marines COIN manual really cannot be effectively waged in a country with the high level of technical expertise that Iraqis have– and a country, moreover, whose borders to states with very different agendas to that of the US are very permeable indeed. (See my earlier commentaries on the manual here and here.)

Bottom line: The COIN campaign that Petraeus now finds himself leading in Iraq is already a lost cause. The events of Diyala and Mahmoudiyah, and the thick stream of body bags now bringing dead US soldiers back to their home-towns here in the US prove that.
However, the White House is still for some reason bullheadedly insisting that we need to wait until September, when Petraeus himself can come back to Washington to give his ‘report card’ on the surge, before any alternative can be decided on… I guess Bush doesn’t want to be the one who said, “We tried but we failed.” (Anyway, why would anyone give any credence to a strategic judgment uttered by that brief part-time naval aviator/strutter… Evidently “David”– as Bush likes to refer to Gen. Petraeus– is being carefully groomed and prepped to come back and be the one to give the nation the “bad news” that in fact, we all know about already.)
But it certainly is interesting that even in the immediate aftermath of the (brief and evanescent) political “victory” that Bush won when he stared down the congressional Dems on the withdrawal-deadline issue last week, he and some of his key advisors were already not just continuing to plan out their ‘Plan B’, but also starting a strategic leaking campaign around it.
I imagine that Bob Gates, the eminently realistic man who is now the Secdef, has been having people from both the brass and the civvie sides in the Pentagon come to him and explain just how really disastrous some of these now-looming “Iraq catastrophe” scenarios could yet, any day, turn out to be.
Diyala was bad enough… and then, it almost immediately forced a radical shift away from the “live with the people” mode dictated by Petraeus’s (theoretical) COIN doctrine back behind truly massive– and politically quite self-defeating– fortifications.
Mahmoudiyah was bad enough– and indeed, it continues to be terrible for those most closely involved, since two of the US soldiers abducted there are still missing… And then, since Mahmoudiyah, the military has shown just how much it is prepared to get itself tied into enormous logistical knots to try to find the missing soldiers, thus providing a powerful incentive for others who might want to capture US troops alive, rather than simply kill them.
(Regarding which, I imagine a lot of people in the Pentagon are now wishing they hadn’t earlier been so cavalier in their bending of the rules that the Geneva Conventions lay down regarding the treatment of POWs. It would have been far better for everyone at this point if the US President could have voiced an eloquent– and convincing– appeal that the abducted soldiers should be treated in line with the Geneva Conventions.)
Anyway, my present conclusion– based on the Sanger/Cloud piece, as well as on various other pieces of recent information– is that the “majority party” inside the Bush administration now clearly seems to be preparing a policy of cut and blame, which is a version of “cut and run”.
Blame Maliki, that is. Last week, we got other “leaked” information that administration insiders had decided to “leave Maliki in place”, rather than continuing to mount various pressures against him. That fits in perfectly with a “cut and blame” policy. Because if the Bushites had maneuvered Maliki aside in some way– whether with Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, or Iyad Allawi, or anyone else, then in a sense they would have been under more pressure to “own” the political outcome of that. With a weakened, ineffective, and quite possibly corrupt Maliki still in place, they (might feel that they) don’t have to “own” anything.
(In this regard, I have to say that I find the whole question of “benchmarks” for the Iraqi government, as discussed earnestly and at great length within certain Washington policy circles, to be either irrelevant or actually immoral. First of all, it is the height of imperial arrogance for US politicians to argue that the government of Iraq should be in any way accountable to them and their expectations. Secondly, it is another height of arrogance for these US politicians even to imagine that they know what is best for the Iraqi people… Yes, of course it would be wonderful if the Iraqi government could clean up the death squads that may well be operating within its ranks, and to find a way to include the Sunnis effectively in the governance system, and to divide the country’s oil wealth in a transparent and fair manner… But why should any US politicians imagine that at this point it is appropriate to condition the reconstruction aid they give the Iraqis over the months ahead on the Iraqi government jumping through Washington-defined hoops on these issues, like a trained dog?)
Back to Sanger and Cloud. They write directly about the electoral-politics considerations that are behind the administration’s current interest in a workable Plan B:

Continue reading “Bushites and Iraq: Plan B and more realism?”

