Category: Iraq 2003 thru June 2005

You can now find my CSM column dated for Thursday November 13. It’s here. In it, I argue:

Vietnamization, like Iraqification, was accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about “democratization. “But because it was rushed, politically driven, and pursued unilaterally by the US according to US timetables, Vietnamization was a dangerous fiasco for most of the people of Vietnam and helped usher in the period of abusive communist rule that followed. It “succeeded” only in that it helped Nixon win reelection in 1972.
In Iraq, the stakes are even higher than they were in Vietnam. That’s why a botched “Iraqification” that is pursued nearly unilaterally by a rushed, politically driven US is in the interest of absolutely no one. But I truly don’t think that a successful Iraqification can happen if Washington continues trying to do it under its own almost unilateral control.
For everyone’s sake, the UN has to be invited to take over this vital process. The UN alone – not NATO, not the present US-led coalition – has the international legitimacy, and can command the international resources that are needed to get this job done.

But read the rest of it as well, and send your comments in HERE.

I’m just in the middle of writing a CSM column about the dilemmas of “Iraqification” of the administration in Iraq. And suddenly I thought well heck, what if what’s really happening in the world should actually be called the “Iraqification” of the administration in Washington DC?
Meaning, that we’re getting increasingly closed-door, Orwellian, crony-istic, anti-democratic decisionmaking right here in the US, never mind what’s happening in Iraq.
But then I though, nah– that is really not fair to the Iraqis, to paint them all with a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brush… “Saddamization” of Washington DC, perhaps? Nah, that’s too extreme. Something in between, though…

ABC News broke the story Wed. night, then the NYT had it in more detail today: that the Bushies turned down what looked like a last-ditch, groveling offer from Saddam that would have met most or virtually all of the US’s pre-war demands.
According to both those versions of the story, Saddam was offering to let “2,000 US agents” comb his country for evidence of the WMDs. Plus, the NYT said he had offered to cut cosy deals with the US on access to Iraqi oil and also to hold elections within two years.
So the Bushies turned down the offer. It seems they were determined to fight their war.
(Some important details of the story– those concerning the holding, though not necessarily the content, of the back-channel contacts– were confirmed for both news outlets by Richard Perle, to whom the contacts had been directed.)
Why did Imad Hage, the key Lebanese-American business executive who was the key go-between, suddenly spill the beans to the US media? One clue may come from the fact that Mike Maalouf, a Lebanese-American who was then working in Doug Feith’s office in the Pentagon and who was apparently involved in the contacts along with Hage, has in the interim been “put on administrative leave.”
Maybe these two guys want the folks in the Pentagon to know that they have plenty of information and are not afraid to use it?
But here’s another interesting wrinkle, too. AFP reported today that the Hage’s key Iraqi intermediary, Tahir Jalil al-Habbush al-Takriti, described as Saddam’s intelligence chief, had been suborned by the Americans somewhere along the way. (Maybe through the contacts with Hage? Separately? Who knows?)
According to this AFP story– which my spouse sent me off the ‘net, but I can’t find a URL for it yet– this Habbush was one of four top regime people who were due to meet with Saddam at a restaurant in the Mansouriyeh district of Baghdad on April 9. But Habbush never turned up. Saddam, fearing that Habbush had betrayed him, high-tailed it away from the location– and 15 minutes later the whole place went up in smoke after having that really heavy US bomb dropped on it.
The AFP story is sourced to a “former government official” in Iraq.
The story then quotes three former government officials as saying that Habbush “was evacuated by the US forces as soon as they entered Baghdad, along with other members of the former regime who collaborated with the United States.”
So the small question here is “How long had Habbush actually been on the payroll before April 9?”
But the big question still has to be, Exactly who was it in the Bush administration who put his (or her) foot down on any further exploration of the intriguing negotiation being offered by Hage? Was it Perle himself? Or had he taken it to Rumsfeld or the Prez then one of them turned it down?
Whoever it was made that tragic call is probably– or let’s hope so– having serious regrets right now.
Maybe in light of the scale of the tragedy in Iraq since March, the whole lot of them should just resign.

