Author: Helena

Iraqi, Iranian dimensions of the Sukkariyeh raid

Well, as was quite predictable Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has now trotted out new lines condemning Sunday’s raid in which US ground forces took off from (presumably) Iraqi territory on their heliborne extra-judicial execution mission in Sukkariyeh, in neighboring Syria.
The BBC tells us (link above) that after an Iraqi cabinet meeting today,

    government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh explicitly criticised the US over the reported helicopter strike.
    “The Iraqi government rejects the US helicopter strike on Syrian territory, considering that Iraq’s constitution does not allow its land to be a base for launching attacks on neighbouring countries,” he said.
    “We call upon American forces not to repeat such activities and Baghdad has launched an investigation into the strike.”

Yesterday, after Dabbagh was quoted as expressing some support for the extra-judicial execution raid, I noted that, “it is sometimes a little unclear who Dabbagh works for. In the past he has sometimes seemed to be a loyal mouth-piece for his Iraqi political bosses, and sometimes to be a bit of a cat’s-paw for the Americans.” Today, his Iraqi government masters have evidently jerked his chain.
Of more consequence than Dabbagh’s vacillations, however, is the fact that at that same cabinet meeting Iraq’s ministers were discussing the latest draft of the SOFA agreement sent along by the US: In the negotiation over this agreement the Iraqi side is still strongly insisting that any US forces on their territory should not be used to launch any operations against other countries that are not explicitly authorized by Baghdad.
The BBC report of the cabinet meeting said,

    Iraq’s cabinet authorised PM Nouri al-Maliki to put forward proposed changes to a security pact with the US.
    A government spokesman said the suggested amendments, agreed at a cabinet meeting, addressed both the wording and the content of the Status of Forces Agreement.
    … The US and Iraqi governments had previously said the pact, which would authorise the presence of US troops in Iraq until 2011, was final and could not be amended – only accepted or rejected by the Iraqi parliament.

Actually, I’m not sure the Iraqi government had previously said that. And evidently, if they– or perhaps the ever-dodgy Dabbagh claiming to speak in their name– did so, then now they have changed their mind.
Take that, Washington.
Also of note: Syria is no longer the international pariah it was earlier on this decade. Foreign Minister Walid Moallem has been in London, which wouldn’t have happened earlier on in the decade. Also, Syria has international allies who are weightier and more inclined to protect its interests than they were back then. (Russia is just one of these.)
Meanwhile, the Sukkariyeh raid has also attracted some notice in Iran, where some analysts have wondered whether the new US doctrine of “alleged hot pursuit” from inside Iraq could be applied across their border with Iraq, as easily as across Syria’s. Asia Times’s Kaveh Afrasiabi, writing from Tehran today, quotes an unnamed “political scientist” there as saying,

    “The chances are that the US incursion into Syria is a dress rehearsal for action against Iran and the [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards [Corps], just as they often portray Israel’s aerial attack on Syrian territory last year as a prelude for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.” … [He/she added] that since the US had already branded Iran’s Guards as terrorists, it had the necessary rationale to do so.

Afrasiabi also writes,

    In light of the incursion on Sunday by US forces inside Syrian territory, ostensibly to pursue al-Qaeda terrorists, there is suddenly concern on the part of many analysts in Tehran that the security agreement between Baghdad and Washington is not simply an internal matter for Iraqis to decide, but rather a regional issue that calls for direct input by Iraq’s neighbors.

I would say, strictly speaking, that there must have always been a degree of such concern; but maybe the recent raid increased it. Anyway, the Sukkariyeh raid is clearly very relevant to those clauses of the draft Iraqi-US SOFA that deal with who exercises effective authority over the use of any US troops that remain in Iraq: Washington or Baghdad?
Afrasiabi’s piece is interesting and apparently well reported.
He writes:

