Category: Hawkwatch

It is now 26 days since I wrote this about Iraq:

It is 24 days already since the election. It took the authorities an inordinately long length of time to certify the election. And now, where is the presidential council?

Since then, I’ve increasingly been wondering– what with Neroponte first of all preparing to leave Iraq, and then leaving for his big new intel-management job in Washington… And what with the continued failure of the Iraqi parties to reach agreement on forming a government…
So I’ve been wondering: who the heck, on the US side, has been responsible for shepherding along the political process there?
Look, we might not like the fact, but under the international law of military occupation the US does have overall responsibility for the good governance (hah!) of Iraq, pending conclusion of a final peace agreement between Washington and a representative Iraqi government.
And hey, it’s not just that Neroponte was up and leaving the place, but don’t you remember, some time back, we were all assured that National Security Advisor Condi Rice was going to be “in charge of running Iraqi affairs from Washington”?? But since then she too has been given new responsibilities and now she’s off tooling around various parts of the world in her dominatrix jackboots…
So who is in charge of the Iraq “file”? Maybe just Rumsfeld? Maybe purely the military?
Or how about…nobody?
Yesterday, Steve Wesiman had an intriguing piece in Sunday’s NYT titled U.S. Avoids Role of Mediator as Iraqis Remain Deadlocked.
Here’s what he wrote:

Senior Bush administration officials said this week that the administration was avoiding direct intervention to break the deadlock among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish factions, still trying to form a government in Iraq six weeks after national elections.
The officials said they had concluded that despite the bitter wrangling over how much power to distribute among the factions, particularly Shiites and Kurds, any attempt by the United States to mediate would be likely to backfire.
“So far, we’re letting it happen,” a senior administration official said, referring to the Kurdish-Shiite dispute. “That’s really by design.”

This official gives the excuse that, “If we try to impose a solution, then anyone who gets the short end of the stick will hold a grudge, not only against us, but against the deal that was reached. It could lead to instability down the road.”
Well, maybe that’s the reason… Or maybe, given the horrendous levels of internal fighting (Sunni vs. Shiite) in the country in the 50 days since the election, Washington’s “non-intervention” in helping to resolve the government-formation problem has more to do with letting those two ethnic-Arab communities continue fighting among themselves while the Iraqi Kurdish parties sit pretty and gain in relative political strength as the other two communities mutually attrite each other?
Weisman– who was reporting from Washington– wrote that a second official he spoke to last week,

said that Kurds, Shiites and some of Iraq’s Arab neighbors want the United States to play a facilitating role in forming a new government, but that Washington is resisting. “There’s pressure from the players out there, but not here,” he said. “We are comfortable exactly where we are.”

Oh, how fine and ducky for them, all those Bush administration officials sitting pretty in DC while the public-security situation in Iraq continues to be quite nightmarish. But where is “responsibility” in all this?

So, Negroponte has today left Iraq.
Mission accomplished?
It depends what the mission was, of course. If it was to “lead” Iraq through a mockery of an election, leave the physical and much of the social infrastructure in tatters, public security a nightmare, and the political situation in an impotent impasse, then yes, jolly well done, John!
If on the other hand this man cares one whit about the wellbeing of the people of Iraq, he should be hanging his head in shame and slinking out of the country to hide for a very long time in an “undisclosed location.”
So how do the rest of us think John Negroponte will get treated when he gets to Washington? Feted or fetid?

You think it’s scary to have the United States occasionally barging around the world starting wars, defying international conventions, and generally acting like a rogue state?
Well, how about this: the idea that within the US administration there are rogue tentacles that go around the world doing exactly the same but almost entirely out of any centralized control system?
To me, that is even scarier.
At least, with a rogue state, you have the general idea that there’s some kind of a centralized “intelligence” at work, assessing risks and trying (perhaps) to minimize the overall damage caused to the global system… Or, at the very least, that there’s a single “address” to which people can go with any queries or complaints about various US actions.
But now, according to this disturbing article in today’s WaPo, the Pentagon is actively promoting a plan that,

would allow Special Operations forces to enter a foreign country to conduct military operations without explicit concurrence from the U.S. ambassador there…

The reporters, the estimable Ann Scott Tyson and Dana Priest, cite as their sources, “administration officials familiar with the plan.” They note that,

The plan would weaken the long-standing “chief of mission” authority under which the U.S. ambassador, as the president’s top representative in a foreign country, decides whether to grant entry to U.S. government personnel based on political and diplomatic considerations.

