Author: Helena

The Bush administration’s rush toward repositioning itself as pursuing a policy in Iraq that is both “responsible” and one that involves a certain amount of troop withrawal has been amazingly speedy.
I suspect the main outlines of this move were most likely decided when Amb. Zal Khalilzad was in Washington around three weeks ago. But over the past few days there has been a torrent of reports from various US sources– in the Pentagon and in Iraq– about the nature of the newly emerging policy. Like this one, in today’s Newsweek, or this one, in today’s Time magazine.
The Newsweek piece describes the new plan in these terms:

The new approach is the result of long negotiations between Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and Gen. George Casey, commander of the Multinational Forces. Their overall strategy: on the military side, “clear, hold and build” while training up Iraqi forces; on the political side, wean Sunni leaders from their support of the insurgency, buying them off with incentives tribe by tribe and village by village; and on the U.S. domestic front, appease rising outcries for withdrawal by reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq to under 100,000 troops—hopefully by midterm Election Day 2006.
… Success or failure in Iraq … could well turn into a race between U.S. public opinion, which is increasingly impatient to see the bloody adventure over with, and a grand strategy that’s just getting ponderously off the ground. Is the political will going to be there to see the strategy through, especially when it is likely to cost many more U.S. casualties than the 2,108 dead and 15,804 wounded so far?

Good question.
Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, today’s “Week in review” section there carried this interesting piece by James Glanz, in which he looks at the difficult art, for imperial powers, of trying to effect a withdrawal-under-pressure as “gracefully” as possible– and crucially, while losing as little general political credibility as possible on the global scene.
He describes the challenge as being to look for “a dignified way out of a messy and often unpopular foreign conflict.” He then examines a number of possible historical precedents. Among them,

the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.
Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States in a more dignified position, including the continuing American presence in South Korea and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. But even those stand in stark contrast to the happier legacy of total victory during World War II.

Bosnia, as a relative success story? I am certainly not sure about that… Just last week we had the tenth anniversary of the Dayton “peace” accords– an occasion that served to underline just how fragile and unsatisfactory the Dayton agreement has proved to be. (See, for example, here and here.)
Still, Glanz describes the current attitude of much of the US political elite with respect to Iraq fairly well when he writes: “The highly qualified optimism of these experts about what may still happen in Iraq – let’s call it something just this side of hopelessness – has been born of many factors, including greatly reduced expectations of what might constitute not-defeat there.” I love that use of the term “not-defeat”, since everyone is rapidly coming to the conclusion that the word “victory” will not be at all applicable.
Glanz is hilariously funny when he writes in an apparently dead-pan way about a history professor called William Stueck who seems to think that the “Iraqification” strategy might work if given enough time…

Korea reveals how easy it is to dismiss the effectiveness of local security forces prematurely, Mr. Stueck said. In 1951, Gen. Matthew Ridgeway felt deep frustration when Chinese offensives broke through parts of the line defended by poorly led South Korean troops.
But by the summer of 1952, with intensive training, the South Koreans were fighting more effectively, Mr. Stueck said. “Now, they needed backup” by Americans, he said. By 1972, he said, South Korean troops were responsible for 70 percent of the front line.

Aha! So all the US needs in order to “win” with Iraqification at this point would be a further 21 years in which to pursue it?
One of the historical examples that Glanz uses that has a clearly “de-colonializing” story-line is that of the French retreat from Algeria. He quotes another historian, Matthew Connelly, as saying that, “Over the long run, history treated de Gaulle kindly for reversing course and agreeing to withdraw… De Gaulle loses the war but he wins in the realm of history: he gave Algeria its independence… How you frame defeat, that can sometimes give you a victory.”
H’mm. I’m not so sure about that. It may have made De Gaulle look masterful, statesmanlike, and “modern”. But the loss of Algeria was nonethless part of a worldwide retraction of French imperial power. Britain’s worldwide empire was also very busy indeed retreating in those days. Both those formerly sizeable global powers were losing global power at a rapid clip between 1950 and 1970, and it is important to remember that.
Now, the same kind of erosion of global power is happening, to some degree, to the United States’ globe-girdling military behemoth. And all of us who seek a world that is not dominated by military force and that is not structured to provide privilege to the US citizenry over and above everyone else in the world should be very clear about that fact, and should welcome it.
In fact, as I wrote here a couple of days ago (and have written on JWN before that, too), even a complete withdrawal of the US military from Iraq will not be enough to build the basis for the kind of just, nonviolent, and egalitarian global system that the 96 percent of the world’s people who are not US citizens so desperately need. And especially not if the (nuclear-armed) US military continues to dominate the entire Gulf region from its fleets inthe Gulf and all their supporting Gulf-side bases.
There was one bit of significant and generally welcome news in the Newsweek story, I should add. This came towards the end of this page of the story:

Khalilzad revealed to NEWSWEEK that he has received explicit permission from Bush to begin a diplomatic dialogue with Iran… “I’ve been authorized by the president to engage the Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly,” says Khalilzad. “There will be meetings, and that’s also a departure and an adjustment.”

Okay, so we may all have grave reservations and worries about the role that Iran is playing inside Iraq today. But still, as Winston Churchill so memorably said, “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. (It sounds better in English-English than it does in US “English”, by the way.) If the US is going to be talking to Iran about its concerns regarding Iraq, that is far, far better than the situation two years ago when it was threatening to invade it.

Next stop, a resumption of talks with Syria, I hope?
But beyond all this, I think it’s time for people in the peace movement here in the US– while we continue working on the need for a rapid and total US withdfrawal from Iraq– to start also thinking more broadly about the kind of relationship we want our country to have with the rest of the world, say ten or 20 years from now.
What we most certainly don‘t want to see at that point is a country that– having “recovered” from its little setback back there in Iraq in 2006 or so– is willing and able to launch some similar kind of a catastrophe on another country someplace else.
We have to recognize that our country has some very dangerous forces in it… and we need to find ways to prevent them from acting out their sick fantasies on the world stage (and also, here inside the US) ever again.
How can we do that?
One first strategy must be to give them serious punishment at the polls. In 2006, and again in 2008, 2010, 2012, and so on.
Another must be to relentlessly continue the investigations into just how, through outright manipulatipon and lies, they were able to visit their sick fantasies on so many member of Congress back in 2002.
Another must be to pass strong legislation that will bind the executive branch to a full respect of the global Convention Against Torture– and while we’re about it, also the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and especially Article 6 of the NPT…
So, there’s a long road ahead– both on Iraq, and beyond Iraq. We can still only start to glimpse the full dimensions of that road. But still, though I know things are still really horrendous for the people of Iraq, and probably continue to be so for some time– still, at least now we can start to see that there might be a better world for everyone somewhere ahead… Because finally, the US empire is being forced into a significant and long overdue retreat.

The noted Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld has now written in the US Jewish newspaper Forward that:

The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon — and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.

Van Creveld– whose work I have followed, and admired (with some caveats) for more than 20 years now– points out that in Vietnam, at least the retreating US forces had the option of leaving most of their heavy gear behind, with the nominally indepedent Army of the Republic of (south) Vietnam, the ARVN. It then took a couple of further years before that equipment fell into the hands of the North Vietnamese, with the definitive collapse of the ARVN in 1975.
He notes that today, the situation is different. Firstly, there is no opposing government with which the modalities of this withdrawal can be negotiated. In addition, he notes that that the weapons now being used by the US inside Iraq:

are so few and so expensive that even the world’s largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.
Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.

As in the nine-point exit plan that I spelled out on July 7, Van Creveld wrote that the retreating US forces will have to be withdrawn through the south of Iraq:

Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge — if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.

Van Creveld does write, however, that a “complete” withdrawal “is not an option”:

A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as “the Great Satan.” Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war — a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs’ clutches.
A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets’ nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah’s name.
The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.

