Author: Helena

US national command authority in disarray?

Okay, I know I’m a little late writing about the news that came out last week (here and here) that (1) the Bush administration had decided to hire a new “Iraq war czar” (also briefly, and quite infelicitously, titled an “execution manager”) who would sit in the White House and provide a direct operational link between the Prez and David Petraeus, the US commanding general in Iraq; and (2) no fewer than five retired generals have now turned down an invitation to take up this post.
But I actually think this new plan is a more serious sign of disarray in the highest levels of the US chain of command than most people have so far realized.
Crucially, I think it signals that the President has a serious lack of trust in Defense Secretary Robert Gates. This, because– in line with longstanding US practice, as written into US law– the chain of military command currently runs from the President, through the (civilian) Secretary of Defense, and from him to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and thence to the commander on the ground.
This is not, in practice, too onerous a process to go through. Especially with the speed and convenience of modern-day communications. And meanwhile, it ensures the effectiveness of the civilian command of the military, the integrity and predictability of the chain of command at those high levels, and the ability of both the military and the civilian leaders in the Pentagon to be able to act strategically (that is, to be able to deploy military assets around the world in an informed and balanced way.)
But now the President wants to disrupt this longstanding system. Why?
Well, according to the WaPo’s Peter Baker and Tom Ricks, one key impetus for the change was a memo that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who for unknown reasons fancies himself a strategic thinker) sent to the White House several weeks ago. This was one of 18 recommendations he made in the memo.
Baker and Ricks write:

    “The slowness and ineffectiveness of the American bureaucracy is a major hindrance to our winning, and they’ve got to cut through it,” Gingrich said in an interview yesterday.
    Under the proposal [as subsequently developed] by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, the execution manager would talk daily with the military commanders and U.S. ambassadors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The official would then meet with Bush each morning to review developments. The goal to meet requests for support by Petraeus and others would be “same-day service,” the proposal said.

Right. When what you’re doing in Iraq isn’t working, why not re-scramble the wiring diagram, play musical czars, and figure out a new bureaucratic fix?
Makes perfect sense. (Not!)
In their April 11 article, Baker and Ricks revealed that the three generals who (as of then) had turned it down included retired Gen. Jack Keane– who was one of the main intellectual authors of the “surge” proposal!– and retired Marines General Jack Sheehan.
They wrote,

    Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ ” he said.

At this point, three things seem clear to me:

    (1) There is a widespread distrust among senior retired generals in either the content of the present policy, or the conditions under which this new post is being created, or both;
    (2) The Prez definitely looks as if he’s wanting to cut the Secdef out of the loop. (I believe this may even be illegal? It is, anyway, very very unwise.) And,
    (3) The scrambling around and trying to find a new bureaucratic “quick fix” for the policy is a sure sign that the senior administration people themselves realize the policy isn’t working well.

In this regard, the situation in Washington seems highly reminiscent of what was happening in Israel in the third week of their war against Lebanon last summer. At that point the IDF’s increasingly desperate chief of staff Dan Halutz summarily appointed a new commander to come in and take command of the Northern Sector over the head of the sector’s existing commander… Now, in Washington, Bush seems to be trying to bring in a new (preferably military) person to come in and, in effect, replace Bob Gates.
All this is potentially very disquieting. On the other hand, the administration has already seen fairly high levels of (high-level) distrust, second-guessing, and general administrative flailing around throughout the disastrous course of this war in Iraq. One thing that struck me from reading Tom Ricks’s book “Fiasco”, for example, was how often Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld or other high-level actors felt they needed to send their own personal envoys out to Baghdad to get a feel for what was going on there. That gave me the distinct sense that these officials didn’t trust the reports they were receiving through the normal channels, that is, from each other. (And therefore, they didn’t trust each other.) Meeting and dealing with this constant stream of high-level envoys must quite often have been a real headache for the Iraqis, and for the US generals on the ground.
So this latest development is, it seems to me, a continuation of a long-running flailing around within the upper reaches of the Washington bureaucracy. But it’s probably the most serious to date.
(Maybe it marks the ‘beginning of the end-game’ for the US military presence in Iraq? Let’s hope so!)
Meanwhile, I’d love to know what Bob Gates is thinking about all this…