Living under military occupation for 40 years

What is 20 years? What is 40 years? (What is 59 years?)
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1987, I spent quite a bit of time in Israel and Palestine, with Bill the spouse and our daughter Lorna, who was then two. I think that was the first time I met the Israeli strategic-affairs writer Ze’ev Schiff, who was already a ‘grand old man’ of the Israeli military-affairs scene. I was researching my third book, The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, so he was one of the people I interviewed there.
Earlier that summer, the IDF’s ‘Civil Administration’ Branch, the arm of the military responsible for actually running the military rule over the occupied territories and their inhabitants, had brought out a glossy little publicity booklet to “celebrate” the many achievements of that rule. It had a photo of a field of waving grain on the cover, and photos of smiling Palestinians inside.
Ze’ev wrote scathingly about it in HaAretz, I remember. “It’s so short-sighted and basically untrue!” he said when I talked to him later about the article.
(Looking back from today, I would say it was very similar to all the occupation-lauding p.r. materials produced by the US military and their flacks in their early months in Iraq.)
Six months after my 1987 visit to Palestine and Israel, the first intifada broke out. With it, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza rose up as a single, fairly well-coordinated body to say “Enough!” of rule by foreign military occupiers.
The vast, vast majority of what the Palestinians did in that intifada was nonviolent, pro-independence, civilian resistance. It took the IDF and their political masters six years to break it– a feat that they finally accomplished only when they concluded the “Oslo” interim accords with the PLO, and exchanged formal recognition with the PLO.
But Oslo did not bring to either side what it needed. For Palestinians it did not bring final-status peace talks according to the mutually agreed schedule. It did not bring an end to having their land expropriated by the Israeli settlers. It brought a considerable worsening in the situation of the 180,000 or so Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem… And to Israelis it brought no end to either their conflict with the Palestinians, or their state of chronic insecurity. In 1996, a series of very lethal suicide bombs that anti-Oslo Palestinian militants from Hamas and from Fateh’s militant wing set off in Israeli cities shook many Israelis to their core.
I don’t think I went to Palestine or Israel in 1997. I know I was there in 1995; I went there to write a series of articles about the draconian new measures the Israelis were taking in and around East Jerusalem. Basically, they were working fast, in that post-Oslo period, to cut the city’s Palestinian population off from their compatriots, cousins, schoolmates, and business partners in the rest of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. This cutting-off was achieved in three ways: with the erection of new roadblocks to control the movement of Palestinians into and out of the city; with the issuing of new administrative orders that separated the life of the Jerusalem palestinians from that of their compatriots just outside the city’s boundary; and with the construction of vast, fortress-like new “Israelis-only” settlements that sliced around the city to further cut its Palestinians from their confreres in the Palestinian hinterland.
It was a grim time to be there. I should dig out my notes of the lugubrious conversations I had with Faisal Husseini, a gentle and visionary leader for all the Palestinians of the West Bank, who felt marooned in his office in the faded beauty of Jerusalem’s Orient House. He was continually being besieged there by ultra-nationalist Israeli extremists who set up a little tent camp right outside the entrance. The Israeli government did little or nothing to restrain them. He also felt nearly completely marginalized by Yasser Arafat who was busy preening for the international diplomatic corps in nearby Ramallah.
Well, that was 1995. In 1999, the deadline set in Oslo for the ending of the final-status talks between the two sides came and went. (In Washington, Clinton’s advisor Dennis Ross still talked endlessly about the need for a “process”, rather than for actual peace.)
The occupation continued.
In September 2000 the second intifada broke out– more violent on both sides than the first one. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent tanks and planes in to destroy nearly all the fragile institutions of “limited self-government” that the PLO had been allowed to establish after Oslo. That was almost exactly 20 years after he bloodily destroyed the institutions the PLO had established in West Beirut.
