More moaning and handwringing in Washington this week over the everywhere evident lack of success of the US government’s campaign to “sell” the US to the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world. Condi Rice gave a major speech at the US Institute of Peace Thursday on this theme. The next day, the WaPo‘s Robin Wright had a front-page article joining and amplifying the general bemoaning.
“Oh, if only some well-conceived p.r. campaign could come along and just unlock the magic door that would enable the always well-intentioned US government to explain its good intentions to the world’s Muslim masses” …That seems to be the theme.
People like Rice and Wright who harp on it so much either forget completely, or seek to minimize to near-zero, one simply fact:
It’s not the “values” or the “image” of the US that Muslims around the world “hate”.
It’s the policies, stupid!
So one more p.r. push–in a series that is already, let’s face it, very long and thus far completely unsuccessful– just ain’t going to succeed. Here’s my advice to Condi and her minions, and Robin Wright (who should know better) and all her colleagues in the major US media:
Why don’t you quit sitting around agonizing over whether “Radio Sawa” or some slick little new US-funded news magazine in Urdu will finally “do the trick”. And then start looking instead at the policies, the policies, the policies.
If US citizens and our appointed leaders really listen to what the grievances that other people around the world have about the content of the US government’s policies; if we/they engage in serious dialogue about those grievances, and then actually change the policies that are seen–in many cases, rightly–as bullying, imperial, abusive, and just plain unfair… If all that happened, then no slick p.r. campaign would even be needed to “sell” America to the 1.3 billion Muslims and the several billions of other, non-Muslim critics that the US has around the world.
Policies like what, you may ask?
Category: Hawkwatch
New neocon group gets egg on face
It was clearly meant to be an impressive launch… Tuesday, Senators Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl had an op-ed in the WaPo where they announced the launch of the third incarnation of a high-level, militaristic lobbying group called the Committee on the Present Danger. Wednesday, the relaunched CPD took full-age ads in the WaPo and the NYT— and maybe elsewhere, too?– laying out their manifesto.
It terrifyingly identified the “present danger” facing the “American people” as coming from “radical Islamists” and “rogue regimes”… (Are you scared yet?)
Later Wednesday, however, the CPD’s managing director, Peter Hannaford, had to step down after journo-blogger Laura Rozen had revealed that he once represented Austrian neo-Nazi Jorg Haidar in Washington. (See also this.)
Egg on face. Great. May the banana skin of history continue to lie just under the shoes of these dangerous people!
Great work, Laura.
We should note that CPD-2, the previous incarnation of this organization, was one of the main incubators of today’s well-organized network of neo-cons. If you want a concise history of CPD-1 and CPD-2, this is one good place to start– though the info there hasn’t been updated since July 1989.
Of course, shortly after July 1989 the Soviet Union, which had been the focus of CPD-1 and CPD-2’s agitation, collapsed completely. Many of the CPD-2 people, who were well embedded in the two Reagan administrations, and fairly well represented in the Bush-1 administration, subsequently claimed credit for that.
But hey, we can’t have a militarized republic, and the taxpayers agreeing to divert huge proportions of public monies from essential social needs at home to the maintenance of a massive military abroad, without having another “present danger”, can we?
Reading through the list of people–in addition to Hannaford!– who are on CPD-3 is an interesting, if faintly depressing, exercise…
Transition? What transition?
- Update note, Monday a.m.– I wrote the following Sunday evening, before news came in that they’d brought the transition ‘ceremony’ forward. Most of the post still stands, except that where I’d speculated on a large-ish, TV-clip-friendly ceremony what they had ended up in a small back room, far from public view, for all the world like a drug deal or an illicit sexual liaison… Oh, and the flag on view–they had no space to ‘haul it up’– was the Saddam-era one… Read on…
Today, the counter on the CPA’s inimitable website breathlessly tells us, “4 days to a Sovereign Iraq©”. (Oops, how did that copyright symbol sneak in there?) If you go to this page on the CPA site, however, you’ll get a good idea of just how circumscribed that “sovereignty” will be.
That’s the page where they list and have (often non-functioning) “links” to the text of some 12 CPA “Regulations”; some 99 (and counting… ) “Orders”; 17 “Memoranda”; and a dozen or so “Public notices”.
