Category: Iraq-2007-Q1

The waPo’s Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker have apparently been partially anointed by the Bush White House as its current chroniclers of choice. And thus, in today’s Wapo, we have their “authorized by the White House” version of how Bush undertook the allegedly extensive “policy review” that resulted in the current escalation plan.
The short version of the story of this policy review would be “ABB”: that is, “Guys! Cobble together a policy that is Anything But Baker-Hamilton”. But I guess the White House spinmeisters wanted to craft a longer, slightly more compelling narrative for it that would make their boss look deliberative, decisive, and wise…
And so we have “A&B”, Abramowitz and Baker.
They write:

A reconstruction of the administration’s Iraq policy review, based on more than a dozen interviews with senior advisers, Bush associates, lawmakers and national security officials, reveals a president taking the lead in driving the process toward one more effort at victory — despite doubts along the way from his own military commanders, lawmakers and the public at large.

The main official whose words are quoted by name in the article is Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley. So this really is the “authorized version” of the chronicle.
About the most significant aspect of A&B’s narrative is that, in their attempt to make Bush look “decisive” and “leaderlike”, they make Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki look like a pathetic US cat’s-paw… This, in contradiction of the official administration story so far wherein Bush is sending in the surge in troops “in response to a request from the Iraqi government.”
Right there at the top of theie story, A&B write that when Maliki and Bush met in Amman on November 30, Maliki formally presented– Power Point slides and all!– a proposal whereby US troops would

withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.
The president listened intently to the unexpected proposal at their Nov. 30 meeting, according to accounts from several administration officials. Bush seemed impressed that Maliki had taken the initiative, but it did not take him long to reject the idea.

So much for Iraqi “sovereignty.”
Later, A&B tell us of Bush that,

He never seriously considered beginning to withdraw U.S. forces, as urged by newly elected Democratic congressional leaders and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. And he had grown skeptical of his own military commanders, who were telling him no more troops were needed.
So Bush relied on his own judgment [oh my G-d, what a terrifying thought… ~HC] that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. When his generals resisted sending more troops, he seemed irritated. When they finally agreed to go along with the plan, he doubled the number of troops they requested.[!!!]
It was a signature moment for a president who seems uninfluenced by the electorate on Iraq and headed for a showdown with the new Democratic Congress. Presented with an opportunity to pull back, Bush instead chose to extend and, in some ways, deepen his commitment, gambling that more time and a new plan will finally bring success to the troubled U.S. military mission.

These nearly always unnamed “senior Bush advisers” etc who are quoted by A&B admitted to the chroniclers, however, that along the way they– though not, of course, their extremely wise and omniscient boss– had made at least two key errors of political judgment.
One was regarding US politics, where,

They understood that many if not most Democrats would not welcome a troop increase but thought at least some would grudgingly go along — not anticipating what ended up as near-universal opposition by Democrats and visceral anger even among some Republicans…

And the other error was regarding Iraqi politics:

By early fall, even as Bush was on the campaign trail accusing Democrats of defeatism, he and his senior advisers were coming to the conclusion that his core assumptions were wrong. The political process would not lead to security in Iraq. In fact, it would have to be the other way around. And they started to doubt the advice from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior commanders in Baghdad that troop levels were adequate to contain the violence.
“It was pretty clear when you started to look at our assumptions, many of them just weren’t right,” said a senior administration official, who like others discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

And thus, as we have seen, the “way forward” to the surge involved, right after the November 7 elections, Bush firing Rumsfeld and the two senior commanders in Iraq.
A&B describe how the White House’s “Iraq policy review” picked up steam after the election:

The Bush team concluded that the previous Baghdad security plans had failed for four reasons: The Iraqis never took ownership over security, Maliki placed political constraints on military operations, there were not enough reliable Iraqi and U.S. forces, and there was no serious effort to rebuild areas taken back from insurgents or militias.
Bush spent hours in conversation with Maliki, on the phone and in videoconference, probing to determine whether he could count on the prime minister. “The president decided we need to bring this issue to a head,” one senior adviser said. “We need to clarify whether this government is really a partner or not.”