Faisal Husseini died in May 2001.
Today, the second intifada has been going for more than six and half years and it still hasn’t been suppressed, though goodness knows the Israelis have inflicted massive punishment on the Palestinians in their attempts to achieve that.
Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in March 2004, and his successor Abdel-Aziz Rantissi a month later. Yasser Araft died in November 2004.
… Back in 1967, I was 14 years old. I remember sitting at home in England and watching news footage of the Six-Day War on our family’s black-and-white t.v. It came with all kinds of cheerleading in the commentary, for “plucky little Israel” and its very brave and wily fighters.
In 1977, I was 24. I was hard at work covering the massacre-studded civil war in Lebanon. The year before, I had covered the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel el-Zaatar, in East Beirut, to the Falangist militia forces. I still have the clippings from the Sunday Times of the part where the “plucky” young Falangist leader Bashir Gemayyel told us– before he led our group of western journos into the corpse-strewn wasteland of the camp– that “I am proud of what you are going to see there.”
That was what he said. It was all on the record. Six years later, after Gemayel had been assassinated, Ariel Sharon led his vengeance-seeking followers into two more Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut– in Sabra and Shatila. And Sharon later claimed he “did not know” that those Falangists might be seeking to kill Palestinians indiscriminately once they got into the camps.
In the summer of 1977, I was newly pregnant with my first child. My husband of that time and I drove our new Fiat 127 from Beirut to England, where I did a pregnancy test and was able to announce our happy news to my family.
Now my son Tarek is nearly 30.
What is 30 years? What is 40 years? What is 40 years of a military occupation rule that is a burden both to the occupier and to the occupied?
But most especially for the occupied.
Here in the US, our government has been maintaining a military occupation rule over the people of Iraq for four years. Both occupying bodies– the Israeli and the American– have sought to use divide-and-rule to decrease the chances of a successful nationalist resistance emerging. In Iraq, that divide-and-rule has already, after just four years, had devastating consequences. In occupied Palestine, there has as yet been only a little of the kind of terrible, internecine fighting that occupied Iraq has seen, though recently Gaza has teetered on the brink of something like that. But for Palestinians, for all the years I’ve been going there, it has been the steady grinding effect of the many administrative controls and rules imposed against them by the (completely unaccountable and anti-democratic) occupation authorities that have– along with the every day visible expansion of the racist settlement proejct– worn them down… Year after year after year after year.
That, and the intense concern about the fate of their brothers and cousins in very vulnerable positions in the ghurba (the Palestinian diaspora)… in Lebanon, still today, in Iraq, or Jordan, or Kuwait…
Is there still hope for two viable states there west of the Jordan, in Israel and Palestine? I hope so. But the insidious and continuous spread of the settlement project has made it harder and harder to see how a viable two-state outcome can be won. Maybe all that is possible now is something like the unitary binational state that Martin Buber and Judah Magnes both called for long ago?
Right now, though, no-one in the “international community” is even talking about moving to any kind of a swift final outcome. So in the absence of any truly hope-inspiring diplomacy, it just looks like more of the same.
Unless, the people on both sides can come up with a new pardigm. Perhaps one day soon, they might start to really understand that violence– whether direct physical violence of weapons or the grinding, anti-humane violence the oppressive occupation– can never solve their problems. Neither side can wipe the other out…
So where is the principled and visionary leadership from the “international community” that tells them all that this conflict needs to get resolved fast– and indeed that it can be resolved, speedily and satisfactorily, on the basis of the well-known principles of international law and in a way that allows both these peoples to be safe and to flourish?
I do not want to be here 10 years hence, writing a follow-up to this same essay.

UN “envoys” in M.E.: Perpetuating European power, excluding the rest?

