Category: US foreign policy

Bush brings forth a mouse

The Prez, having beaten away the hands that Baker, Hamilton, and and Co. extended to him from their lifeboat, then determined that he would find his own way to swim to safety through the increasingly perilous seas of his Iraq policy.
He “conferred”. He “deliberated”. He tried– without much success– to look “presidential” and “in control” in several tightly controlled public appearances. He wrestled “mightily” with the issues…
And he brought forth–
This pathetic, mewling little mouse of a suggestion:

    As he puts the finishing touches on his revised Iraq plan, President Bush is considering new economic initiatives to go along with a possible increase in troops to help stabilize the country, according to officials familiar with the administration’s review.
    Among the steps being considered are short-term jobs and loan programs aimed at winning back the waning local support for the U.S. presence in Iraq…

That, from the WaPo’s Robin Wright and Michael Abramowitz, in Crawford with the Prez. (Where also, Cindy Sheehan just got arrested for sitting down on a public road.)
There are still, apparently, some murmurings of criticism– or at least, concern– from the top military people about the efficacy of sending in the “surge” (or let’s more realistically say, “cosmetic surge-ette”) of additional troops that the Prez still for some reason seems wedded to.
Wright and Abramowitz write:

    One idea gaining currency in the administration is to send between 15,000 and 30,000 additional troops to Iraq, at least on a temporary basis, to help improve security, but there are questions among senior military leaders about how effective this move would be.
    The Pentagon has pressed for political and economic plans to complement such a possible surge in troops.

And the president has responded! Namely, he’s coming close to endorsing some totally ridiculous– and by no means new– political and economic “initiatives”.

    The political component of the emerging Bush package would set up benchmarks for long-overdue steps, such as amending the constitution to help address the objections of Iraq’s Sunni minority and dismantling 23 predominantly Shiite militias…
    Some U.S. officials think an economic package may be the most promising element of a revised strategy… The economic package now on the table focuses on three elements, and is separate from the long-term jobs-creation program being promoted by the U.S. military… One element, traditionally linked to a counterinsurgency strategy, is to follow up any military sweep with a short-term work program that would immediately hire people in the neighborhood to clear up trash or do other small civil-affairs jobs.
    This project would begin within hours rather than days of a military operation and would help signal a return to normalcy. It might also help wean young unemployed Iraqi men from the militias or prevent them from joining any of the armed factions that are fueling Iraq’s escalating sectarian strife.
    The second part would be a micro-loan program…
    The third part of the package, which has been developed in part by the Treasury Department, would review dormant state-owned industries to try and determine which ones are economically viable and worth reopening….

Does anybody in Bubble-boy’s personal “Green Zone” in Crawford dare tell him how insultingly penny-ante and stupid all these proposals are? Does anyone there dare tell him how truly terrible the living situation now is in Iraq?
All these economic proposals may, just possibly, have made some sense if they’d been implemented, say, back in May and June of 2003. (Instead of which, that was the time when Bremer came in and dismantled the army and the state industries, throwing millions of Iraqi breadwinners into the streets.) Back then, I remember several earnest discussions in which Americans debated whether “economic” or “politics” or “security” issues should take precedence in Iraq. But the Bush people paid serious attention to none of these spheres.
Then– as now– it is politics that needs to be looked at, as the highest priority. And in particular, the politics of national reconciliation within Iraq, allied to the politics of finding a way to negotiate a speedy and total US withdrawal.
Based on those essential elements, the Iraqis themselves can doubtless, sooner or later, figure out a way to deal with issues of public security, and with reviving a national economy wrecked by 12 years of US-UK-patrolled sanctions and nearly four years of US-UK direct misrule. The Bushites’ proposal that– after every military operation they launch against Iraqi neighborhoods– they wade in “within hours” with their dollar bills and pay Iraqi young men to sweep up the carnage from the streets… and that that will help “win” their hearts and minds??? … All that is insulting nonsense.
Almost unbelievable.
Oh wait. It’s the Bush presidential team we’re talking about here. Not unbelievable, at all.