A&B write that one “problem” for Bush,

was that the military did not necessarily want more troops. Army Gens. John P. Abizaid, the Middle East commander, and George W. Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, opposed an influx of U.S. forces because they were unconvinced it would change the dynamics on the ground.
Resistance from Casey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff flared throughout the process. On Dec. 13, Bush went to the super-secure “tank” at the Pentagon to listen to his top generals, only to walk away convinced that some of them were trying to manage defeat rather than find a way to victory.
Bush decided to placate some of the concerns expressed by the generals about the overextended military and told The Washington Post six days later that he would expand the size of the Army and Marines. When Gates went to Baghdad that week, he came back with Casey’s agreement for more troops based on the understanding that the commander would no longer be held back by the Iraqi government and that the United States would address the country’s economic needs.
“He was not overriding his commanders,” one Bush aide said of the president. “But he was pushing them to identify what went wrong and what do we need to change what happened.”

Of course he was overriding his commanders. But they pushed back just a tiny bit, and got something they wanted out of that negotiation. Namely, an assurance that the US troops in Iraq “would no longer be held back by the Iraqi government.”
However, even having Casey’s agreement for some increase in troop levels, Bush continued to hold out for an increase even larger than Casey had agreed to:

Bush had already decided to replace Casey with Petraeus, and through intermediaries the president reached out to Petraeus, who was supportive of more troops than Casey requested.
So the president reversed Casey’s plan, deciding that all five brigades would go to Baghdad in a phased deployment. “The president came out and said, ‘Let’s err on the side of making sure they have everything they need,’ ” said a senior official.

So there is the political insiders’ “backstory” on this horrendous debacle of an escalation that is about to unfold.
… And if we should want an additional indicator of just how truly reckless this surge policy is, we could note that even that old hawk Henry Kissinger today came out in the WaPo with a lengthy peroration that was unprecedentedly critical of it.
I guess Henry’s deal with the many newspapers that carry his opinion columns is that they not make the texts available on the web, and I’m afraid I don’t have time to type in very much of what is in his piece today. But he warned explicitly that, “These circumstances have merged into an almost perfect storm of mutually reinforcing crises… ” [both within and beyond Iraq.]
Henry is also urging that the administration needs to talk with both Iran and Syria…
So if even he is this worried about the situation and about the way the Prez’s present policy feeds into it, then the rest of us should certainly be scared about its recklessness… Very scared indeed.

The British historian Elizabeth Monroe must have been born in about
the same year as my father– 1910.  I have Monroe’s1981 book
Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914-1971 here
in front of me, and in the bio note it says , “After serving on the staffs
of the League of Nations and Chatham House, she obtained a Rockefeller Travelling
Fellowship in 1937 for study in the Mediterranean area.” (After that, she
headed the British government’s Middle East Information Division during
World War 2; then she was ME correspondent for the Economist
for 15 years before settling down at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, to
write history.)

My father, James (JM) Cobban, gained his degree from Cambridge in Classics
in, I think, 1933.  Then in 1935 he published his first book,
Senate & Provinces, 78 -49 B.C.; Some aspects of the foreign policy
and provincial relations of the senate during the closing years of the Roman
Republic.  

I have that in front of me, too, along with another volume that
I inherited from my dad’s estate after he died eight years ago.  It’s a
volume by Percy Sands, who had been my dad’s Headmaster at the Yorkshire Dales
“public” (i.e. private) school where he spent nine of his most formative
years. Many decades later JM would tell me that Sands had been his most important role model as he grew up. And as I look at Sands’ book today I see that on his book’s title page– as on my father’s–
it notes that this piece of work in ancient history won Cambridge’s 
“Thirlwall Prize” for history.

