Category: Iraq-2007-Q1

I don’t know when the WaPo started putting thier Sunday columns up on their website on Saturday. But today I just saw this column by the generally very wise Washington insider David Broder.
It’s worth reading. Broder starts:

With his new Iraq policy, President Bush essentially has written off any prospect of regaining broad support at home for his course of action, in the slender hope of finding the key to military success and political agreements in Baghdad.
It is a huge personal gamble, one that has triggered a debate that may well dominate the final two years of Bush’s tenure.

Later, this:

Bush said that he has Maliki’s word that all this will happen — and that there will be an end to the unspoken policy of targeting Sunnis while protecting Shiite militias. When I asked a National Security Council official why the promise should be taken seriously, after so many disappointments in the past year, he said that the prime minister faces not just external pressure from the United States but also the urgings of “other moderate elements” in his own coalition who are weary of the fighting.
A skeptic would say that Bush has sacrificed the support of moderates at home — the Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers voicing skepticism about his plan — for some supposed “moderates” in Baghdad.
For this gamble to work, a lot of implausible things have to happen. Maliki’s governing coalition, which includes the party of Moqtada al-Sadr, will have to steel itself to send troops into the neighborhoods controlled by Sadr’s own Mahdi Army. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says this will happen, but the promise remains to be tested.
Also unproved is the capacity of the Iraqi army and police force, which are supposed to be “in the lead,” with American troops in support, in clearing out Baghdad…

I gotta run. I’m expecting Laila el-Haddad and her family here any moment…

US Secdef Robert Gates, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, was trying to re-package Bush’s outrageous “surge” plan in what looked like a frenzied attempt to tamp down the criticisms it has incurred from lawmakers of both parties. In today’s WaPo, Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson described Gates’s testimony there thus:

If the plan works, the United States could begin drawing down troop levels by the end of the year, Gates said. If the Iraqi government does not deliver troops and political and economic support, he said, the United States could withhold many of the 21,500 additional troops Bush has ordered to secure the most violent parts of Iraq.

Oops, maybe not such a strong commitment from Gates to the “surge” after all?
But honestly, at this stage in the tangled decisionmaking of this Keystone Cops of an administration, who knows?
(The Senate ASC also got a nuanced little message from Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the brass in the Pentagon do not want to get dragged into any military adventures against Iran. Pace, those same reporters write,

assured members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that there are no plans to take military operations into Iran, clarifying remarks Bush made on Wednesday in announcing the new Iraq package.
“From a military standpoint,” Pace said while responding to questions, there is “no need to cross the Iranian border.”