I guess the idea that (mainly male) people of European origin have some kind of near-monopoly on wisdom regarding the administration of Middle East affairs goes back a long way…
As regular JWN readers will know, I remain a stalwart supporter of the idea that the UN should, in general, play a much bigger role in Middle Eastern diplomacy than it has until now. (Including in both the Arab-Israeli peace process, and the negotiations over the US’s ever-closer exit from Iraq.)
But this is completely outrageous! New UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently announced the appointment of the third of the UN’s “special envoys” in the Middle East– and just like the other two, this one is a white, male European. Namely, Michael Williams of the UK, who has been appointed as “Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.”
That’s the same job that Terje Larsen– yes, the author of the failed “Oslo” interim-accord project– was handed on a plate way back when. But in December 2004 Larsen was moved over to become “Special Envoy for the implementation of Security Council resolution 1559 (2004)” — John Bolton’s anti-Syrian resolution. And in March 2005, Larsen was joined on the “Lebanon beat” by his countryman Geir Pedersen, who is the SG’s “Personal Representative for Southern Lebanon.”
The Brits and the Norwegians both have quite a lot of responsibility for the present imbroglios in the Middle East. I don’t understand why anyone would think these countries’ citizenries have any special “wisdom” regarding the region?
Plus, the whole issue of access to the levers of power is a central part of what has made today’s world so inequitable, and this unequal access still, today, perpetuates the world’s deeply engrained inequities on a continuing basis…
Isn’t it bad enough that the top seats in the World Bank and the IMF are “by custom” divided up between the US and the Europeans? Isn’t it also shameful that today, despite the UN having been in existence for 62 years, this so-called “world organization” has still done nothing effective at all to seek out and empower a whole, globally representative range of people capable of becoming effective Mideast envoys?

Congress lets Bush run his own war

Yesterday, the Congressional Democrats gave up their previous insistence on writing troop-withdrawal deadlines into the legislation funding the Bush administration’s continued administration of the war in Iraq. Basically, the President has an override-proof veto. He’s already vetoed one version of the spending bill and had threatened to do the same if the bill came back with the withdrawal deadline/timeline still in it.
WaPo’s Shailagh Murray writes,

    in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.
    The spending package, expected to total $120 billion when the final version is released today, would require Bush to surrender virtually none of his war authority…
    Instead of sticking with troop-withdrawal dates, Democrats accepted a GOP plan to establish 18 political and legislative benchmarks for the Iraqi government, with periodic reports from Bush on its progress, starting in late July. If the Iraqis fall short, they could forfeit U.S. reconstruction aid.
    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said.

How should we look at this outcome? I am trying to do so in a way that puts front and center the interests of the Iraqi people, who have been so badly damaged by my government’s actions over the past four years.
Would it have been better if the antiwar folks in Congress had been able to attach a firm withdrawal deadline to the spending bill? Yes, I believe it would have. Even though the language they were seeking to attach was, I believe, language that only specified the date for the beginning of a withdrawal, rather than for its complete ending, it would still have sent a powerful message.
But now, the President and his Republican co-believers– many of whom have rapidly been growing disenchanted with the war– will really have to wholly “own” the way things go in the next few months in Iraq. The antiwar Democrats tried to work constructively with Bush. But since he refused to put in even the fairly cautious timeline language they wanted to put in, then the conduct of the war is now firmly back in his hands… And meanwhile, all of us antiwar people– of whatever political party– can work even harder to bring pressure to bear on the President– Bush, up until January 2009; or if necessary, after him the next one– to bring all the troops home in a speedy, orderly, and generous way.
And by the way, while we’re planning a strategy for this, let’s make sure that all of us give due weight to the need to involve the UN quite fully in all aspects of the diplomacy and modalities of the pullout. The US may well have been able to “get into” Iraq nearly completely on its own. But it seems to me pure folly to imagine that it can get out of Iraq in anything like an orderly and acceptable way unless it recognizes that the era of unilateral US action on the world stage– including in Iraq– is definitively over.
That need for a robust and constructive rapprochement between Washington and the UN is something that was missing from the Baker-Hamilton report. It has also been significantly missing until now from most of the congressional discussion on Iraq.
Now, with the President having once again asserted his strongly unilateralist tendencies, seems like a good time for the US public and our representatives in Congress to have this very necessary conversation about the relationship between our country and the rest of the world.