Percy Sands’ book was published in 1908.
 Its title was The Client Princes of the Roman Empire.
under the Republic

Why am I telling you all this?  Well, mainly to demonstrate that the kinds of quandary George Bush faces in the
Middle East are not new… Not new at all!  Indeed, many whole sections
of Sands’ book The Client Princes could be applied
almost exactly to situations in the US empire today.  (Remember, too,
that a number of the “provinces” and the “client princes” written about in his book, as in my father’s book, were in what we now think of as the Near, or
Middle, East.)

One example of the similarities then and now:  Sands’ Appendix B cites
both Latin and Greek sources to provide evidence of more than a dozen instances
in which various client kings (read “Ahmad Chalabi”, etc) had bribed
men of presumed influence within imperial Rome…

And then, in his final chapter Sands segués effortlessly from
his consideration of client-center political relationships within ancient
imperial Rome to client-center political relationships within the then-contemporary
British Empire.

In his Section 90, for example, he writes:

Continue reading “Empire then and now”

Here is a translation of Moqtada’s interview with La Repubblica, contributed to JWN’s comments section earlier today by “JHM”, who modestly writes, “Please let me know if there is something wildly wrong with the translation.”
I gratefully say, “Thanks, JHM!”

“A Secret Army Against Us, But the Shiites Will Know How to Fight Back”
by Renato Caprile [correspondent of La Reppublica of Rome]
He feels stalked and goes into hiding. He sleeps no more than one night in the same bed. Some of his most faithful allies have already turned their backs. He has even moved his family to an undisclosed location. Muqtada al-Sadr feels that the end is near. Enemy forces, forces infiltrated amongst his own people! Yet for him it is not about al-Málikí, whom he considers little more than a puppet, so much as about ’Iyád al-‘Alláwí, the former prime minister, whom the Americans have never stopped aiming [to empower]. He [‘A.] is the true director of the operation which proposes to wipe him [S.] off the face of Iraq, him and his Mahdi Army.
[Q1] How is it that al-Málikí, who up until a short time ago even saw to it that there were six ministers of your movement in his cabinet, is suddenly so aware that the religious militias, and especially yours, are the true problem that must be solved?
[A1] Between me and Abú Asárá [al-Malikí] there has never been much good will. I have always suspected he was up to something and I never confided in him. We only met a couple of times. The last time he said to me, “You are the backbone of the country,” and then went on to admit to me that he was “obliged” to fight. Obliged, you see?
=
[Q2] The fact remains that he is on the brink of [?] unleashing an iron fist against his own people.
[A2] It is effectively unleashed already. Yesterday evening they arrested four hundred and some of my people. It is not we that they wish to destroy, it is Islam. We are only one obstacle. For the moment we shall offer no resistance.
=
[Q3] Do you mean you are going to disarm?
[A3] The Qur’án forbids killing in the month of Muharram [21 January through 18 February 2007]. So they’ll do all the killing then. There is no better time for a true believer to die, Paradise is guaranteed. But God is merciful, we are not all going to die. After Muharram, we’ll see.
=
[Q4] Some claim that the army and police have been extensively infiltrated by your men and that the Marines by themselves will never manage to disarm you.
[A4] It’s really exactly the other way around: it is our militia which is swarming with spies. It doesn’t take much doing to infiltrate an army of the people. It is precisely those people who by soiling themselves with unworthy actions have discredited the Mahdi. There are at least four armies ready to unleash themselves against us. A “shadow” about which nobody ever talks, trained in great secrecy in the deserts of Jordan by the American armed forces. On top of that, there is the private army of Allawi, the unbeliever who will soon succeed Maliki, which stands ready at the al-Muthanná military airport. On top of that, there is the Kurdish _peshmerga_ and finally the regular American troops.
=
[Q5] If what you say is true, you have no hope of resisting.
[A5] For all that, we are still who we are. [Commenter Christiane renders the foregoing as “”We are many, too.”] We represent the majority of the country that does not want Iraq turned into a secular state and a slave of the Western powers, as Allawi dreams to the contrary.
=
[Q6] For a week now you have been officially targeted. The regime claims that without their leaders the religious militias are much weaker militarily.
[A6] I am well aware of it. That is why I have moved my family to a safe place. I have even made a will and I continually move around so they have trouble knowing exactly where I am. But even should I have to die, the Mahdi would continue to exist. Men can be killed, but not faith and ideas.
=
[Q7] It is said that you were present in the crowd at Saddam’s execution. Is that true?
[A7] It’s utter nonsense. If I had been there, they would have killed me also. As for Saddam, I’m certainly not going to cry for the man who massacred my family and my people by tens of thousands. The only thing is, I would have executed him in a public square so that all the world saw it.
=
[Q8] If you were not there yourself, do you deny that there were a lot of your men in that room?
[A8] No, they were not my men. They were people paid to discredit me. To make me look like the person really responsible for that hanging. Listen to the audio again, the proof is that in reciting my prayer they left out some basic passages. Stuff that not even a child in Sadr City would ever have done. The object was to make Muqtadá look like the real enemy of the Sunnis. And they’re getting away with it. At a time when I have been received with full honours in Saudi Arabia! But suddenly after that show under the scaffold, my spokesman al-Zarqání, who was on the pilgrimage to Mecca, has been arrested. A subtle way to let me know that I am no longer on their list of friends.
=
[Q9] In any case, the war between you and the Sunnis goes on.
[A9] It is true that we are all Muslims and all sons of the same country, but they must first distance themselves from the Saddamites, from the radical groups, from men like Bin Ladin, over and above just repeating their “No” to the Americans. The only thing that will be enough is for their ulema to accept our conditions [and issue a fatwa against killing Shiites]. So far they have not done so.
=
[Q10] Perhaps there will be nothing but bloodshed in Iraq’s future?
[A10] If the future is a country split three ways, I see no alternatives. And that is what Bush wants, so as to have better control. It is certainly not what the Iraqis want. In my opinion, there is only one possible way to arrive at a solution: immediate American withdrawal.
——————
Update Saturday p.m.: Christiane just sent me a great document that’s a three-column tabulation of the Italian original, JHM’s translation, and her own. It’s a Word doc. She has picked out in red the few points where she feels JHM probably misunderstood the Italian, but says in an accompanying email that she thinks his English is far better than hers. Thanks, Christiane, and thanks again, JHM. You’re once again showing us the great information-leveraging power of the internet.