According to Tyson and Priest, this shift is still only “proposed”. And not surprisingly the proposal has come in for a lot of resistance from the State Department (and also, perhaps a little more suprisingly, from the CIA.)
The reporters attrobute to “current and former administration officials” the news that,

Over the past two years, the State Department has repeatedly blocked Pentagon efforts to send Special Operations forces into countries surreptitiously and without ambassadors’ formal approval.

And they attribute to recently retired deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage the info that, while he was still on the job,

Continue reading “Rogue tentacles,now?”

Steve Weisman has a piece in today’s NYT about both the Bush administration’s recent escalation of its campaign against the Lebanese party Hizbullah, and the difficulties it has encountered in Europe as it tries to drum up support for this policy.
The piece reveals Weisman’s usual close understanding of US politics and a level of misunderstanding of Middle East politics that’s only too common among “well-connected insiders” in Washington DC.
Weisman sources his story to “officials and diplomats” in both the US and Europe who, “would not give their names, saying they did not want to be seen as worsening tensions between the United States and Europe on the eve of Mr. Bush’s trip.”
Did not want to be seen as worsening tensions? Yes, that is apparently right, because the difference of opinion between the US and most of Europe over the Hizbullah issue seems to be very deep indeed.
Of course, the fact that the sources that Weisman claims are unnamed makes his whole story rather nebulous and hard to pin down. But I don’t doubt that– because of who he is, and because his editors decided to run the story on the front page above the fold– he had some pretty authoritative ones.
Here’s what he writes:

In the past two weeks, the officials said, France has rebuffed appeals by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, which would prevent it from raising money in Europe through charity groups. The United States has long called Hezbollah a terrorist organization, but the French, American and European officials said, have opposed doing so, and argue that making such a designation now would be unwise, given the new turbulence in Lebanon.

That’s kind of interesting about the French, since back in September they were apparently enthusiastic supporters of Security Council Resolution 1559 that called for the dismantling of Hizbullah and other militias inside Lebanon (as well as Syria’s ouster from it.) President Chirac was also a very prominent presence at Rafiq Hariri’s funeral yesterday, having been a long-time friend of the Hariri family.
Ah, but here’s a very sly kicker from Weisman:

Israeli and American officials say that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has told them that he, too, regards Hezbollah as a destructive force in the Middle East, one determined to undermine peace talks by supporting militant groups that attack Israelis.

I wrote a bit here, on Saturday, about Israel’s newly energized diplomatic campaign against Hizbullah.
I wrote there, too, that the Jerusalem Post was running a piece that attributed to “PA security officials” a fear of a Hizbullah assassination attack against Abu Mazen.
Of course, so far we’ve not yet had any actual expressions of such a concern– either from Abu Mazen or from security officials around him– that haven’t come out pre-filtered through (or, indeed, generated by) Israeli or American sources… So why on earth should we take all that pre-cooked hasbara seriously at all?
Why didn’t Steve Weisman try to ask Abu Mazen, or someone around him, whether he actually entertains such fears about Hizbullah?
Oh, sorry, Abu Mazen’s an Arab. That must mean he’s a congenital liar, right? [Irony alert in this paragraph, friends.] Clearly, “Israeli and American officials” can be trusted on to know the truth about his fears and concerns much better than him…
(In that post last Saturday, I also quoted Hizbullah’s deputy Secretary-General, Naim Kassem as having categorically denied to a Reuters reporter that they were trying to recruit Palestinian militants to destroy new Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts. Oh, but he’s an Arab too, right?)
Okay, so I’m waiting till we have any concrete evidence at all, on any of these Israeli-generated allegations against Hizbullah, before I rush to judgment.
I guess that makes me part of the old-fashioned, “reality-based community”, right?
But back to the story of how the Hizbullah issue is causing fissures between the Europeans and the Bushies…

Continue reading “Bushies fixin’ to fight Hizbullah”

Asia Times Online’s incomparable Pepe Escobar has a lengthy piece there today titled “Evildoers, here we come”… Evidently, that’s a reference to how he sees the mindset of the GWB-2 administration.
As Escobar says right up at the front of the piece:

Iran is very much in the US spotlight at present over concerns that it is developing nuclear weapons, with much talk of “regime change”. Over the next four years … any of a number of countries could come into the crosshairs – Syria, Saudi Arabia and “axis of evil” original North Korea.