    “Iraq’s neighbors have been asked by the international community to participate in Iraq’s reconstruction and therefore by definition they should also be involved in security matters as well,” another analyst at a Tehran think-tank told the author.
    This is not altogether an unreasonable request. Iran and the US have participated in three rounds of dialogue on Iraq’s security, and that, according to Tehran analysts, is as good a reminder as any that Washington’s decision to ignore Iran’s viewpoints on the security agreement is a bad error.
    Simultaneously, there is a feeling that not all is lost and that the architects of this agreement have indeed taken into consideration some of Iran’s vocal objections, such as the initial agreement’s provisions for extraterritoriality whereby US personnel in Iraq would be immune from the Iraqi laws. That aspect has been modified, and the agreement also sets a time table for the withdrawal of US forces by no later than December 31, 2011, again something favored by Iran.

The bottom line I take from that is that there is a politically significant trend in Iran that is not wholly opposed to some US troops remaining in Iraq for a while longer— at least, so long as the actual mission and use of those troops is subject to some pretty severe constraints.
Iranian contentment with the continued deployment of some (or perhaps even a substantial number) of US troops inside Iraq– provided they are not a precursor force for a US attack on Iran– makes some strategic sense. All the US forces deployed throughout Iraq, at the end of very long and vulnerable international supply lines, act as, in effect, Iran’s first line of deterrence against any serious attack on its territory by either the US or Israel. They are sitting ducks for Iranian counter-attacks that, in the event of a US or US-enabled attack on Iran would be quite justified under international law.

Differential effects of the financial crisis

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the present crisis of the western world’s “casino capitalism” will have much less of a total impact on China, India, and other big economies that have not yet taken the (as we now see) extremely risky step of deregulating their financial systems and thereby allowing/encouraging the growth of highly leveraged and often quite non-transparent derivatives markets.
On Friday, the NYT had a fascinating graphic that seemed to illustrate this point excellently. (Sorry I can’t embed it right now. I’ve forgotten how to do the resizing that would be needed.) It’s a scatter-chart produced by the London-based investment bankers Dresdner Kleinwort, plotting various “emerging market” countries according to DK’s estimation of their “financial vulnerability”, along the x-axis, and their “macroeconomic vulnerability”, along the y-axis.
Anyway, even a cursory glance at the graphic shows that DK’s analysts judge that Brazil, China, India, and Russia all have low “macroeconomic vulnerability” to the crisis. Those judged to have a lot are Mexico, Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia (at the very top of the chart), Latvia, and Iceland.
Regarding financial vulnerability, Russia and India have notably more than China or Brazil.
I wanted to find out more about the methodology the DK analysts used in composing this chart– and I hoped they also had one that gauged the MV and the FV of the world’s big developed markets, too.
Actually, DK itself has fallen prey to the financial vulnerability of both Germany and the UK, where it has significant operations. Back in early September it got taken over by Germany’s largest bank, Commerzbank, which immediately fired DK’s chief exec and announced that 1,000 more of its 2,000 London-based employees would soon also be facing the chop.
I noodled around DK’s website a bit more, looking for some more open-source research products. I found none at all. The press page still contained links to many slightly outdated, very self-congratulatory plaudits about how deeply DK had been involved in various sectors of the derivatives markets. The press page is headed by a fashionably cropped image of a tulip.
Tulip, huh? Prescient or what?
And regarding another item in the “rise of China” file, I see that in 2012 China is set to overtake the US in the number of patents filed annually.

Syria raid, additional notes

I see that Pat Lang is speculating that the raid might have been some kind of rogue operation on the part of the US Special Forces Command.
I certainly respect the Colonel’s lengthy experience on such matters, but I still find it hard to believe that that even the Special Ops boys would be foolhardy enough to go into a whole new, very sensitive national jurisdiction (country) without getting political clearance at the very highest level… and also without coordinating closely with, and getting the permission of, the commanders operating in that very same locality, in this case the commanders in Western Iraq and in Iraq, nationwide. The all-Iraq commander is now the bellicose Gen. Ray Odierno.
Lang writes of the Special Ops Forces that they,

    are exclusively focused on hunting down terrorist people and support group[s] world-wide. Rumsfeld made them largely independent of the regular military chain of command. They amount to a global SWAT team. They develop their own targeting intelligence and make their own plans. The amount of control that the local US joint commander has over them is not very clear. They are not noted for a great deal of insight into geopolitical niceties.
    – General Odierno, the man who replaced Petraeus in Iraq, is not famous for nuanced reactions to frustrating situations.