CSM column on why the US needs to talk with Iran, Syria

Thursday I have this column in the CSM. (Also here.)
Basically I’m arguing that it’s not a matter of noblesse oblige or doing anyone any favors. It’s a matter of pure cool necessity for the US to be able to talk to– especially– Iran, but also Syria and all of Iraq’s other neighbors, as it pulls the US troops out of Iraq.
The nub of the argument there:

    A glance at a map will show why any “responsible” drawdown of US troops from Iraq requires Iran’s cooperation. Iran has the longest border with Iraq and dominates Iraq’s heavily populated east. In a crisis, it could easily close the sea lanes through which most US military supplies reach Iraq. It has longstanding relations with a broad range of Iraqi political groups.
    It’s important to recognize – as the ISG also clearly did – that the US has no viable option either for any sustained increase in the US troop strength in Iraq or even for maintaining the current US deployment for very much longer. Both the sentiments of US voters and the constraining overall size of the US military prevent that.
    There has to be a drawdown. The only question is this: Will it start sooner and be relatively orderly, or will it be delayed and run an increasing risk of being chaotic? And yes, the scenarios now foreseeable do include – if the delay is too long – a humiliating emergency withdrawal reminiscent of the US evacuation from Saigon in 1975 and Allied forces’ flight from Dunkirk in 1940.
    Either way – whether the administration is able to fashion a policy that allows for a relatively speedy and orderly drawdown, or the drawdown is delayed and more like Dunkirk – it will need to engage in significant coordination with Iran if it is to avoid a debacle…

Further to that argument, I would add here that anyone who is now arguing against close US coordination on these metters with Iran and Syria, on whatever flimsy grounds, should be held responsible for all the additional deaths– of US soldiers as well as of Iraqis– that will occur for as long as the US withdrawal is thereby delayed.
(On a generally similar note, I see the WaPo’s Richard Cohen– who for long was a strong supporter of the war but a few months ago “reluctantly” came out as a critic– is today arguing that: “As with Vietnam, the ending is inevitable. We will get out, and the only question that remains is whether we get out with 3,000 dead or 4,000 or 5,000. At some point the American people will not countenance, and Congress will not support, a war that cannot be won. Just how many lives will be wasted in what we all know is a wasted effort is about the only question still left on the table. Realism dictates as few as possible.”)

Cordesman declares a US defeat in Iraq

Tony Cordesman is a cautious man who is an experienced and conseravative analyst of military affairs. Well regarded inside most of the professional military and across the strategic-studies community, he has done generally solid analytical work on Middle Eastern issues for decades.
Today, in a comment buried at the bottom of an NYT op-ed on Afghanistan, he makes this statement:

    In Iraq, the failure of the United States and the allies to honestly assess problems in the field, be realistic about needs, create effective long-term aid and force-development plans, and emphasize governance over services may well have brought defeat.

“May well have”… It’s an interesting locution, don’t you think? I read it as Tony saying that, on balance, he thinks there probably already has been a US deafeat in Iraq…
In which case, all that would remain would be– what? To clean up what can be cleaned? To save what can be saved? To extricate what US forces can be safely extricated at this point?
I’ve looked over a few other recent Cordesman pronunciamentos on Iraq. (Still figuring out the utility of my ‘Delicious’ account… For what it’s worth, here is the content of my newly minted ‘cordesman’ tag there.)
So on Dec. 10, he was quoted in a Newsday editorial as saying:

    “The Iraqi government is weak as much because of U.S. action as [because of] Iraq’s inherent problems.” Cordesman says Washington is acting like a bull in a china shop, blaming the people who own the shop, the Iraqis, for not being able to put the pieces of china back together.

That editorial, btw, was titled: The game is over: Bush’s dream of spreading democracy is in tatters. If he doesn’t pull back now, he could instead spread war across the Mideast.
Good for those wise people at Newsday!
On Dec. 10, too, Cordesman had his own op-ed in The Baltimore Sun. In it he wrote:

    The principal recommendations of the Iraq Study Group are very unlikely to produce success… The key problem is that events may be spiraling out of control, and the key to success is not outside action but Iraqi action. As a result, the most important single sentence in the Iraq Study Group’s executive summary is its introductory caveat – “if the Iraqi government moves forward with national reconciliation.”
    Almost any reasonable mix of recommendations would work if Iraqi society as a whole moved forward with reconciliation. But the report does not make workable suggestions for creating or inducing such action.
    Simply calling for a weak and divided Iraqi government to act in the face of all of the forces tearing Iraq apart is almost feckless.