Fareed Zakaria had an op-ed in today’s WaPo titled “Iraqification: Losing Strategy”.
He’s right in some respects. As when he argues, ” This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than with American democracy. The president wants to show, in time for his reelection, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home.”
He also may be somewhat right when he predicts: “Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less.”
For an eery possible precedent here let me take you back to Lebanon, early 1984. The French and US “peacekeepers” there had been very badly battered by the suicide bombings Shi-ite extermists had launched against their positions in the city in 1983… In early February, the French troops were regrouping for more effective defense. Ever since September 1982, the US had been trying to rebuild the Lebanese national army, which had falledn apart during preceding years of civil-war fighting.
By February 1984, the US hoped it had cobbled together enough of a Lebanese army to fill the holes being left by all the peacekeepers who were so eager to regroup. Their man, Ibrahim Tannous, the Christian extremist army commander, had promised them he had many well-staffed, well-trained new units.
Thing was, though, most of the foot-soldiers in that army were Shi-ite Muslims. On Feb. 5, 1984, the order came for the army to deploy into an area that was a stronghold for some anti-government Shi-ite militias. And guess what?
You can read all about it on pp.204-205 of my book The Making of Modern Lebanon:

At this stage, [the then-ascendant Shi-ite leader Nabih] Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did–in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon…

You reckon the man whom “Yankeedoodle”, the author of the great Today in Iraq blog calls “Lieut. AWOL” ever read my book? (Or any book?)
But back to Zakaria. Where I think he’s wrong is where he says, “The first task of winning the peace in Iraq is winning the war — which is still being waged in the Sunni heartland… [W]hatever it takes, the United States must do it.”
Actually, I think he’s wrong on two counts there. The first is that it is not the case that “the US must do it.” We do still, after all, despite the best efforts of John Bolton and the other members of the Bush administration’s other bash-the-UN brigade, have a viable (if battered) United Nations– and its legitimacy inside Iraq and around the world is still considerably higher than that of the USUK coalition.
Plus, it is actually not the case that the battle that counts in Iraq is the one in which the US forces are currently engaged, inside the Sunni heartland.
The one that really counts is the battle for the allegiance of the country’s Shi-ites. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, Shi-ites make up around 60-65 percent of the national population. And though they have numerous internal and external problems of their own these days (as Berri’s people did in Lebanon in 1983-84), still, at the end of the day their community can be expected essentially to stick together and make up by far the largest power bloc inside Iraq.
Right now, I’ll bet most of them are just happy as clams to see their two traditional opponents– the US and the Iraqi Sunnis–slugging it out with many casualties a little further to the north.
Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that that is the “triangle” that really needs watching inside Iraq these days: the triangle of competition between the Sunnis, the Shi-ites, and the US forces. Not the merely geographic “Sunni triangle” that everyone in the mainstream media sounds off about as though they know what they’re talking about…

You have to love Britain’s world-class leaders in the field of financial media. First, a couple of weeks ago, came the Economist‘s cover with the big title: “Wielders of Mass Deception?” super-imposed over a photo of Bush and Blair. And today comes a piece in the Financial Times reporting on a conference of international-law experts in London who concluded that US Gauleiter L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer’s Order 39, which essentially allowed the global asset-stripping of most of the Iraqi economy at bargain-basement prices, might well be illegal.
The article, by Thomas Catan, reports the following regarding a discussion about Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA):

“Is what they are doing legitimate, is it legal?” asked Juliet Blanch, a partner at the London-based international law firm Norton Rose. “Most [experts] believe that their actions are not legal”, she said. “There would be no requirement for a new government to ratify their [actions].”
International law obliges occupying powers to respect laws already in force in a country “unless absolutely prevented” from doing so.

Later, Catan turns to the question of the status of pre-existing, i.e. Saddam-era, contracts:

The CPA has yet to announce what will become of pre-existing contracts, many of which are held by Russian, Chinese and French companies.
However, international law experts have said they could be enforced, raising the possibility that contracts with the ousted regime might be more enforceable than those signed with the CPA.

Of course, it all depends whether you actually believe in the validity of international law, and its relevance in matters relating to military occupations. By and large, most governments in the world do believe that situations of military occupation should be governed by international law. Two governments disagree. They are Israel and the US.
Is this an amazing coincidence or what?
The main existing body of international law in such matters consists of the provisions codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949. The government representatives who met together in Geneva then and voted their agreement to the Conventions still had vividly in mind the depradations that Germany’s military occupation of most of continental Europe had wrought on the peoples and societies of the continent’s non-German peoples. Maybe we should urge the US and Israel to keep those terrible precedents in mind today, too?
Long live the Geneva Conventions! They are one tiny basis of normative agreement in a frequently brutal world.