Alan, Haleh, and all others unjustifiably deprived of their freedom

It’s been more than two months of heart-rending uncertainty now, for Alan Johnston, the courageous and professionally talented BBC reporter who was abducted by persons unknown in Gaza back on March 12. Since then, Gaza has been wracked by very violent internal conflict and has been shelled by the Israelis several times. In Gaza there is almost no functioning civil administration, given the harshness of the siege to which the area’s people and their elected leadership have been subjected by the US, Israel, and other governments.
The elected leaders, and representatives of many civil-society organizations in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine, have all expressed great concern for Alan’s wellbeing. But the PA government still aparently remains powerless to free him.
I hope he’s still alive, and that he can be freed very very soon.
Now, many people in the US are becoming concerned about Iran’s recent arrest of the US/Iranian scholar Haleh Esfandiari. Haleh is a sweet and talented woman, very dedicated to exposing the US public to a broad variety of views about Iran. In her work at the congressionally funded Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars she has been able, in particular, to bring a broad range of Iranian voices to Washington DC, the vast majority of whom have spoken out strongly in favor of more dialogue, more understanding, and NO WAR.
There is some reason to be concerned about Haleh’s wellbeing. In 2003, Canadian-Iranian journalist Zahra Kazemi was beaten to death, apparently inside Evin Prison, the same notorious place of detention where Haleh is now being held. However, at least the identity of Haleh’s captors– unlike that of the shadowy grouplet that abducted Alan Johnston– is well known. The Iranian government has admitted it is holding her and is subjecting her to a judicial investigation on allegations that she has been involved in the Bush administration’s extremely hostile, illegal, and foolhardy program of “regime change through subversion inside Iran.”
People who know Haleh’s work find these charges ridiculous; and I hope the Iranian investigators rapidly discover that they are quite baseless, and free her.
Haleh had gone to Teheran back in December to visit her mother, who is 93. Since her arrest she has been allowed a few short phone calls with her mother; but her mom has not been allowed to visit her in the prison.
I know both Alan Johnston and Haleh Esfandiari a little– Haleh better than Alan. It makes me quite sick to think of the sadness and fear that they and their families must now be feeling.
Yet I have hesitated to write about either of them until now.
I know that in the Middle East there are many thousands of individuals– most of them probably just as humane, talented, and innocent as these two– who are being held as “bargaining chips” or for other quite illegal purposes in the various horrendous conflicts now affecting the region.
For example, the UN’s Assistance Mission in Iraq reported that as of March 31, “37,641 detainees were being held by Iraq and US-led forces.” The term “detainees” is usually used in these circumstances for people against whom no formal charges have been laid.
I believe the number of Palestinian detainees being held by Israel is around 7,000. There are hundreds or thousands of political prisoners in each of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iran, and saudi Arabia, too…
So I personally believe that any pleas we make on behalf of Alan Johnston or Haleh Esfandiari should be tied very firmly to pleas of equal strength for the release of all people in the Middle East– and in Afghanistan and Guantanamo– who have been deprived of their liberty in a quite unjustifable way, and have been denied access to anything like due process in a fair tribunal.
For each of these individuals, and their families, the sadness and fear are just as real and just as intense as they are for Alan and Haleh. Free all the detainees! If there are people against whom there is solid evidence of wrongdoing, bring them to a fair and open trial.