Let me say that I completely agree with his diagnosis that, inside Iraq, the single most important key to the country’s survival and to the restoration of some semblance of wellbing for its people is national reconciliation. However, I do also think there’s something the US needs to do, from outside, which is to work with all other world powers to as much as possible “hold the ring” around Iraq so that the Iraqis themselves can get on with the national reconciliation without having their country torn apart through the interference (armed or otherwise) of all of its rapacious and/or terrified neighbors.
Hence the central importance of Recommendation 2 of the ISG report, which reads:

    The goals of the diplomatic offensive as it relates to regional players should be to:
    i. Support the unity and territorial integrity of Iraq.
    ii. Stop destabilizing interventions and actions by Iraq’s neighbors.
    iii. Secure Iraq’s borders, including the use of joint patrols with neighboring countries.
    iv. Prevent the expansion of the instability and conflict beyond Iraq’s borders…

But anyway, that’s a bit of a digression. Mainly I wanted to see if Tony was, as of Dec. 10, declaring a US defeat in Iraq or not. I don’t think he did. To say “events may be spiraling out of control” is a far less strong statement than to say that the US’s actions in Iraq “may well have brought defeat.”
On Dec. 11, Cordesman was quoted on this ABC News site as saying, “events in Iraq are moving so quickly that it may be Iraq that dictates the future — and not U.S. policy.”
H’mm. I agree with that– up to a point. But really, there is still a LOT the US could do to make it easier or harder for the Iraqis to reach national reconciliation, and to optimize the chances for some return of stability to the country as they do so.
That “holding the external ring” task I mentioned above is one thing they can do.
Stopping all these silly tactics of trying to split the UIA and build an anti-Sadr coalition on the most unprincipled of grounds is another.
Exiting Iraq without having all guns blazing is another…
Anyway, another key point here. I noted above that today’s op-ed by Cordesman in the NYT, with which I led this post, was primarily about Afghanistan, and it was in that context that he had mentioned– oh, just in passing, really– that the US “may well have” already lost in Iraq.
His whole op-ed there is of course extremely important. It builds directly on the kind of analysis that British Army Chief of Staff Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt went public with back in early October.
Back on October 20, reflecting on Dannatt’s analysis, I wrote this JWN post, titled Choice time: Iraq or Afghanistan? My analysis there still looks pretty good to me, nearly two months later. But Cordesman is now telling us he thinks there is no such choice there to be made.
Here btw are my (admittedly small) Delicious collections for Dannatt and for Afghanistan.

ISG reaction from Reidar Visser

    Reidar Visser has written some very good analysis of the Baker-Hamilton– Iraq Study group– report. It’s posted here on his historiae.org website. But I’m also going to put it up here so we can then all discuss it. ~HC

