Author: Helena

Bush administration in Iraq: Recognizing the inevitable

Bush called a “surprise” press conference at short notice this morning. For the WaPo’s Bill Branigan the main story was that Bush said,

    … he shares the American public’s dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq, but he warned against succumbing to “disillusionment” about the U.S. purpose there and expressed confidence in both Iraq’s prime minister and his own defense secretary.

Here’s the official transcript.
(I don’t have time to read the whole thing. I’m about to go to the airport to travel to Amman for a week.)
In addition to having its main newspaper, the WaPo also runs a website called washingtonpost.com that carries most of the deadwood paper’s content and also– slightly confusingly– content from some of the website’s own writers. These latter include the site’s “White House” correspondent Dan Froomkin, who often puts good things up on his pages. Today, for example, he had his own quick account of the Bush press conference and the circumstances in which it was held, along with an excellent compilation of some of the best of the recent political reporting in the big MSM.
And almost immediately after posting that on the site, Froomkin ran a “live online” discussion about current events. He made this really interesting observation there:

    Qun. from White Plains, N.Y.: I believe Mr. Bush was quoted earlier this weeks as having said “I never said ‘stay the course'” Why is the press not addressing this aggressively as a glaring example of the president”s knowing and willful distortion of reality?
    Dan Froomkin: Oh but they are! With truly surprising vigor! See my columns today, and yesterday , and Monday.
    In fact, a keen observer called me just yesterday to see if I could explain the vigor, given the many other similar opportunities that the corps has passed up. I don’t have a firm answer, but in my October 11 column, I wrote about how Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” had finally convinced establishment Washington that Bush has a serious credibility problem.

This is mind-boggling. Froomkin is simply assuming that the MSM press corps is part of “establishment Washington”– actually, not an unrealistic assumption, in general– and then saying that “establishment Washington” needs to get some kind of permission from Bob Woodward before it asks the tough questions about Bush’s credibility…
Better late than never I guess.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading this latest Woodward book. It has some interesting things in it, to be sure. But the guy’s narrative skills are not particularly good. Indeed, one of the least satisfying aspects of the book is that he just skips over a whole lot of things that he’d written about in his first two– much more laudatory– books. So it’s not a “complete” story at all. What somebody needs to do some day is to go back and put all of his accounts of this period together, into a single account– and also, crucially, to pull out all the glaring dissonances between the kinds of laudatory things he was publishing three or four years ago and the ways he describes almost exactly the same incidents today.
Oh well, the main story these days is still an intriguing one to follow: President Bush and his senior cabinet members struggling to come to terms– somehow!– with the collapse of their massive and very, very harmful project in Iraq… And to do this in a way that will minimize the damage the GOP suffers at the polls November 7.

Zeitgeist shift among Iraqis, too (of course)

A really revealing round-up of the views of many Iraqi bloggers was published last week by the currently exiled Iraqi blogger “Treasure of Baghdad”– ” A young reporter from a destroyed country where truth is lost and lives of the innocent are mixed with their blood.”
ToB asked Iraqis who blog in English a standard set of questions, and on October 18 he published the 16 sets of answers he’d received. They are all well worth reading. His fourth question was: Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?
Of those 16, eight said clearly it was not worth it; six gave answers expressing uncertainty; and only two said Yes, it was worth it.
It’s not clear to me how many of these bloggers are currently living inside Iraq– some are, some aren’t– or how many had been exiles from Iraq prior to March 2003. But the fact that they blog so articulately in English, and have enough access to internet connections that they can blog with, apparently, some regularity indicates to me that either they are currently living in exile or that if they are still resident in Iraq, then they are most likely from better-off segments of Iraqi society.
In other words, these are people who should have been the natural allies of any credible democratization project inside Iraq. Some of them, like Najma of A Star from Mosul, admit to having changed their views on the value of the US invasion– towards a more critical view of it– over the past three years.
Also Zeyad, who has a pretty famous blog called Healing Iraq, did not “come out” as an open critic of the US invasion of his country until the day after ToB published his survey. In that latter momentous post, Zeyad wrote:

    Another close friend of mine has been killed in Baghdad. We had lunch together in Baghdad just days before I left.
    I can’t concentrate on anything any more. I should not be here in New York running around a stupid neighbourhood, asking people about their ‘issues’.
    I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle.

(Hat-tip for Christiane for sending me to that post and through Healing Iraq to everything else mentioned here.)
In his answer to ToB’s question, “Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?” Zeyad had answered only, “I’m afraid to answer that question.”
The Iraqi blogosphere is, of course, an area of discourse that has expanded tremendously since the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Prior to his toppling there was already, however, the redoubtable Salam/Pax blogging his way through the last days of Saddam’s rule and through the whole invasion. Salam hasn’t posted anything at all since July 18 on his current blog, which he’d renamed at some point The Daily Absurdity Report..
Amid all the terrible stories about the assaults against gay people in today’s Iraq– and the fact of his ‘out’ gayness– I just hope (a) that Salam’s safe, and probably also (b) that he is no longer in the country.
Regarding my own two long-favored Iraqi bloggers, Riverbend and Faiza, Riverbend had a 2.5-month hiatus there before her most recent post on the Lancet study. And Faiza’s been uncharacteristically quiet recently, too. She wrote this long post, in Arabic, on September 30; but nothing since.
Here’s how she started the post:

    I have stopped writing on my website for a while now…
    And the reason is perhaps; because I was occupied working with the Iraqis who fled the hell of life inside Iraq, or perhaps that I was bored from the same talk about the painful reality that is going on for more than three years, until I no longer like to talk, as if repeating the same words, uselessly.
    Iraqis are still dying everyday; killed by trapped cars, sectarian militia, and death squads who carry out random assassinations on the streets. Or they die by assassinations organized against every nationalist or cultured Iraqi, against every scientist, doctor, or university professor…
    There is someone out there who decided to assassinate everything in Iraq, everything that moves on the land of Iraq, and bears the Iraqi identity…
    A Sunniey or a Shia’at, rich or poor, a Muslim or not a Muslim, cultured or not, with or against the occupation; all these are targets, and dead bodies are filling the streets, eaten by dogs…
    And Bush is still living in his delusions, giving speeches about imaginary victories in Iraq. Is he fooling himself, or his people?
    Perhaps both. This is what tyrants do, all over the world.
    If Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, this Bush is no less a tyrant…

And near the end she tells this story:

    I started working with Iraqi non-governmental organizations who work in Human Rights affairs. We receive here dislodged people from Iraq, who were threatened with death for sectarian reasons, by the death squads and the new death militia which the occupation policy spawned, to rip apart the Iraqi’s unity.
    We collect donations from here and there, so we can provide for them some lodgings, cloths, and the least minimum level of a good life.
    ((Welfare shall remain in my nation until the Day of Judgment)) says the Holy Prophet, (may the blessings of God be upon him).
    And from Baghdad, I have a short, sad story, but one which I consider to be a model for the stories of sadness from Iraq.
    Some six months ago, one of our neighbors was assassinated. He used to work as an officer in the Iraqi Army. I wrote about him at the time.
    He had a wife and two sons, (five and four years), Ahmad and Muhammad.
    The wife, I don’t know why, lost her mind, and killed herself one month ago, in her sadness for her husband.
    The children remained with their mother’s mother; a lonely, poor old woman. Their father’s kin are in Samara, where two of their uncles were killed, their grandfather was arrested, and the rest of their uncles are detained by the occupation forces.
    My friends and I made an agreement to send them cloths and presents from time to time…
    If I was living in Baghdad, I would have brought them to my home, to live with my family.
    The Holy Prophet says: ((I, and whoever supports the orphan, are in heaven)), (may the blessings of God be upon him).

People who want to explore the recent work of Iraqi bloggers some more can find a good portal to this in this round-up from last week by Salam Adil. Salam Adil, btw, is a nom-de-plume. It is also Arabic for “A just peace.” Wouldn’t that be a great thing for Iraqis– and Palestinians and Israelis and all the peoples of the Middle East– to achieve.

Elections and post-conflict tasks: Iraq and elsewhere

Juan Cole had a quick link to this piece by Robert H. Reid in yesterday’s Guardian. Reid argued there that,

    The search for an end to Iraq’s violence is being complicated by an electoral system that empowers religious and sectarian leaders who see little gain in offering concessions to rivals or cracking down on factions that put them in power.
    That makes it tough for the U.S. to steer Iraqi leaders toward the kind of political compromise that American military commanders believe is the only way to guarantee long-term stability.

He quotes the (American neo-con) analyst Michael Rubin– who had been a political advisor in an earlier portion of the US occupation rule in Iraq— as now criticizing the proportional representation electoral system that the US introduced there:

    “The problem with proportional representation … is that it encourages populism and empowers ethnic and sectarian leaders. It encourages politicians to be more accountable to party leaders rather than their constituents,” said Michael Rubin, a former political adviser in Iraq.

Well, yes and no. It is not as if the main alternative to a nationwide p.r. system– that is, some form of a constituency-based system, with either single-seat or multi-seat constituencies– may have been any better for Iraqis. In those systems you are more likely to get a “winner takes all” outcome. And it was always very unlikely indeed, in the very fragile political environment created in Iraq after the American occupiers had not only removed Saddam but also dismantled all the main institutions of national governance, that a constituency-based system would have served the interests of stability in Iraq any better than a national p.r. system.
The central political problem in Iraq by the summer of 2003 was how the Iraqis could conclude the kind of national political compact needed to act as the foundation on which they could quickly reassmble their national institutions.
Roland Paris recently published a very important book called At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict in which he studied the various attempts made to build stable post-conflict orders in 14 countries wracked by civil strife in the 1980s and 1990s. One of his big conclusions was the need, in general, to aim at achieving “institutionalization before liberalization”.
He summed up this approach in six important lessons (p.188):

    1. Wait until conditions are ripe for elections
    2. Design good electoral systems that reward moderation
    3. Promote good civil society [with a warning there, that not all “civil society” is in fact good.]
    4. Control hate speech
    5. Adopt conflict-reducing economic policies
    6. The common denominator: Rebuild effective state institutions

