Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 119 – Info, analysis, discussion

Conway does a Dannatt (sort of)

At the Pentagon yesterday, the Commandant of the US Marine Corps established an unequivocal link in a meeting with journalists between the need to draw down quickly in (at least some parts of) Iraq and the manpower needs of the US military in Afghanistan.
Here’s how the WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson reported it:

who would be better employed fighting in Afghanistan

Conway– and also, we have to assume, the chiefs of staff of the other US armed services, and indeed, the political echelon that sits above them– thus seems to have arrived at the same judgment that former British Chief of the General Staff Sir Mark Dannatt arrived at expressed publicly in October 2006, when he said (a) that the “war” in Iraq was not winnable by the western military occupiers and (b) that the situation in Afghanistan needed western troops much more urgently than that in Afghanistan.
To be sure, Conway is not saying flat-out, as Dannatt did, that the US-led western coalition forces can’t win in Iraq… But he was saying very clearly that US military resources need to be significantly shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan.
For some time now, I have been arguing that that is the main dynamic behind the shifting balance between the US and Iraqi leaderships in Iraq. The Iraqis still have an internal political system marked by a lot of incoherence and internal disagreement. But they are all (except the Kurds) fairly strongly united around a fundamentally Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation stand, and since– ahem, did anyone in Washington notice this?– it is actually the Iraqis’ country there, their willpower to fight for it and the cost they are prepared to pay to regain control over it is far, far higher than the willpower of the US to maintain its control, and the cost the US citizenry is prepared to pay to do that.
So the US drawdown/exit from Iraq is not (yet) on the order of the humiliating rush of the last US people off the roof of the Saigon Embassy… but it is sliding some distance toward that. For their part, many Iraqis– even among those strongly opposed to the US– might continue for quite some time yet to be content to allow the US’s drawdown/exit to be non-humiliating… And I am sure that right through November 4, the Bush administration will continue to be happy to pay out large amounts of money to a wide variety of different forces in Iraq to ensure that no big humiliation of the US occurs before that day.
Of course, a formal negotiation of the exit would be far preferable to this approach of sort of slithering out while claiming that everything’s going really well there… as Gen. Conway was. And at a certain point in the slithering out, negotiating the remainder of the process with all relevant parties inside and outside Iraq will become absolutely necessary if the whole Gulf region is not to go up in flames.
Baker-Hamilton report, anyone?
Meanwhile, it is evident that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating very seriously indeed in recent weeks and months. Key dimensions of the governance crisis there, nearly seven years after the US invaded and started occupying the country, are that

Paul Rogers, who has watched the Afghan/Pakistani situation very carefully for many years now, has a good description of the current situation in Afghanistan, here. It’s titled Afghanistan: on the cliff-edge.
Back in early August I wrote a column in the The Christian Science Monitor arguing that, to win a decent outcome in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US would need to involve the UN Security Council, at the highest levels, in the decisionmaking and thorny peace diplomacy both countries require. So far, the Bush administration has shown few signs of doing that. Conway and some others in the decisionmaking echelons may have started to favor a troop-drawdown in Iraq, but regarding Afghanistan, just about everyone in the policy elite in Washington still continues to act as though simply throwing more US troops into the mix there will do the trick.
In good part, that point of view is buttressed by the argument that it was the “surge” in troop numbers that “succeeded” in Iraq, so therefore a similar approach should be used in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, the surge in US troop numbers made only a small contribution (if any) to the reduction in violence witnessed over recent months. It has been political developments among the Iraqis themselves, and the cautious, wily policy pursued by big neighbor Iran that have made the bigger difference.
A “surge” in the numbers of US and NATO troops is even less likely to do any good in Afghanistan. Indeed, if the additional troops sent there continue to act in the same gung-ho, shoot-from-the-air way the existing troops have acted, then the situation can only be expected to become a lot worse.
Nevertheless, the increasing recognition among US policymakers that in Iraq, at least, more US troops are not going to solve the problem is a good first step.