It’s the “Orders” that are really important these days. You could call ’em diktats. You could call ’em edicts. You could call ’em fatwas. But “orders” is a fine, descriptive word. And that page even tells us about their status:
- Orders are binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law.
Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer has promulgated no fewer than 18 of these 99 orders since the beginning of May, and may well be promulgating additional ones even as I write.
“Penal consequences.” Sounds bad. And it could indeed be pretty bad, especially if anyone’s hoping for anything that might look like real sovereignty to be happening come July 1.
(That reminds me. I know from growing up in the UK that when a foreign country is “given” its independence there’s supposed to be a flag-raising ceremony. Have they figured out yet which flag they’re going to raise in Baghdad, come Thursday? Will it be the ridiculous, made-in-Washington “design” featuring the two suggestive blue stripes that Bremer came up with some weeks ago? Will it be Iraq’s traditional national flag, the red, white, and black stripes with the three green stars? Will it be Saddam’s adaption of that, that had “Allahu” and “Akbar” scrawled between the stars? Or perhaps, this?)
But anyway, I’ve been thinking some about flimsy, totally stage-managed “independence-granting” events that take place under circumstances of military occupation… The fate of the Palestinian Authority, created as a result of just such an event in the 1990s, immediately came to mind…
Gelb on Tenet resignation
I cruised around the ‘net a bit to check out speculation etc about Tenet’s resignation. Actually, the most interesting thing I found came from that very well-connected old fox, Les Gelb.
(Gelb even taught Tenet in a seminar when Tenet was a senior at Georgetown U., back in 1981, and they’ve stayed in pretty close touch since.)
Here’s the most interesting thing I saw Gelb saying, in the interview with him on cfr.org:
- Generally, you never know exactly what is going on. You hear some people repeating one rumor and other rumors come out, too. I don’t think his leaving helps Bush politically, and I don’t think he would resign to help Bush politically.
There are some other interesting things in the interview, too. Check it out.
Btw, I agree with Gelb that Tenet’s resignation doesn’t help Bush politically.
#1 It adds to the impression of an administration in gathering chaos (prez hiring private legal advice, polygraphing of high officials at the Pentagon over the Chalabi leak, Ashcroft not talking to Ridge, etc etc etc…. )
#2 If Tenet is a “private citizen”, he’ll be in a much better position to defend himself and name the other names that need to be named since the upcoming, reportedly extremely damaging reports on pre-9-11 failures and other issues start rolling off the presses.
Tenet resigning–who’s next?
I’m in Ontario. I see there’s lots of speculation about why George Tenet resigned. Of course, there are many reasons he should have resigned, at many points along the way– him and Colin Powell, both. Indeed, those two and anyone else of any possible integrity in the service of this government…
One of the delightful (and weird) twists on this story is that our dear old buddy Ahmad (‘Don’t blame me, I only sold them the snake-oil’) Chalabi, who is now in Najaf, rapidly trying to reinvent himself as a Shi-ite national hero (?), is now acting the wounded party and blaming Tenet for having framed him re the passing-secrets-to-Iran business.
If we were to believe Chalabi – oh, ha-ha-ha, this is almost to crazy to write… If we were to believe Chalabi (!), then Tenet’s sudden downfall might look like the doing of Chalabi’s longtime backers in the Wolfie-Feith-Perle circle?
But what it certainly looks like to me is that there’s a really delightful falling-out among all the rabble who’ve been running our country’s so-called foreign ‘policy’ under Bush…
And Tenet’s resignation surely isn’t the end of it.
U.S. military pressgangs at work
The strain imposed on U.S. military planners by the total failure to do decent follow-up (‘Phase 4’) planning for either Iraq or Afghanisatn continues to grow. Today, the NYT carried an impassioned plea from an Army captain that the soldiers about to be re-impressed into the forces to keep up the troop strength are being very harshly treated.
The program in question is called “stop-loss”. The captain is called Andrew Exum. Here’s the bottom line on what he wrote:
- for enlisted soldiers, men and women who sign on with the Army for a predetermined period of service in lieu of commissions, stop-loss is a gross breach of contract.
These soldiers have already been asked to sacrifice much and have done so proudly. Yet the military continues to keep them overseas– because it knows that through stop-loss it can do so legally, and that it will not receive nearly as much negative publicity as it would by reinstating the draft.