So his argument is that the American kill team was either acting independent of the Iraq command, or doing so with Odierno’s support. For my part I still don’t see them transgressing the Syrian border in this extremely blatant (and lethal) way without getting clearance from the very highest levels in Washington: the President himself.
After all the public (and doubtless also private) discussion over whether and how to mount similar kinds of operations inside Pakistan– where the presumed targets of such raids include Osama Bin Laden and his highest lieutenants, i.e. targets of the very highest ‘value’ to the US— no-one in the military, not even Ray Odierno or the commanders of the Special Ops Command, can be foolish enough to think that such an operation can or should ever be mounted without getting the highest imaginable clearance from Washington.
(After reading 2/3 of Gellman’s book on Cheney, I would say it would be Cheney calling the shots in this matter, and then delivering the ‘presidential’ decision, pre-made, to GWB on a plate.)
As it happens, the NYT reported today that,

    The White House has backed away from using American commandos for further ground raids into Pakistan after furious complaints from its government, relying instead on an intensifying campaign of airstrikes by the Central Intelligence Agency against militants in the Pakistani mountains.

In this AP report today, Pauline Jelinek made clear that back in July it was “President Bush” (read, President Cheney-Bush) who back in July made the decision allowing ground raids into Pakistan. The US Special Ops Command then launched only one documented ground raid there pursuant to that decision. That was on Sept 3. Pakistan’s newly elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, a strong US ally, immediately became apoplectic, and sent his national security adviser to Washington to protest in the strongest possible terms…
So my surmise is still certainly, as I noted earlier, that it must have taken a “presidential” decision in Washington to permit yesterday’s ground attack against Syria to take place.
—
And a note about the Government of Iraq’s role in the affair. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has been quoted by Reuters as saying,

    the attack was launched against “terrorist groups operating from Syria against Iraq,” including one which had killed 13 police recruits in an Iraqi border village.
    “Iraq had asked Syria to hand over this group, which uses Syria as a base for its terrorist activities,” Dabbagh said.

This Reuters report (datelined from Damascus, but also using reporting from Baghdad and other capitals) notes that Dabbagh “did not say who had carried out the raid inside Syria.” He also did not say who had authorized the carrying out of the raid.
Did his bosses in the Iraqi political leadership get to sign off on it before it was executed?
I highly doubt that.
Actually, it is sometimes a little unclear who Dabbagh works for. In the past he has sometimes seemed to be a loyal mouth-piece for his Iraqi political bosses, and sometimes to be a bit of a cat’s-paw for the Americans.
If the Americans did conduct this raid without the clear, antecedent permission of the Iraqi government, then this is precisely the kind of rogue US military operation, using Iraqi territory to attack other countries, that the Iraqi government has been seeking to prohibit under the terms of the still-unsigned SOFA.
McClatchy Baghdad’s correspondent Sahar writes:

    Unilateral job? Joint American – Iraqi job? Does it really matter?
    Is Iraq going to become a launching pad for blatant American aggressions upon targets in neighbouring countries?
    The Status of Forces Agreement is still in a no-man’s-land; doesn’t the U.S. want the Iraqi people to support it?
    If they do, they’re certainly not going about it the right way.

—-
As regular readers here are probably aware, all the highest-level officials in the present Iraqi government– but not, perhaps, spokesman al-Dabbagh– have warm relations with Syria. (And also, by the way, with Iran.)
That same Reuters report linked to above tells us that,

    Syrian Interior Minister Bassam Abdel Majeed said last week that his country “refuses to be a launching pad for threats against Iraq.”