This list is, in my judgment, an excellent one. Of these steps, the US occupation authorities in Iraq only ever really tried to work on #2– by using a p.r. system instead of a winner-takes-all system. Meantime, they were acting determinedly against Paris’s recommendations as regards #1, #5, and especially #6.
I readily confess that back in 2004, when Sistani was calling for quick elections as a way to facilitate the quick exit of the US troops from the country I thought that was a good idea (and wrote so, many times, here on JWN.) However, it is now quite clear that that whole string of electoral “events” that were orchestrated by the occupation authorities between then and December 2005 never resulted in brokering and cementing the key political compact required within Iraq; nor did they succeed in providing a basis for the rebuilding of effective national institutionshin the country; and nor, finally, did they pave the way (as Sistani had hoped) for a speedy and orderly withdrawal of the US occupation presence from the country.
Back in 2004, I had hoped that speedy elections inside Iraq could play the same role there– in helping to midwife a basically peaceful transition from a non-representative, minority regime to one of full one-person-one-vote democracy– that nationwide elections had played in midwifing an transition of just such a nature in South Africa, back in 1994.
I think that far and away the main factor that was missing in Iraq in 2004 and since, that had been present in SA in 1993-1994, was a substantial degree of insulation of the country’s national politics from any influences from outside, meaning that all the players within the South African system realized that, for their own longterm survival, they needed to find a way to deal with each other, without having any option of using an outside force as a crutch. There were other differences, too, of course; but that was certainly the main one.
So now, all these three main challenges for Iraqis still remain: to find that internal political compact; to rebuild the country’s institutions; and to get rid of the occupying forces.
Right now, it does look as if, acting from purely domestic-US political motivations, the Bush administration may well be planning at least a substantial drawdown of the US deployment within Iraq. (And if we anti-occupation forces can keep up our pressure, there’s a good chance we can force them to undertake a complete withdrawal fairly soon, too?) So as the US footprint within Iraq shrinks, will the political forces inside Iraqi society be able to find the national-level internal political compact that will allow them to start rebuilding their country together? I certainly hope and pray that this is still possible. It won’t be easy– mainly because of the terrifying divisiveness that the US presence there has sown over the past 42 months.
But it’s not impossible.
And then, once Iraqis have made some good progress in rebuilding their core national institutions, perhaps one day in the future they can have some truly democratic national elections, whenever they themselves are ready for them… And by “truly democratic elections”, I’m not just referring to procedural issues like the nature of the electoral system or whether all parties have been given a fair chance at campaigning… I’m talking about elections that are not held under the heel of an occupying army, and elections that generate a national leadership that is connected to, and will accountably assume responsibility for a set of real, existing instruments of national governance.
As opposed to all the Potemkin elections that have been held in the occupied country so far.

Zeitgeist shift in DC on Iraq

Well! The WaPo has now finally come to roughly the same position regarding the US presence in Iraq that Juan Cole was espousing in June-July 2005. In a key editorial today, the paper’s august editorial team argued,

    PRESIDENT BUSH said this month that he was willing to “change tactics” in Iraq if U.S strategy was not working. We believe the time has come for such a change. The Iraqi coalition government that Mr. Bush has been counting on to forge political compromises and disarm sectarian militias doesn’t seem to have the strength to carry out either mission. A U.S.-led attempt to pacify Baghdad by concentrating forces in the capital has failed, while contributing to a grievous spike in American casualties. Support for the war is rapidly slipping, in the country and in Congress; a congressionally mandated commission is likely to recommend a new course sometime after next month’s election. Mr. Bush would be wise to act sooner than that: The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq needs to be addressed urgently…
    A revised U.S. strategy must aim to jump-start political accord and militia disarmament. But it must also provide for the possibility that decisive progress will not be achievable soon…
    But if, as appears more likely, Iraq’s civil war deepens and spreads, the United States should abandon attempts to pacify Baghdad or other areas with its own forces. It should adopt a strategy of supporting the Iraqi government and army in a long-term effort to win the war… A reserve force of U.S. troops could remain as a guarantor against a military victory by insurgents and as a rapid reaction force that could strike al-Qaeda targets.

The editorial then plainly raises the possibility of failure:

    “A change of course won’t necessarily rescue the U.S mission in Iraq.”

It ends with this plaintive (and fairly unrealistic) little bleat: “But there remains a chance the government could gain control over the country. As long as that prospect exists, the United States has a moral obligation and a practical interest to remain in Iraq.”
The clear implication there being, of course, that once it is clear there is no chance that the Iraqi government can “gain control over the country”, then it will be time for the US forces there to head for the exits, fast.
(So why not go straight to a “speedy, complete, orderly, and generous” withdrawal plan such as I have been advocating for some years now? H’mmm.)
But anyway, we do need to recognize the depth and importance of this shift in the WaPo’s position, especially given the intense degree to which the WaPo and its editorial board were cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq throughout 2002 and 2003, and have been supportive of the administration’s general policy there ever since.
And another indication of the current zeitgeist shift: Right opposite the editorial itself we have the latest signed column by Jim Hoagland (who had probably also helped to write the editorial.) Jim had been one of the biggest members of the mainstream commentatoriat beating the drums for the war back in 2002. Now, here’s what he wrote today:

    The bloody chaos of Iraq under U.S. occupation is shaking Western governments into sobering reassessments of that conflict and of war itself. More urgently, some of these governments have launched tightly held contingency planning for the consequences of a possible American failure in Iraq.

