Category: US foreign policy

I’ve spent more time today wondering why, exactly, Phil Zelikow yesterday chose to resign from what looked like his dream job as Condi Rice’s “Counsellor”, and to do so in a way that was abrupt and woefully inadequately explained.
I have wondered, too, about the timing and other aspects of the peace overture that Israeli PM Olmert made to the Palestinians yesterday. Again, it looked fairly abrupt and ill-prepared, and was not discernibly part of any broader peace move in the region.
And I’ve wondered about why Bush, Cheney, and Rice all suddenly decided to start criss-crossing the Sunni Arab world in these particular days…
And then, over at this post on Badger’s “Missing Links” blog, I read his rendering of an article that Abdel-Bari Atwan has in Al-Quds al-Arabi… (scroll down some on Badger’s post there; for various reasons I don’t find the Zaman piece he quotes from at the top there particularly credible or interesting)… And I started to see that there is indeed a possible “single cause” that could explain all three of the above, slightly strange developments…
And that would be, that Zelikow might have learned (or deduced) that Bush and Olmert have reached agreement on a plan for the speedy launch of a military attack on Iran.
Yes, I know, I know, I know: no such attack can even possibly be said to “make any sense”, either militarily or politically. (That’s why, if he had learned of it, the intelligent realist Zelikow would have resigned.)
I also recall, with some pride, that in all the months leading up to the recent midterm elections, I publicly dismissed the fears that so many other commentators were voicing, that the Bushites might launch an attack on Iran as part of their pre-election campaigning.
I was right on that.
And I still think it would be a crazy, crazy, and very destructive thing to do. But Bush has fewer domestic political constraints against doing something extremely foolhardy now than he had before the election. He himself will, of course, never be running for re-election, and now it’s a long two years till any of his GOP comrades have to run again… And anyway, nowadays many of the Democrats coming into the majority in the Congress have already been baying for blood against Iran. So if a military strike is launched against Iran in the upcoming period, when that venture turns into the quite predictable and inevitable regionwide (and possibly global) debacle and when, as is extremely likely, the lives of hundreds of US service people in Iraq would end up being put at direct risk because of this attack, the Democrats will already be there in the majority positions on Capitol Hill and, with most of them having also joined the clamor for an attack against Iran, they will be be forced to take some of the responsibility for that aftermath.
But why the apparent hurry around whatever it is the Bushites seem currently to be planning?
Well, GOP “adult” Jim Baker and Democratic “adult” Lee Hamilton are about to come out with the recommendations of their Iraq Study Group. Which almost certainly will include a strong recommendation that the US needs to include both Syria and Iran in the diplomacy over how to de-escalate the situation inside Iraq. The Israelis absolutely hate that idea. So, I’m sure, does the chief asset whom the hardline Israelis still have as an ally within the Bush administration, Elliott Abrams. Abrams, remember, is now the number-two person in the National Security Council and in charge of all the NSC’s work on the Middle east, except Iraq. (So yes, that would indeed include Iran, and all those big Sunni Arab states… and Israel.)
In this article in today’s Newsweek, Abrams is described as perhaps being the neocons’ “best hope for keeping President Bush onboard”. The Newsweek writers also quote an un-named senior administration official as saying, “Bush has enormous regard for him.” (And as I recalled earlier today, there had been some reports recently that Zelikow had been angling for Abrams’ present position. But even his good friend and long-time collaborator Condi Rice failed to win it for him. So Bush must really like having Abrams there.)
… So maybe all the haste with which Olmert and the Bushites are acting these days has to do with them trying to pre-empt the recommendations that the ISG are expected to come out with? After all, once the relatively sage recommendations of the wise adults of both parties are out there publicly on the table, and framing the national debate, it would be a lot harder for Bush and Olmert to launch a military adventure against Iran, unconstrained by political realities.
(Bush and Olmert would have to create some kind of an immediate “pretext” for the attack. But doing that need not be hard to arrange.)
So maybe all the present visits by Bush and his high-level acolytes to Sunni countries are related not so much to planning regarding Iraq, but to some final advance planning for a military strike against Iran that may be fairly imminent?
In the event that such a plan is afoot, it is not clear to me whether the US or Israel (or both?) would actually launch the strike. But either way, getting overflight agreements and other arrangements worked out in advance with some key, large Arab states in locations like, for example, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, would be an extremely helpful part of the planning.
And whether Israel or the US (or both) do go ahead and launch any kind of a military strike against Iran, I repeat: the affair will absolutely certainly turn out very badly for the US and for US troops and allies throughout the whole region.
… Gosh, I certainly hope I’m wrong on this one. But many pieces of evidence do, suddenly, seem to be coming together in this very worrying direction.