And Josh Landis this morning gave some recent assessments from Centcom commander Gen. Petraeus about the general (though not total) effectiveness of the measures Syria has been taking along the country’s long border with Iraq.
The Reuters report says this about Syria’s early diplomatic responses to yesterday’s attack:

    [Syrian ambassador in London Sami al-]Khiyami said Syrian authorities were still awaiting word on the raid from the United States before deciding how to respond and whether to complain to the U.N. Security Council.
    … Syria’s foreign ministry summoned the U.S. charge d’affaires in Damascus on Sunday to protest. Syria has also urged the Iraqi government to carry out an immediate inquiry into the attack.
    Russia condemned the assault. “It is obvious that such unilateral military actions have a sharply negative effect on the situation in the region, and widen the seat of dangerous armed tension,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
    The Arab League also denounced the raid and called for an investigation.

So Syria’s diplomatic response is churning into action. It is doubtless slowed to a great extent by the extremely stingy amount of investment the government has put into the basic infrastructure of diplomacy (phones, computers, broad cadre of diplomats all around the world, etc) for the last half century. But it is happening.
As I noted earlier, the Asads are cautious and patient in their response to international crises.
But that’s no guarantee at all that Cheney-Bush won’t continue to try to provoke them.
Calling Bob Gates! Bob, you definitely need to put a straitjacket on that dangerous man, Dick Cheney.

Attack on Syria: White House misjudgments

Without a doubt, last night’s attack by heliborne US forces against a farm compound inside Syria must have been authorized by the President or Vice-President himself. Josh Landis has provided more than enough evidence to prove that.
So the question is Why? That is, why undertake this very evidently provocative act that constitutes, actually, an act of war against Syria instead of continuing the longstanding and generally very productive policy of working quietly with Syria to stanch the flow of anti-US militants into Iraq?
Was this intended to be– or to provoke– the last-minute, electorally related “October surprise” that many Obama supporters have been warning against? … That is, a “nice” (from the point of view of Cheney and McCain) little national-security crisis designed to change the subject in the US and get people lining up behind McCain instead of Obama?
I had thought, and wrote earlier, that it was already too late for such an October surprise to be successful. We are now just eight days from the election. Perhaps we are still at the outer edge of when– in the estimation of the McCheneys of this world– such a crisis might be “politically advantageous.”
If so, their judgment is deeply flawed on two counts.

    1. First, and most important, a raid of this dimension– a handful of helicopters, going against one farm compound, and killing a reported eight people, all described as civilians and described as including four children– is not on its own going to provide or provoke the kind of security crisis that would make waves inside the US. For that to happen, the raid would have had to provoke a strong Syrian response.
    But the Syrians have not responded, and are not about to respond, in any way that is violent or otherwise escalates tensions.
    I’ve been studying the behavior of this Baathist regime in Syria closely for 34 years now. They have steely nerves. They are just about impossible to “provoke,” at any point that they judge a harsh response is not in their interest. They are quite ready to absorb material and human losses without making any kind of harsh response, and even to suffer repeated episodes of political humiliation from among their highly nationalistic political base, as they do so.
    They are not about to over-react.
    This stymies any McCheneyist plan for an October surprise.
    2. But the idea of initiating some kind of security-related “October surprise” also, imho, represents a serious misread of US public opinion. A clear majority of US opinion is now clearly very angry over many aspects of the Bush-Cheney years, with the financial/economic crisis now top of the list of their (our) concerns. The US electorate might have been distractable with foreign military adventures for much of the past eight years. (I’m reading Bart Gellman’s masterly study of the Cheney vice-presidency. He sketches out what could be a convincing case that just about all of Cheney’s actions– in the realm of foreign affairs as well as economic affairs– have been directed centrally at increasing the powers of the presidency. Disturbing to think that at one level Cheney was simply “using” the whole of the GWOT and the foreign military projects just for that… )
    But I think the scales have now fallen from the eyes of enough of the US electorate, regarding the lying and very damaging manipulations that have marked the Bush-Cheney years, that no additional military/security escalation anywhere could swing opinion back behind McCain.