He wrote of,

    the gathering sense at home and abroad that the administration is belatedly engaged in a search for a political-economic exit strategy. Such a strategy would quickly reduce the role of U.S. combat troops in Iraq and gradually increase the economic involvement of other countries, including Iraq’s neighbors.

He gives no clue, of course, as to how you get the “neighbors” to start picking up the economic costs of running Iraq without also giving them a share of the political/diplomatic decisionmaking. But maybe this is the way Hoagie and his friends in the administration might be hoping to “package” a move to involve the neighbors in Iraq-related consultations, for the benefit of a US audience? I doubt that Iran, Syria, and other Iraqi neighbors who have been systematically belittled and in many cases outright opposed by Bush for the past 6 years would be ahappy to participate in this project on quite those terms.
Then, he writes this:

    military leaders and diplomats in Western capitals are not waiting for the Baker and U.N.-sponsored efforts to conclude before they assess the mistakes, poor strategy and changing conditions of warfare that have brought U.S. forces face to face with the bitter prospect of having to withdraw, mission unaccomplished…
    The need for changes in practice and doctrine was reinforced by Israel’s inconclusive July-August war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, a classic guerrilla force that also possesses a strategic missile arsenal capable of damaging and shutting down entire Israeli cities…

Oh, I have to say that it is fine spectator sport to watch Hoagie squirming as he starts to come to terms with some of these harsh (for him) political and strategic realities.
Then, right under him, we have veteran (paleo-)conservative George Will posing some questions that he thinks Jim Baker’s Iraq “Study” Group ought to be asking the Bushites. The first of them is this:

    * What are 140,000 U.S. forces achieving in Iraq that could not be achieved by 40,000?
    * If the answer to the first question is “creating Iraqi security forces,” a second question is: Is there an Iraqi government? In “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward quotes Colin Powell, after leaving the administration, telling the president that strengthening Iraq’s military and police forces is crucial but that “if you don’t have a government that you can connect these forces to, then, Mr. President, you’re not building up forces, you’re building up militias.” And making matters worse.

Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Will concludes with this:

    On Sept. 19 Hamilton said that “the next three months are critical.” On Oct. 5 Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that the next “two or three months” are critical. If only the worsening insurgency were, as the president suggested Wednesday, akin to North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive. The insurgency is worse: Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnam. [But a political victory… ~HC] The president says the war in Iraq will be “just a comma” in history books, but by Nov. 26, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with the Study Group’s recommendations due, the comma will have lasted as long as U.S. involvement in World War II.

And so, as the Democrats continue to edge closer and closer to looking able to take one or both houses on Congress on November 7, we should ask, will the Democrats’ policy on Iraq be any better?
A first answer to this would, honestly, have to be “No.”
On that same op-ed page, veteran WaPo political commentator David Broder writes about a conference call that Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, both longtime members of the Armed Services Committee, held recently with a number of reporters.
He wrote:

    Reed, who has made many trips to Iraq and returned just weeks ago from his most recent visit, described the “very, very difficult situation” he found there. “We have to begin to work toward redeployment without setting a timetable,” he said. “We have to start laying out some red lines for the Iraqis . . . give them some clear goals we want them to achieve.” They need to set plans for disarming militias, conducting elections at the provincial level and spending some of the funds being hoarded in Baghdad on better services for the people, he said.
    Implicit in their comments is a belief, based on their firsthand observations, that the current rulers in Baghdad have a different agenda for themselves than the Bush administration’s bland assurances suggest. As Levin put it, “Our only leverage for change is to force the politicians in Iraq to realize we’re not there as their security blanket. When they recognize that reality, they’re more likely to make the necessary compromises on sharing of oil revenues and sharing power. The prospect of losing us as their personal security blanket will focus their minds.”

This is extremely close to where the administration’s current policy is– if not identical with it. Today’s news pages are all full of reports that the Bushites have decided to establish “benchmarks” and whatever for the Maliki government to live up to in Iraq… This is nearly all, at this stage of how bad things are in Iraq, meaningless posturing before the US voters. (And quite likely to backfire badly with Maliki and others who might consider this as a quite unwarranted form of US bullying, not to mention unwarranted intervention in Iraq’s internal affairs…)
Also, at one level, it’s a hilariously misdirected “threat”. “Look here, Maliki, you better do as we tell you, or otherwise we’ll– well, we’ll do just exactly what you, your party, and the vast majority of Iraqis want us to do.”
Monty Python does the governance of Iraq.
But Broder continues with the crux of why these two senior Democratic good ol’ boys are so disappointing:

    When the senators were asked if a Democratic majority in the House or Senate would force the issue in Iraq by threatening to cut off funds for the war, they quickly ruled out any such action. Levin said that a simple resolution recommending to the president that he set a date to begin redeployment might do the trick.