Thanks to Margaret Powell who sent me a link to this great article in the current issue of Fortune, which described how financial whiz George Soros has decided that intense political engagement against the Bushies is the only way to try to make the world safe again.
Here’s a little of what writer Mark Gimein has to say:

At the age of 73, George Soros has found new purpose: He has recast himself as a fierce, angry, partisan critic of the Bush administration and American policy…. Soros has argued that the U.S. right now is in the midst of a crisis. He believes that both at home and abroad, the American government has put in jeopardy the values of openness and democracy in a search for “invisible enemies.” A careful observer of the international political scene, with contacts ranging all the way from UN chief Kofi Annan to Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva to Bush foreign-policy eminence Paul Wolfowitz, Soros attacks Bush in the most direct and dramatic terms.
“I lived through both German and Soviet occupation,” Soros told me as we walked through a park on Budapest’s Margaret Island. “When I hear President Bush say that those who are not with us are against us, I hear alarm bells.” He calls Bush’s speeches “Orwellian” and compares the Bush vision of international democracy?”You can have freedom as long as you do what we tell you to do”?to Soviet rhetoric about “people’s democracies.”
Soros has just committed $10 million of his own money to an effort to drum up support for Democrats in key states, immediately becoming one of the biggest individual donors to next year’s electoral race. In September he staged a fundraiser for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. And after years of writing moderate, carefully argued–and not very influential–tracts about the international economy, he is now almost ready to publish a very different kind of work, a book to be called The Bubble of American Supremacy. It’s a no-holds-barred attack on what he sees as the hubris of American policy. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” Soros told FORTUNE, “that one can do a lot more about the issues I care about by changing the government than by pushing the issues.” In short, he has become the world’s angriest billionaire.

One initiative Soros’s Open Society Institute has launched has been the “Iraq Revenue Watch” website, to which alert JWN reader Dan pointed us in a Comment posted last night. I hadn’t been to the IRW site for a while– it has become excellent. Check out in particular their Links list and their resources section.
Thanks, Margaret and Dan!

According to the L.A. Times Condi met Chaolocchio in NYC in late Sept., and then again in DC September 30:

“She was instructed to tell him to behave. She stressed how unhelpful it was for Iraqis to be enunciating positions that were personally embarrassing for the president, who was the strongest advocate of a new regime in Baghdad,” said a senior U.S. official. “She was blunt.”

That story, by Robin Wright and Maggie Farley, ran in the LAT yesterday.
(Thanks to Juan Cole for pointing me to that piece. Robin W, who has a great, decades-long track record of reporting and writing about Iran and Iraq, has another good story in the LAT today, saying that Iran is offering some reconstruction aid to Iraq. That development was, of course, totally predictable– indeed, actually predicted long ago by yrs truly. Plus, it has considerable weight of sheer logistical/political logic behind it.)
Anyway, back to the story on Chalocchio, Condi and the UN: it notes that when Chalo gave a long address at the UN Thursday, he was actually not any more the “President” of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose presidency had rotated away from him Oct. 1.
It also has an interesting quote or two from former Chalocchio boosters close to the administration who articulated their sense that they had been seriously let down by him. (Duh! Ask hundreds of thousands of small Jordanian investors who felt the same way 20 years ago when his so-called “Petra Bank” ran away with their life savings… )
The story quotes Henri Barkey, a well-connected former State Dept staffer who, it says, once worked with Chalo, as now saying,

He didn’t deliver. Once we got into Iraq, intelligence provided– whether on weapons of mass destruction or other issues– could be tested. We began to realize that all these things he was telling us were not exactly correct.

“One well-stocked 7-11 could knock out 30 Iraqi stores; a WalMart could take over the country,” exults one of the partners in New Bridge Strategies in a good round-up article in yesterday’s Washington Post.
NBS is the “consulting” firm hastily put together by well-connected Republican lobbyists. Their website promises that:

The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in the United States and on the ground in Iraq.