So once again, in these two respects, the folks in the White House have seriously misjudged the world that exists outside their bubble. This is certainly the case if their intention was that yesterday’s raid would lead to a Syrian over-reaction that would then provide the excuse for further US escalations.
The Syrian government is deliberately responding only through strong diplomatic protests.
The American provokers may, of course, have a slightly longer-term project in mind– perhaps one in which a whole series of US raids into Syria, which are not “answered” by a response from the Syrian government that is “strong” enough to satisfy the country’s hardliners, could lead to rising anti-government unrest inside Syria?
And then– ?
But the Asad government has many additional things it can do, at the purely diplomatic level, to respond to even a lengthy campaign of provocation of this nature. Personally, I’m surprised they haven’t yet registered a strong protest with the Security Council. But that is always an option. And once the topic of this raid– or any follow-ons– gets taken up by the Security Council, Syria has a much stronger base of political support there than it did back in the 1990s or the late 1980s.
Also, if yesterday’s raid is indeed followed by a number of similar raids and the Syrians start seriously downgrading the cooperation they’ve been giving the US forces in Iraq until now, then the US military and Secdef Bob Gates will certainly start acting to rein in the Cheneyites.
But we also have a time of dangerous political uncertainty inside Israel these days. Maybe Olmert and Linvi would like to “wag the dog” with regard to Syria, even if they don’t want to attack Iran?
Nothing can be ruled out in the three months of uncertainty and political transition that lie ahead– within both Israel and the US. The outlook might be particularly risky if Obama wins the election and Cheney decides he wants to pursue a Samson-like option in some portion of the Middle East.
But as for this escalation– or indeed, any other– “saving” next week’s election for McCheney? No, for that I think it is already ways too late.

News open thread

Thanks so much for all the good wishes received re the new grandbaby. However it didn’t feel right to have news of violence, war, and conflict in the same post as those much appreciated wishes. So let’s keep the news discussions here and the mabrouks, mazel tovs etc on the earlier post.
By the way, sorry that for privacy reasons I didn’t post many details about the baby on the blog.

My grandchild, your open thread

My daughter had her baby yesterday. I cut short my tour in California to come and be with her and her husband. Thank God mother and baby are doing well.
This is my first grandchild. In recent weeks I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the life of my maternal grandmother, Blanche Mary Marlow, nee Williams. She was born in London in 1888 and died in London in 1981. Her only brother was killed in WW-I and her only son in WW-II. For the rest of her life she was a very sad woman.
The world has changed a lot in the past 120 years. I am deeply convinced that we have the chance to make the 21st century a much better time for the flourishing of all humankind than either the 19th or 20th centuries. But that depends on all of us– especially those of with relatively privileged positions in the world order– acting with foresight, wisdom, and compassion.
Anyway, I’ll be spending the next few days snuggling the grandbaby and helping out the newly enlarged family. (While Obama is saying what must be a poignant farewell to his grandmother.)
I’ll leave this thread open for readers’ comments.

‘Bipartisan’ group urges US escalation vs. Iran

I think it is too late now for the ‘bomb Iran’ networks that are deeply dug into various portions of the US political elite to launch an ‘October surprise,’ i.e. a military action against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region– and also, crucially, toincrease the climate of fear within the US in a way that would push voters to rally round John McCain.
However, it is not too late for an ‘inter-regnum surprise’, that is, a military attack against Iran designed to escalate tensions in the Gulf region to the point that that region and the whole world system become a chaotic stew of catastrophe that would then be handed to President-elect Barack Obama to deal with, come January..
I am relying mainly on Defense Secretary Bob Gates to prevent that from occurring, even if some of the dark forces in the Vice-President’s office– or their close friends in Israel– might be tempted to push toward it. But at this point I’d have to say that the ‘inter-regnum surprise’ looks unlikely, too.
But the pathologically Iranophobic forces in the US elite remain busy looking for ever-new ways to whip up tensions against Iran and to prepare US opinion for the launching of a war against it. Last May, Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of WINEP published their little study trying to claim– quite counter-factually– that a war against Iran would not after all be terribly damaging to the US forces so widely deployed in the region.
And today, a new group called the Bipartisan Policy Center has come out with a report urging the new administration to step up all forms of pressure on Iran, including preparations for a military attack against it (pp.xiii and xiv):