The NYT’s Helene Cooper has a well-reported but very worrying piece in today’s paper in which she writes:

As President Bush and his top diplomats try to halt the downward spiral in Iraq and Lebanon, they seem intent on their strategy of talking only to Arab friends, despite increasing calls inside and outside the administration for them to reach out to Iran and Syria as well.

She noted that there have been

signs of strain within the administration, particularly at the State Department, where career Foreign Service officials have argued for increased dialogue with Iran and Syria to try to stem the violence in Iraq and Lebanon. “We’ve got a mess on our hands,” said a senior State Department official, who, like others discussing the subject, spoke on the condition of anonymity…

Speicifically, she wrote,

the United States wants Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt to work to drive a wedge between the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has been behind many of the Shiite reprisal attacks in Iraq, a senior administration official said. That would require getting the predominantly Sunni Arab nations to work to get moderate Sunni Iraqis to support Mr. Maliki, a Shiite. That would theoretically give Mr. Maliki the political strength necessary to take on Mr. Sadr’s Shiite militias.
“There’s been some discussion about whether you just try to deal first with the Sunni insurgency, but that would mean being seen to be taking just one side of the fight, which would not be acceptable,” the administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic practice.

In this context, I think “dealing with” the Sunni insurgency means “trying to put it down”, rather than dealing diplomatically with it (though I do wish Cooper had been a clearer on this, as the two meanings are almost directly opposed to each other.)
But however you read that phrase, the anonymous US diplomat’s implied claim that the policy he was describing would not be seen as “taking just one side of the fight” is quite risible.
Basically, they are proposing trying to split the Shiite community while politically “capturing” one portion of it and holding it in a supposed alliance with a Sunni Iraqi bloc that is allied with Washington’s Sunni Arab stooges in the region? This is not “one-sided”???
Anyway, it is highly unlikely to “work”, at any level. Who or what do they think Nouri al-Maliki is? Vidkun Quisling? “Chief” Gatsha Buthelezi? Marshal Petain? Mustafa Dudeen?
Well, he just possibly might be a potentially “quisling” type of individual on a rank with any of the above. (And it is possible that while in office he may have stashed away enough US aid dollars in his private accounts in Switzerland that he might now feel tempted to go along with this crazy scheme. I don’t know.) But he already saw, when he got stoned during his visit to Sadr City a couple of days ago, that many in the large and sprawling pro-Sadrist movement in Iraq have extreme distrust of him at the present.
More importantly, though, Maliki is not just a disembodied US stooge. He’s the nominee and top representative in the Iraqi government of a longstanding and authentic Iraqi political movement called the Daawa Party, which has been in a relatively stable alliance with the Sadrists for some time now. If he goes along with whatever anti-Sadrist scheme the Bushites have in mind for him, then it’s very unlikely that he could take more than a handful of the Daawa people with him. And then, what use is he to the Americans anyway??
It’s a lunatic scheme. Indeed, since it promises to bring nothing bit further division and political polarization to Iraq’s long-battered people, it is not just lunatic but criminally so.
This latest mad attempt to sow division among Iraq’s people is just, in a sense, the “argumentum ad absurdum” of the “divide and rule” policy that Martin Indyk and others have been urging the Bushites to pursue in Iraq since April of 2003. And it shows the essential absurdity and impossibility of the Bushites being able to achieve anything even partially constructive in Iraq at this late stage of its pursuit of an imperial scheme there.
The only alternative? A deep, deep breath, and a decision to find a way to end the imperial scheme.
.. And at a broader level, too, I would note that if the Bushites are setting themselves up to be the force that regulates in some micro-managing way the broader relationship between “Shiites” and “Sunnis” throughout the whole Middle East, then they are also setting themselves up for a much broader failure and regional conflagration. In fact, as we have seen in Iraq, the only way they have been able to “regulate” Sunni-Shiite relations there has had the–unintended or, quite frequently, fully intended– consequence of exacerbating tensions between the two groups (while US lives and interests have also thereby been placed in extreme danger.) Are there any members of Middle Eastern societies today who want to see the whole region go up in flames of violence, sectarianism, and fear, Iraq-style?
Only possibly some hardliners in Israel– in alliance with their good White House friend Elliot Abrams– might be content to see that outcome.
But I very much doubt that the rulers of Jordan or Egypt will feel comfortable getting dragged into supporting a US policy in Iraq that (1) shows no chance at all of succeeding inside Iraq, and indeed will only make things worse there, and (2) also threatens to sow further seeds of sectarianism and unctrollable fitna throughout the whole region.
The alternative policy that I have argued consistently for, here and elsewhere, is one that seeks above all the de-escalation of tensions and fear, a broad campaign to win commitments to resolve differences and address concerns through negotiations and other nonviolent means, and the enrolment of all of Iraq’s neighbors, along with the United Nations, in an attempt to resolve the many urgent concerns in Iraq and to ease the ability of the US to undertake an orderly and speedy exit from Iraq.