China gets Iraq oil deal

The WaPo’s Amit Paley has just reported that the Iraqi government has signed a $3 billion oil deal with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. that’s described as “much more lucrative”– I’m assuming for China?– than the “technical contracts” it has been negotiating with western countries for a long time, but thus far unsuccessfully.
Paley quoted Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry as saying that the deal with the Chinese oil company was concluded before the other deals both because it built on a slightly different kind of contract that Iraq had been negotiating with CNPC prior to the US invasion and “to rebut concerns that the U.S. government was manipulating the process to benefit American corporations.”
Interesting. I wonder if that means the deals with the US companies will be finalized soon? Maybe– or maybe not. Let’s wait and see.
But either way, China’s entry into this economic relationship with Iraq– which parallels its recent conclusion of a large mining agreement with Afghanistan– indicates that some significant things are happening in the balance among the world’s big powers.
I mean, really. Given that China holds, now, more than $500 billion worth of US T-bills, if Beijing decides it wants access to oil in Iraq or other mineral resources in Afghanistan, do you think the US is in much position to keep them locked out?
Paley adds that the deal with China “still requires the approval of the Iraqi cabinet, which the Oil Ministry hopes will come as early as next week.”

Rest-of-world saving US from recession?

Time was, the US economy dominated the world economy to such a degree that economists would quip that if the US economy sneezed the rest of the world would catch a cold.
Things have changed.
While the US is still a huge player in the world economy, its total (ppp*) GDP is now less than that of the European Union. This great chart, that compares the GDP’s of the EU and its constituent states with those of the US and its constituent states, tells us that in 2006, the ppp GDP of the EU was $13.3 trillion, while that of the US was $13.1 trn. And this PDF chart from the World Bank tells us that in 2007 the ppp GDP of the US was $13.8 trn (21.2% of the world total of $65.2 trn) while that of China was $7.1 trn (10.9% of the world total.)
Recently, the veteran international economist Fred Bergsten has started talking about the “reverse coupling” of the economies of the US and of the rest of the world. At last January’s Davos World Economic Forum he defined that as occurring “when the others will help keep the US from falling too far.”
On July 1, Bergsten published a Financial Times op-ed titled Trade has saved America from recession. In it, he argued that “reverse coupling” had already started to occur.
He wrote,

prevented recession in the US

He explains what has been happening thus:

the continued robust growth of the world economy.

His conclusion is this:

shifts in global economic power

paying huge dividends to all its participants, most dramatically during this episode to the US

Bergsten is far from being alone among economists and policymakers in seeing the fortunate, “reverse coupling” effect that the economies of the non-US 95% of humanity have been having on the US economy.
In this piece of reporting from Washington (HT: Nazia Vasi of 2point6billion), Xinhua’s Liu Hong quotes Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, as noting that China “is now contributing more to global demand than the United States.”
Liu cites IMF data showing that China “has accounted for about one-quarter of global growth over the past five years. Altogether “the BRICs”– that is, Brazil, Russia, India, and China– “have accounted for almost half of global growth and all the emerging and developing economies together for about two-thirds, compared with about half in the 1970s.”
Liu also quotes Bergsten as saying, “”China now plays a decisive role in the world economy as indicated by its dominant role in global economic growth.”
Well, evidently, China– whose population is four times that of the US– will still have to grow about sevenfold for its per-capita GDP to reach that of the US’s citizens. (If we’re committed to the equality of all human persons, we would want to see that happen– or to see the US doing some quite plausible “leveling down.” But if we’re committed to the survival of humanity on this fragile planet of ours, we need to work fast and hard to find ways for this to happen without carbon-emitting us all into overheated oblivion.) But for Americans who have long taken pride in their (our) country’s role as the motor for world economic growth it is important and interesting to recognize that right now, our economic world wellbeing is dependent on the economic performance of others around the world, not just on our own.
This gives us a lot of new ways to think about economic globalization. I completely understand the concerns of those in the US who worry about job-losses in our country when their functions are shifted to lower-paid workers elsewhere. And I am also very concerned about the horrendously destructive effects that the strongly pro-free-trade policies pursued by the “Washington consensus” over the past 20 years have had on entire societies and nations that are much more vulnerable than we are– in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or Asia. The heartless, greedy way that economic globalization has been pursued in the past 20 years has inflicted huge damage on hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
But it has also had some benefits for world humanity. Crucially, the degree of economic entwinement that has been built up among the world’s major power blocs has made open warfare among them less likely– certainly a huge benefit to us all.
Also, there are many measures that can be taken even within the context of the world’s current, strongly pro-trade economic structure that can (a) straighten out the extremely unfair “tilts” in the world economic playing field that the rich nations have maintained in it– to their own clear advantage– for many years now, and (b) start to build into the world economic order the kinds of social protections for the world’s most vulnerable that nation-states have nearly always had for their own most poor and vulnerable.
Why not? If we all plan together and pull together on this, it is enitirely doable. To put it bluntly, there is actually quite enough basic material “stuff” (including food) to go around in the world today, and to offer all the world’s people the hope of a decent, meaningful life and the development of their capabilities… Provided we can start to really see each other– all around the world– as worthy of our care and concern.
(I note that when modern-day academic economics was launched by John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and others in the British empiricist school, it was pursued as a sub-branch of “moral philosophy,” that is, of philosophical ethics. We certainly need to honor and return to those roots as we ponder the challenges the world economy faces today.)
As I blogged here earlier this week, the present era is one of the “return of geography” to many dimensions of the world order that some people– neoliberals and others– have long assumed could be kept effortlessly “global.” And yes, the rise in fuel prices will undoubtedly change some aspects of what happens in the world economy. But this is far from signaling a retreat to isolationism and autarky in international economics. Russia, China, the EU, the US, and other international actors all strongly need each other, at the economic level, if their own economies are to survive and prosper.
And right now, we here in the US should just be very glad that the world trade system our country has dominated for the past 63 years has now grown strong enough to help cushion or support our own economy from effects of its gross mismanagement of recent years. Thank you, world!
—-
* “Ppp” is a unit called “Purchasing power parity dollars” that allows international comparisons of things like GDP among countries with different price structures. It’s not perfect but I think it gives a better picture than raw $ figures for GDP.