The Iraq Study Group: Regionalisation Not Balkanisation
By Reidar Visser (http://historiae.org)
6 December 2006
In a remarkable rejection of partitionist winds that have blown through America over the past year, the Iraq Study Group (ISG) in its report of 6 December 2006 recommended a final big push for the Iraqi national reconciliation process, with the collective effort of regional powers as a potential catalyst.
As far as state structure issues are concerned, partition (or any kind of unconstitutional federalisation, whether “from above” by Iraqi elite politicians or on the basis of foreign advice) was apparently never taken seriously by the ISG. Already prior to the release of the report, a few members of the ISG working groups had complained to the press that they had felt marginalised during the process and that their proposals never truly came on the agenda. The report itself rather brusquely dismisses the prospect of “devolution to three regions” (p. 43), citing arguments that for once are almost identical to those of the Bush administration: practical infeasibility and the dangers of greater regional chaos. Elsewhere, the report mostly shuns the federalisation question, with the implicit message that they envisage this process to stay on track according to the constitution: outside Kurdistan, federal decentralisation is optional not mandatory, and if it is to be done, it will start by initiatives “from below” in the Iraqi governorates, not by Baghdad politicians or by outsiders with “plans” for Iraq.
Instead, the report advocates a serious attempt to get the national reconciliation process back on track, especially as regards re-inclusion of the Sunnis. To facilitate this, it proposes new initiatives on several levels. Perhaps most significantly, there are proposals to work for greater regional momentum that could be conducive to a more peaceful Iraq. The ISG advocates the creation of an “international support group” for Iraq that would include neighbouring states, which in a collective forum might be able to transcend some of their narrow interests linked to their particular protégées inside Iraq. Importantly, active steps to progress in the wider Arab–Israeli conflict and the Palestine issue are recognised as a central pillar for improving the regional atmosphere.
The ISG also suggests that the Iraqi government itself is not doing enough to drive the national reconciliation effort forward. It focuses on the need for rapprochement with the marginalised Sunnis, and introduces several new ideas about how to achieve that. These include a suggestion for United Nations support in the constitutional revision process, a rather outspoken criticism of the current Iraqi constitution’s allotment of undiscovered “future” oil fields to the regions instead of to the central government (apparently the criticism is also directed against regional control of the oil sector as such), international arbitration over Kirkuk, and a delay of the Kirkuk referendum (pp. 65–66.) There is also a more general “talk-to-everyone-but-al-Qaida” attitude throughout the report.
Many of these proposals are quite radical in that they explicitly challenge the current version of the Iraqi constitution. But at the same time they also serve as alternatives that could receive consideration in the constitutional review process. Some of these suggestions have earlier been floated in international NGOs and by figures working in the United Nations system. It is likely that the driving forces behind the 2005 constitution (chiefly the two big Kurdish parties and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI) will feel threatened by some of the recommendations in the report. On the other hand, these suggestions should appeal to a large silent majority of Iraqi nationalists of both Shiite and Sunni backgrounds, as well as to regional powers worried about Iraqi decentralisation spinning out of control.
In the current situation, regionalisation and multilateralism generally come across as good ideas, although the United States should not underestimate the desire of regional powers to keep them engaged, mired down in Iraq. The proposed overtures to regional powers in turn reflect a failure of United States policy in the Middle East in two areas. Firstly, inside Iraq, it relates to a communications problem. The ISG report explicitly acknowledges this (p. 14), asserting that the United States is “unable” to talk to the most important Shiite figure (the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani), and “does not talk” to another important political leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. This has led to sole reliance on the Shiite party that best understands how to deal with Washington – SCIRI – which happens to be the party with the most long-standing and systematic ties to Iran, and which is also the author of the Shiite federalism proposals that most infuriates the Sunnis. But SCIRI account only for some 23% of the deputies within the big pro-Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), and their elevation to a pre-eminent contact point reflects a failure on the part of Washington to engage other partners among the Shiites. This has created some remarkable contradictions in US policy. There was something distinctly Trojan about the way in which pro-Iranian SCIRI leader Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim was invited to Washington for high-level talks only days after a leaked memo by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had advocated a robust strengthening of US forces along the border with Iran to physically protect Iraq against Iranian influences.
The second issue that has precipitated a turn to regional powers relates to overall US policy in the region. Importantly, the ISG recognises the inter-relationships between Iraq and broader regional issues. Until there is a minimum of consistency in the US approach to democracy and human rights issues across different countries in the Middle East, it will remain unable to conduct an ideological foreign policy and will rely on compromises with regional states. This also affects the situation in Iraq, where many parties are reluctant to talk to the United States precisely because they are unconvinced about Washington’s overall vision for the region. Until the US becomes more energetic in solving the Arab–Israeli conflict – chiefly by speeding up the process towards an independent Palestinian state within borders approximating the pre-1967 situation and with an honourable settlement for the 1948 refugees – this problem will remain.
Copyright © 2006 historiae.org
This document may be freely reproduced as long as http://historiae.org is credited as the source.

Bush and new buddy Hakim

And yes, when I wrote the last post I was quite aware that SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim met Bush at the White House today. I just couldn’t figure how to fit that into the rest of the post there.
I am absolutely befuddled as to what the heck Bush thinks he is doing with this meeting. (Probably not as befuddled as Bush himself… “Who is this dude with a turban? Is he from Eye-Ran or where?”)
This BBC report tells us,

    The Associated Press news agency quotes Mr Bush as saying he told Mr Hakim “the US supports his work and the work of the prime minister to unify the country”.
    “I told his eminence that I was proud of the courage of the Iraqi people. I told him that we’re not satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq.”

This is such gobbledygook. Hakim has done very little indeed to “unify the country”– and it is SCIRI’s militia, the Badr Brigades, that has committed the very worst kind of atrocities against Iraqi Sunnis.
As I’ve remarked before, the Bushites (and most of the US media) seem intent on painting Moqtada Sadr as the main sectarian divider in Iraq, while generally overlooking the many ghastly crimes of sectarian hatred committed by the Badr Brigades. But Moqtada has, by all accounts, always been much more intent than anyone in SCIRI/Badr on keeping his lines of communication and dialogue open with Iraqi Sunnis. (Even though on several occasions he has apparently been unable to maintain the requisite level of internal discipline in this regard over all his scores of thousands of followers.)
And now, most recently, we have seen Moqtada working with Saleh al-Mutlak and others to build a new, cross-sectarian, national coalition.
Well anyway, Bush’s Iraq “policy” is in a completely direction-less, flailing-around tailspin. They grasp at straws. I suppose that this particular Hakim-related straw, whenever it was set up, was aimed at “sending a message to Maliki” to the effect that if he wouldn’t shape up then the Bushites had another favored candidate for PM waiting in the wings..
It is all pathetic, all tragic, and signifies nothing. (Except, so long as the US forces remain in Iraq, continued suffering for the Iraqi people and continued losses and traumas for the men and women of the US armed forces…. Regarding which, I have one main comment: “Draft the Bush twins!”)