“New” US strategies for Iraq proliferating

The WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson was the chosen leakee for this story, out of the Pentagon and the State Department that assures the increasingly skeptical US public that “Yes! Indeed those wise folks running our administration do have a strategy for Iraq that is broader than just the surge!”
Extreme skepticism is still, however, called for.
The “new strategy” that Tyson so breathlessly reported at the top of the WaPo’s front page has been fairly well summarized by Juan Cole as follows:

    1. Back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki rather than trying to organize a new government.
    2. Expand and build up the Iraqi Army, which is less purely sectarian than some other security forces in Iraq.
    3. And then implementation of 3 points:

      a. Protect the local population from the insurgents so as to allow them to become independent actors in civil society.
      b. Increase capacity and efficiency of government ministries and their integraton with provincial administrations.
      c. Purge Iraq’s government and security forces of “sectarian abusers,” replacing them with “Iraqi nationalists.”

The principal authors of this “new” strategy are the US’s much-lauded (by some people, not by me) military commander in Iraq, David Petraeus; the (ditto) US Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker; and Petraeus’s (ditto) “senior counterinsurgency adviser”, David J. Kilcullen. As Tyson describes it, Kilcullen basically put together the new plan with the help of a team comprised of, “about 20 military officers, State Department officials and other experts in Baghdad known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team.”
She wrote that “More than half a dozen people with knowledge of the plan” had discussed its contents with her. Most of these people had, she said, requested anonymity “because they were not authorized to speak about it to reporters.” But the team members whom she does quote by name, as giving details of the plan, include Kilcullen as well as the British scholar of Iraqi affairs Toby Dodge. So it seems quite clear that the leaking-in-Washington was part of Kilcullen’s deliberate strategy there.
(I note that Kilcullen is is the gung-ho Australian Army counter-insurgency “specialist” featured by George Packer in one of his recent pieces in The New Yorker… It really is notable that at this stage of the war the Bushites have run so low on their own supply of the relevant expertise– and remain so distrustful of the numerous never-consulted US experts on Iraq and the region– that they feel they need to import these British/Commonwelth types in to tell them what the heck they need to do.)
Pat Lang, over at his blog, notes percipiently that the new “Kilcullen plan” for what the US should do in Iraq seems in many ways to run counter to this plan, which was leaked to David Ignatius in, presumably, the same time period, and which David wrote about in his column in yesterday’s WaPo in these terms:

    President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a “post-surge” strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available.

David doesn’t name any of the sources for his column, or identify them in any way more specific than that they are “senior administration officials.”
Lang writes:

    The difference in what is described in these two [WaPo texts] leads me to ask if the two visions of possible futures for America in Iraq are the result of significant disagreements over policy within the executive branch. If that is so, are the contending parties waging proxy-warfare in the press?
    If it is not the case that these articles represent some kind of struggle, then the incoherence of substance and unreality of many of the arguments and positions in these papers may indicate a disintegration of thought that would be alarming.

My informed guess on this is that both of Lang’s explanations for what is happening are partly right. It seems clear there is an intra-administration “war through leaking to the WaPo”… Heck, that much seems quite evident, and is a very, very old Washington-insiders’ trick.
But it also seems clear to me that there is “incoherence” and “unreality” both between the two leaked plans and, indeed, within each of them taken on its own.
On Kilcullen and his alleged “expertise”, we need only look at this little quote from him, down near the bottom of the Tyson piece:

    “Our notion of ‘reconciliation’ . . . is not necessarily where Iraqis are at right now,” said Kilcullen, explaining that the word has no equivalent in Arabic.