I honestly can’t decide whether it’s hilariously funny or just plain downright tragic, the extent to which the Bushites’ have built their entire political “house” in Iraq on a foundation long ago laid and since then assiduously maintained by Teheran and Damascus.
Honestly, has nobody among the Bushites ever noticed this?
* There, back in the day, was Ahmed Chalabi, back in February and March 2003, going back to Iraq as the US-sponsored “liberator”– but travelling there via Teheran, where he held close consultations with the regime’s intelligence people.
* There has been Jalal Talabani, now the US-installed “President” of Iraq, visiting Syria over the past few days–m the first visit by an Iraqi head of state to Syria in over 30 years. The trip is scheduled to last six days. Talabani made the gracious gesture of traveling to the Asad family’s home village of Qardaha to visit the tomb of the late president Hafez al-Asad… Yes, that would be the same Hafez al-Asad who gave Talabani refuge for roughly 15 years, from 1975 through 1991.
* And there is SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim, long puffed up by the Bushites and their obedient press corps as “the strongest Shiite politician in Iraq”, etc. The same man whom the Bushists were hoping– along with his always politically malleable sidekick, Adel Abdul-Mehdi– would help them organize the anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki ‘coup’ they were planning a few weeks ago… And there he was, yet again today, still whingeing publicly about the US forces’ “arrest” (or actually, capture) of five employees from Iranian consular offices in northern Iraq last week.
… Well, we can forget for now (but probably not forever) about Chalabi. But let’s just look at the positions now being espoused by the kingpins of the US political “plan” in Baghdad: Talabani, Hakim, or, for example, Iraq’s ethnic-Kurdish Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari (who on Sunday told the BBC that Iraq needs a constructive relationship with Iran); or, come to that, PM Maliki himself….
So where are there any “converts” at all within the Iraqi political firmament for the Bushists’ plan for Iraq, namely that a firm battle has to be fought inside Iraq,and the broader region, against both Iran and Syria?
There are none. (AP’s Robert Reid, from Baghdad, has also made this point well.)
The Bushists’ anti-Iranian, anti-Syrian political plans for Iraq are built on sand.
This quite evident idiocy of the political dimension of the Bushists’ “Anything But Baker-Hamilton” plan for Iraq means that no level of military expertise– whether in the area of counter-insurgency or in any other kind of operations– can bring about “victory”.
(War, after all, being “an extension of politics by other means.” D’you think Bush has ever heard about that?)
And that makes the decision to pour an additional 21,500 US service-members into the imbroglio in Iraq even more unforgiveable.