Russia and the world

Yesterday, the Russian government recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In today’s FT, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev explained why. (The two main house organs of British capitalism are so much more open-minded and coolly realistic than their spluttering Wall Street counterpart. Can you imagine the WSJ opening its opinion page to Medvedev at this time?)
His bottom line on the events of the past 2.5 weeks:

These last two sentences make it sound as though regime change in Tbilisi is still on his agenda.
And “Russia had no option but to crush the attack to save lives. This was not a war of our choice.” This is the rhetoric of just about every political leader who launches a war or any other form of radical escalation of violence.
The response among the vast majority of western politicians has been a degree of verbal apoplexy fueled to a significant degree by their frustration over realizing that, actually, the “west” had no plausible military options in the Osssetian War and that their darling, Saakashvili, had recklessly overplayed his hand.
So the past inability to act led to much current spluttering. But where might the current western spluttering lead if wiser heads are not to brought into the global equation? I worry about that. Back on August 16, I asked “Where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?” He is still notably MIA. But where are the others who could also act like wiser heads?
Two small glimmers of light. While Barack Obama himself said the US should “further isolate Russia” because of its support for the two breakaway regions, two of his top national security advisers, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, called for more engagement. Good for them.
For his part, John McCain is still doing what he can to revive the embers of anti-Russianism. I wish Obama wouldn’t continue trying to sing from the same inflammatory songsheet, but would describe a realistic and constructive way forward that could de-escalate the tensions with Russia rather than further stoke them.
Another glimmer of good news comes from this FT report, which notes the following:

It’s not that I particularly want Russia to throw its weight behind what still looks like a badly misconceived western military project in Afghanistan. But I am glad to see that in certain fields, officials in both Russia and the west see that they have a broad degree of common interests.
Medvedev, meanwhile, has gone off to Dushanbe, capital of Tajikstan, to make his debut at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a body that since 2001 has established a lot of coordination among its members: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Also in Dushanbe will be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose application for full membership is still outstanding. Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, and India all have observer status at the SCO…. I am sure the SCO summiteers will all have lots to talk about.
This analysis of the SCO by Stephen Blank of the US Army War College indicates there is considerable tension between Russia and China within it, with each of them seeking to push it in a different direction. Anyway, it is notably not, as NATO is, a defense-pact grouping that requires an external enemy for its own justification.
This evening, I was watching the BBC’s distinctly overwrought diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall as she sought to confront Pres. Medvedev in an interview. At one point she huffed and puffed about Russia having to work a lot harder to “restore its relations with the outside world.” I was struck by that latter phrase. As though Russia were currently in some kind of tightly enclosed situation, and the people in “the outside world”– that is, the west– would be able to control the degree to which Russia could have contact with this “outside world.”
Sort of like Israel and Gaza.
Except that in the case of Israel and Gaza, that’s exactly how it is. Israel is the jailer and Gaza is the completely encircled jail. (And even then, the Gazans haven’t given in to their jailers’ demands.)
Russia, I submit, is not Gaza. There is plenty of “outside world” to which Russia has good access. Including, some of the world that lies to its west. And even more of it that lies to its east and its south.

Milanovic: From Global Trade to Global War

Editorial note from HC: In the piece I had in the CSM last Friday about the current, Georgia-revealed shifts in global power balances, I argued that the many economic interdependencies among the world’s major power centers will act as a powerful brake on their going to war against each other. Afterwards, I received an intriguing critique of this position from none other than Branko Milanovic, an economist on global inequality whose work I admire a lot. (Indeed, I used this recent book of his quite a bit in my Re-engage! book.)
So although Milanovic’s conclusions are very different from mine– or rather, precisely because they are so different from mine– I am very happy to publish the short argument he has composed on this subject, so we can have a good exploration of these issues.

From Global Trade to Global War
by Branko Milanovic, August 26, 2008
Openness to trade and globalization lead to interdependence and cooperation and hence to global peace. There is a venerable school of thought, beginning with Montesquieu and Kant, that argues more or less exactly this. Less famously, the same point was made in Norman Angell bestseller that had the misfortune of being published just a few years before the vaunted cooperation and interdependence transmuted into the worst carnage the world had ever seen up to that date (1914). But there is another school of school to whom the carnage of the Great War did not come unexpected. It belongs to the Marxist and semi-Marxist tradition, starting from Hobson and continuing with Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg. It viewed the war as inevitable as capitalists from different countries clashed when dividing up the globe, and then manipulated the public and used their nations’ armies to further own interests.
And indeed the unease with the standard (“peaceful globalization”) version of events is evident even today. In one of globalization cheerleading bestsellers Martin Wolf (“Why globalization works?”) shows a singular difficulty explaining how apparently benign global capitalist competition resulted in the disaster of 1914. His explanation is to lay blame on “German militarism”. But German militarism was only special because it was a late-comer’s militarism: once most of Asia and Africa was divided (not always without conflict; witness Fashoda) between the French and British capitalists, the up and coming German capitalists wanted a slice of the pie too. So, it is the very nature of global capitalism, not some unique “German militarism,” that is to blame.
Why does it matter today, exactly 100 years from the run-up to World War I (the Tangier crisis which almost led to a direct clash between the French and the Germans) and just short of the World War I centennial? Because the same forces are at work again. Consider the following. The three most important countries, US, China and Russia have a nicely balanced division of assets among them: US has capital and technology, China labor, and Russia land and natural resources. But to make more money, US capital needs control of as many natural resources as possible. A glance at the map shows that the sparsely populated and natural resource-rich Siberia and Central Asia are the prime candidates for their lucrative control. After the break up of the Soviet Union, it seemed, all too briefly, that the US and Western capitalists had all this wealth within their reach. The Yeltsin regime was engaged in a fire sale where multi-billion plants and oil-fields were being sold for a song. But already by the time the second Yeltsin administration, the rules of the game started changing. In the swindle that has since become known as “loans for shares”, Russian big capitalists (known as the “oligarchs”) figured out that they did not need to share all these riches with foreigners. Instead, why not keep them for themselves?
This trend accelerated under the two Putin terms. The division of spoils was limited to a restricted circle of cronies and secret agents who suddenly developed an acumen for business deals. The agreements with foreign capitalists were rescinded or revised (most famously, the British Petroleum Tyumen oil field deal). Oligarchs who did not accept the new rules of the game, and who wanted to build pipelines with foreigners (Khodorovsky) were stripped of their assets and sent to jail.
Thus today the struggle between the West and Russia that threatens the world with not only another cold, but rather hot, war is between the two bands of greedy men, and it involves the riches of the Eurasian heartland (“the world island”) east of the Urals. It is an implacable fight because it is a zero-sum game. In contrast, the nature of the Sino-US rivalry is different because of complementarily which exists between capital and labor. Both are needed to produce toys and micro chips. But when it comes to natural resources, it is either you or I who control it.
No less an admirer of global capitalism than Keynes saw its Achilles’ heel in greed that at times becomes so irrational that it works against person’s own interests. Lenin agreed: he thought that a capitalist would sell the rope with which he would be hanged. They might still be right. Halliburtons and Gazproms of this world, rather than ushering an era of universal peace, may bring us World War III.