Cutting off the funding for the war in Vietnam was, of course, the only way that Congress was able, back in the day, to end the militaristic madness there. And these guys want to “quickly rule out any such action” even before they’ve even come anywhere near any taste of real Congressional power?
Almost beyond belief.
So am I still motivated to help elect this bunch of Democratic Party rascals to office? Yes, I am. The most important thing is still to send a strong anti-war message to the Bushites. After that we can get to work on these lily-livered Democrats– and some Dems, actually, have positions that are far better than those articulated by Levin and Reed.
Plus, if the Democrats get control of even one of the houses of Congress, they can start to win some real form of accountability from the administration by holding authoritative hearings into so many different aspects of the administration’s policy at home and abroad.
What is intensely noticeable to me, meanwhile, is that even in the absence of any decent leadership on the war issue from our so-called “opposition” party here, the zeitgeist in the country has been turning so strongly against the war over the past few weeks.

Afghanistan: US big media go AWOL

The news pages of the US MSM have gone completely AWOL on coverage of the rapidly unravelling strategic situation in Afghanistan. (A situation whose strategic importance I started to discuss here, on Friday.)
Today’s NYT magazine did carry an excellent piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the resurgence of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. It contained a lot of good material that she had gathered during a reporting trip back in summer, and definitely has a lot of helpful detail about the ambiguous (at best) policy toward the Taliban pursued by Pakistan’s infamous ISI intel service. So yes, it does provide some really useful background to the “news” events that have been occurring in Afghanistan over the past week…
But where is the coverage in the big US media of these momentous news events?
Almost nowhere, it seems… Most likely, because there are very few US service people left in Afghanistan any more. They have all been sucked up into the big “flood the zone” deployment in Iraq. And meanwhile, the Canadians, Brits, and other non-US members of NATO have been left holding the bag in Afghanistan.
Which probably also explains why the MSM in those countries has been covering the Afghan story much more than the US MSM.
Following up on the outspoken comments made by Chief of the British Defense Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt ten days ago, his predecessor Field Marshal Sir Peter Inge reportedly told a meeting of European experts last Tuesday that the British forces risk defeat in Afghanistan.
Here is how Mark Townsend and Peter Beaumont described Inge’s remarks in a piece in today’s Observer:

    ‘I don’t believe we have a clear strategy in either Afghanistan or Iraq. I sense we’ve lost the ability to think strategically. Deep down inside me, I worry that the British army could risk operational failure if we’re not careful in Afghanistan. We need to recognise the test that I think they could face there,’ he told the debate held by Open Europe, an independent think tank campaigning for EU reform.
    Inge added that Whitehall had surrendered its ability to think strategically and that despite the immense pressures on the army, defence received neither the research nor funding it required.
    ‘I sense that Whitehall has lost the knack of putting together inter-departmental thinking about strategy. It talks about how we’re going to do in Afghanistan, it doesn’t really talk about strategy.’

Well, if Whitehall has stopped thinking strategically about how to plan and balance the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, you can be almost certain that Washington DC hasn’t been doing any better at the task.
What I still don’t understand, though, is why people in the big US media are so asleep on this story?

Jim Baker’s dance of the seven veils

There’s been some public buzz generated recently by this “Iraq Study Group”, convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by Bush I’s longtime consigliere and fixer James Baker and veteran Democratic wiseman Lee Hamilton.
Steve Weisman has a pretty good article on the ISG in today’s NYT. The key quote in the deadwood version I just read has for some reason been omitted from the web version. It is this:

    The one hallmark of Mr. Baker’s efforts, associates said, is that he would not undertake a project destined to sit on a shelf and be ignored. His modus operandi is to use the Iraq Study Group not so much to “study” the problem as to work out a solution behind the scenes that is acceptable to a broad spectrum of people, most of all the president.

My own best source in the ISG’s entourage agrees with this characterization of its role.
From this point of view, Hamilton’s function as co-chair is more or less– for now– one of window dressing. But of course if the Dems win control of one or both houses of Congress come November 7 then winning bipartisan support for “the Baker plan” will become much, much more important. So any negotiations that go on among the ISG’s members over the content of its final report will have to wait till after the post-election balance of political power is known; and thus, delaying its report till December or January, which has all along been the plan, makes a lot of US-political sense. (Regardless of whether this will prolong or exacerbate the agony of the Iraqis. But colonial/imperial self-referentialism was ever thus…)
Meanwhile, the group’s members are not really “studying” anything at all, but mainly spinning their wheels… But still, even while it’s not doing much of anything right now, the ISG still has– from the President point of view– an important role to play: This is is simply to be there, in a Chance Gardener-ish kind of way, so that when asked searching questions about the unraveling debacle in Iraq, the President can say “I have Mr. Baker and others of the nation’s finest minds working on this problem.”
Meanwhile, though, Baker is also– as it happens– flacking his latest book, “amusingly” titled Work Hard, Study Hard, and Keep out of Politics! No shrinking violet he. He was on the Jon Stewart show the other night– and I have to say he turned in an excellent performance to that tough, Generation Y-ish new York audience. So as he goes around promoting his book he’s been getting asked lots of questions about the ISG, and he’s been throwing out just enough hints to make it seem as though the group’s eventual report might be recommending some “bold” changes.
As Weisman writes:

    Mr. Baker has declared that neither Mr. Bush’s “stay the course” message nor what the White House calls the “cut and run” approach of critics offers a way out.
    “There are other options other than just those two,” Mr. Baker said recently on National Public Radio while promoting his new book… His group’s proposals, Mr. Baker added, will probably not please the administration or its foes.