Down near the bottom of his blog post today, Juan Cole wrote this:

Al Franken had me on his radio show on Air America Tuesday and suggested that Congress and Bush could play bad cop, good cop with PM al-Maliki. As I understood the argument, he suggested that Congress cut off funding for the extra troops such that it would run out by the end of this summer. Bush could then tell al-Maliki that there has to be substantial progress on curbing militias and national conciliation by then, because Bush can’t guarantee a sustained US commitment now that his party has lost Congress. I told Al that his plan sounds good to me. I do think a lot of the problem here is that the top Shiite and Kurdish leadership doesn’t feel a need to compromise with the Sunni Arabs because they know if the latter make trouble, the US will deal with them. They might not be so cocky, and might compromise more readily, if they thought they’d have to fight them themselves.

Why do I find Juan’s position there so politically naive and so morally troubling??
Politically naive:
(1) Juan– and also his host there, Al Franken– both seem to have bought, hook, line, and sinker the whole (administration-propagated) narrative that portrays what is going on in Iraq as exclusively a power-play between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds– one in which the “poor beleaguered Americans” find themselves caught in the middle, earnestly and benevolently trying to establish the optimal “balance” among those wild and unpredictable local forces… (See my analysis of the manipulative and politically inspired roots of this narrative, here.)
(2) Juan also apparently believes that threatening to withhold US troops from Iraq is a threat that can force Maliki to comply with US wishes on the political front??? But as I noted here, that’s a totally non-credible threat. Maliki wants the US troops to leave. How come Juan doesn’t seem capable of factoring that into his calculus? It’s true that Maliki seems like a timorous, diffident political figure; and it’s quite probable that the US have given him all kinds of cash inducements while he’s been PM, to get him to stay “on the team” with their plans. But despite all such inducements he– and more importantly the political coalition of Daawa and Sadrists of which he’s a member– have all remained committed to a speedy and total US withdrawal from Iraq.
So all this business about “the top Shiite and Kurdish leadership … might not be so cocky, and might compromise more readily, if they thought they’d have to fight them themselves” bears what kind of relationship to political reality there in Iraq??
Morally troubling:
(1) So we have a large and well-grounded political movement in this country that’s getting closer and closer to (a) bringing the Bushites into some form of accountability re their handling of the war, and (b) forcing the administration to withdraw from Iraq completely…. And Juan– and apparently also Al Franken– wants to compromise and blunt this movement by having it enter into some form of intentional and neocolonialist coalition with Bush on his handling of Iraq?
(2) And to do this, moreover, by explicitly joining with the Bushites in the “divide and rule” game they’ve been playing inside Iraq since April 2003, whereby they try to dole out incentives and very lethal punishments in such a way that it divides the Iraqi groups against each other and deliberately attempts to suppress the (still existing) nationalist Iraqi movement whose major leitmotif is “end the occupation”??
(3) Just the bullying language Juan uses there is a giveaway… “Bush could tell Maliki…” “if they make trouble, the US will deal with them…” et., etc.
… Honestly, I can’t imagine how someone like Juan Cole , whose probity and good intentions I generally strongly admire, has gotten anywhere near expressing support of this “good cop/ bad cop” idea. We in the US who are deeply disquieted over the tragedy that our government’s actions have inflicted upon the people of Iraq should do our utmost to reverse the administration’s policies as fast as possible. That is, to lift the yoke of ill-considered occupation and brutal “counterinsurgency” off the Iraqis as soon as we can.
“Good cop/ bad cop” sounds like a recipe only for continued colonial-style manipulation of the Iraqis’ tragic fate by Americans.
And I can’t understand why Al Franken– whose reported credentials as a “leftist” are actually much stronger than Juan’s– would have any truck with it, either.