The destructive self-referentiality of the hegemon

Here’s what I notice– not only from Rumsfeld, Hadley, and the rest of the Bushites, but also in the vast preponderance of what passes for public “discussion” among members of the US policy and media elite: In practically all these statements and discussions the “problem” of Iraq is presented overwhlemingly as one that it is the job of Americans to solve, on their own.
Most notable by its absence from this discussion: any mention of the UN having any significant role to play.
(I’m still not sure whether the Baker-Hamilton report will even mention the UN– no word yet of its doing so, which means any mention there is likely quite tangential. We’ll know for sure on Wednesday.)
One very welcome item of news today is that the White House has now decided not to try to renew John Bolton’s term as ambassador there… That, however, is only the very start of the massive re-organization of US-UN relations that needs to take place. And it needs to take place now, as an integral part of the attempt to find a “least-bad” outcome for Iraqis q in conjunction with an orderly– or let’s say non-chaotic– US exit from Iraq.
Back on Nov. 10, when I sketched out my best, considered suggestion for what needs to be done regarding Iraq (a.k.a. the ‘Namibia Plan’), I wrote that

    The UN will be necessary to provide a cover of some international legitimacy for whatever the security regime on the ground inside Iraq will be– and to help broker both the intra-Iraqi political compact that needs to be won and the international dimensions of the agreement over the whole transformation of the security situation in the region…