Incarcerations in Iraq, in context

The WaPo’s Walter Pincus has a very disturbing piece in today’s paper in which he writes that the US forces in Iraq are currently holding about 18,000 detainees, the vast majority of them Iraqis. Pincus also mentions almost as an afterthought that “As of last month, the Iraqi detention [by which I assume he means the separate archipelago of prison-camps that is run by the Iraqi ‘government’] contained about 34,000 detainees.”
For a total of 52,000? This is truly horrendous.
First, remember that these detainees are probably nearly all able-bodied men of breadwinning age and imagine how many dependents each might have, relying on this man to bring home an income for the family.
Second, remember that these ‘detainees’ have not been incarcerated as the result of any transparent, fair judicial hearing. Instead, they are ‘security detainees’– such as may be held by an occupying power in the territory it occupies, if there is an overwhelming security reason to do so in each case… But the conditions for such detentions are strictly regulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention, which Pincus doesn’t mention. I wish he had.
I should note that– notably unlike Afghanistan– the US military and political leadership did say when it went into Iraq that it would respect the Geneva Conventions there and considered its status there to be that of a foreign occupying power. Thus, duly organized combatants captured there would be considered as POWs; and other individuals held as security detainees there should be held only under the conditions specified by the Fourth Geneva Convention. This includes access to the ICRC, guarantees of decent basic treatment, no torture, etc.
If the US and the Iraqis between them are now holding 52,000 security detainees– with the majority of them presumably Sunni Arabs– then this makes the detention rate there comparable with that in numerous other (generally unsuccessful) counter-insurgency campaigns around the world. See some of my notes on this phenomenon in this paper I published recently.
I am also very familiar with mass incarcerations from Israel’s longstanding practice of holding thousands of Palestinians in the occupied territories there in Palestine as “administrative detainees”. I note, though, that while in Israel each such detainee has to have his/her case reviewed every six months, according to Pincus’s account that period of time in the US detention system in Iraq is three times as long: 18 months!
Here’s what Pincus says about the process in the US detention centers:

    The average stay in these detention centers is about a year, but about 8,000 of the detainees have been jailed longer, including 1,300 who have been in custody for two years, said a statement provided by Capt. Phillip J. Valenti, spokesman for Task Force 134, the U.S. Military Police group handling detainee operations.
    “The intent is to detain individuals determined to be true threats to coalition forces, Iraqi Security Forces and stability in Iraq,” Valenti said. “Unlike situations in the past, these detainees are not conventional prisoners of war.”
    Instead, he said, they are “diverse civilian internees from widely divergent political, religious and ethnic backgrounds who are detained on the basis of intelligence available at the time of capture and gathered during subsequent questioning.” [Um, how’s that again? You detain a person on the basis of intel you gather after you’ve detained him? How does that work again? ~HC] Valenti said 250 of those in custody are third-country nationals, including some high-value detainees.
    Last month, military spokesmen in Iraq told The Washington Post that the United States held 17,000 detainees — 13,800 in Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and 3,300 at Camp Cropper, outside Baghdad. One year ago, less than 10,000 Iraqis were in U.S. facilities in Iraq, but that figure has grown and could reach 20,000 by the end of this year, according to military contracting documents. [That sounds worrisome. Does it mean some of these people are being guarded and questioned by contractors? And who keeps the contractors in line? ~HC] As of last month, the Iraqi detention system contained about 34,000 detainees.
    The initial decision to detain or release those arrested is made by a U.S. unit commander with the assistance of an Army lawyer, Valenti said. A file is made for each detainee that includes intelligence reports and any sworn statements and other evidence that supports the determination that the person is a threat.
    At the U.S. detention facility, each case is reviewed by a Magistrate Cell. The decision of the Magistrate Cell is given to each prisoner in writing. Each case is reviewed after 18 months by the Joint Detention Review Committee, an Iraqi-U.S. panel. “Approval for continued detention beyond the initial 18-month timeframe requires joint approval from the MNF-1 commander [Multinational Force commander Gen. David H. Petraeus] and the prime minister of Iraq,” Valenti said.

Actually, in counter-insurgency ops everywhere, mass detentions are used for a number of reasons both related and unrelated to the need to protect the public. They are used to punish large swathes of the population. They are used to try to gather intelligence (though the intel gathered from broad round-ups of the population is usually pretty suspect or useless.) But they are also used, crucially, to try to “turn” members of the targeted population– that is, by applying unbearable pressures to these individuals during the time of detention, or by using the detention period to develop means of blackmailing them, the aim is to turn a large enough number of them into informers for the occupying power that then everyone who’s been incarcerated becomes suspect to the insurgent commanders… And thus, the hope is, the the unity of the insurgent force can be eroded.
It nearly always fails to bring victory to the occupying power. But meanwhile, the human cost on the detainees of undergoing those means of humiliation and coercion can be long-lasting and truly damaging.
(And the US forces are doing all this, like Guantanamo, in the name of ‘freedom’?? It truly is Orwellian.)
Pincus writes,

    Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor who helped draft the Iraqi constitution, asked, “Pursuant to what law are we holding people who are not turned over to Iraqi courts?” Because they are not considered prisoners of war, he said, the United States must consider them in the “enemy combatant” category used to justify holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

I think Feldman fails to understand a few things about the laws of war. The US is still, under international humanitarian law (the laws of war), the occupying power in Iraq… That is the only status the US forces there have: as a “belligerent military force” under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. Certainly, they are not there under the terms of any ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ with the Iraqi government, since the Iraqi ‘government’ has never concluded any such agreement with the US.
So the detainees in Iraq are being held pursuant to the laws of war, pure and simple, Noah Feldman. Why do you think the dainty little ‘Iraqi Constitution’ they paid you to write for them back in the day might get in the way of that?
Feldman is also wrong to say the US must consider the detainees it holds to have the same status as the ‘enemy combatants’ it captured in Afghanistan. Because, as I noted above, the US did (quite rightly) declare that it would respect the Geneva Conventions in Iraq; and because those conventions do allow it to hold security detainees, under conditions regulated by Geneva 4.
(The US was quite wrong, anyway, to undertake that unilateral derogation from the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan.)
Pincus also quotes an anonymous non-governmental expert as saying that the Iraqi detainees are anyway “better off” being held in US custody for the time being than they would be if they were sent to join the 34,000 detainees being held– often in lethal or otherwise atrocity-marked conditions– by the US-trained ‘Iraqi’ security forces.
Well… yes, at some level I suppose that is true.
On the other hand, the US still is the responsible occupying power in Iraq– and therefore it is just as responsible for the gross abuses being committed by security forces whom it has raised up and trained there, as it is for the abuses its own units commit directly. So the fact that the 18,000 detainees in US hands may in some ways be “better off” than their 34,000 compatriots held by the Iraqis doesn’t excuse the US from having to take responsibility for the whole darned stew of violence, coercion, and brutality it has brought into being in Iraq.
Beyond that, the US needs to figure out how to leave Iraq– rapidly, and completely. Under those circumstances, there is at least a significant chance that the Iraqi political figures and community leaders who have been dealing with each other in one way or another for millennia now will find a way to resolve their currently continuing conflicts and figure out a way to coexist with each other into the future.
That notably has not happened at all during the now four years of US occupation of the country. Instead, every year the US troops have been there the situation of Iraq’s people has gotten significantly worse.
And even in these past few weeks– when the US forces have been “surging” into some parts of Baghdad, and the numbers of suspects detained has also risen further– these tactics have still, quite clearly, done nothing to end the carnage that still stalks the country.
When the US forces do finally leave the country, we will leave behind many broken souls, many broken bodies, many broken families and communities. One of the ways we have been inflicting this harm is through the detentions policy. Let us recognize this harm for what it is and end it– and the whole occupation– as soon as possible.

Lille, London, the art of global conquest

I’m in Lille, in northern France, where I’m teaching a two-week course on Transitional Justice at the city’s Institut des Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po). It seems like hard work but the students all seem strongly engaged in the topic, which is good.
And I’ve been running around quite a bit over the past couple of weeks… London., Wales, Dorset, and now Lille. Where Bill and I are in an apartment in the middle of a sometimes unnervingly Corbusieresque cityscape… We look out of the windows at extensive, sloping roofscapes clad in metal, boxy apartment blocks clad in metal… a whole swathe of the view brutally clad in the same, with beyond it some hints of an older city and beyond that again, trees, countryside.
However, the city also has an incredibly efficient metro system: sprightly, two-car trains that zip around town with great frequency and rapidity. Only after a day or two did I discover they are completely driverless. In mounting one, the rider puts herself at the mercy of a machine, and becomes perhaps also a part of that machine herself.
H’mmm.
Anyway, before leaving London, I did write nearly the whole of a post for JWN about some exhibits I saw in London. Just now, I tried to finish that post up. So even though there’s been a delay of some days in posting it, let me put it in here:

Continue reading “Lille, London, the art of global conquest”

Paul Wolfowitz and ‘accountability’