(I believe he actually meant to say that “Iran and those other countries” could come into the crosshairs, since that’s the tenor of what he writes thereafter.)
Then, before going through the situation country by country, he presents the considerable amount of evidence there isfor thinking that the 2nd GWB administration will be even more warlike than the first one:

Vice President Dick Cheney’s concentration of power under Bush II will be even more complete. Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld – despite Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the quagmire in Iraq – remains in place. The CIA under Porter Goss has been through a Soviet-style purge and is being turned into an ersatz Office of Special Plans (OSP), which everyone remembers was a Rumsfeld-sponsored operation that specialized in fabricating false pretexts for the invasion of Iraq. The OSP was directed by neo-conservative Douglas Feith (who now wants the US to attack Iran). The new CIA is Feith’s OSP on steroids. Goss’ job is to make sure the CIA agrees with everything Bush and the neo-conservatives say. Expect more wars.

In my humble opinion, this analysis is all good as far as it goes– But what it notably doesn’t take into sufficient account is the tough strategic/political reality of a situation in which the US military is already considerably bogged down and bleeding badly, in Iraq. At this point, the US commanders will be extremely lucky if they manage to pull the US forces out of Iraq anytime in the next four years without suffering a series of major battlefield debacles due to supply strangulation…

Continue reading “Further American aggressions?”

Every so often the WaPo brings out an issue that’s filled with great news (from the journalistic viewpoint that is, meaning “news stories that are well reported and well written”). Like today. Here are some of these stories:
* The Bushadministration has been intensively tapping Mohamed ElBaradei’s phone calls with Iranian diplomats,

and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials. (Dafna Linzer, p.A1.)

* Baghdad ER doc Luai Rubaie told Anthony Shadid that,

He sees maybe 100 cases a day, twice as many as before the invasion in March 2003. Back then, he estimated, one in 1,000 was a victim of gunfire. Now half the cases are the consequence of the city’s strife. (pp. A1, A30.)
“It’s a museeba,” Rubaie said — a disaster.

* It strikes me this is a big story, that I don’t think has received enough attention. It’s in the paper on p.A28. Brad Graham, reporting from Baghdad, tells us that:

In an effort to reduce the amount of military cargo hauled in vulnerable ground convoys across Iraq, the U.S. Air Force has begun airlifting much larger quantities of materiel to bases around the country…
Additionally, U.S. cargo aircraft are ferrying more materiel from base to base within Iraq. In the past month, the amount of military items hauled daily by air has jumped from about 350 tons to about 450 tons… according to Col. Mark Ramsay, deputy director of air mobility at the Combined Air Operations Center here…
So far, the Air Force has been able to handle the extra load without bringing in more than the 60 C-130 cargo planes it already has in the region. This is because some of the burden has been borne by larger C-17 and C-5 planes that fly the long-haul routes from the United States and Europe.
The bigger planes, which can carry three times or more the load of a C-130, have in the past simply dropped their pallets at one of the major hubs in Iraq and headed back. Now, some of the aircraft are being kept in the region for several days and used for short-haul trips…

Continue reading “A bountiful WaPo”

Today, the NYT published a story by Thom Shanker in which he wrote that,

A harshly critical report by a Pentagon advisory panel says the United States is failing in its efforts to explain the nation’s diplomatic and military actions to the Muslim world, but it warns that no public relations plan or information operation can defend America from flawed policies.

The advisory panel in question was a “Strategic Communications Task Force” appointed by the Defense Science Board. (I think the DSB is the descendant of the historic DARPA agency, which gave the world the internet.)
So I rushed on over to the DSB’s website and found the whole text of the 102-page report right there.
[Update, 11/27: For some reason, the above link doesn’t work for everyone. (It still works for me, though.) However, The Federation of American Scientists has helpfully also put the text up on their site: here. Thanks to alert reader Allen for telling us about that.]
The report was presented to the folks in OSD–to, I think, Paul Wolfowitz– back at the end of September. But I suppose nobody, including no-one I know of in the blogosphere, was paying much attention to that arcane corner of the OSD (Office of the Sec. of Defense) back then. People were mainly focused on the US elections. So it’s taken till now for this fascinating report to get the attention it needs.
I skimmed through the whole thing really quickly this afternoon. It is actually, perhaps, even a bit “better” in many ways than Shanker writes. (In other portions though it’s pretty bad: pablumy, and filled with media strategists’ jargonizing.)
So anyway, thanks to my new skills in being able to copy large chunks o’ text out of (some but not all) PDF files, here are some of the parts I found most interesting.
By the way, if you want to go to the link I gave above and read the whole thing, I’d advise you to go to Chapter 2 first, which is where the most interesting criticisms of “public diplomacy” efforts up to the present can be found.
Okay, Helena’s annotated excerpts start here:

Continue reading “Pentagon board trashes “public diplomacy” efforts”

Today’s WaPo has an intriguing article by Dana Milbank in which he writes that just nine days after Bush’s re-election he had a special meeting in the White House with Natan Sharansky… Or, as Milbank describes him, “an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon of being soft on the Palestinians.”
Sharansky has apparently recently co-authored a book called “The Case for Democracy”, which argues that nothing should be given to the Palestinians at all until they have established a full democracy. (Under conditions of foreign military occupation?? Exactly how are they supposed to do that, again?) His publisher got copies of the galleys to Prez Bush, who was so impressed that he (a) invited Sharansky over and (b) incorporated most of his ideas into the policy toward the Palestinians that he outlined at the joint press conference with Blair.
As Milbank writes,

Sharansky made waves this spring when he rallied with Jewish settlers to oppose the Likud prime minister’s plan for a unilateral pullout from Gaza — a plan that Bush had endorsed. Sharansky, head of a Russian immigrant political party, said Sharon’s plan, though supported by a number of Likud hard-liners, would be “encouraging more terror.” A figure who has previously railed against the “illusions of Oslo” and described that famous accord as “one-sided concessions,” Sharansky resigned in 2000 from Ehud Barak’s government over the Labor prime minister’s plan to attend a peace summit in Washington.
“He’s been suffering in the political wilderness in Israel with these ideas for some time,” [his co-author Ron] Dermer said of [Sharansky]. But when it came to Bush, Dermer said, “I didn’t see a lot of daylight between them.”

This whole idea that a nation must be fully democratic before it can allowed its independence is quite bizarre, and quite a-historical. Did the US colonists have a full range of their own fully democratic institutions before they fought for and won their independence from the British Crown? Of course not! It took them 13 more years, as I recall, to work out the details of the US Constitution.
In the modern (i.e. post-WW2) era, no other nation has been obliged to “prove” its democratic credentials before being given independence… Of course, a working democracy is a very desirable thing. But to make it a precondition for national independence? That is the bizarre thing.
Anyway, I could write a bunch about this whole cart-before-horse idea, but I have to go… Just finally, though, I’d note that the tired old proposition that “democracies don’t launch wars against other nations” is palpable nonsense in the present era.

So you thought US foreign policy in Bush’s first term was as bad as it could get??
Ha-ha-ha. Does Unca Dick Cheney have some surprises in store for you.
Those talented and straight-talking Knight-Ridder journos Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay wrote yesterday that:

U.S. officials and foreign policy analysts said Monday that by agreeing to Powell’s departure and approving a purge by new CIA chief Porter Goss, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the U.S. national security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control.
Powell and his State Department team – quietly backed by the intelligence community – argued often for a foreign policy that was more inclusive of allies and that relied on diplomacy and coercion rather than on force to deal with adversaries.

Strobel and Landay also report that some of Powell’s friends said he had “hoped to stay on a little longer”.
Bombs-Away Don will be staying on, meanwhile, and of course Condi’s heading over to State. S & L have this great quote from the Brookings Institution’s Ivo Daalder… (read on)

Continue reading “It’s going to get worse. Much worse.”

The war against Fallujah is putting a lot of strain on the US forces inside Iraq. But at the same time, the bullying nature of the ideologically driven political appointees whom Bush and Co. have put in charge of national security decisionmaking has been putting a lot of strain on the seasoned professionals within the relevant government agencies.
Is Washington’s national-security decisionmaking apparatus cracking under the strain?
Yesterday the WaPo reported that Robert Blackwill, the administration’s previous Chief Minister for Iraq, had phsyically jostled or assaulted a female State Department employee in Kuwait, shortly before his very hasty (and probably related) resignation from his post.
But today we have even more startling news, from the WaPo’s Dana Priest and Walter Pincus, namely that the CIA’s top “regular cadre” employee, John McLaughlin, resigned yesterday.
He did so, they write,

after a series of confrontations over the past week between senior operations officials and CIA Director Porter J. Goss’s new chief of staff that have left the agency in turmoil, according to several current and former CIA officials.

Goss, you’ll recall, is the Republican attack dog recently appointed (and confirmed by the US Senate) as Bush’s person to head the CIA. McLaughlin was (until yesterday) the Deputy Director of the CIA, but he was its Acting Director for two months, pre-Goss, in the summer.
The WaPo story continues that McLaughlin:

Continue reading “Disarray in US policymaking”