Let’s hope that position stands firm, eh? Also, as I’ve written before a number of times– e.g. here, last September– the US military really should agitate very hard indeed at this point for military-to-military hotlines and other deconfliction mechanisms with Teheran. Right along the length of the Iraq-Iran border, along the whole of the Iranian coastline onto the Gulf, and also along Iran’s border with Afghanistan, the two militaries face each other eyeball to eyeball. A confrontation or provocation could flare up at any point– by the intent of the national command authorities on either side, through the intent of infiltrators into the forces on one side or the other, or completely “inadventently.” That’s why the highest levels of the militaries need to have a way to communicate clearly and authoritatively with each other.)
Anyway, this post was not meant, primarily, to be about that. It’s about the present Keystone Cops-ish disarray in the highest levels of the US strategic/military decisionmaking strata over this whole question of Bush’s much-ballyhooed “surge.”
The more one hears from people like Gates, the more unclear the point of this “surge” seems to be…
So okay, let’s go back to early August last year: Israel. By then it was abundantly clear to the national leaders that the “knockout blow” against Hizbullah that their strategically illiterate chief of staff had promised them in Lebanon had not worked… With 100-200 Hizbullah rockets raining down daily on communities in northern Israel that were either completely unprepared for such a barrage or seemed paralyzed by it, PM Olmert was coming under increasingly open criticism from his public… His political capital was washing out from under his feet from hour to hour… I can imagine Olmert– a national leader with very little experience of his own either in the military or in military-strategic decisionmaking– tearing his hair out (if he had much left to tear, okay), in desperation, and imploring his chief of staff to “Do something! Do something! Quick!”
So what Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, came up with was to add to his previous (by now, quite evidently failed) military plan in Lebanon the previously unplanned addition of– a quickly-thrown-together ground force surge. What’s more, that surge– like the one presently being discussed in Washington– also involved around 20,000 additional troops.
Didn’t make any sense for the IDF. Won’t make sense for the US in Iraq.
Olmert’s reckless insistence back in August that the ill-prepared Israeli ground forces mount that last-minute “surge” into Lebanon cost Israel the lives of some 36 or more soldiers. It notably did not succeed in improving Israel’s position on the battlefield in south Lebanon. Instead, the widely-disseminated reporting of the wounded Israeli units streaming back over the border into Israel with their casualties further pummelled an Israeli posture of strategic deterrence that had already been considerably weakened by the events of the previous 30 days. Some members of those units returned home and immediately joined in a broad campaign of criticism and reproach against Olmert, Halutz, and the rest of the reckless leadership that had thrown their units thus cavalierly into the caldron of war… And at the domestic political level, Olmert has never really recovered since.
Bottom line on Olmert’s surge: not good for Israel’s strategic deterrence, and not good for Olmert’s political standing.
So now, here we have Bush and his team, launching an eery replay of many of those very same moves. Go back and read some of the reporting from Israel that I cited in this JWN post on August 6. Especially at the portion subtitled “Note 2: Disarray and splits in Israeli decisionmaking”.
This looks remarkably similar to the way that Gates is now trying to re-fashion and/or re-package Bush’s absurd and esclatory orders to undertake a “surge” in Iraq… and that Gen Pace is also trying to re-fashion and/or re-package what Cheney and Bush might have been pushing toward, regarding a huge escalation against Iran.
With this difference. Gates and Pace may both have many faults and weaknesses. But at least both men have considerably more experience in strategy and strategic decisionmaking than their counterparts in Israel had last August.
However, the US (like Israel) is a country in which the political echelon, quite rightly, remains in command of even the highest levels of the military. So we, the concerned citizenry of the US, cannot simply leave it to Robert Gates and Peter Pace to rein in the mad adventurism of the President. We have to continue– working at the grassroots as well as with and through our representatives in Congress– to keep the pressure up, politically, on Bush to reverse his disastrous course in Iraq.
My lord, I wish we had a decent parliamentary system here! If we did have one, the elections of last November would not have left this dangerously crazy Presidential-Veep team in control.

The tectonic plates of history are, finally, shifting in this country. A citizenry that was largely stunned into fearful followership by the attacks of September 2001 has started to regain its sense of reponsibility, its morals, and its agency.
We saw that at the ballot-box, November 7. But it didn’t end there. Since November, citizens’ antiwar pressure on our lawmakers has continued. An incoming Congress whose leaders originally planned to put their first focus on domestic affairs was forced instead to put the Iraq war at the top of its agenda. They started yesterday. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was grilling Condi Rice on the President’s new “plan” for Iraq, at the same time the House Armed Services Committee was grilling new Secdef Gates on the same topic.
Crucially, in the Senate hearings, nearly all the Republicans there joined the Dems in expressing strong criticism of the Bush Plan.
The best read on that is Dana Milbanks in today’s WaPo. He wrote that at the end, committee chair Joe Biden told Rice bluntly:

“I hope you’ll convey to the president… that you heard 21 members, with one or two notable exceptions, expressing outright hostility, disagreement and/or overwhelming concern with the president’s proposal.”

I saw some news clips of the hearing on t.v. last night. GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel was completely scathing about the Prez’s plan for escalation, and very, very persistent in his criticism of Condi.
Condi tried to claim that what the Prez is proposing is not an escalation but an “augmentation.” (What on earth does that mean, anyway? Sounds like a distinction without being a difference to me.)
I believe the Prez’s plan is an escalation in two ways:

(1) It’s an increase over the current number of US troops in Iraq (though admittedly still not an all-time high), and also
(2) It mandates a significant increase in the lethality of the operations the GIs will be allowed, or even encouraged, to undertake in Iraq in the period ahead.