How excited I was to read in the headlines that Paul Wolfowitz has finally “accepted responsibility”… But then I learned that this was only’for getting his Saudi-American girlfriend Shaha Aliriza an unjustifiably large promotion– and accompanying pay raise– at the World Bank, where he has been President since June 2005.
In that position, Wolfowitz gets his own huge salary. (Can anyone provide the exact figure for me? This page in the ‘jobs’ area of the Bank’s own website is titled ‘Compensation & Benefits’… But coyly enough it gives no details of the Bank President’s salary.)
Also, of course, the job as President of the World Bank carries a lot of power. Among his responsibilities there, Wolfie gets to lecture government officials in all kinds of impoverished countries about the dangers of graft, nepotism, etc.
What’s sauce for the goose seems not, in this case, to be sauce for the gander, too.
But here’s my question. Yes, it is fairly egregious that Shaha Aliriza– a fairly nice woman whom I once knew a little– has been getting a salary inflated to nearly $200,000 a year by virtue of her longstanding romantic relationship with Paul Wolfowitz.
But when is Wolfowitz– and the rest of the rogues who engineered the invasion and subsequent destruction of the state of Iraq– ever going to be held accountable for their leadership-level engagement in that much, much, much more harmful project?
A lot of US people– especially liberals– just love to sound off about the need for various tinpot dictators and other low-level miscreants around the world to be “held accountable” for their misdeeds.
But when will we start to demand that those of our own leaders who took our country into this quite baseless and avoidable war in Iraq and thereby set in motion the destruction of the state institutions in Iraq that then allowed the eruption of the hyper-lethal anarchy we have seen there for the past 3.5 years… while they are also responsible for the deaths of 3,250 US service members, the maiming of many thousands more, the draining of hundreds of billions of dollars from the US Treasury that could otherwise have been used to support much, much more constructive programs both at home and abroad… when will we start to hold those individuals accountable in any meaningful way for their criminally reckless and aggressive actions??
I think Paul Wolfowitz’s post-Pentagon elevation to World Bank Prez is the outcome that riles me most.
This was rewarding the man, not holding him accountable! (Small wonder if, seeing that he and the administration he served had “gotten away with” contravening the norms and rules of international law in such an egregious fashion, Wolfie thereafter thought he could contravene the norms and rules of the World Bank’s Staff Association and also get away with it…)
The fact that Georgetown University, a solidly Catholic institution, also gave a very cushy post-Pentagon job to Douglas Feith should also certainly be put under the microscope…
I suppose many Americans might say that the main thing we need to do is “punish” the Bushites at the ballot-box. I agree that needs to be done– and I’m delighted that last November we started to put that process into motion.
But I don’t think that’s enough. Those men (and the few women) who bear responsibility for taking the US into the terrible military misadventure in Iraq should be repudiated by civilized society everywhere until they are prepared to admit the error of their ways. And then, perhaps, we should encourage them to do something useful to make some amends to some of the numerous Iraqis (and US citizens) whom they have harmed. Working for ten years as an orderly in a rehabilitation hospital in one country or the other… that kind of thing…
But instead of that the Bushites, the US citizenry, and the rest of the world community were apparently quite content to see Paul Wolfowitz emerge from the Pentagon with that much blood on his hands and just saunter over to the World Bank and start working as President there??
That was the real outrage.

Iran and Britain in the Gulf, contd.

The 15 British naval POWs arrived home yesterday, after having been freed by Iran late Wednesday night. But even as they were boarding their plane to freedom in Teheran, four British soldiers on a patrol in Basra were killed— along with their Kuwaiti interpreter– when a roadside bomb blew up their vehicle.
A good friend of mine here in London who watches such things closely told me yesterday that every time the British forces in and around Iraq do something to pique the Iranians, then the pro-Iranian militants inside Iraq hit back by killing one or more British soldiers… Interesting, if so.
But quite evidently, everyone involved in the potentially extremely lethal military tangle in and around Iraq has been deeply engaged in probing and counter-probing each other’s forces and capabilities in a host of different ways, over the past four years.
Anyway, here in England, there have been some discreet but mounting questions over two aspects of the sailors’ capture: firstly over why they did not resist capture in the first place, and secondly over why they had not had firmer orders to give only “name, rank, and serial number” to their captors, resisting the Iranians’– as it turned out, fairly successful– attempts to interrogate them further and even to get them to utter filmed “confessions”.
Royal Navy head Lord Admiral Jonathan Band said today that the crew “reacted extremely well in very difficult circumstances”.
However, Lt Gen Sir Michael Gray, former commander of the 1st Battalion of the (always much more gung-ho) Paratroopers, was reported by the BBC there as describing the situation as a “shambles”.
And then, from what I very much hope is his comfortable wheelchair in Washington, here is neocon blowhard Charles Krauthammer:

    Iran has pulled off a tidy little success with its seizure and release of those 15 British sailors and marines: a pointed humiliation of Britain, with a bonus demonstration of Iran’s intention to push back against coalition challenges to its assets in Iraq. All with total impunity. Further, it exposed the impotence of all those transnational institutions — most prominently the European Union and the United Nations — that pretend to maintain international order.
    You would think maintaining international order means, at least, challenging acts of piracy. No challenge here. Instead, a quiet capitulation.

I suppose he would rather have seen this small engagement lead to the outbreak of World War 3? What a sad guy.

Pelosi and Damascus, part 2

When we left Nancy Pelosi earlier this week she was still in Damascus. Yesterday, she was in Saudi Arabia. (She said she raised with her Saudi governmental hosts the Kingdom’s lack of any female political figures.)
But the controversy continued to swirl around her visit to Damascus. When she was there she announced she had delivered a message to Pres. Bashar al-Asad from Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, whom she’d met with the day before, to the effect that Israel “was ready to engage in peace talks” with Syria. She also announced that she had found Asad ready to resume the peace talks, as well.
Olmert immediately undercut her, arranging for a message to be posted on his website saying that there was no way Israel could talk with Syria until Syria had met several preconditions including ending its support for what Israel calls terrorism, etc etc.
Was this a big humiliation for Pelosi? The WaPo editorial writers evidently thought it was (or, that it should be seen in that way.) They tried to rub in this humiliation by penning an editorial viciously critical of her, under the headline Pratfall in Damascus.
It declared,

    any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

One big problem: The editorial writers there seemed to have taken completely at face value Olmert’s claim that Pelosi had fabricated the content of the message he wanted to send to Damascus, and to have completely discounted her claim that she did not.
Why on earth would the editorial writers of the Washington Post choose to take the word of a foreign politician over that of the duly elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives?. (Also, why should they criticize her for seeking to lead the House of Representatives in exercising its completely constitutional power of the purse?)
There are many possible explanations of what happened re the “Pelosi message”. One is that she is a careful politician and proven good listener who conveyed exactly the message she had been asked to convey. The other is the WaPo/Olmert story that she dangerously bungled this small piece of discreet international communication… Then, of course, there is also the hand of the Bushites, who as we saw earlier were apoplectic that Pelosi should even dare to visit Syria at all.
Here are some possibilities worth considering:

    — Perhaps Olmert deliberately set Pelosi up from the get-go, as a presumed favor to his equally embattled buddy George Bush, or
    –Perhaps Olmert didn’t set her up beforehand; but after sher had made her (interesting but quite evidently non-operational) comments in Damascus about her various diplomatic contacts until then, the outraged Bushites called Olmert and asked him to issue the retraction? (This, remember, after several seemingly credible reports emerged late last summer that the White House intervened during the 33-day war in Lebanon to prevent Olmert from sending out peace feelers to Damascus…)

Anyway, whatever the truth of the back-story there, one thing seems fairly clear: Olmert has certainly not enhanced the way that this very experienced and politically significant Speaker we now have in Washington will view him in the future. And nor, for what it is worth, has the WaPo editorial board.

US citizens: where do our tax dollars go?

The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL)– which is the excellent American Quaker lobbying organization with which I have a loose affiliation– has a great downloadable flier titled Where Do Our Income Tax Dollars Go?
In case you don’t want to wait to download that PDF file, here are some of the highlights…
From every dollar you (we) pay in income tax:

    * 41 cents goes to war-related expenditures— both financial obligations from past wars, including interest on the military portion of the national debt, which altogether come up to 13c; and paying for the current wars and preparations for future wars (28c).
    * Just 1¢ goes to humanitarian aid, maintaining diplomatic missions, and international cooperation.
    * 19¢ goes to federally funded health programs; 12c to programs related to housing and other poverty-alleviation measures; 10c for interest on the non-military portion of the debt, etc., etc.