Volunteer soldiers on active duty don’t have the right to protest or speak out against the policy… For those of us who have seen these soldiers repeatedly face death, watching them march off again– after they should have already left the Army– is painful.
Exum also wrote about the high costs the activation of the Individual Ready reserve is imposing on all the families affected by that program, too.
I don’t know when he wrote that piece. But it sure is timely. Today, AP has some big stories about stop-loss being implemented for:
- several units about to go to Iraq: most of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, from Fort Drum, N.Y.; the 265th Infantry Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard; the 116th Armored Brigade of the Idaho National Guard; the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment of the Tennessee National Guard, and the 42nd Infantry Division’s headquarters staff, from the New York National Guard.
The 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, a South Korea-based unit, is expected to deploy later this summer and will be subject to the expanded stop-loss program as well, officials said.
I wonder, was the whole Iraq war “adventure” a fiendish plot to try to break the back of the US Army? Can we blame Ahmad Chalabi? Can we blame the Iranians?
Nah, I think we all really know where the buck really stops. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Northwest DC is where the guy in question lives. (Or just possibly, the Naval Observatory up on Mass Ave… home of Unca Dickie.)
All that sorrow, all those lives ended, broken, or mangled beyond recognition. In our country and even more so in Iraq.
As Yankeedoodle would say: 86-43-04.
In Bernard Lewis-land meanwhile…
Responding to my recent post on Fouad Ajami, commenter John Koch asked the excellent question:
- Why pick on the humbled Ajami when, week by week, Lewis makes bold assertions and predictions, based on his presumed unsurpassed knowledge. No one challenges him or points out how his past predictions about Iraq turned out mostly wrong. Witness: Bernard Lewis Advocates War, Predicts Iraq Future (2002).
Well, I disagree with the assessment that Fouad has been “humbled” by recent events… Momentarily taken aback, perhaps.
But John’s right that at least Fouad seems to evince some general cognizance that his confident earlier predictions had not panned out. And I was interested in checking out what Bernard Lewis has been writing recently.
It was the work of a few moments to go on a visit to the strange land of fog, wilfull ignorance, and misperception inhabited by this sadly misplaced medieval (in more senses than one!) historian.
See, for example, this interview, conducted by Atlantic Monthly contributor Elizabeth Wasserman on April 15, 2004.
Well, Elizabeth was throwing him the most amazingly silly and softball questions. (“You mention that the reason that the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be the central preoccupation in the Arab world is that it’s the only local political grievance that people can discuss freely in the open forum.” Yes, I know: it’s not even a question, as presented there….) Meanwhile, April 15: never mind that over there in Iraq things were going to hell in a handbasket for the whole US imperial adventure and for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, eh?
So you might not want to wade through the whole, turgid transcript of Elizabeth’s interview. But if you go to almost the very end, you can read this gem:
Fouad Ajami’s mea not-quite-culpa
I admit it. There is a certain delicate pleasure to be had by parsing the terms in which one-time supporters of–and even cheerleaders for–Bush’s quite optional invasion of Iraq have started to try to wriggle off the hook of their own prior positions.
I wrote here in mid-March about Michael Ignatieff’s attempt in that direction.
But at least I have a good deal of respect for most of Ignatieff’s public work and argumentation.
Today, we have the public writhings –on the New York Times Op-Ed page, no less–of a quite different fish, Fouad Ajami.
Ajami–just like Ahmad Chalabi, as it happens–is a Shi-ite Arab who left his homeland while still young and ended up in the United States as a strong supporter of Israel and a darling of the neo-cons. Beyond that, Ajami is blessed (cursed?) with a delusion that he is Joseph Conrad reincarnate, a condition that manifests itself through the generation of prose of a staggeringly self-aggrandizing, mock-heroic grandeur.
(Actually, I think Edward Said had that delusion, too. Don’t know what the cause of it is/was in either case?)
So today, here is Ajami, bloviating as follows:
Beware of chaos–and the wounded neocon tiger
Just how deeply has the U.S. national-security establishment
(and therefore, its ability to make rational decisions on national-security
issues) been damaged by the accelerating confusion marking the conduct
of its policy in Iraq and elsewhere?