Bush administration eminence grise Henry Kissinger told the BBC in an interview aired today that a US military victory in Iraq is now impossible.
To be precise, he said:

“If you mean by ‘military victory,’ an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don’t believe that is possible.”

He also said the Bush administration needs to enter into a dialogue with all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran, in order to make any “progress” at all in the region.
At the same time, though, he warned against a rapid withdrawal of US troops… Or at least I think that’s what he was saying. All I have so far is the AP account of the interview, linked to above, which seems to conflate the idea of a rapid withdrawal of US troops with “a dramatic collapse of Iraq”. Personally, I think that’s a big mistake. It is, after all, the presence of the present US troop structure there that has led to the dramatic collapse the country has seen in the past three years.
But anyway, the fact that Henry is now urging a significant change of course– including talking with Iran and the other neighbors– means that it is now much, much more likely that this is the course the Bushites will follow. Let’s hope that’s soon. And let’s hope the new, more diplomatically inclusive policy comes close to the approach I sketched out here, nine days ago.
And from Henry, shall we have a little contrition, self-reflection, and perhaps even a mea culpa for having been so wrong about Iraq for so long? I hold my breath for it…

Avigdor Leiberman, Israel’s newly appointed “Minister for Strategic Threats” has very productively been launching more than a few of them. Today, in a single speech, he:

* urged Israel to take back full control of Gaza’s border with Egypt,
* called for the assassination of entire (elected into office) Hamas leadership,
* dismissed elected PA President Mahmoud Abbas as too ineffectual to be worth dealing with, and
* dismissed the entire post-Oslo peace process, ditto.

In Israel, Meretz Party chairman Yossi Beilin has denounced Lieberman’s statements and called on PM Olmert to dismiss him from office.
But what about the attitude expressed toward Lieberman’s statements by US policymakers? So my question to the men and women in the US administration, and the members of the US Congress is this:
How much longer will you use the tax monies and the legitimacy given you by the US citizenry to fund and give strong political support to a government that contains an individual so damaging to the peoples of the Middle East and the security of key US interests in the region?

This is exactly the kind of one-sided US policy action that needs to change. Bush’s ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, today vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have:

* condemned Israel’s recent military actions in Gaza,
* called on Israel to withdraw its troops from Gaza,
* condemned the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel,
* called on the Palestinian Authority to take “immediate and sustained action” to end the rocket fire,
* created “an international mechanism for the protection of civilians” in the area,
* requested that Kofi Annan establish a fact-finding mission to investigate Wednesday’s attack on Palestinian civilians in Gaza and report back within 30 days, and
* called for the resumption of international efforts to achieve peace by the so-called Quartet.

Bolton reportedly told the council that the resolution “does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
??
The first draft of the resolution was submitted by council member Qatar, in the wake of the ghastly incident Wednesday night in which a sustained Israeli artillery attack against a residential complex in Beit Hanoun killed 18 of the Palestinian civilians who lived there, many of them children and women. Over the two days that followed, the wording was subjected to intense negotiation and renegotiation, and the draft that was finally submitted for a vote this afternoon won a yes vote from ten of the council’s 15 members.
Only the US voted against. But of course, given the SC’s bizarre system of vetoes, that vote was sufficient to quash the entire initiative.
Four council members abstained: Britain, Denmark, Japan, and Slovakia.
France, which has voted with the US on a numnber of recent issues, voted for the resolution as finally submitted. That NYT report linked to above noted that,

Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the ambassador of France, said he felt the final negotiated text was “a balanced one” and would have sent the right message to both Israel and the Palestinians. He added, “I hope that the fact this text has not been adopted will not renew tensions on the ground.”

