Category: US foreign policy

It is excellent news that the Bushites have finally been forced— by their own puppet government in Baghdad, no less– to sit down at the same table with representatives of Iraq and all its neighbors, including Iran and Syria.
That WaPo report says this:

Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee,”We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region.”
The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.
…Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has long advocated a regional conference, though originally it was meant to include only Iraq’s neighbors. The administration decided in recent weeks to attend the conference, but in an effort to avoid the spotlight it ensured that it will be joined at the table in March by other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, U.S. officials said. The foreign ministers’ meeting in April will be further expanded to include representatives of the Group of Eight industrialized countries.
It was decided “relatively recently” to include the permanent Security Council members, and the G-8 was invited “as of last night,” a senior administration official said. Rice’s announcement appeared intended to assuage congressional concerns about the administration’s Iraq policy, which have threatened to derail passage of a nearly $100 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq.
Administration officials noted that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell attended a regional conference on Iraq in 2004, where at one point he found himself seated next to the Iranian foreign minister and made idle chitchat. But that meeting took place in a different context, before Iran had started uranium enrichment and before Syria was implicated in the killing of a Lebanese political figure — two reasons the administration has frequently cited for limited diplomatic engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

Of course these meetings won’t be the end of the sorry tale of the US’s extremely destructive involvement in Iraq. But they point the way to possible process in which a steady, orderly– and let’s hope complete and speedy!– US withdrawal from Iraq might occur.

(with thanks to Donald A. Weadon, Jr. for his comments – below))
Heeee’s back. No, not Virgil Goode, (!) but Ahmad Chalabi. Friday’s Wall Street Journal cover headline proclaims that the American “Surge” has returned Chalabi to the “Center Stage” of Iraqi politics.
I wonder how many coffee cups spilled over this one.
Chalabi has become so infamous that his very name deserves a Webster’s dictionary entry. Just as one would not want one’s reputation “Borked” or “Swift-boated,” one would not want to have the “Chalabi” pulled over one’s eyes.

If we observe (correctly) that the neocons wish to anoint an Iranian “Chalabi,” it will be understood that we mean a “fraud,” a “slippery character” who speaketh, as one line of my ancestors might say, “with forked tongue.” An Iranian Chalabi would be an Iranian expatriate who will prattle nicely in English about “democracy” and Israel, will prophecy that an American military overthrow of the Iranian government will be easy and popular, and will boast of a huge personal following inside Iran.
An “Iranian Chalabi” would also have influential MSM columnists publishing glowing tributes to his “leadership” credentials. In case anyone is paying attention (as we all should be), the current neocon frontrunner candidate for “liberating” Iran is Amir Abbas Fakhravar.

JWN regulars over the past four years will recall that Chalabi has long been at the top of Helena’s least favored list, and she has appropriately taken apart (in)famous colleagues like Jim Hoagland (“Hoagie”) and Judith Miller for their willing roles in promoting Chalabi’s frauds. (Type in “Chalabi” on the jwn search feature, and you’ll get a feast of Chalabi bad memories.)
Chalabi’s star status in Washington deteriorated along with America’s misadventure in Iraq, as it devolved from “mission accomplished” to “central front in the war on ter-er.” Over the past year or so, key neocons and even intelligence veteran Pat Lang intimated that Chalabi must have been an Iranian double agent all along. After all, the logic went, how could somebody that nefarious, unscrupulous, and prone to dissimulation have been anything but Iranian connected? Besides, he visits Iran. (as if that proves anything – in itself.)
I was never convinced of this argument. That the Iranians might have endeavored to connect to Chalabi is hardly suprising, as the Iranians have every “rational” interest in trying to have ties to as many Iraqi poltiical players as possible, from Talibani to Sadr to Hakim, to Maleki, to yes, Chalabi.
The Iranians, by the way, were similar disposed to assorted Afghan players in the late 1990’s – amid Iran’s severely strained relations with the Taliban. I recall even warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar finding exile in Iran…. even as it was clear Iran was less than thrilled to have him. (He was expelled in early 2003.)
Still, the bizarre, if tantalizing suggestion that Chalabi was a deep cover Iranian agent back when he was being hawked so rapturously by Miller, Hoagland,(Bernard) Lewis, Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, etc. is too “good” to be believable…. no? Were Miller & Hoagie that blind? Well, the possibility at least made for delicious irony…. :-}
As the neocons and Chalabi went through bitter reciminations and public mutual finger pointing, Chalabi’s political stature appeared to hit rock bottom when his (American favored) list of candidates failed to win a single seat in the December 2005 elections for Iraq’s Parliament.
Phoenix….
Alas, reports of Chalabi’s political demise were premature.
Today’s Journal reports he’s back at the center stage of Iraqi politics, having been appointed by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to serve as “chairman” of a “popular committee to mobilize public support…” for the surge. Astonishingly, Chalabi has been installed as the top “liaison,” the “indispensable link” between the counter-insurgency and the people.
Excerpts of the WSJ report follow below. Yet first, here’s a brilliantly sardonic take on Chalabi’s rising from the ashes, from Donald A. Weadon, Jr. — a distinguished international lawyer, and friend in Washington. Don first contributed this comment on “peace, harmony, & bunny rabbits” to the closed “Gulf 2000 forum.” I re-post here, with Don’s permission and his edits:

“Like a mischievous cat, Ahmad Chalabi bears close watching as he runs through his nine lives.
After dodging a bullet in Jordan for massive bank fraud, he ran to the United States to parlay his intellect and his guile into a close connection to a band of lost intellectuals with grandiose plans, the neoconservatives.
While it is difficult in retrospect to imagine a University of Chicago professor who, being followed by an InterPol warrant for his arrest, comes to Washington D.C. as the darling of a cabal of folks who want to unleash their mindless vision of harmony by way of the sword in the Middle East and provides them the werewithal to give it a try at the public’s expense — well, that’s what happened.
Feeding the neocon butterflies who hovered about the early Bush 41 White House the nectar of fraudulent defectors with fabulous tales of secret WMD shenanigans, mobile nerve gas vans and the like to bolster their grandiose fantasies, he seduced the Administration and Congress into feeding him tens of millions of dollars a year for his most bogus Iraq National Congress and then even more national treasure into a Defense Department petri dish — a building next to the Pentagon under Wolfowitz’s patronage where AC toiled to create a government in exile, ready to “plug in” the minute Saddam was toppled. No wonder Rumsfeld didn’t want to know about “Day 2” onwards — he, too, had been bamboozled by AC, the celestial fraudster, into believing that all one had to do was to topple Saddam and plug him and his coterie in, and all Americans could just go home, and AC would lead the newest, friendliest client state for America smack dab in the middle of the Middle East. Peace, harmony and bunny rabbits.

Continue reading “Iraq’s Phoenix Rising Again?”

Preface (note – this is Scott writing).
Lest any jwn readers think my satire of CNN’s 3 General Stooges incorrectly reflects a general hostility towards all things military, I note only that my father once dreamed of a military career, and my son is now living that dream (my nightmare) as an officer in the “Virginia” Guard.
Like Helena, I too have closely followed strategic writings of this and that military think tank, sometimes even with great admiration. General William Odom is a case in point. Odom was an upperclassman at West Point when my late father was a plebe there. I think Dad would have admired General Odom’s steely nerve, his Eisenhower-like capacity to speak truth when his colleagues and allies were koolaid-drunk, and best of all, his track record of being right on target, especially when it wasn’t popular with the prevailing winds.
In Sunday’s Post, Odom again is out with an iconoclastic blast that says what many in Washington think, but don’t yet have the courage to say. Helena has already made reference to the essay via the “Delicious” sidebar, so here’s my quick highlighting – for the record!
For Odom, “victory is not an option.”

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush’s illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Of course, the Administration lately has been trying to re-define, without admitting, what “victory” means. But Odom is holding up the original standard and pointing out what should have been obvious even before going in — that democracy can’t be imposed at the barrel of a gun, and even it magically does take root, a democratic Iraq will not be predisposed to be pro-American or pro-Israel. These are the two “truths” that American’s need to face:

There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question:
First, the assumption that the United States could create a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq defies just about everything known by professional students of the topic. Of the more than 40 democracies created since World War II, fewer than 10 can be considered truly “constitutional” — meaning that their domestic order is protected by a broadly accepted rule of law, and has survived for at least a generation. None is a country with Arabic and Muslim political cultures. None has deep sectarian and ethnic fissures like those in Iraq.

Strangely, American political scientists whose business it is to know these things have been irresponsibly quiet. In the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion, neoconservative agitators shouted insults at anyone who dared to mention the many findings of academic research on how democracies evolve. They also ignored our own struggles over two centuries to create the democracy Americans enjoy today. Somehow Iraqis are now expected to create a constitutional order in a country with no conditions favoring it….

I beg to quibble with the general on the point about American political scientists being “irresponsibly quiet.” I rather think the problem was with the power of those neoconservative agitators – who pressured producers and opinion page editors (even at the once venerable CSMonitor or the PBS NewsHour) to avoid the contributions of major, non-beltway, think-tank academics. It’s happening again in the madness to the rush to pick a war with Iran!

Second, to expect any Iraqi leader who can hold his country together to be pro-American, or to share American goals, is to abandon common sense. It took the United States more than a century to get over its hostility toward British occupation. (In 1914, a majority of the public favored supporting Germany against Britain.) Every month of the U.S. occupation, polls have recorded Iraqis’ rising animosity toward the United States.

Odom notes that these realities are becoming more widely recognized, even as Congress thus far hasn’t had the courage to act on them for fear of four “pernicious” myths – in need of the dismantling Odom memorably provides:

Continue reading “Odom: “Victory is Not an Option””