    There are two aspects to the military option: boosting our diplomatic leverage leading up to and during negotiations, and preparing for kinetic action [the fancy new term for ‘combat’]. For either objective, the United States will need to augment its military presence in the region. This should commence the first day the new President enters office, especially as the Islamic Republic and its proxies might seek to test the new administration…
    While current deployments are placing a strain on U.S. military assets, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan offers distinct advantages in any possible confrontation with Iran…
    If all other approaches—diplomatic, economic, financial, non-kinetic—fail to produce the desired objective, the new President will have to weigh the risks of failure to set back Iran’s nuclear program sufficiently against the risks of a military strike. We believe a military strike is a feasible option and must remain a last resort to retard Iran’s nuclear development, even if it is unlikely to solve all our challenges and will certainly create new ones… No matter how much the next president may wish a military strike not be necessary, it is prudent that he begin augmenting the military lever, including continuing the contingency planning that we have to assume is already happening, from his first day in office.

The new study is significant as much for the line-up of people standing behind it as for its bullying, hawkish content. The study is issued “in the name of” a task force whose eleven members include Dennis Ross, the perennially pro-Israeli eminence grise in US politics who notably succeeded during eight years as Pres. Clinton’s chief adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs in winning eight more years for Israel’s pro-settlement activists to continue their work. (He did this by systematically blocking all signs of movement on the Palestinian-Israeli negotiating track.)
Dennis has greasily been positioning himself for high office in a future Democratic administration. After being a strong Hillary backer, as soon as her campaign folded he signed on with Obama’s campaign, where he’s been hard at work elbowing aside anyone else who might compete with him for the candidate’s ear.
The “task force” was co-chaired by former Senators Chuck Robb (Dem) and Dan Coats (GOP), who also published this linked op-ed in the WaPo today. Another member was Steve Rademaker, spouse of the ardently pro-Likud Danielle Pletka.
So what kind of bird, you might ask, is this new “Bipartisan Policy Center”? It seems to have been cobbled together earlier this year. Its founder and president is listed as Jason S. Grumet, who must surely be the same Jason Grumet who’s been a leading adviser to Obama on climate and energy matters for some time now. Since 2002, Grumet has been the Executive Director of the non-governmental and determinedly bipartisan “National Commission on Energy Policy”, whose office is right next to that of the BPC on Washington’s I Street. Actually, the two organizations seem incestuously linked in a number of ways.
To me, it looks as though Grumet, who may or may not understand a whole lot about Middle east policy and strategic affairs, may have gotten bamboozled by Dennis Ross or others into running this “task force” with its determinedly alarmist and hawkish findings. The “findings” of the task force were, in fact, most likely determined not by the eleven former high-level officials who were task force “members”, but by the people put in to staff and support the task force in its work. These included “consultants” Kenneth Katzmann and Michael Rubin (who actually wrote the whole report) and “project director” Michael Makovsky. Jim Lobe gives us some background about these individuals here.
I hope that despite the involvement of Grumet and Ross in the work of this task force, Barack Obama is also listening to a much broader spectrum of views on what to do about Iran. Just going along with these bullying and escalatory recommendations would rapidly lead him to a dangerous dead end.

Obama on Iraq, Afghanistan

Time magazine’s Joe Klein has the transcript of his new interview with Obama up on the web. Obama gives his description of the meeting he had in Iraq with Petraeus back in August, summing it up with this: “I would say it was between spirited and agreeable.”
Klein asked Obama if he thought that conditions in Iraq today are “good enough” for the US to leave Iraq. Obama replied:

    I don’t think it’s quite good enough yet because I think we have to do a little more training. We’ve got to build up the logistical capacity. I think the possibilities of ethnic strife breaking out again are still present, precisely because the political system has not stabilized itself yet. But I do believe that we are at a point now where we can start drawing down troops. I think we can time a process where the drawing down of troops parallel to building up the capacity in Iraq and the Sofa agreement that just, the Sofa that was just put forward I think reflects that reality.