It is hard to see, on the basis of what that NYT account tells us about the text, why the Bush administration would object so strongly to it that it cast a veto. It is especially hard to see why they would do this at a time when US soldiers and their supply-lines are strung precariously throughout a Middle East that has long been extremely resentful of the one-sided help that the US has continued to provide to Israel, at every level, despite Israel’s many transgressions against international law and its assaults on the lives, interests, dignity, and hopes of its Arab neighbors.
Is this administration really ready to put US service members and US citizens’ interests at additional risk because of its slavish support for “Israel, right or wrong”? I thought this was what a majority of us here in the US voted against, just on Tuesday.

This afternoon, Sen. George Allen undertook possibly the most gracious act of his career and made a very civil, realistic speech conceding victory in our state’s hard-fought Senatorial election to Democratic challenger (and now Senator-elect) Jim Webb.
Since Conrad Burns in Montana has also now conceded to his Democratic chellenger there, it is finally official: the Democrats have won the Senate as well as the House!!
Rumsfeld has already, as we know, been tossed from the GOP car as it screeches for the exits. The next casualty of the GOP defeat will most like be the controversial (idoelogical and acerbic) Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton. Bolton was appointed a couple of years back only as a not-requiring-confirmation “recess appointment” and need Senate confirmation now for his term to be renewed. But Sen. Joe Biden, expected to come in in January as chair of the Senate Foreign relatins Committee today said, “I think John Bolton’s going nowhere.”
In addition, Democratic control of the senate is good news for all of us who’ve been worrying about the possibility of yet another Republican getting appointed to the Supreme Court. For example Justice John Paul Stevens, a long-time liberal voice on the bench, is now 86 years old and may need replacing within the next two years… Fewer worries about that, as from today…
Back to foreign affairs, though, let’s hope that the rethinking of policy that results from Tuesday’s election goes far beyond merely axing Bolton. Beyond that, the country’s policymakers need to seriously rtethink the terms and nature of our relationships with the UN and, more broadly, with the whole of the rest of the world.
There have been some inklings of that happening, at least partially, from the “leaks” that have emenated so far from the “Iraq Study Group.” (Of which, of course, the new nominee as SecDef, Robert Gates, has been a member.)
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ISG that,

if the Dems win control of one or both houses of Congress come November 7 then winning bipartisan support for “the Baker plan” will become much, much more important. So any negotiations that go on among the ISG’s members over the content of its final report will have to wait till after the post-election balance of political power is known…

Doubtless, that will now start happening. I actually think it’s excellent that this vehicle for reforming the policy is already in place; that its members have already done most of their homework; and that they were chosen to be people with such strong support in the leaderships of both parties.
We the pro-peace, pro-human-equality citizenry will need to keep up our pressure for the kinds of fairminded, peaceable policies we want to see enacted… Today, I went along to our local peace demonstrationas usual. We still got some great response from the drivers-by….
Just one final note. Our local pro-peace Congressional cnadidate Al Weed sadly did not win election. On Tuesday, I did spend 40 minutes or so offering Democratic stickers to people exiting our local polling place (with the idea they should continue wearing them prominently on their lapels or whatever for the rest of the day.) Most people at our polling place were happy to take them! But there were a significant number of folks who took the “Webb” sticker while politely declining the “Weed” sticker. Too bad. Al is a good and wise man.
Our other bit of really sad news is that Virginians voted by quite a wide margin to embed into our state constitution some language that is extremely hostile not only to gay couples but also to any unmarried couples who might seek to conclude any form of civil contract that “imitates” the effects of marriage. Virginia already has laws that do this; but embedding this provision into the constitution is an even more serious business, and will make it much harder to pass laws friendly to civil unions in the future.
We have among our friends several gay couples who maintain relationships of great integrity, mutual support, love, and joy. Some of them have children in their families and have been giving them wonderful, strong homes. But the state is so hostile to these families, and threatenes them at every turn. I often fear for them; and now, the votes cast on this issue by my fellow Virginians reminds me yet again what a gay-hostile state we live in. So the news from Virginia this week is by no means all good…