But though he writes that a complete withdrawal “is not an option”, from the wording he uses, it’s not clear whether he would foresees that some of the residual force he’s writing about would be stationed inside Iraq, or not. Most likely, not, since he writes specifically about a “withdrawal from Iraq”, not a retrechment/redeployment of forces inside the country. The residual force he has in mind would therefore, it seems, most likely be stationed just “over the horizon” from Iraq– with components most likely dispersed among Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the in-Gulf US Navy presence.
In my book, a sizeable residual force would still be a force for quite unwarranted US intervention in the region. We should aim for its dismantling, too– as part of the much broader re-ordering of US relations with the rest of the world that will be needed in order to build a world marked by real human equality.
Nevertheless, Van Creveld’s plan seems to go significantly further than, for example, Juan Cole’s plan of leaving a significant US residual force inside Iraq. It is great to have this clear-eyed strategic realist and very experienced military historian writing that what I have been advocating for a while now has indeed become a necessity.
Van Creveld concludes, quite pointedly:

Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from — and more competent than — the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

Well said!
Van Creveld, I should note, is no raving lefty anti-American. He’s a very sober historian whose tag-line there at the the Forward tells us that, “He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army’s required reading list for officers.
And I forgot to tell you the title of his article there. It is this: Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War.

A lot has been happening in the world– including in Iraq– in the past
ten days.  I’m sorry it’s been so long since I last posted.  But
at least now I can  try to give a broad overview, based on what I’ve
been reading and on conversations I had in DC, of how I see things developing.
 Here are the headlines:

Iraq moves front and center of US politics

The internal debate over Iraq policy, inside the US political system, is
now more audible and prominent than it has been at any time since August-October
2002.  Actually, probably since long before then, too, given the paucity
of the debate at that time.  (But d’you remember Sen. Robert Byrd’s great
oratory?)

But once Congress had passed the war-enabling resolution, back in that traumatic
October of 2002 when nearly all the Dems were scared sh**-less by the prospect
of being tarred as “lily-livered pacifists” in the upcoming mid-terms, public
debate on the policy at the level of the national party leaderships became
almost completely silenced.  And especially, of course, once the invasion
had been started.

Since then, “Iraq”, and the tremendous human and financial losses it has
inflicted, has been the silent elephant in the room of  US national political
discourse.  The Dems couldn’t find a voice, or a policy they could visibly
unite around and proclaim as their own.

Well, they still haven’t.  But the rising casualty toll, the revelations
of continuing US war crimes, the failure to achieve anything credible on the
ground in Iraq, the budget crisis in this country to which the Iraq war has
so visibly contributed– all those factors, plus (heh-heh!) the salutary setback
the GOP suffered at the state-level polls earlier this month mean that the
once-silent elephant has started to trumpet its presence very loudly.

Okay, I recognize that in the US political context, talking about an elephant
starting to trumpet loudly could also be interpreted as referring to the Republican
Party, since the elephant is their symbol…. And in one way, that’s appropriate,
since the debate over Iraq policy that’s been going on inside the
Republican party has been at least as significant as the one between it and
the Dems.

And this has led to the really delicious signs of GOP disarray over how
to respond to Congressman Murtha.  Sure, the House Republicans tried
to stomp all over him.  (And the House Democratic leadership didn’t
do very well in defending him, either.)  But while Bush himself then
felt forced to intone talking-points about Murtha being a great patriot etc.,
Cheney was still adopting a very accusatory and weaselly public stance.

Bush administration forced to give some appearance of troop withdrawals

Behind the childish rhetoric of “staying the course”, the administration
has clearly made a decision that it needs to start presenting at least the
appearance of some movement toward drawdown of the troop presence in Iraq.
 I imagine their main motivators for this are (a) a long-overdue (and
still small) amount of budgetary and military-planning “realism”, and (b)
pressure from within the Republican party– especially after the most recent
elections here– to the effect that there needs to be a significant decrease
in the troop deployment before November 2006 if the party is to avoid getting
creamed in the mid-term elections…

Continue reading “Iraqi round-up”

Riverbend had a great post yesterday about White Phosphorus, and she has another great one today about the torture houses.
Excellent reading, both. Thanks to Janinsanfran for the heads-up.