The return of geography

Some of the commentary on the whole Russia-Georgia affair has talked about the “return” of history, in somewhat post-Fukuyaman terms. (Though Fukyama himself has denied that what is underway now is a simple return to the older Cold War dynamics.)
But it strikes me what is happening these days is much more a “return” of geography to world affairs than a return of history.
Not that the hard facts of geography ever went away, any more than the ongoing dynamic of history. But Tom Friedman was only one of many western-bubble commentators who saw the world as a sort of endlessly level playing field in which the factor of distance (whether physical or cultural) had lost most of its salience.
In a geography-free world, it might have seemed quite “natural” that just one set of values and global priorities, which oh, by a remarkable coincidence happened to be those of the US-dominated west, would always prevail and indeed would necessarily be desired and recognized as superior by all the world’s (increasingly homogenous) people. In a geography-free world it seemed natural– or indeed, actively laudable– that a handful of western-educated lawyers in a courtroom in the wealthy and well-ordered city of The Hague would “know what is best” for millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa reeling from the blows of IMF-imposed pauperization, the widespread destruction of their lives and livelihoods, and the existential disorder of the civil wars that were thereby fueled.
In a geography-free world, it must have seemed just as doable and justifiable to many Americans to engage in military forms of “regime change” in distant Asia as it has long seemed to be in Central America.
But now, geography is back. It has come back most noticeably, perhaps, in the form of huge increases in fuel prices in recent months. But even without those fuel price hikes Americans would already, by this point, have been starting seriously to notice the cost of continuing to sustain the country’s massive military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the US to maintain a military unit of any particular size in Iraq is, it turns out, considerably more expensive than maintaining a unit of the same size in Guatemala. (Who knew?) It is even more expensive than it is for Russia to maintain a unit of that size in Georgia, which is right next door.
Back in January 2003, when I went with a bunch of fellow peace activists here in Charlottesville, Virginia, to persuade the city council to declare our town a “city of peace”, I made a fairly short argument about how– based on my 30 years of experience as a student of Middle East strategic affairs– I saw that the imminent invasion of Iraq was most likely not going to be the promised cakewalk; that the US troops would likely find themselves bogged down in distant Iraq for several years; and that the sheer cost of sustaining this deployment would reverberate down through every sector of the US economy, including to the level of budgets for the states and cities.
I pointed out too– there, and in some of my writings at the time– that after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, within three years the cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation had sent inflation in Israel sky-rocketing and brought Israel’s economy to its knees. And Iraq, I pointed out, was considerably further away from the US homeland than Lebanon was from Israel… Therefore, the longterm cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation would likely be even higher.
Well, for various other reasons, we haven’t had Israeli-style hyper-inflation here (yet.) But the costs of the post-invasion occupation have proven to be just as damaging to the longterm health of our economy as I feared.
It’s largely about geography, you see.
And if you think the geography of maintaining a military presence in Iraq is high, well, just think about doing the same in the landlocked massifs of Afghanistan… There, even the Soviets– some of whom lived right next door– couldn’t afford to maintain the level of occupation force that would have been needed to quell the anti-Moscow insurgency of the 1980s.
The “return of geography” will have a number of deep ramifications in all the different dimensions of world affairs: strategic, socio-political, economic, and cultural. Most likely, geography-based “spheres of influence” will make a comeback. (Of those, of course, the US’s own Monroe Doctrine, which covers the whole of North and South America, is by far the longest established.) The specificities of human geography will be strengthened, too, as against the claims put forward by bubble-dwelling values universalists who made the ill-founded claim that their universalism was quite “culture-neutral.”
Does this mean we are doomed to revert to the formation of competing blocs, international arms races, and war? I say no. Just because there will be spheres of influence and a re-emergence of “cultural difference” doesn’t mean that all conversation is suddenly ended. Indeed, the existence– and more importantly, the recognition– of difference can and should be seen as an invitation to globe-circling conversations about these matters. That, it seems to me, is the biggest difference between today and the 19th century. Today, citizens of just about all the world’s countries have the ability to engage in unmediated, level-playing-field conversations across national borders, about all the matters that concern us. That has never happened before.
If we can open ourselves up to having these conversations, in a respectful and egalitarian spirit, there is so much we can learn about the world, about each other, and therefore about ourselves! (That’s one of the things I love about the blogosphere, and the main reason I keep coming back here.)
We can also start to understand the dubious nature of some of the claims made by our own governments.
For example, if the US has a “Monroe Doctrine”, why should Russia not have something similar of its own? Why should what’s sauce for the goose not also be sauce for the gander?
… Just one final point here. Many Americans have a very scant understanding (or appreciation) for the discipline of geography. In the UK, when I grew up and today, young people undertook several years of study of geography in high school and many of them then went on to study geography, as such, at university. Here in the United States there is almost no such systematic study of the subject. It exists in the K-12 curriculum only as small portions within the broader subject known as “Social Studies,” most of which is focused on history and civics. And only a handful of US universities offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in geography.
This always surprised me. Here’s the US– a country with, by British standards, huge amounts of geography and not very much history– and the students were supposed to spend endless amounts of time parsing the minutiae of what one “Founding Father” or another thought about something 230 years ago while ignoring the many opportunities they have, right here, in this extensive and beautiful country, to gain a rich and multi-layered understanding of geography.
Well, guys, geography is back. And nowadays, it’s decidedly global. Let’s figure out how to deal with that.