At the end of the flier, it says, “The federal budget is a reflection of our country’s moral values. Does this budget reflect your values?” And it gives information on how to lobby Congress for a more moral budget.
It strikes me, for example, that as and when we seriously restructure the US’s relationship with the rest of the world on a more rational and more effective basis, we could take just about all of that 28c per dollar of funding for present and future wars and divide it equally between: paying down the national debt (9c); investing in health and education programs at home (9c); and building strong relationships with other countries through diplomacy, international cooperation, etc (9c).
Such a program would increase the investment in global relationships by 900 percent! And in my judgment, it would be fully 1,000 percent as efficient at safeguarding the essential (and essentially human) security interests of the US citizenry as the present, heavily war-distorted allocation of our tax dollars.
FCNL’s website also has a great page with information about the many activities US citizens can undertake in this tax-payment season– which is also a time when many of our Congressional representatives will be back home for their Easter recess, and thus available to be lobbied.

Pelosi’s spring break in Syria

(This post has been cross-posted to ‘The Notion’.)
If it’s spring break in Washington, then that must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi– accompanied by, my goodness, the perpetually pro-Israeli Tom Lantos!– heading for Syria this week.
Pelosi’s delegation is currently in Lebanon. AP’s Zeina Karam writes there that the Speaker,

    said she thinks it’s a good idea to “establish facts, to hopefully build the confidence” between the U.S. and Syria.
    “We have no illusions, but we have great hope,” she said.
    … Pelosi, who is leading a congressional delegation on a fact-finding tour of the Middle East, said she would speak to the Syrians about Iraq, their role in the fight against terrorism, their support for militant groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas — whose exiled leaders live in Damascus — as well their influence in Lebanon.

And guess who’s waxing apoplectic about this? Yes, that would be Dana Perino, the fill-in for Tony Snow as White House spokesperson. Karam’s piece notes that Perino said,

    “We ask that people not go on these trips… We discourage it. Full stop.” [Plus, it] “sends the wrong message to have high-level U.S. officials going there (to Syria) to have photo opportunities that Assad then exploits.”

Oops! Then I guess having the Bush administration’s very own Assistant Secretary of State for Refugee Affairs Ellen Sauerbrey go to Syria last month was all a terrible mistake then?
Even Israel’s Acting President, Dalia Itzik, was much more moderate than Perino. She told Pelosi yesterday that,

    “Your expected visit to Damascus has naturally touched off a political debate in your country, and of course, here… I believe in your worthy intentions. Perhaps a step, seen as unpopular at this stage … will clarify to the Syrian people and leadership they must abandon the axis of evil (and) stop supporting terrorism and giving shelter to (terrorist) headquarters.”

But the main thing Washington needs to talk to Syria about right now is Iraq. And this strand of the American-Syrian diplomatic dance is quite complex, and in some ways very counter-intuitive. Did you think that it was the Syrians and their Iranian allies who want US troops out of Iraq and the stubborn old Bush administration that wants them to stay?
To a great degree you’d be wrong, on both counts. Here in London a couple of weeks ago my friend the veteran strategic analyst Hussein Agha told me (and on reflection, I quite agree) that, for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw. The gist of what Agha said was that for some of those neighboring countries– and this definitely includes both Syria along with Iran– the status quo lessens the likelihood of US attacks against them. Meanwhile for others of the neighbors (and yes, that includes Syria, once again) it represents a situation strongly preferable to the regional turmoil they fear might follow US withdrawal…
As for the Bush administration– well yes, at the ideological/political level of Bush and his resident “brain”, Dick Cheney, it is quite possible that some of them still believe all that stuff about “staying the course”, the value of the “surge”, etc. But Matthew Dowd, who was a key Bush political advisor during the 2004 election campaign is only one of the former Bush supporters who has now been “mugged by reality”, and has come out as openly critical of the way the Prez has been waging this war… Aas for the serving military, it has been clear for some time that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace has been prepared to quietly push back against the Bushites’ rampant bellophilia… And former commander of the US Army War College Maj.-Gen. (Retd.) Robert H. Scales recently wrote openly in the Washington Times that,

    the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer…

Since Scales is also a former advisor to Rumsfeld when Rummy was at the Petnagon, I guess that makes him a clear defector from the Bush project in Iraq, too.
Here’s the bottom line though: It is now not only (or perhaps, even, not mainly) the Dems, in Washington, who now want to find the speediest and safest possible exit for the US troops from Iraq. It is also the uniformed military– and also, quite likely, the very low-key Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who seems to see his role overwhlemingly as acting as the “anti-Rumsfeld” in the Penatgon.
But the Syrians, Iranians, and all the rest of Iraq’s neighbors are meanwhile (quietly) quite keen to see the US troops remain in Iraq. I have a little direct evidence of that, myself. When I defied the President’;s injunctions and went to Damascus at the end of February, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Mouallem was adamant during the interview I conducted with him that the US should effect a complete withdrawal of all its forces from Iraq– but when I pressed him to specify the time-period over which he thought this withdrawal should occur, he notably declined my invitation to do that.
So the diplomacy of this US withdrawal from Iraq look set to be very interesting indeed…