I also wrote that, in the context of planning for an orderly and speedy US withdrawal from Iraq the US urgently needs to engage diplomatically with Iran and with all of Iraq’s other neighbors. The Baker-Hamilton report reportedly is going to make this suggestion. But under what possible auspices can such talks be convened? Here again, the UN is in a unique position to be able to do that convening.
Three final important points on the important topic of US-UN relations:
(1) It’s very unfortunate that, in these crucial weeks for Iraq, the UN is in a possibly lengthy situation of leadership transition. Present Sec-Gen Kofi Annan has already entered his lame duck phase. His term ends December 31, and he has already started going around making the kinds of courtesy public appearances that denote a man who has little power left to wield and little energy left with which to wield it.
Annan did make impassioned references to Iraq’s plight in his recent interview with the BBC. But that cri de coeur was not allied to any policy push to try to reconfigure the UN’s relations with Washington. Indeed, the interview might even have made things worse by ruffling feathers inside an Iraq whose people already harbor a longheld distrust of the UN. (That stems principally from the role the UN was forced to play in enforcing the horrendously lethal sanctions regime from 1991 through 2003… Of course, it was mainly the vindictiveness of the US-UK governments that forced the UN into doing that; but Iraqis’ bitterness towards the UN is no less real, and is certainly a complicating factor.)
Meanwhile, the incoming South Korean Sec-Gen, Ban Ki-Moon, has been keeping an extremely low profile. Probably, that’s appropriate. But it does raise some fears that he might need a long learning curve after he comes into office January 1, before he can start to figure out how to do anything useful in reconfiguring UN-US relations.
Always remembering, of course, that the UN Sec-Gen is never an independent actor. He is, in essence, the servant of the Security Council. So it is the balance of forces on the SC that provides the boundaries of whatever the Sec-Gen is able to do… It takes a wily, well-connected, and self-confident diplomat in the Sec-Gen’s chair to be able to deal with that. No indication yet on whether Mr. Ban has what it takes…
(2) It’s crucial to remember that– back in those dim, distant days when the war in Iraq was still about something for Rumsfeld and Cheney– one of the things it was crucially about was Washington’s very muscular reassertion of its “right” to act unilaterally wherever and whenever it wanted to in the world. So any significant drawdown of US power inside Iraq, such as I have long argued for, will necessarily have to involve a renegotiation of Washington’s relations with the rest of the world; and a renegotiation of the US relationship with the UN will clearly have to be part of that.
Quite simply stated, any negotiated US withdrawal from Iraq, or indeed any significant drawdown of US troops from there that is negotiated, will represent a humiliating end for the Bushites’ whole doctrine of muscular unilateralism. (And quite appropriately so.)
There is no form of orderly withdrawal from Iraq that is not negotiated; and there is no negotiation that I can envisage that would not also, in a major way, involve the UN. Who else does anyone think could convene the needed kinds of mutliple negotiations at both the intra-Iraqi and the region-wide levels? NATO? OSCE? The Charlottesville Gardening Club?
No, only the UN– with all its flaws and failings– has the international legitimacy and global reach that are needed for this job.
(3) The continued self-referentiality of the discussions among US pols and the US commentatoriat, as described above, are a cause for real concern. The fact that so few of these guys (and yes, nearly all of them are “guys”, though a handful of them now come in skin tones of a tasteful brown) are even talking about the UN having any kind of a role in helping to de-escalate and transform the situation in Iraq makes me think they really haven’t yet gotten beyond the traditional assumptions about US superiority in the world.
Public opinion surveys inside the US routinely show that the US public is significantly more internationalist in outlook than most US politicians seem to be. (Though yes, there is always a small-ish lump of the US public that’s determinedly isolationist.) But inside the hot-house politics of Washington, far too many pols, and their pals in the commentatoriat, seem to forget their constituencies and seek to have the US strut across the world stage as though it owns the whole damn’ thing. Inside Washington DC, too, a pro-Israel lobby that determinedly opposes the UN being given any real role in the world and staunchly defends the idea of unilateral military action on its account also has a strong influence on the way US pols and commentators think about the UN and about world affairs in general… (The same lobby that helped the US get into the whole tragic mess in Iraq, indeed.)
So we who seek a sustainable de-escalation in Iraq that involves an orderly withdrawal of US troops from there and the emergence of a capable and legitimate form of government within the country– make that, “within both countries”– do also need to challenge this whole self-referential and hegemonist mindset within Washington, head-on. The US needs the United Nations today, more than ever before, and we US citizens need to understand that our place in the world truly is not that of any kind of “indispensable nation” but of “one nation among many”– and a nation that is, as we all now know, far from being either the most virtuous or the most capable.
Strengthen the UN. Iraq, the US, and the world have no workable alternative. Let’s not avoid the subject any longer.

Ramazani on engaging Iran

One month ago, I featured here an essay by my mentor, R.K. Ramazani, on how the Bush Administration was misreading Iran’s nuclear policy. His latest essay in today’s Daily Progress challenges the “chorus of hostile diplomatic rhetoric against Iran (that) threatens to drown out” the much anticipated Baker-Hamilton Commission recommendation “to engage Iran to assist the stablization of Iraq.”
I provide the full text below for jwn readers to consider and discuss. (The Payvand Iran news service also carries it here.)
Drawing upon his 54 years of chronicling US-Iran relations, the Professor finds the present US-Iran impasse “grim, but not hopeless.”
Ramazani’s references to the impact of American “evangelicals” on the making of US Iran policy were catalyzed by a recent depressing New York Times article. (I will soon post a longer personal reflection on the dangers of such “holy warrior” messianism….)
Yet on the bright side, I especially appreciate Ramazani’s invocation of cultural traditions in both Iran and the United States that might yet be marshalled to muster the courage for both parties to talk seriously.
Where else can we find the immortal sage words of Sa’di, Washington, and… Reagan called upon to buttress the cause of constructive dialogue?
As I’ve written here repeatedly, its time to get on with it.
(Ramazani essay below:)

Continue reading “Ramazani on engaging Iran”