Still no US-Iraq security agreement (yawn)

Alert readers of JWN will have noticed that I haven’t posted much recently. A number of reasons for that, among them the desire to sit around with the spouse watching the Olympics many evenings. But also, heck, I so much called it on the US’s waning ability to impose its terms on Iraq in the all-important ‘security’ sphere– ever since back in early June, and most recently here— that the subsequent development of the story kind of lost its interest for me.
Apart from the still-horrendous living conditions being endured by Iraq’s remarkably hardy people. Suicide bomber story here. Nearly 3,000 cases of measles story here. Nearly a billion litres of raw sewage still– 65 months after the US invasion– being pumped into Iraq’s waterways: lengthy and well reported story here.
That degree of human misery is only to be expected in a river-system country in which the central mechanisms of regulation and public order have broken down– or, as in Iraq’s case, been wilfully destroyed by a foreign occupying power. In this respect, Iraq is very different from a mountain-dominated country like, say, Lebanon or Georgia. In those countries, people can get along more or less okay without a functioning central government, since they have many more of the inputs for basic self-sufficiency and are not reliant on orderly administration of vulnerable central water systems.
Anyway, in Iraq, it looks as if the national population is already adjusting itself to a very imminent (or, actually, already underway) retraction of US power.
Which, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is being fueled primarily by Washington’s own very urgent force-planning considerations.
I’ve been trying to ponder why it is has proved to be the case in Iraq that the standard kinds of US blandishments and bribes seem not to have “worked” by persuading PM Maliki and his coterie of close advisers to sign off on the US-proposed security agreements. I’ve come up with a number of possible hypotheses. One is that the stand blandishments and bribes– such as promises of large amounts of money deposited in foreign banks, sweetheart business deals for close relatives, or “scholarships” for numerous children and relatives at nice US universities– may somehow not have the appeal for these people that they would have for, say, an Ahmed Chalabi or a Mohamed Dahlan. Another might be that the Iranians could actually outbid the Americans in terms of blandishments and bribes that would actually be valued by Maliki and his circle. Another might be that these men are true Iraqi patriots. These three explanations are not mutually exclusive, at all.
Also, though I’ve written about “bribes and blandishments”, obviously these are part of a broader spectrum of activities that outside powers might engage in, which could be broadly described as “structuring the incentives” for these men. That would include threats as well as bribes. The US, at an earlier point in the negotiations was “threatening” to hold onto a large chunk of Iraq’s oil revenue unless it could get the security agreement it wanted out of Maliki. But even that threat appeared not to work.
An interesting world we live in.