The enhanced permissivity of the military’s ROEs in Iraq (as spelled out quite clearly by the White House on Wednesday, here, p.10) is an even stronger marker of the escalation in the level of conflict that the new plan will bring to the “battlefield” in Iraq than the somewhat paltry increase in the troop numbers.
This escalation spells increased death and destruction– overwhelmingly for the Iraqis, but also for the US service members who will be caught up in the middle of it.
… And the US citizenry are starting, in strong numbers, to understand this.
Longtime JWN readers will know that every Thursday when I’m in my home-town in Charlottesville, Virginia, I take part in our town’s weekly antiwar vigil/demonstration. On many occasions there have been just three or four of us gathered on the windy street corner outside the federal courthouse building here, valiantly holding up our signs that urge the many passing motorists to “Honk 4 Peace”.
Throughout 2006, we saw a steady increase in the numbers of motorists responding. But still, for the most part, there were just between three and seven of us standing there for that one hour per week. (On occcasion I have stood alone, at least for a short time; and several times just two of us have been standing there for 15 minutes or so till someone else came to join us.)
On Thursday last week, there were about 15 people.
Then yesterday, as my doughty co-demonstrator Jane Foster, age 82, and I approached the corner at 4:30 p.m. with our bulky bundle of signs, we were surprised to see people waiting around there for us to come. People whom, for the most part, we didn’t know. “What– ?” I thought to myself as I rushed over to them with the signs. People grabbed them from the pile. Soon, we ran out of signs. People kept coming… Mothers with kids in strollers. Middle-aged couples coming in from out of town. A bunch of people from our Quaker meeting… My dear friend Catherine Peaslee, age 84. (She and Jane have both been stalwart demonstrators over the past year. What incredible women!) I saw people there I hadn’t seen at demonstrations since the big ones we held before the invasion of Iraq– and, as I said, lots of folks I’d never seen before.
The “front” side of our demonstration stretched out, facing the traffic, right along that one corner kerbside outside the courthouse and stretching a long way down sidewalks both ways.
The honking was incredible. Definitely the most ever. We’ve been working hard to “train” the drivers on this for more than three years now. I was so proud of their response yesterday! For sure, everyone who was anywhere near our busy intersection during that hour would have gotten a very strong message… and that includes, probably, the occupants of some 5,000 or 7,000 vehicles driving through. As usual, we got a particularly strong response from African-American drivers, and women. But all sorts of demographics were represented among the honkers yesterday, including the (white, male) drivers of some enormous trucks, people in expensive cars, drivers of old jalopies crammed with a bunch of co-workers going home after a long shift, etc, etc.
Many people wanted just to lean long and hard on their horns. Others did a defiant little thum-thum-a-thum-thum. At times it built up into a broad, glorious concert of varied rhythms and tones.
I must admit that the back side of our demonstration had a bit of a carnival atmosphere as old friends saw each other and went over to hug and say hi. We old-timers had been totally unprepared for this and asked each other in amazement: “What happened?” The general answer was twofold. Number one: the totally unconvincing nature of the President’s speech the night before. Number two: one of our people, Chip Tucker, had actually listed our weekly demonstration on the website of the national organizing group Moveon.org, and several of the new people had seen it there and come along.
In retrospect, I wish we had done more to follow up on and consolidate some of the new energy we saw there. (We should probably try to be a lot more intentional about this next week.)
But it really was an amazing experience… and it certainly helped convince me that Bush has now, fairly definitively, lost the battle for public support of his Iraq war.
Other indicators of this abound. The hearings on Capitol Hill– which are continuing today, and will certainly continue next week– are just riveting. They remind us how great it is, finally, to have a bit of a two-party system back in operation here… I do still want to underline that the opposition to the Bush War is not “merely” partisan. Now, as since the very beginning of this war, there has always been serious opposition to it from some Republicans. But oh, it is so great to see a leadership in the the two houses of congress that now seems prepared to explore, harness, and focus this opposition and– finally– to start to hold the administration accountable.
Today’s papers also have lots of indications that disenchantment with the President and his war policy is strong, deep, and growing. There are some poll results– I can’t immediately find a link– that reportedly show that Bush didn’t even get any tiny blip of an increase in poll numbers with his Wednesday night speech.
And today’s NYT tells us that:

* President Bush’s talk on his new Iraq strategy received a restrained response from soldiers at a Georgia military base.
* Voices in two conservative districts in Pennsylvania swung to an antiwar Democrat in the last election, and continue strongly antiwar.
* Iraq’s tepid response to the U.S. proposal raised questions about whether it would make a good-faith effort to prosecute the new war plan…