Baker-Hamilton: Too little, too late

I have been scrying all the best news reports I can find regarding what can credibly be known about the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. Based on past journalistic performance, this account by the WaPo’s Peter Baker and Thomas Ricks is probably as good as any. It tracks fairly well with this one by the LA Times’s Paul Richter.
The ISG is due to present its report in public on Wednesday, Dec, 6. Group co-chairs Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton apparently set great stock by having the group emerge with a single set of recommendations. Maybe that’s the reason the recommendations as reported (leaked, really) so far don’t go nearly far enough.
What seems to be known about the recommendations is that they are extremely cautious on the issue of troop withdrawals; and I’ve also seen no mention yet of the ISG pushing for a significant shift of responsibility and authority towards the UN, which I still think is a sine qua non for finessing the tricky politics and diplomacy of an orderly US withdrawal.
The boldest thing that does still seem to be in the report is some kind of a recommendation that the administration needs to talk directly with Syria and Iran, about Iraq. Baker and Ricks’s article did not make this sound like a firm recommendation. They wrote only, “Among other things, the commission considered proposals to reach out to Iran and Syria and to convene a regional conference to bring all of Iraq’s neighbors into the process of stabilizing the country.”
Richter and the NYT’s David Sanger, by contrast, described the talk-to-Syria-&-Iran recommendation as more of a done deal (at the ISG level). Richter even wrote, “Although the report’s prescription for a troop drawdown attracted attention this week, the 10 panel members consider a recommendation for a new diplomatic offensive, including talks with Iran and Syria, to be its most important.”
Regarding the military dimensions of the ISG ‘s recommendations, Baker and Ricks wrote that the ISG,

    plans to recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis…
    The call to pull out combat brigades by early 2008 would be more a conditional goal than a firm timetable, predicated on the assumption that circumstances on the ground would permit it, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the commission’s report will not be released until next week. But panel members concluded that it is vital to set a target to put pressure on Iraqi leaders to do more to assume responsibility for the security of their country.

(They note that, “The choice of early 2008 as a goal could also, intentionally or not, change the nature of the debate over the war at the height of the U.S. presidential primary season.”)
They give these further details of the military plan:

    Pulling out combat units would not mean the end of the U.S. military involvement in Iraq, which could continue in a different form for years. The withdrawal would be partially offset by an influx of advisers, trainers and embedded troops. The number of such troops now stands at roughly 5,000 and should be quadrupled to about 20,000, the group’s plan says, according to a source. The commission envisions leaving at least several thousand quick-strike U.S. combat soldiers to protect all those other American troops.
    Although it was not clear how many U.S. troops would be left in Iraq by 2008, some people knowledgeable about the commission’s deliberations have said that it might be possible to reduce the force of 140,000 to half by then. “There’ll still be a presence there that will be significant just because of the nature of embedded forces,” said one of the sources familiar with the commission’s report.

This military plan looks to me to be doomed to failure– primarily because neither the ISG nor the government that it is seeking to advise has any kind of realistic plan for transforming the currently destructive imbroglio of dysfunctional political relations among the players inside Iraq (including the multiple Iraqi parties along with, of course, the US occupiers) into a more constructive and workable set of relations.
The idea that the role of US military “advisers” is a completely a-political, technical role seems to be a completely unexamined assumption there and in much of the current US discussion on this issue. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Being deeply entangled– or as they now cutely phrase it, “embedded”– with Iraqi troops down to the small-unit level ensures a deepler entanglement of vulnerable US soldiers in the heart of Iraqi politics than ever before. This, at a time when core issues of authority, legitimacy, and political power inside Iraq are still being deeply, and very violently, contested… Which is a way of saying, yes, that Iraq is already in a civil war.
So the ISG is proposing “embedding” US soldiers as advisors with precisely which set of participants in this civil war? Perhaps all of them?
What an ignorant, fundamentally a-historical idea this is. (Sorry, Jim and Lee, I just needed to get that off my chest.)
One of the several big failures of nerve of the ISG was that it resisted all calls that it recommend that the Bushites publicly declare a deadline for the completion of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Heck, I haven’t even seen any mention of the idea that the President should a public declaration that “the US has no lasting claim upon the territory or resources of Iraq and no intention of maintaining a long-term military presence there.”

    And talking of the presidential declarations made by Bush, I have to say the one he made yesterday, in which he smirkingly disparaged the idea that “there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq” to be one of the most wrongheaded he’s made for a long time now. It’s right up there “bring ’em on!”
    He doesn’t want a “graceful exit”? What does he think the alternative is: No exit at all? No, Mr. George W. Bush, the alternative to a “graceful” (or, as I prefer to describe it, “orderly”) US exit from Iraq is a disorderly, perhaps even catastrophically chaotic US exit.
    So please stop disparaging the idea of a graceful exit. If there’s a catastrophe in Iraq in the months ahead and the death-rates for US service members suddenly spiral out of control, you’ll wish desperately that you had never been so dismissive of it. Attaining any kind of an orderly exit will be harder to do (and exact a higher political cost from the US) with each week that you continue to delay it.