My first answer is that the damage goes far beyond the few Military
Police and Military Intelligence units at the epicenter fo the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal. (This, even on the day that the WaPo has published
some of what seem to be the shocking
photos and videos
of Abu Ghraib torture that were shown to lawmakers earlier this week, as
well as a collection of
sworn statements
from former detainees, collected as part of an internal military investigation
into the Abu Ghraib abuses as long ago as January 16-18.)
Policy on Iraq, in general, is in evident turmoil:
- The question of who–at the highest levels of the chain of command–
commanded and authorized the torture techniques at Abu Ghraib continues to
be both revealed and very revealing. Today’s WaPo has a good
story by Brad Graham
that spells out that Rumsfeld himself was the one, in late 2002, to explicitly
authorize the first use of abusive interrogation tactics in the Gitmo branch
of the Global Gulag (from where, many of them were later transferred by Gen.
Geoffrey Miller to the Abu Ghraib branch). The NYT has a good
story
about how interrogation techniques developed and used in the Afghanistan
branches of the Gulag were transferred to Abu Ghraib–along with a good,
short
timeline
showing some of the key decisions along the way there. - The President of the quasi-puppet Interim Governing Council got effortlessly
blown up near the gates of the US Imperial Compound in Baghdad earlier this
week. Meanwhile, the question of who commanded and authorized the raid
against the home and office of IGC member and close (until two days ago)
Pentagon ally Ahmad Chalabi remains shrouded in mystery. US-trained Iraqi
Police were directly involved, along with US agents not in uniform who were
identified as belonging to the FBI and CIA. But what about the US military,
which is supposed to be running the whole occupation? Where were they on
this? - There is zero evidence that the Bush administration has any plan at
all–let alone a workable one–for how Iraq will be governed after June 30th,
a date that is only 40 days away. (For a few really macabre
cheap laughs, go check out the
‘Countdown to Sovereignty’
website the CPA has put up.) - Meantime, Reuters is reporting that “U.S. troops pounded Shi’ite militia
in the holy city of Kerbala on Friday [i.e., today] in a bid to crush insurgents
whose demands for Americans to leave Iraq are gaining support among
Iraqis frustrated with the occupation.” (emphasis by HC there). This reporter,
Sami Jumaili, also noted that Moqtada al-Sadr was able to slip out of Najaf
to nearby Kufa to deliver his Friday sermon there. - The big question of who is currently making the decisions regarding
the use of US power in Iraq remains very mysterious. It was mysterious
back in early April, when someone– Bremer? Feith? Sanchez? Or even, as reported,
the President himself?– made the disastrous triple decisions to (1) force
an escalation in Fallujah, (2) force an escalation against Moqtada, and (3)
align strongly with Sharon on his unilateral plan for the Palestinians. It
is even more mysterious today, especially since Generals Sanchez and Abizaid
are nowhere near the theater of operations but rather, back in Washington
…
(Time to exit that bulleted list there, since I’m getting to the crux of
my argument.)
Continue reading “Beware of chaos–and the wounded neocon tiger”
Hersh on background to Abu Ghraib
Sy Hersh has yet another blockbuster piece on the Iraqi torture issue in the upcoming (May 24) issue of the New Yorker. This one details the institutional background, within the upper reaches of the Pentagon, to the whole “black” (secret) intelligence-gathering program.
Accpording to Hersh, this program had its origins in the Afghanistan-based war against Al-Qaeda. By November 2001, Hersh reports, SecDef Donald Rumsfeld had become so frustrated with the limitations that military-legal people were placing on the ability of Spceial Forces units to undertake kill or capture+interrogate missions against Qaeda suspects that he set up a whole “special-access program” (SAP) inside the Pentagon, separate from existing chains of command and quite secret, to coordinate those kinds of actions.
This SAP, Hersh writes, had a number of code-names. One was Copper Green. He writes:
- Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were “completely read into the program,” the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. “We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness,” he said. “The rules are ‘Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'”
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon… He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II-‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'” the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”
Cambone’s military assistant was the infamous Gen. Boykin.
Hersh writes that people connected with this SAP played some role during the actual shooting war in Iraq in March and April 2003. But they were not called back to that theater till the fall of 2003…