Over in the WaPo, meanwhile, Sudarsam Raghavan wrote about the disillusionment of US soldiers on the frontlines, in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad. Including this great quote, from 20-year-old infantryman Daniel Caldwell: “They’re kicking a dead horse here. The Iraqi army can’t stand up on their own.”
(All of that short report from Raghavan is worth reading. In it, he describes going out with this unit on an allegedly “intel-driven” raid on some houses “near the Mahanara School”… Turned out, though, that they’d done their intrusive house-to-house searching in a neighborhood near a completely different school, altogether… Those guys didn’t have a clue where they were, or where they were going… And as for their commander-in-chief??)
But what, you might wonder, is absolutely the weakest of the many weak links in the latest Bush “plan” for Iraq?
That would be its reliance on having won the “commitment” to it of Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki. In Condi’s appearance at the Senate F.R. Committee yesterday, she had made a huge deal about how this was the decisive new element in the new plan.
In Baghdad, however, as John Burns and Sabrina Tavernise noted laconically in this NYT piece,

The Iraqi leader, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, failed to appear at a news conference and avoided any public comment. He left the government’s response to an official spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, who gave what amounted to a backhanded approval of the troop increase and emphasized that Iraqis, not Americans, would set the future course in the war.
Mr. Dabbagh said that the government’s objective was to secure the eventual withdrawal of American troops…
“The plan can be developed according to the needs,” Mr. Dabbagh said. Then he added tartly, “What is suitable for our conditions in Iraq is what we decide, not what others decide for us.”

History, as I said, is in the making.

I guess this were the (poisoned) first fruits of the “New Way Forward” that Bush announced last night? Early this morning, US forces stormed an Iranian governmental rep’s office in the Kurdish capital of Arbil (Erbil), arresting five employees, including diplomats and staff.
Unbelievable. And that was in the capital of Washington’s Kurdish allies, too. Reuters had this, later:

Iraq’s Kurdish regional government on Thursday condemned a U.S. raid on an Iranian government office in the Iraqi city of Arbil as a violation of the region’s sovereignty and of international immunity laws.
In a strongly-worded statement from one of Washington’s closest allies in Iraq, the offices of the Kurdish prime minister and Kurdish president expressed their “concern and condemnation” over the pre-dawn operation and urged the U.S. military to release Iranian staff arrested during the raid.

How to make friends and influence people, huh?

So the House Democratic leaders say they want to put forward their own plan for Iraq as a counter to Bush’s? Here is an excellent plan that I have thought long and hard about that I urge them to use.
(Please note that, unlike the vast majority of the people now producing “plans” for Iraq, I have extensive experience in both Middle East studies and strategic studies, as well as the study of peacemaking. Readers might want to see some of what I was writing back in August 2002, Jan. ’03, Feb. ’03, or April ’03 about the US and Iraq….)
So here is my Three-step program for a US disengagement from Iraq:
(1) The President makes an authoritative public statement in which he announces,

(a) His firm intention to pull all US troops out of Iraq by a date certain, perhaps 4-6 months ahead;
(b) An assurance that the US has no lasting claims on the land or resources of Iraq;
(c) An expression of the US’s goodwill towards the people of Iraq, and its sympathy for all the harms that they have suffered in recent years; and
(d) An invitation to the UN Secretary-General to oversee the process of negotiating all the modalities of the US troop withdrawal, including the formation of an Iraqi negotiating team of his (not the US’s) choice, and the convening of a parallel negotiation that involves Iraq, the US, and all Iraq’s neighbors.

(2) The clock starts ticking on the timetable announced by the President. That fact and the other new diplomatic realities created by his announcement all act together to start transforming the political dynamics within Iraq, the region, and indeed the US, as well. The Iraqi parties and movements all have a powerful incentive to work with each other and the UN for the speedy success of the negotiation over the post-occupation political order. They and the UN also start planning for the many tasks of social, economic, and political reconstruction that the country needs. Another important function for the UN will be to resurrect and re-stress the principle of Iraq’s territorial integrity and national soveriegnty against all the pressures that its powerful neighbors may exert in this fragile period. In these months the US troops in Iraq might come under some form of UN command (as happened– imperfectly, but with ultimate success– during an analogous process of a negotiated troop withdrawal in Namibia, in 1989.) But anyway, the US troops’ main mission in this period will be to organize and start implementing their own orderly departure from the country.
(3) On the date certain the last US troops leave Iraq and there is a handing-over ceremony.
… For those who don’t believe such a program is feasible, I’ll just note that when I was growing up in England in the late 1950s and the 1960s this kind of thing was happening almost every week as our “empire” got dismantled. It truly ain’t rocket science.
Iraq is lucky that it has hundreds of thousands of very well-trained technicians, administrators, and other professionals who can– in the right political circumstances– set to work to rebuild their country. They did that successfully after the end of 1990-91 Gulf War, even in the difficult situation of ongoing UN sanctions. (The US should contribute some “reparations” payments to help Iraq’s next reconstruction program along, but should absolutely not seek any control over it.)
Can Iraqis reach and sustain the kind of internal political entente that will allow an orderly, negotiated US troops withdrawal to take place? If they are convinced they can truly regain their national sovereignty through a process like that outlined above, there is no reason to believe that they can’t. Unlike the way Iraq is portrayed in most US media, there is still an ongoing process of cross-sectarian politics underway in the country, alongside the many, more widely publicized, episodes of sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing.
The US and the rest of the international community have a strong incentive to allow (or even quietly help) Iraqis to reach such a withdrawal-focused entente. Apart from anything else, the lives of 150,000 US Americans come close to depending on it.