Palestinians’ lives in limbo (Part LXXXVIII)

Anthony Shadid has a great piece of reporting in today’s WaPo from one of the bleak ‘temporary’ camps at the Jordanian-Iraqi border in which 1,300 Palestinians who fled from Iraq shortly after the US invasion have now been trapped for nearly four years.
Shadid interviews 52-year-old Samir Abdel-Rahim who arrived in Ruweished ‘camp’, about 40 miles inside Jordan, in the middle of the bleak desert that separates Amman from Baghdad.
Shadid writes:

    “If you don’t leave my house, I will burn it down — you and your family inside,” Abdel-Rahim, bearded and balding, said he was told by his landlord in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hayy al-Salam.
    On May 4, 2003, he left with his family [wife and four children] and his brother’s family, buying bus tickets for the equivalent of about $7.
    “We didn’t have a choice,” he said.
    For a brief time in 2003, Jordan allowed Palestinians, including Abdel-Rahim’s family and a few hundred others, into the Ruweished camp, built about 40 miles from Iraq to house a feared influx of Iraqis fleeing the U.S.-led invasion. Jordan then closed the border. In summer 2006, Syria allowed more than 300 Palestinians into al-Hol camp, on its side of the frontier. Then, like Jordan, it sealed the border again….
    U.N. officials say both countries fear the precedent that would be set by allowing in more Palestinian refugees.
    “The line is drawn — that they’re not going to admit them, that they’re not going to absorb one more,” said Robert Breen, the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan. “If you open up for some, the rest are going to come.”
    The Palestinian Authority has offered the refugees sanctuary, but Israel, which controls the borders of the West Bank and Gaza, has denied U.N. requests to resettle them in the Palestinian territories, he said.
    “I can’t recall ever having seen this kind of situation in such a bleak environment,” Breen said. “They can’t go backward, and they aren’t moving forward. They’re literally stuck in the desert — no way back, and nowhere to go.”
    … “If there were a one in a hundred chance that we could have lived safely in Baghdad, we would have never left,” Abdel-Rahim said.
    The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch has said that Shiite militias have murdered dozens of Palestinians in Baghdad and that Interior Ministry forces have arbitrarily arrested, beaten and tortured others. The group said entire communities of the 15,000 Palestinians still there have received threats of eviction. Rumors abound that Palestinians, as Sunni Muslims, have served as suicide bombers and supporters of the insurgency.
    “They have been systematically brutalized,” said Anita Raman, a reporting officer with UNHCR in Amman.
    “You kill a Palestinian, and what is the consequence?” she added.
    …Abdel-Rahim had applied to go to Canada. He pulled out the letter he had received from the Canadian Embassy.
    “You have not provided sufficient evidence that you have a well-founded fear of persecution nor that you have been and continue to be seriously and personally affected by civil war, armed conflict or massive violation of human rights,” it read in part.
    The last line concluded: “I am therefore refusing your application.”
    “I would have to die, my husband would have to be killed, or my children would have to be slaughtered in front of my eyes, so that I’d have the right to leave this place,” his sister-in-law said. “Is that logical?”

So this is what it feels like to be stateless– that is, to belong to a group that does not have any state that recognizes that you are its citizen and is capable of intervening to ensure that your most basic rights as a person– or even your existence– as a person is safeguarded.
It strikes me that the leaders of a Jewish state, of all the states in the world, should well understood the extreme vulnerability of the condition of statelessness, and should be open to allowing the Palestinian Authority to offer a refuge in the areas under its control to these very distressed Palestinians???
Anyway, Shadid’s piece is all worth reading.

Crazed retired US Air Force general urges war on Iran

I can’t get full-text versions of Wall Street Journal articles online. So it’s good that on Friday WaPo blogger Bill Arkin offered some substantial excerpts from a crazed and inflammatory opinion piece that retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney had in that day’s WSJ…
Arkin tells us that McInerney’s favored approach to Iran would be,

    what he calls “minimal military pressure” through a “tit-for-tat” of U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities every time an American soldier is killed with a so-called “explosively formed penetrator,” a shaped charge being used in Iraq in IED attacks. A soldier is killed in Iraq, the U.S. bombs in Iran, that’s McInerney’s recommendation.