Iraq-US: More disagreement than ‘Agreement’

Yesterday, the news from Baghdad was that the visiting Condi Rice was very close to nailing the longer-term security agreement with the ‘government’ of Iraq that the Bush administration has been aiming for for a long while now. But the longer term news looks much more like that of mounting disagreements between the governments in Washington and Baghdad, than increasing levels of agreement.
Disagreement is clear over two key issues: the status of the negotiations over the US-Iraqi security pact, and government policy toward the mainly-Sunni ‘Awakening’ councils that have been a main pillar of the US political strategy since early fall 2006.
Regarding the security pact negotiations, the transcript of the press conference Rice held with Iraq ‘Foreign Minister’ Hoshyar Zebari yesterday shows that, while neither Rice nor Zebari claimed that they had finished the negotiations, Rice was actually more guarded than Zebari in claiming they were getting close to finalization.
Regarding the content of what they were discussing, Rice made clear that she was still talking only about timetables– in the plural– for troop withdrawal that were both conditions-based, and “aspirational.”
For his part, Zebari could not even bring himself to say the word “timetable.” (Perhaps the prospect gives his ardently Kurdish heart some palpitations?) All he managed to talk about was “time horizon.”
That is so much last month’s meme-of-choice.
Today, the evidence of disagreement over the security ‘agreement’ continued. AFP reported that Mohammed al-Haj Mahmoud, described as “the top official in the Iraqi [SOFA-negotiating] team, told them that negotiators had, “finalised a deal which will see the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by 2011, ending an eight-year occupation…”
So he was claiming the negotiation had been finished. But even he made clear that what was being referred to was a considerably less-than-total withdrawal, since he specified it would only be from the cities.
AFP also added that White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe “said the deal was yet to be finalised.… ‘It’s not done until it’s done.'”
It strikes me there is an air of unreality to this whole story of “negotiations” over the terms of a longterm bilateral security pact. Urgent troop planning considerations that have nothing to do with the situation in Iraq are going to be forcing the Pentagon to implement a pretty deep and rapid drawdown of the US troop presence from there over the next 12 months, regardless of whether there is a “SOFA”, an “oil agreement”, “provincial elections”, or any of those other things the US has set as its current political goals in Iraq. The “best” scenario they can hope to achieve at this point is something far more modest than any of those ambitious political goals. It is a drawdown/pullout of US troops that is less rather then more chaotic for the troops involved and that leaves the country and the region in a less rather than more unstable state.
A cynic might ask, “What do the Bush administration folks care about whether the region goes up in flames behind them as they leave?” My answer is that if the region is going up in flames it is certainly not good for the US– either for the oil companies or the citizenry. Plus, this conflagration would not happening only “behind” the departing troops but might also, with a high degree of probability, catch many of the departing troops in its fires, too… As I’ve argued for many years now, the possibility of implementing an “orderly”– i.e. not fired-upon– troop withdrawal is directly linked to ensuring in some way that the Iraqis have a decent chance of reaching their own internal entente as the US troops pull out.
And right now, things don’t seem to be heading in that direction (to say the very least.) The US-installed and -supported Iraqi “government” seems to be seriously feeling its oats these days, doing a number of things that Washington isn’t happy about at all. Notable among these is the campaign it is now mounting directly against the US-incubated “Awakening Councils”
Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad today that,

but may not be able to defend its Sunni allies from a largely Shia government and army.

He also writes,

for the first time since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi government is confident that it can survive without US military support.