Nothing there about keeping troops in Iraq for “anti-terrorist” ops, which is interesting. But keeping troops there for “training” is still quite different from committing to a full and speedy withdrawal.
I continue to find this idea that the US– under any president– is nowadays in any position to impose its own “conditions” on the government in Baghdad quite hilarious. Of course, Gates continues to try to do that.
Klein asked a slightly inflammatory question about the missions of US troops operating in Afghanistan near Pakistan’s border.
Obama replied:

    Here’s my attitude. Number 1 we can’t have our troops remain sitting ducks. We should, under our coalition mandate we are in Afghanistan at the invitation of the afghan government. We’re there legally, under international watch. When those troops are attacked, they have a right to defend themselves. Period. Now I think that the most critical task that we have in Afghanistan is to not only strengthen the Afghan government, it’s military capacity, it’s ability to deliver services to its people, its capacity to work with the agricultural sector there to replace the poppy crop. But it’s to also work through a viable strategy for Pakistan. My sense is that [Zardari] has already been willing to step out and commit himself in a pretty difficult situation to work with the United States to root out militant terrorists.
    So, building a different relationship with the Pakistani government, the Pakistani military, the ISI. Working with Pakistan, this government to deliver for its people so it gains legitimacy, in all regions of the country. Working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve, and Kashmir, crisis in a serious way. Those are all critical tasks for the next administration. Kashmir in particular is an interesting situation where that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically. But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? To make the argument to the Pakistanis, look at India and what they are doing, why do you want to keep … being bogged down with this particularly at a time where the biggest threat now is coming from the Afghan boarder? I think there is a moment where potentially we could get their attention. It won’t be easy, but it’s important.

I find this interesting because it shows Obama’s trying to think and act like a big-picture geo-strategist rather than a provincial, US-bound politician, even if he does so only highly imperfectly. The main imperfection, throughout the whole discussion of both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that he’s continuing to refer to these challenges as ones that the US alone has to deal with. What a sad– and actually quite counter-productive– mindset!
Klein asked whether “we” should be talking to the Taliban. Obama said the possibility of dealing with some of them “should be explored.” He also seemed to be promising/threatening longer terms of duty for the US troops deployed to Afghanistan:

    My impression is that those who have a chance to stay there a little bit longer and develop clear understanding of the formidable complexities are going to achieve a lot more than simply us rotating in folks on a rapid rotation and I think that people on the ground tend to agree with me on that.

Well, the British were on the Northwest Frontier for many long decades– and they still, as Obama noted– failed to “win” in Afghanistan. So I’m unsure how long he wants the US grunts to stay in Afghanistan? And I am completely unconvinced that he has any credible formula for how the US can “win” there.
Memo to Obama: There is no way the US, on its own or with the help of the NATO can “win” in Afghanistan. Bring in the UN!

US-Iraq SOFA latest draft, in English

… It’s been translated from the Arabic and posted here on the AFSC website by their Iraqi consultant, the talented and hard-working Raed Jarrar.
I haven’t had time to read it closely yet. On AFSC’s website Raed says,

    This agreement could further entrench the U.S. military in Iraq… It cannot be negotiated behind closed doors. The public, Congress, and the Iraqi Parliament should be informed and weigh in before we set a direction for the future.

On his own blog, he comments:

    I think it’s really interesting that while the bush administration are putting the last touches on this long term agreement with their Iraqi allies, bush issued a new presidential signing statement last week specifically to allow the U.S. government to control Iraq’s oil resources! The statement was issued as a response to a congressional law that prohibits the U.S. government from taking control over Iraq’s oil and gas resources.
    What a great message to be given at this time: not only we’re planning to occupy your country military, but we also have the intention of steeling your oil and gas.
    for more details on the signing statement, check FCNL’s press-release here. Bush’s statement can be read here.