Anyway, as noted above, the report of the ISG when it is finally released looks set to be a big disappointment. The only possible silver lining there is that, though they seem to have ditched nearly all the other principles of good sense in their recommendations– in the interests of playing to a political lowest-common-denominator on Capitol Hill that is Democratic as much as it is Republican– at least it looks as though there’s a good chance the ISG will be sticking firm with the recommendation to talk to Iran and Syria.
That is no small matter. Indeed, it will be a particularly important position for these politically well-connected and widely respected public figures to hold onto, at a time when the broad campaign to continue demonizing Iran and Syria– and possibly even launching a military attack against one or both of them– still continues. Once Baker, Hamilton, and their colleagues all say in unison that the US should be talking to Iran and Syria that should, I believe, change the framework of the debate over that issue inside this country.
Let’s hope so.
But then, we need to go back to pushing even harder for a full and speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. (If the drivers who came by our intersection at the peace demo yesterday are anything to judge by, that demand is still out there, and now being more strongly and angrily expressed by the US public than ever. Get with the program, Dems!)

The ‘Hadley memo’ on Maliki

The NYT’s Michael Gordon got an apparent “scoop” yesterday by bring given the text (also here) of a classified memo that Bush’s National Security Advisor, Steve Hadley, wrote on November 8, summing up his evaluation of the Iraqi political scene and in particular the capabilities of Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki.
The evaluation was based on a face-to-face meeting that Hadley had with Maliki in Baghdad October 30, and on briefings he was given by US military leaders in Baghdad. It presumably formed an important part of the briefing package that Bush received prior to his meeting with Maliki in Jordan, which is planned to start within the next couple of hours.
In an accompanying article, Gordon wrote of the Nov. 8 memo that:

    An administration official made a copy of the document available to a New York Times reporter seeking information on the administration’s policy review. The Times read and transcribed the memo.

At one point in the memo’s rambling and often unintentionally hilarious text it says of Maliki:

    His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change. But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.

Someone should of course investigate the nature of the “deal” under which Gordon was shown the text of the memo. Has he become wholly a “useful idiot” for certain factions inside the White House? And if so, which? And in the complex dance of seduction and the exchange of favors that journalism of his kind entails, what did Gordon agree to do for his benefactor inside the White House that “won” him the favor of this leak?
But I’m in no position to investigate those issues further. The text of the memo itself seems, for a number of reasons including the apparently embarrassed reaction to its publication from Tony Snow, to have been “authentic”. (Unlike, perhaps, the report that Michael Gordon and Dexter Filkins published yesterday to the effect that one of their Iraqi reporters last summer interviewed a “mid-level Mahdi Army commander who told him that his militia had sent 300 fighters to Lebanon to fight alongside Hezbollah. Yesterday, I wrote that that piece of reporting had had some real credibility… But now, who knows? Maybe that was a constructed or exaggerated “quid” in return for the “quo” of the Hadley memo leaking? Obviously, I don’t know.)
So anyway, do go and read the memo. It is written in the earnest style of someone still struggling to understand the realities of Iraqi society and politics as well as the “responsibilities” of a distant imperial power. It is mind-bogglingly formless and repetitive, and reveals a mind reduced to clutching wildly at any straw that’s available.
Here are some of the aspects of it I find most revealing:
(1) Hadley evidently judged, as of Nov 8, that US Ambassador Zal Khalilzad was doing a lousy job: “We should be willing to… Encourage Zal [Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador] to move into the background and let Maliki take more credit for positive developments…” Guess what, today the WaPo’s Al Kamen reported the rumor that Khalilzad will shortly be moved from Baghdad, and his place there will be taken by yet another US viceroy– this time, Ryan Crocker, currently Ambassador to Pakistan…
(2) It spoke frankly about the existence of “the current four-brigade gap in Baghdad”.
(3) There are some passages that explicitly urge that the US should pay Maliki off with hard cash if he goes along with the Bushites’ scheme… The US should, Hadley writes, “Consider monetary support to moderate groups that have been seeking to break with larger, more sectarian parties, as well as to support Maliki himself as he declares himself the leader of his bloc and risks his position within Dawa and the Sadrists; and Provide Maliki with more resources to help build a nonsectarian national movement… ”
… Well, I guess these kinds of thing go on all the time in the conduct of internatinal affairs. But it is really depressing to see not only how bullying and imperialistic this top-level adviser is trying to be, but also how very clueless and intellectually bankrupt he is. This makes the situation even more dangerous.