Arkin, who lives considerably closer to the real world than McInerney, is completely (and rightly) scornful of this idea:

    The idiocy of this “calculated response,” as McInerney calls it, is not only that such a direct attack would be a declaration of war, but also it imagines a level of control in the world and in warfare that doesn’t exist in the real world.
    First, it imagines that Tehran indeed controls what happens in Iraq and that the regime itself is indeed responsible for the EFPs. There are some who desperately want to trace the EFPs back to the Iranian regime, but that is by no means a foregone conclusion.
    Second, McInterney’s calculated response wrongly imagines that the United States can bomb and control what happens thereafter. Haven’t we yet learned that this doesn’t work, that it didn’t work in Afghanistan, where we are still fighting and not controlling the situation on the ground; and it certainly did work in Iraq, where we are just hoping for an honorable exit?
    Don’t worry though: If escalation indeed occurs, McInerney is happy and ready with what he calls an “air offensive” and a military strategy directed at Iran that he likens to the Reagan administration’s military buildup that bankrupted the Soviet Union and won the Cold War…

I would add to this the extremely salient fact that any US airstrike on any kind of target inside Iran would, by constituting a clear act of war, put at immediate risk not only the 140,000-plus US soldiers distributed throughout Iraq but also all the very thick (and vulnerable) supply lines that support them.
McInerney lives in cloud cuckoo-land. (Didn’t stop him working in the past as a Vice President for the huge US defense contractor Unisys/Loral.)
Arkin does us all a service by underlining this:

    Fortunately for us, the professionals in the military dismiss this kind of armchair generalship for what it is: amateurish and promiscuous speculation devoid of any political context or reality.

I note, too, that it was a technology-crazed air-force planner– Chief of Staff Dan Halutz– who got Israel into all the bad trouble it got into last summer (and hasn’t recovered from since), when he “sold” to his political bosses there the idea that the use of airpower-based “massive retaliation” against Lebanon could solve all his country’s problems there…
Arkin continues,

    But what about the Iranians? I’m afraid they read this drivel in the Wall Street Journal and imagine that it is some kind of “message” written by White House neocons, that it is an American threat.
    Of course, sophisticated Iranians will see it as just another article and will cable back to Tehran or caution their bosses not to be spooked or provoked. On the other hand, hard liners in the Iranian regime will believe every word, using and misusing such a description of war as justification for their own desired Iranian moves, moves that push us closer and closer to confrontation.
    This just goes to prove that there are clumsy and foolish players on both sides, in Iran and in the United States.
    It should be a reminder that before we declare Iran the next enemy we think through the implications of our own declarations. Even our words can be like bombs dropping, the effects of which we don’t really understand and can’t control.

At the head of the piece, Arkin writes,

    The conspiracy theorists will pick up on the news out of San Diego that the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier battle group will sail Monday for the Persian Gulf as meaning WAR with Iran…
    The USS Nimitz is sailing Monday, but Navy spokesmen tell The Los Angeles Times that there will be no overlap of three aircraft carriers in the Gulf.
    The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower will be returning to the United States.
    The decision to send another carrier to the Gulf is itself a signal of a change; at least for now, it appears that the United States will maintain a two carrier presence in the region rather than just one.
    Even if that two carrier presence isn’t specifically intended to be directed at Iran, it does have that effect.
    Aircraft carrier exercises, moreover, such as the one the United States recently concluded, the “largest” since 2003, have the impact of signaling American military readiness.
    One can’t help but think that Iran’s capture of the Royal Marines and sailors must be connected to the desire to have some kind of bargaining chip at a time when Tehran perceives that America is readying for war.

As I noted above, in my view the Iranians already have plenty of human “bargaining chips”, in the form of the US (and UK) troops spread out throughout Iraq.. The wide distribution of those troops gives Teheran much more “insurance” against US military adventures than any small group of 15 UK sailors and marines. And what’s more, the US not only put those bargaining chips into place for the Iranians but has also recently been adding to their number!
I am worried, though, about what Arkin writes about the general political mood in Washington regarding Iran:

    Iran has not so slowly taken on the mantle of favorite enemy to many in Washington, even to the geopolitically challenged who seem content, even desperate, to join the neocons in blithely referring to war there as more justified than Iraq.

Are the war-drums for an attack on Iran really being drummed so heavily and with such success in Washington as he implies? This seems extremely scary to me. I’d really welcome any information or evidence that readers can provide on this point.