Also, check out the photos of tlast saturday’s anti-occupation rallies in Baghdad that Raed posted on the preceding post in his blog, here.
It seems clear, meanwhile, that this latest draft of the SOFA agreement is no more likely than previous drafts to prove acceptable to the Iraqi side (including crucially, the Iraqi parliament.)
Back in early June, I “called” the inability of the Bush administration to impose its will regarding a longterm security agreement on the Iraqi governing body that it itself created back in the post-invasion period!
No reason to amend that judgment yet.

Bush not closing Guantanamo

Back in June 2006, Pres. Bush said he’d “like” to find a way to close the black-hole Guantanamo detention camp. In today’s NYT, Steven Lee Myers quotes un-named administration officials as saying that Bush has decided it can’t be done.
That, we should note, despite the fact that the president “never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere.”
So I guess he never really was that serious about wanting to close this location of some of the worst rights abuses committed by the US government since the Indian Wars and slavery times.
Whether Guantanamo is closed or remains open, the situation of the roughly 250 men still incarcerated there remains dire. It will also, certainly, be very hard to get them out of the (il-)legal limbo in which– by the persistent efforts of leading administration officials over the past seven years– they still remain trapped.
Here’s the problem: There probably exists generally credible, prima-facie evidence of some kind of potentially prosecutable wrongdoing against some proportion (possibly small) of the detainees. Against others, it has now been established– after, in some cases, nearly seven years of detention without trial– that there is no such evidence. But there is also a complete spectrum between these two poles, of men against whom there may be some evidence, but it is of unknown and often very questionable value. Questionable precisely because a large portion of it was obtained through torture and coercion.
In any credible criminal-court system, all the evidence could be reviewed, sifted, and tested for its probative value, and a determination made regarding the culpability of each detained person for the justiciable acts of which he’s accused.
But precisely because of the degree of often horrendous ill-treatment to which these detainees have been subjected, the administration fears bringing the men into an open court lest the accurate descriptions of this abuse (or torture) themselves gain a public hearing.
Meanwhile, the reported conditions of the men’s continuing detention also, certainly, constitute ill-treatment, through sensory deprivation and other means, on a basis that continues month by month by month. They therefore remained trapped in an abusive, beyond-Kafka Catch-22 in which they continue to be punished, in effect, for the crimes of those who tortured them..
So Bush administration officials are now saying they cannot free these men from their (il-)legal limbo. The main concern that administration officials expressed to Myers is that if the detainees get brought to the within the “real” US for trial or anything else, then they’ll get more habeas and related rights than they have now; whereas if they’re released they might “return” to posing a threat to the safety of the US. (And regarding those who never actually were a threat in the past? My gosh, maybe some those– like a small number of those previously released from Gitmo– will feel motivated precisely because of the ill-treatment they received in Gitmo to go out and find an anti-US movement to join…)
The administration officials don’t actually speak publicly about their fears of what might get revealed if the men are given an open court hearing.
Myers quotes one official– un-named, like all those he quotes– who says, “The new president will gnash his teeth and beat his head against the wall when he realizes how complicated it is to close Guantánamo.”
Maybe not so– provided the new president links the decision to close Guantanamo to the establishment of an active, very fully empowered National Commission of Enquiry into how the Bush administration became dragged so far down the path of illegality and gross rights abuses in the first place.
That would enable the US public– and everyone else around the world– to see how easy it is, when a whole body politic becomes convulsed (and brain-addled) by fear, for leaders to manipulate those fears in order to commit the worst rights abuses imaginable and to trash even robust-seeming constitutional and international-law safeguards.
Having such a Commission, while also closing Guantanamo and finding a humane and effective way to deal with the remaining detainees, would do a hundred times more for the real security of the US citizenry than keeping Guntanamo going on the basis of the flimsiest of all possible bureaucratic/political “justifications.”
Would it be hard to design the procedures needed to sift through and deal effectively with the remaining Gitmo detainees? I’m sure there are plenty of other legal experts around the world who’d be happy to help.
Seven years of infamy is enough.