What a consummate Washington player the guy is.
—-
By the way, over at the Guardian I see that Julian Borger has also been writing about the ISG (hat-tip to Frank.) Borger also lays out what he describes as “eight options [for Iraq] that Washngton and London are discussing.” My own quick first reaction there is that not all of the options are mutually incompatible. Indeed, No.5 “Iraqi Strongman” (a possible plan to replace PM Maliki with a strongman like former thug Ayad Allawi) actually has no other substantive content of its own and requires one of the other “options” to give it substance. Interesting that that proposal should have been lifted onto the list at all though, really. Part of the Bushites’ on-again-off-again psywar against Maliki, I assume?
But more fundamentally than that, Borger makes no mention of what I see as an absolutely essential antecedent discussion between the two “allies”– the one on the broader strategic issue of how to manage the intense strategic challenges now arising within both Afghanistan and Iraq… Such as I attempted a first assay of here, yesterday.

Iraq: school attendance plummets

This, from Save the Children via IRIN:

    Thousands of students have been forced to stay at home due to escalating violence across the country. Attendance rates for the new school year, which started on 20 September, are a record low, according to the Ministry of Education.
    Recently released statistics from the Ministry indicate that only 30 percent of Iraq’s 3.5 million students are currently attending classes. This compares to approximately 75 percent of students attending classes the previous year, according to UK-based NGO Save the Children.
    “Last year I had nearly 80 students in my class. Today, there are less than 25. Families are keeping their children safe at home, waiting to see how violence will spread, particularly after many schools were targeted countrywide,” said Hiba Addel Lattef, a teacher and coordinator at Mansour Primary School in the capital, Baghdad.
    “Education [levels are] deteriorating as a result of violence,” Lattef added.
    …According to Faleh Hassan al-Quraishy, an official in the Ministry of Education, threats from insurgents have forced the government to close around 420 of the country’s 16,500 public schools. He added that 310 teachers had been killed and 160 injured over the past year….

Have you checked the ReliefWeb Iraq link on the JWN sidebar recently? This item here is just one of many very sobering reports there.

White House nixing Iraqi partition

The pressure has been growing on Pres. Bush to “do something” to reassure Americans– and in particular, the many millions of Republican voters who are currently disaffected, dubious, and distinctly unmotivated to vote GOP on November 7– that he “has a plan” to deal with the still-unraveling debacle in Iraq.
The Prez looks like a deer caught between two headlights: there’s the side of him that wants to repeat the well-worn mantra of “Stay the course” and the side of him that now wants to say “Okay, folks, I’m on top of this; I know how to be flexible and figure out new tactics to deal with evolving situations…”
You can practically see the two memes battling within him. The President “at war” (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.
Today he did three things. As Reuters tells us here, he,

    said on Friday he will resist election-year pressure for a major shift in strategy in Iraq, despite growing doubts among Americans and anxiety over the war among Republican lawmakers.
    “Our goal in Iraq is clear and it’s unchanging,” Bush told Republican loyalists, denouncing Democrats who want a course correction as supporting a “doubt and defeat” approach.

He met (for a full half hour!) with Centcom head Gen. John Abizaid, the man responsible for US military operations in the portion of the world that includes both Iraq and Afghahistan. A follow-up meeting is planned for tomorrow, at which,

    Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top White House officials will meet U.S. military officials in Iraq for a long-scheduled videoconference. Abizaid will be a key presenter at that meeting, [White House spokeswoman Dana] Perino said..

Note the stress that Ms. Perino felt she needed to place on the fact that this is a “long-scheduled” meeting. What, you think a “crisis-response” meeting might actually be more appropriate at the end of a week that has been this much disastrous for the US military in Baghdad? No, no! It’ll just be “business as usual” there in the Bush White House…
(I am not reassured. And I doubt if many Republican congressional candidates are either… )
Okay, that’s two things the Prez did today in response to the Iraq crisis. The third was to have press spokeman Tony Snow (aka “the President’s attempt at having a brain”) go out and try to explain the President’s Iraq policy to the public. Actually, everyone ought to go and read that White House spinscript there. Especially portions like this sophomoric piece of strategy-babble:

    The President understands the difficulty in a time of war. And he also understands that what you do is you adjust tactically. I was talking today with General Caldwell, and the way he describes it, the military term of art is you “work the plan.” And if things are not achieving the objectives as you wish, you adjust and you work the plan. And he says they’re continuing to work the plan in Baghdad and elsewhere. Those are the kinds of tactical adjustments…

But the most interesting part of the transcript is what comes right after that:

    What the President has made pretty clear is that there are a handful of things that he has ruled out. He is eager to hear about other ideas; but leaving is not going to work, and partition is simply off the table.