What a supercilious ignoramus! Of course Arabic has a word for “reconciliation’. Indeed, it has at least two very valuable words in this field– sulha for the process by which reconciling is achieved in traditional Arab societies, and sulh for the resulting state of being-reconciled…. So here is David Kilcullen, a man who makes a great point about really “knowing your enemy” and understanding any foreign culture in which you do counter-insurgency work. And he’s been working with the US military on Iraq-related things for how long now? But still, he makes this really elementary mistake and talks about these things in this really patronizing fashion…
Reminds of whichever other Bush administration flunky it was who said in a similarly supercilious way that “the French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur!”
Anyway, enough about Kilcullen and his pretensions to expertise… My bottom line for both these “plans” being (competitively) leaked around Washington is that while they have some good and constructive elements to them– especially inasmuch as they stress the importance of political rather than purely military ways to deal with the imbroglio in Iraq– still, they are both far too little, far too late.
Too little, how?
Primarily, because neither of them– nor indeed, most of the discussion on Iraq policy taking place in Congress these days– has gone nearly far enough to recognize that there really is no way for the US to avoid a disaster in Iraq that does not also involve committing to a much more international framework for defusing the current tensions in Iraq and starting to fashion a new security regime for the broader Gulf region.
Ignatius’s anonymous leakers did at least say that, “The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports.”
(Whew! If that’s so, wouldn’t it be, like, just about five months of bloodshed too late for Bush to have finally come around to that position??)
Baker-Hamilton did, of course, urge a noticeably more multilateral approach to Iraq than the almost undiluted US unilateralism that the administration has pursued until now… But even Baker-Hamilton did not go where I thought it– or any other workable plan– needs to go, which is to say that only the United Nations has the global legitimacy and reach that are now required to frame a workable de-escalation in Iraq, including an orderly US troop withdrawal from the country.
And too late, how?
People might take a good look at this little doc that fell into Pat Lang’s hands recently. It’s an unclassified, internal staff notice for the “US Mission in Iraq”, dated May 21, 2007. It’s on this topic:

    Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future… [S]hould the food convoys be delayed further, DFACs will be required to serve MREs for at least one meal out of the day…

There’s some significant context to this problem. Throughout history, the distinctive topography of Mesopotamia has frequently stymied the commanders of foreign invading forces. When I first started thinking about what it would take to sustain a large-scale US occupation force in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion, it was immediately clear to me that the logistics of resupply would be a major, major challenge.
In Vietnam, after all, the US Navy more or less had command of the oceans and was able to maintain ports and depots all along South Vietnam’s lengthy coastline. But in Iraq? They have to bring everything in either through the bottleneck of Kuwait, or with much more difficulty along lengthy (and frequently unsafe) roads through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Turkey. Moreover, this is an army that (1) is absolutely not designed to “feed off the land” wherever it is, but relies on its own supplies for everything, up to and including bottled drinking water, and (2) likes to live well, even in the field… I note that the authors of this latest “MREs” memo felt they had to apologize that for many soldiers in the field, “Fresh fruits and salad bar items will… be severely limited or unavailable.”
More recently, when I’ve been thinking of the possible forms a “catastrophe” for the US force presence in Iraq might take, I’ve thought more in terms of a massively lethal incident of physical violence like the 1983 truck bomb in Beirut… or perhaps a huge crowd of unarmed protesters marching resolutly toward a US base somewhere and getting mown down by nervous perimeter guards, in large numbers, and in front of t.v. cameras…
But maybe we need to go back and look again at the possibility of very serious, near-catastrophic supply-chain problems. What if not just the salad-bar items but also the troops’ drinking water, fuel, MREs, and ammo start to run very low indeed?
Are we talking about the possibility of a “Siege of Kut” type situation developing for the US troops in Iraq?
In that WW1 engagement, some 23,000 British Empire forces– most of them, I believe, Indians– were killed and wounded before, finally, Gen. Townshend surrendered to the Ottomans. I sincerely hope that, if the US forces’ supplies run low, they won’t wait till they reach anything close to those kinds of casualty figures before they do the right thing and request the UN to help them negotiate an orderly exit from all of Iraq.
Until we see our leaders finally acknowledge that they can’t disengage from Iraq without U.N. help, extreme skepticism will still be called for. All these leaks about this “new” US plan or that one will just be political spin and window-dressing.