Richard Oppel of the NYT has a longer version of the same story about the government turning strongly against the Sahwa (Awakening Councils.). It is all unbelievably tragic; yet another twist in the ghastly tale of how the US occupation authorities have aggressively pursued a divide and rule policy throughout the country, in a way that has involved inflaming sectarian and ethnic tensions while pumping additional quantities of armies into beleaguered Iraqi communities.
Washington’s Iraq policy looks poised on the brink of a serious disaster. The Bushites will doubtless do everything they can to prevent it going over the cliff before the U.S. election, November 4. But if Barack Obama wins the election, there may be some in the outgoing administration who wouldn’t be too concerned about the prospect of a disaster occurring in Iraq, say, some time after next January.
I just hope we can rely on Defense Secretary Gates and the leaders of Centcom to act with wisdom and statesmanship during those crucial transition weeks…

NATO’s supply lines in Afghanistan

… First of all, they’re incredibly long. That makes sustaining the troops in the field there incredibly expensive. Another way of looking at that, in the present hyper-privatized era of US public life, could be: Lots of nice fat contracts and opportunities for fraud, payoffs, and payroll padding for the logistics companies! Yum, yum, yum! (For them.)
But here, basically, are the options. (A thought: Maybe we should call the present era that of the Return of Geography, rather than– or in addition to– the Return of History?):

Well, for now, you can forget about numbers 3 and 4– as far as NATO goes. Both Iran and China have decent working and economic relations with Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. But they, um, don’t really have them with NATO.
So that leaves Pakistan– currently in a state of continuing or perhaps even escalating political turmoil… And Russia.
Oops. Our “friend” Saakashvili put a bit of a spanner in the works on that, didn’t he? Well, maybe yes, and maybe no. But evidently, as the western nations and Russia proceed with their negotiations over a more durable settlement for Georgia, NATO’s non-trivial reliance on Russia’s cooperation for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will be another big factor in the talks, along with the reliance of Germany and much of the rest of Europe on hydrocarbons from Russia.
The NATO-Russia Council has been in existence since 2002. On this handy info page that they publish you can learn what it is they do. (Or, what it is they don’t mind you knowing about they do.) Just last March the two sides established the basis for “facilitating transit though the Russian territory of non military freight from NATO, NATO members and non-NATO ISAF contributors in support of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, in accordance with UNSCR 1386.”
I guess that’s what the Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was referring to when he told Reuters yesterday,

NATO and Russia have a very good and trusting relationship.

Translation: “Nice little supply line system we’re running there to Afghanistan. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to that now, would we?”
Rogozin expressed some (perhaps understandable?) confidence that the present, Georgia-related tensions in the NATO-Russia relationship would not last very long…

He also warned that “NATO rearming Georgia after all that has happened would be… cynical and illegitimate.”
Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has been doing some great blogging about the tough logistical challenges NATO/ISAF faces in Afghanistan. See e.g. here.
Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed. He adds:

If one counts with 44,000 liters as a possible standard payload of fuel for each tanker (I’m taking that figure from a news report about a previous attack), that’s 1,760,000 to 2,200,000 liters of fuel lost in the attack. Big fireball, big loss.

Christian, at “Ghosts of Alexander” has a handy map of the Uzbekistan rail system, which could be (or perhaps already is?) used to transport (non-military) goods for ISAF in from Europe– via Russia and Kazakhstan– to the Termez border point between Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. It looks like passenger service takes three days from Moscow to Tashkent and maybe 18 hours from Tashkent to Termez. (Ah. Helena needs to get her ferrophilia back under control here a bit.)
… Right now, the UN Security Council is starting to see some preliminary diplomacy developing around the project to reach agreement on a durable political settlement of the Georgia-Russia crisis. Basically, two drafts are circulating. Russia submitted Sarkozy’s ceasefire plan of last week– which has been signed by both sides– to win the SC’s imprimatur of support for it. A draft resolution that France submitted yesterday, that apparently has US support, expresses support for the existing ceasefire but also calls for immediate Russian withdrawal and the “return of Georgia’s forces to their bases.”
As I noted in my CSM piece, now up on the web already though it’s dated tomorrow, if there is to be an un-vetoed resolution, then it will have to represent a negotiated consensus that all the Permanent Members can support. In these negotiations, Russia is not without its own leverage in the realms of both hard and (as Kishore Mahbubani noted) soft power. Let’s see how the negotiations proceed.

My CSM piece on the big-picture implications of Georgia

I worked pretty intensively on this earlier this week. It’s here.