If you go to the site, click on the “Bios” section and learn about all these lovely people…
Well, as I said in the handy how-to guide I put into a post here a few days ago, on how to run a successful colonial empire, Step 2 included: “Pauperize the ‘native’ population as fast as you can by destroying their ‘native’ economy.”
Seems NBS is doing well, following my simple 5-step program. I think “knocking out 30 Iraqi stores” for each 7-11 foisted onto the native population would count as part of Step 2, don’t you?
The WP piece, by Thomas B. Edsall and Juliet Eilperin, notes that many NSB principals are also involved in a security company called Diligence -Iraq that provides physical protection for “companies and for corporate leaders visiting the country.” Amazing, Diligence is already reporting turning a profit…
How does that work again?
The general state of insecurity in public spaces throughout much of the country is so grave that women dare not go out of their homes for fear of being abducted, raped, or otherwise harrassed. Much of the country’s public space is still like the OK-Corrall. Under the Geneva Conventions, the “occupying power”– that is, the aptly named USUK coalition–has the responsibility for ensuring public order… But the Bush administration, which is so hand-in-glove with all these people in NSB and Diligence, decided it could get along with “occupation lite” and didn’t put nearly enough boots on the ground to meet their obligations re public security…
So in steps “Diligence”! Does it provide pro-bono services so that Iraqi women can go to school, to their jobs, or to the market? You gotta be kidding! They provide highly-priced services to corporate exex who are eager to visit to go and scout out prospects for those 7-11s and those WalMarts…
So there are two nominations for the Hall of Infamy. Paul Krugman, in one of his recent, excellent columns in the NYT, recalled that when the Truman Administration set aside some very huge amounts of $$ to invest in the Marshall Plan in Europe, he was at great pains to ensure that there was no possibility of political favoritism being employed in the awarding of the contracts. (Plus, I seem to recall, much of the thrust then was to empower European companies to pull themselves back together and do much of the work.)
Well, that was then and now is now. It’s sick, it’s disgusting, and it signals a massive collapse in public morals in this country.

As if it isn’t bad enough for the poor Bush administration that US soldiers keep getting killed in Iraq, that Colin Powell can’t persuade the balky furrners to agree to serve as cannon-fodder for the US occupation forces, that someone snitched on Karl Rove or whoever else it was that outed Joe Wilson’s wife, that the ungrateful US public seems no longer to be swooning at every mention of W’s name– but what else has to go and happen?? Now, well-tuned puppet Ahmed Chalabi has cut his strings and seems to be taking on a life of his own, independent of his creator!!
Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
There was Chalocchio, just the other day, schmoozing at the UN with the French, and agreeing with them–against the Bushies– that the CPA (a.k.a. the Condesecending and Patronizing Americans) should hand over power to the “Interim Governing Council” on a speedy schedule.
And there he was yesterday, schmoozing on Capitol Hill with the congressional Democrats, and agreeing with them–against the Bushies– that the CPA certainly shouldn’t just be handing out non-competitive contracts to big, well-connected US conglomerates like Halliburton…
As you may know, I am not (to put it lightly) any great fan of Ahmed Chalabi. But even I have to recognize the guy’s political wiliness and sheer chutzpah. And it certainly couldn’t happen to a more fitting bunch of folks than this White House, and this Pentagon, to have their carefully-groomed puppet turn against them…
But don’t worry, readers. I still haven’t been snowed by old Chalocchio. I can still see that his nose is still ten times longer than anyone else’s.

A lieutenant in the US occupation force in Iraq left a very interesting comment on the Warblogging.com blog yesterday, giving his view of how Chalabi is regarded by Iraqis and others in Baghdad. (This view accords exactly with that expressed on numerous occasions by Riverbend of the Baghdad is Burning blog.)
Here’s Nick’s comment:

last time i wrote–months ago–i was getting ready to deploy. been in baghdad since april…
for what it’s worth, virtually every ordinary just-trying-to-live-their-lives iraqi i’ve met talks smack about mr chalabi. (“thief! as bad as saddam! who is he to tell us what to do, when he ran away for thirty years!”)
i myself have had the thrill of dealing with his employees a number of times, since one of the things i do is to run checkpoints near the new iraqi government center. chalabi’s goons–i can’t think of a better word for the caravan of bodyguards which follow him around–are constantly rude not just to my soldiers (which i can almost understand) but to their iraqi neighbors as well. chalabi’s men expect–sorry, DEMAND–access to restricted areas so they can avoid the traffic they’d run into by driving around, and throw temper tantrums when i let ordinary iraqi citizens into ‘our’ neighborhood before them. my favorite exchange so far:
CHALABI THUG (in arabic, directed at my translator): can you not explain to the americans that we are special people? we don’t have to wait in line like the rest of you.
TRANSLATOR: (in arabic) that’s the way things used to be under saddam. now, we are all equal.
CHALABI THUG: (in arabic) we are not equal! we are special!
ME (in english to my translator): please tell him to calm down and wait his turn.
TRANSLATOR: (in arabic) the lieutenant says you need to wait. please wait.
CHALABI THUG: (arabic) you are iraqi! why do you listen to the americans?
ME: (in arabic) if you don’t want to wait in line, that’s fine with me. go away. now.