To what degree have the US forces on the ground in Iraq already started implementing the “permissive” Rules of Engagement (ROE) described in this slide presentation from White House staffers last week? (That’s a PDF file. I picked out the essentials of it in this JWN post.)
It seems they’ve already started.
Today’s WaPo has this article in which Sudarsan Raghavan reports from Baghdad on the way US commanders there describe and analyze the difference between the (failed) attempt they made last August/September, under “Operation Together Forward”, to work alongside Iraqi army units to seize control of the whole of Greater Baghdad, and the new, ‘surge’-reinforced campaign they are planning now, with once again the same goal in mind.
As I’ve noted previously, only one of the new elements in the new plan will be the increased force size. The other is the more permissive ROEs.
Raghavan writes this about Lt. Col. Fred Johnson, deputy commander of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division:

Johnson [said] that Operation Together Forward was a “deliberate cleanup” that telegraphed U.S. strategy to insurgents, who fled neighborhoods with their weapons days before U.S. and Iraqi forces swept in. This time, he said, the emphasis would be more on targeted strikes against leaders, which are already underway.

Raghavan also, quite hilariously, quotes Lt.-Gen Peter Chiarelli, who was recently in the second-in-command slot in Iraq that has just recently been taken over by the pugnacious Ray Odierno, as saying,

“This conflict is so complicated that now we have to start talking about things like cultural awareness and language training.”

Now they need to “start” talking about things like cultural awareness and language training?
These guys truly are about as organized as the Keystone Cops– though about about a million times more lethal.
(The rest of Raghavan’s piece makes pretty interesting reading, too.)

Iraq is starting to look like Jeb Bush’s Florida: they can’t even do executions right.
Today, the Iraqis hanged Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim, and former head of his revolutionary court, Awad Hamed al-Bandar.
Under heavy global scrutiny and American pressure after the execution of Saddam, which in practice amounted to a sectarian lynching, the Iraqi authorities insisted that, “Those present signed documents pledging not to violate the rules.” The press was told by Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh that “the gallows were built to international standards and in accordance with human rights organizations.”
I’d like to know what human rights organization has published standards on executions.
In any case, how come the hanging resulted in Barzan Ibrahim’s head being severed?
Does this seem grotesquely familiar? Two years ago, we had the horrendous spectacle of hapless American contractors in Iraq being decapitated on video, garnering deserved international outrage. Will there be any similar outcry this time?
Assuming the US media even dares to ask, the Snow-job excuse machine will no doubt be out in force with a line suggesting that well, sometimes “these things” happen, but “rarely.”
But according the macabre Wikipedia entry on hangings, “scientific advancements” in hanging technique dating to 1872 (that’s the 19th Century!) were supposed to prevent hangings that ended as bloody decapitations.
Iraqi Sunni politicians understandably are already smelling foul play. Khalaf al-Olayan, a key Sunni parliament member, told Al-Jazeera television that,

“It is impossible for a person to be decapitated during a hanging…. This shows that they (the government) have mutilated the body and this is a violation of the law.”

Are we sickened of this yet? This subject reminds me of my mentor’s essay last week which well asks how any of these trials and executions promote democracy. I post in full here with his permission:
How can flawed trial, execution of ex-leader promote democracy?
By R.K. Ramazani
Charlottesville Daily Progress
Sunday, January 7, 2007
The flawed trial and execution of Saddam Hussein deal a heavy blow to the Bush administration’s goal of creating a “new Middle East” based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law.

Continue reading “Hanging, Decapitation, & Promoting Democracy?”