In-ter-est-ing… Now I can see why in the run-up to an election Bush would want to slam the idea of “leaving” Iraq. Especially after he’s just criticized the Democrats for being the party of “cut and run”– or “doubt and defeat”, or even worse, as Snow put it there, the party of “walk and talk”, that is, a party that not only leaves Iraq but wants to talk to the Iranians while doing so (!) (Not that many Dems are, actually, advocating that right now. It’s mainly Republican consigliere James Baker who has been raising that as an idea so far. And honestly, good for him.)
But why is Bush/Snow so eager to slam the idea of partition?
I can see no possible party-political benefit in being as definitive about this as Snow (and the president) have been… So maybe they are really serious about it?
More from Snow’s press conference on this:

    Q On the partition question, you said yesterday it was a non-starter; today you said the President doesn’t want to think about it. You have prominent Republicans like Senator Hutchison and Senator Santorum saying that it should be looked at. Why does the administration —
    MR. SNOW: It has been looked at. It has been looked at.
    Q Why is it not — why is it a non-starter?
    MR. SNOW: It’s a non-starter because you don’t want to recreate the Balkans. What you have is — within Iraq there is a sense of national identity, and it was expressed at considerable risk by 12 million Iraqis last year. They made it clear that they consider themselves part of a nation. And the idea of breaking them into pieces raises the prospect in the south that you’re going to have pressure from Iran on the largely Shia south; you’re going to have difficulties in the north with the Kurds, with the Turks and the Syrians, who are worried about a greater Kurdistan; and then if you have in the middle a Sunni population that has been cut out of the prosperity by oil to the north and south, you have a recipe for a tinderbox…

I do think he’s trying to get a serious message out there– in particular, to the Iraqi Kurds, who have been working very hard, since 1991, not only to partition Iraq but also to secure Washington’s support for that policy. And the Kurds have plenty of (guilt-ridden) allies within the US political system for that.
So why does Bush seem to be so adamantly opposed to partition at this point?
I think it may be part of the slow process by which he is– oh so gradually!– coming to terms with reality in Iraq.
Look at it this way. Partition of nations has been either part of US policy or a quite acceptable fall-back option in a number of conflicts the US has gotten involved in since WW2. From SKorea to Germany to Vietnam, the US has been quite happy to go along with the partitioning of nations– even in cases where the “will of the people” was quite clearly in favor of national unity.
But in all those earlier cases, the “pro-US” fragment of the nation that was thus partitioned was directly connected to the US’s existing global military supply lines. A landlocked Kurdistan, by contrast, would be more like a landlocked West Berlin during the various Berlin crises from 1948 on than it would be like, say, West Germany or South Korea. A partitioned, quasi-“independent” Kurdistan would have no natural allies among its neighbors, and indeed, mught have to be “sustained” by the US in the midst of a completely engulfing sea of anti-Kurd hostility. Resupplying it would be a logistical challenge that would dwarf the Berlin Airlift… And for what? At least West Berlin played an important role in the US’s big struggle of that era, against the Soviet Union. But what strategic value would a US-dependent Kurdistan have?
If Kurdistan was in southern Iraq, next to the Gulf and next to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Bush and Snow might be speaking very differently about the prospect of partition in Iraq… (But that spot is already taken– by a social/political grouping that is very, very different from the Kurds.)
So I think what we’re seeing now, as the Bushites start to face up to the idea of some truly momentous decisions having to be made regarding Iraq, is the White House telling the Kurds as plainly as it can that yes, once again, as in 1975 and as in 1991, Washington is going to be letting them down. (In 1975, it was Kissinger who did it, too.)
The Iraqi Kurdish leaders are not particularly impressive as exemplars of democratic practice (to say the least!) But they are a wily bunch of guys who’ve survived in their part of the world for many decades now. At this point, they may well revert to some of their earlier alliances there– with Syria, with Iran– or who knows, even perhaps with some of the ethnic-Arab forces in Iraq.
As I said, interesting days.

Choice time: Iraq or Afghanistan?

This was basically the message that Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt was posing when he spoke to The Daily Mail last week; and he was answering it in favor of Afghanistan, arguing basically that the western nations “should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon.”
His argumentation was based mainly on operational considerations: Namely the fact that, as he assessed it, the western presence in Iraq “exacerbates the security problems,” whereas

    “There is a clear distinction between our status and position in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which is why I have much more optimism that we can get it right in Afghanistan.”