This, from Gilbert Achcar:
AN EXCHANGE BETWEEN SUNNI MUSLIMS AND A SCIRI LEADER
On the occasion of the Iraqi conference to be held in Cairo under the auspices of the League of Arab states, IslamOnline—a website related to the pan-Islamic (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood—invited Dr. Ali al-Adad, a prominent member of the Central Council of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), to a live exchange with its readers in one of the online discussions that the website organizes regularly on very diverse issues. The exchange took place on November 17, and is posted in Arabic on IslamOnline.net.
It is an interesting document since it is rare to find the record of such a frank and direct exchange. It gives a view (rare in the Western media) of the discourse addressed by the SCIRI, the most prominent Iraqi Shiite organization closely linked to Iran, to Muslim audiences, including its own Iraqi constituency. It is, of course, quite different from the discourse held by those SCIRI members who are appointed to the task of dealing with the US, like Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi who visited Washington recently.
I have excerpted and translated what follows.
Gilbert Achcar
….
Q: It is said that the [Cairo] conference is backed by the US in order to control the situation in Iraq and overcome the valiant Iraqi resistance in the name of opposing terrorism. How do you assess this view? Is the national entente [between Iraqis] going to allow the resistance to act against the occupiers only, or will it contribute to make the situation in Iraq comfortable for the Americans and exclude the prospect of a timetable for the withdrawal [of occupation troops]?
A: It is true that the Americans need the Arab governments to take a positive stand toward the situation in Iraq, but the Iraqis and the Iraqi government and patriotic Iraqi forces need to be integrated in the Arab League and in the Arab nation and Arab people so that they join the Iraqi people and support it in building Iraqi unity.
There is no disagreement on the stance toward American soldiers. All Iraqi forces, Shiite, Sunni and Kurds, want a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops. There is no disagreement on this issue, but there are major reservations on the military operations of the so-called armed resistance since they are not only targeting the Americans, but have undertaken operations of mass murder and ugly crimes against women and children under criminal sectarian slogans, while declaring the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people to be miscreants [takfeer].
This is why we cannot accept this insane criminal resistance to participate in the talks. We want these criminal forces to be definitively isolated by the unity of Arabs, Shiites and Sunnis, and Kurds, and all other minorities, in building a democratic Iraq that refuses sectarianism and rejects the attribution of posts on a sectarian basis instead of attributing them on a positive basis of competence for the building of a unified Iraq for all.
…
Q: Mr. Ali al-Adad, do you have a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq? What is your position on the Iraqi resistance? Do you put it in the category of terrorism?
A: The political forces that will participate in the forthcoming [December 15 parliamentary] election, and in particular the [United Iraqi] Alliance’s slate that includes 17 movements and parties, the majority of whom are Shiites, agreed that the first demand on their political program is getting foreign troops out of Iraq, by setting a timetable for the evacuation of these troops. The second demand on their political program is the rapid and strong building of interior security forces so that they assume the defense of the country and take hold of all the territory including the borders, so that there remains no justification for the presence of foreign troops.
[The reply to the second part of the above question reiterates what was said already.]
…
Q: As-Salam aleikum, the head of the previous regime was a “Sunni,” and the Sunnis, and I am one of them, used to like the Shiites, and I have never felt that there was a discrimination against them or acceptance of an injustice that hurts them whether from the head of the regime or from his ministers.
Today the head of the ruling regime is very much Shiite, a Jaafari [the last name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, is also the name of the majority doctrine of Shiism]. Now that a little part has been uncovered of the hidden savage repressive practices denounced for long by the Sunni representatives and freely practiced by the Ministry of Interior, which is headed by a member of your [Supreme] Council, and by the apparatuses of the [SCIRI’s] Badr militia against the Sunnis:
1-Do you believe that an entente is possible without a clear position and sanction on this?
2-Will the actions undertaken by the resistance against the apparatuses and members of the Ministry [of Interior] continue to be characterized as terrorist—as all Iraqi Shiites like to call them today, and they even call the resistance against the occupation terrorism—especially that the little uncovered of what is hidden has been uncovered by your American ally itself? Please reply without beating around the bush.

Continue reading “SCIRI Central Cttee man talks with Muslim Brothers”

Some more sordid details from Salam/Pax about the Baghdad charnel/torture houses.
Including stuff about chain saws, razors, etc. Also this:

It is said that the investigations will reveal that there are about 10 or 12 such centres in and around Baghdad. One of them in al-Ameryiah district was being used as a sort of a site for graves for those who die in detention.

His conclusion– an astute reference to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses— is particularly worth reading.