So it seems that the Democratic Party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives have finally “gotten” at least a portion of the antiwar message the voters sent last November?
Yesterday, that renowned control freak (but also, very savvy pol) Nancy Pelosi announced that she has abandoned the plans she’d earlier laid to focus the much-touted “first 100 hours” of the new House’s legislative work completely on some long overdue pieces of domestic legislation. Now, as Jonathan Weisman reports in today’s WaPo, the congress’s new leaders,

have concluded that Iraq will share top billing, and they plan on aggressively confronting administration officials this week in a series of hearings.
Pushed by House members who want a quick, tough response to the Iraq strategy President Bush is expected to announce this week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has backed off from her initial assertion that nothing should detract attention from the legislation she hopes to pass in the first 100 hours of House debate.
Late last week, she summoned the chairmen of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, intelligence, Homeland Security, and Oversight and Government Reform committees to plot a series of hearings. On Thursday, Democrats will call Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to defend the war-strategy shift Bush will outline in a nationally televised speech [on Wednesday].
A House Armed Services Committee hearing with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned for Jan. 19 was abruptly moved to this Thursday after consultations with Pelosi. And leadership aides went to work on a response to Bush’s speech that they hope will be delivered on national television after the president’s appearance…
“Iraq is the elephant in the room,” said Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a close ally of Pelosi’s.

Good political antennae there, Ms. Sanchez!
The Senate is also planning Iraq-related hearings this week. The Foreign Relations Committee under new chair Joe Biden will start its hearings Wednesday and will call Rice to testify Thursday. The Armed Services Committee will call Robert Gates in to testify Friday…
Earlier, Democratic leaders had said they would not use the powers they have under the Constitution to cut the funding for the war. But in an interview with CBS talkshow ‘Face the Nation’ yesterday Pelosi made a clear distinction between the funding for the troops that are there now, and those whom Bush is reportedly planning to add to their number in the surge/escalation he is expected to announce on Wednesday.
Pelosi made clear to CBS that she’s not saying a complete ‘No’ to the deployment of the additional troops. But, she said, the President “is going to have to justify [the new deployment] and this is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions.”
Indeed, any degree of real congressional oversight of his war plans is very new for Bush.
There is more caution, however, from Sen. Biden. Over in this WaPo article, Ann Scott Tyson notes that Biden told an NBC talkshow yesterday,

that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to authorize the war but then cap troop levels or cut funding for specific items. Biden said any troop increase would be “a tragic mistake . . . but as a practical matter, there is no way to say, ‘Mr. President, stop.’ ”

Well, Congress could always think about revisiting the terms of that old, October 2002 war-allowing resolution, built as it was on the whole argument about the threat from (the late) Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) WMDs… But of course, we have to take into account that Biden is also– as he confirmed there yesterday– definitely planning to run for president in 2008. So it is quite likely that his vanity in that direction and the political timorousness associated with running for prez may get in the way of him going into any principled, forthright confrontation with Bush over the war…
In general, the Democratic leaders of the senate are (a) in a tighter position from the votes viewpoint, and (b) less energized by the antiwar “Spririt of November 2006” than their House colleagues. (Especially since only one-third of the Senators have to go to their home districts and engage fully with the voters in election races in any given election year; though all the members of the House have to do that every time.)
But still, this looks like an epoch-making week ahead in Washington.