Dannatt did use a little bit of legal/political argumentation– namely, when he drew a distinction between, as he put it, the western forces having “kicked the door in” in Iraq, and their being in Afghanistan “at the invitation” of Karzai’s government. (He glossed over the door-kicking that did, in fact, occur in Afghanistan in October-November 2001, and the fact that Pres. Karzai, just as much as Pres. Talabani and PM Maliki, was installed under the auspices of the US-led occupation force. No matter.)
But the main thing is that, at an operational level– in terms of the prospects for mission success– Dannatt was arguing for concentrating the efforts of the British military and perhaps also that of the US military in Afghanistan rather than in Iraq.
And once Dannatt had expressed his view in public about the urgency of this situation, Tony Blair was forced to say he “agreed with every word.” (Game, set, and match to Dannatt, I would say.)
Is this discussion also being held in Washington? I very much hope so. I strongly suspect it is already being intensively held at the headquarters of Centcom there in Qatar… But it certainly needs to be held in Washington, too.
What are the strategic implications of this choice that now presents itself with increasing urgency– between Iraq and Afghanistan?
Of course, all of us could readily argue– as some of us did at the time– that this was a choice that should have been confronted and thought through carefully back in early 2002, the time at which Rumsfeld and the President started their planning in earnest for the invasion of Iraq, and for the concomitant diversion of much-needed resources and attention away from the post-invasion stabilization mission in Afghanistan.
But no, they did not confront that issue and that fateful choice back then. So now, four years, many scores of thousands of lost lives, millions of blighted lives, and $335 billion of war spending later, the US leaders, US citizenry, and the world will have to face it very soon now, and on terms very different from those that existed back in 2002.
Iraq vs. Afghanistan. For US strategic planners, this is quite a tough choice.
Is it one that this US government will try to make alone? Is it one that, at this point, any US government can make alone? I strongly suspect not.
I clearly need to write a whole bunch more about this issue in the days ahead. But my first thoughts are these:

    (1) The tasks the US faces in both countries are different. In Iraq, the task can only at this stage be described as being to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the US position. After the collapse of Operation “Forward Together” or whatever this latest debacle was called, catastrophe-avoidance seems to be the best that Washington can hope for. How might it be achieved? At this point, only through entering into speedy discussions with all of Iraq’s neighbors, over a plan for reordering the main strategic features of that immediate region in a way that will allow a speedy and orderly drawdown of the US troop presence inside Iraq…
    In Afghanistan, by contrast, though the strategic position of the NATO forces is pretty stretched and challenged, still there is some hope that, with some reconfiguring of the international troop presence and considerably increased investment of international attention and resources, the country’s situation might yet be stabilized…
    (2) The strategic importance of each country within the world system is distinct. In the late 19th century, Afghanistan and the other “Stans” to the east of it were at the epicenter of the “Great Game” that was played out between the three power centers of British India, Russia, and China. Today, the British no longer rule India, and there have been many other changes in the political/strategic geography of the region. But it is clear that the country remains a locus of intense concern to numerous different powers, including Russia, Iran, Pakistan, India, China, and the other Stans… It is harder to see what NATO’s actual direct interest in Afghanistan is. It strikes me, NATO’s interest (and that of the US) is largely derivative, being focused on the “draining the swamp” aspects of the campaign against border-straddling terrorist groups. That makes NATO’s presence there somewhat “altruistic” rather than being motivated only by crass national self-interest. Altruism is not a bad thing. But surely it would be better to do it much more through economic and political stabilization measures that worked rather than through the present reliance on military measures, which seem not to?
    The strategic importance of Iraq, for many people in the US, can be summed up in three concepts: Oil, Countering Iran, and Protecting Israel. As we now know, when the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq back in 2002-2003, Iraq did not, in fact, form any threat to Israel, at any level, and it still does not today. That leaves Oil, and Iran as issues that we need to talk about. Regarding oil, the US occupation regime in Iraq has done a lousy job of shepherding the reconstruction of the Iraqi oil industry. Indeed, it has left much of Iraq’s oil sector in tatters. The oil sector, Iraq’s people, and the world will be much better off once public security, public order, and orderly government can return to Iraq, and that is quite evidently– based on 42 months of experience now– not going to happen so long as the US occupation continues. Regarding Iran, the two main tasks are, it seems to me, to avoid a catastrophic US-Iran confrontation, and to find a way to restore order and predictability to US-Iranian relations. Discussions over Iraq can be an appropriate lead-in to this.
    (3) The world-political challenge of achieving this retrenchment of the US global empire. We need to be quite clear: the strategic dead-end the US forces face in Iraq today is the result of significant and quite ill-considered imperial over-reach by the Bush administration. So Washington cannot at this point simply make one quick decision: “Okay, we’ll stick with Afghanistan; let’s forget Iraq” (or, more likely in my view, the other way around), implement this, and then get back to business as usual… There are a whole host of reasons why that would be impossible. Anyway, just as with the retrenchment (shedding) of the colonial empires by Britain, France, and other European powers that occurred in the post-WW2 era, so with the retrenchment of the US military empire today, the whole of the political system within this globalized world of ours will have to adapt itself to this shift…

But let’s all think where this might lead. Let’s think of being able to build a world that is more truly based than the present order on the principles of human equality and care for the flourishing of all of God’s children. And let’s place a huge focus on making the transition to this new situation orderly and peaceful. In the timeless words of A.J. Muste: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”
That has never been demonstrated more clearly than through the tragic fate of the Bush administration’s attempts to build a “stable and just” world order through the use of military violence.