The catastrophe that is the Bush administration’s “intervention” in Iraq is now clearly revealed for all to see, and there is currently a massive mêlée of neocons and other architects of that policy (including JWN’s longtime nemesis, Ahmed Chalabi) scrambling to pass off the blame for it to somebody else… anybody else at all.
Of course, their protestations of non-responsibility are inherently non-credible. They are even less credible than all the accusations they pumped up and circulated in the pre-war period about Saddam Hussein’s possessions of WMDs, his links to Al Qaeda, etc… which is to say they have no credibility at all.
But still, it is a wonderful sight to see these men– and yes, they all are men– scrambling to distance themselves from the sinking ship that is Bush’s Iraq “policy”, trying to grab for themselves any lifebelts of self-justifcation that might be around (though there aren’t many), while wildly pointing fingers of blame all around and savagely beating away the hands of any of their own one-time comrades also trying to grab onto the lifebelts they now claim for themselves.
At one point, I used to think we should tread gently and graciously with former participants in the Bush-war venture, calmly welcoming any expression of self-doubt they might feel moved to voice while not pointing too many fingers of blame of our own at those misguided souls.
I am almost past that now. The scale of the suffering they have inflicted on Iraqis (and along the way, also on Palestinians… let’s not forget that) is too large now for me to feel much motivated to stick to the niceties. I am feeling increasingly happy to wallow in the enjoyment of the spectator sport now being played out by and amongst these men before our very eyes…
Just in the past couple of days we have had:
Chalabi blaming Wolfowitz:

“The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge…

This is in a piece by Dexter Filkins that will be in Sunday’s NYT Magazine (Nov. 5). The text should be more freely available on Sunday, I think.
Btw, this piece also includes some intriguing vignettes from a trip Chalabi made to Iran in November 2005. Filkins writes about, “the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there.” After crossing a land border into Iran with Chalabi, Filkins discovers an executive jet waiting nearby that whisks Chalabi and the entourage to Teheran where Chala is almost immediately taken into a lengthy meeting with Iran’s national security adviser, Ali Larijani… And the next morning he has a meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…
Filkins quotes former CIA operative Robert Baer and former DIA analyst Pat Lang as describing Chala as, basically, an Iranian asset:

“He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections – he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials.

Well, enough about Chala (for now.) because we also have, in a great piece rushed out under the title “Neo Culpa” by Vanity Fair’s David Rose, the following great tidbits:
Frank Gaffney, David Frum, and Michael Rubin blaming Bush himself.
Here’s Frum, the Canadian who as Bush’s speechwriter invented the whole concept of “axis of evil”:

“I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. (!) And that is the root of, maybe, everything.”

Kenneth ‘cake-walk’ Adelman blaming Rumsfeld:

“I’ve worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I’ve been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I’m very, very fond of him, but I’m crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don’t know. He certainly fooled me.”

Oh, let’s not forget Rummy’s expensive new mansion in St. Michael’s, Maryland, while we’re at it. How much are these various pieces of real estate worth between them? I think that many people wronged by Rumsfeld in Iraq and elsewhere could bring a nice little civil suit against him and strip him off all his ghastly, ill-gotten gains pretty quickly…
And Rose tells us we also have:
Richard Perle blaming Condi Rice:

“[Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly.”

For most of these years, of course, Rice was the national security adviser; and after she went over to the State Department her former deputy Stephen Hadley took over at the NSC…
Michael Ledeen blaming the women in the White House:

“Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes.”

H’mmm. This is a new angle. Last thing I knew, Dick Cheney was probably the single most powerful person in the White House. Is Ledeen trying to tell us that Unca Dick is, secretly, yet another of the “women who are in love with the president”? Strange world…
Adelman also blaming Tenet, Franks, and Bremer:

“The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There’s no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq.”

But not him, Kenny Adelman, oh no… Of course, you can get a great behind-the-scenes view of the role that Adelman and all these neocons– and Chalabi– played in not only pumping up the threat of war but also determining the way it was fought, if you read Bob Woodward’s latest book…
Richard Perle blaming everyone except the neocons:

“Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

… So yes, all in all, it is excellent sport to see the great falling-out among all these miscreants who took the US into the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is particularly excellent that all these revelations– from the Woodward book on, and including all these latest revelations– have been put into the public domain before rather than after the now-imminent midterm election.
I recognize that it makes very little difference indeed at this point to the traumataized and war-shattered survivors of the US-induced violence in Iraq whether any of these once-preening warmongers now feels regret or not about the role he had played in instigating, promoting, and executing the invasion. It might make a difference to Iraqis over time, however. For if we in the US who have always opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq can now take advantage of these latest revelations to gain increased political power and influence inside our own country, then hopefully the policies that emerge from Washington over the months ahead will be less damaging to Iraqis than they might otherwise have been.
As I have long argued, the best– or let us say at this stage, the least bad– policy that the US can pursue is one that works for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that is speedy, orderly, complete, and generous.
Maybe this latest round of revelations will make it more possible to attain such a policy over the months ahead?