Violence begetting violence in the Middle East

One of the truest teachings of the Dalai Lama and of other nonviolence activists throughout history is that the use of violence to attain one’s goals will always cause more violence to cascade down into the future. And one of the most tragic things about gross inter-group power imbalances such as the one the world has known since the dawn of European-origin imperialism is that systems of violence initiated and maintained by the powerful nearly always end up resonating with particular harshness among those groups excluded from exercizing any meaningful power on the world stage…
Hence the fact that during the time of “White” colonization and colonial rule in Africa or the Americas, the vast majority of those killed by direct physical violence or through the imposition of damaging systems of administrative or ‘structural’ violence were the indigenes of the continents being colonized, not the colonizers… Hence, too, the fact that a large proportion of those indigenes killed by physical violence were killed in conflicts with their fellow indigenes— conflicts that were very frequently stirred up by the colonial powers, who would also systematically inject into them significant amounts of high-lethality weaponry.
It is so tragic to see, in these early years of the third millennium of the “common era”– that is, the era that is dated from the presumed year of the birth of the Middle East’s prime teacher of nonviolence, Jesus of Nazareth– the return to the Middle East of those older dynamics of violence begetting violence, and to see once again that the people on the receiving end of the killingwho are quite disproportionately those who were already impoverished and marginalized from power.
It is depressing, too, to see the seeds of further resentment, killing, and hatred being sown on a daily basis among the peoples of Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Iraq by the violence that has settled like a blood-sucking vulture onto their nations, pulling so many people into its fanatical grip.
But what can we expect when the “deciders” in the most powerful nation on the earth have already, for the past five-plus years, turned resolutely away from the use of the many, many nonviolent means that are available to such a powerful nation, and have stuck instead to the employment of extremely lethal means of violence to win their goals?
The violence employed by the US administration in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past five years has not “succeeded” in the goal of winning any increase in the security of the US citizenry. On the contrary, it has created and helped to incubate nihilistic, ‘cosmopolitan’ terrorists in far greater numbers than existed back in August 2001. But what it has “succeeded” in doing is spreading the seeds of violence in a truly viral fashion to so many already poor, hard-pressed, and marginalized places around the world– including Somalia, along with the nations of the Middle East.
All of us in the world need to take responsibility for working together to halt these now-spinning cycles of violence.
As U.S. citizen, I need to play my part to bring my government away from the truly major role it’s been playing in spreading violence around the world. I know that in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and everywhere else where violence currently brews, there are citizens and political leaders who yearn to turn their communities and their countries away from the path of violence… But how much more powerful those nonviolence proponents elsewhere could be if the leaders of the most powerful country in the world would step up and say something simple and profound like, “The military means we turned to after 9/11 have not worked. We deeply regret the damage that we havecaused. And now we invite all the peoples of the world to a new peace conference where we can discuss how humankind can exit this phase of devastating violence and truly strengthen of the world’s mechanisms and capabilities in the field of nonviolent conflict resolution.”
And where are the voices of international conscience, meanwhile? Where is the new U.N. Secretary-General? Where are the leaders of the the world’s other, non-US “big powers”? Why are they not all alike speaking out and saying that the tragedies of violence in the Middle East and elsewhere must be halted, the politics of accusation and counter-accusation laid aside, and a new way sought?

Palestine open thread

So much to discuss and think about… Check out Laila el-Haddad’s great writing from Gaza. Also this report from today’s WaPo, spelling out quite clearly that,

    Israel this week allowed the Palestinian party Fatah to bring into the Gaza Strip as many as 500 fresh troops trained under a U.S.-coordinated program to counter Hamas…

How tragic for two generations of secular Palestinian nationalists that the organization that has dominated their movement for 40 years has now turned into an almost exact replica of the “Inkatha Freedom Party” that was armed, financed, and supported by the apartheid regime in South Africa to battle the ANC in the waning days of apartheid. Those clashes killed thousands upon thousands of Black South Africans… and for what?
Now, these Fateh units armed and trained by the US are being sent in to torpedo the National Unity Government that the Palestinian political leaders had painstakingly negotiated and put together with the help of the Saudis… and for what?
Divide and rule. It’s the oldest game in the playbook of imperial powers and sometimes the only one they know how to play.