Just World News with Helena Cobban

Yesterday, the Congressional Democrats gave up their previous insistence on writing troop-withdrawal deadlines into the legislation funding the Bush administration’s continued administration of the war in Iraq. Basically, the President has an override-proof veto. He’s already vetoed one version of the spending bill and had threatened to do the same if the bill came back with the withdrawal deadline/timeline still in it.
WaPo’s Shailagh Murray writes,

in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.
The spending package, expected to total $120 billion when the final version is released today, would require Bush to surrender virtually none of his war authority…
Instead of sticking with troop-withdrawal dates, Democrats accepted a GOP plan to establish 18 political and legislative benchmarks for the Iraqi government, with periodic reports from Bush on its progress, starting in late July. If the Iraqis fall short, they could forfeit U.S. reconstruction aid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said.

How should we look at this outcome? I am trying to do so in a way that puts front and center the interests of the Iraqi people, who have been so badly damaged by my government’s actions over the past four years.
Would it have been better if the antiwar folks in Congress had been able to attach a firm withdrawal deadline to the spending bill? Yes, I believe it would have. Even though the language they were seeking to attach was, I believe, language that only specified the date for the beginning of a withdrawal, rather than for its complete ending, it would still have sent a powerful message.
But now, the President and his Republican co-believers– many of whom have rapidly been growing disenchanted with the war– will really have to wholly “own” the way things go in the next few months in Iraq. The antiwar Democrats tried to work constructively with Bush. But since he refused to put in even the fairly cautious timeline language they wanted to put in, then the conduct of the war is now firmly back in his hands… And meanwhile, all of us antiwar people– of whatever political party– can work even harder to bring pressure to bear on the President– Bush, up until January 2009; or if necessary, after him the next one– to bring all the troops home in a speedy, orderly, and generous way.
And by the way, while we’re planning a strategy for this, let’s make sure that all of us give due weight to the need to involve the UN quite fully in all aspects of the diplomacy and modalities of the pullout. The US may well have been able to “get into” Iraq nearly completely on its own. But it seems to me pure folly to imagine that it can get out of Iraq in anything like an orderly and acceptable way unless it recognizes that the era of unilateral US action on the world stage– including in Iraq– is definitively over.
That need for a robust and constructive rapprochement between Washington and the UN is something that was missing from the Baker-Hamilton report. It has also been significantly missing until now from most of the congressional discussion on Iraq.
Now, with the President having once again asserted his strongly unilateralist tendencies, seems like a good time for the US public and our representatives in Congress to have this very necessary conversation about the relationship between our country and the rest of the world.

The WaPo’s Ann Scott Tyson was the chosen leakee for this story, out of the Pentagon and the State Department that assures the increasingly skeptical US public that “Yes! Indeed those wise folks running our administration do have a strategy for Iraq that is broader than just the surge!”
Extreme skepticism is still, however, called for.
The “new strategy” that Tyson so breathlessly reported at the top of the WaPo’s front page has been fairly well summarized by Juan Cole as follows:

1. Back Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki rather than trying to organize a new government.
2. Expand and build up the Iraqi Army, which is less purely sectarian than some other security forces in Iraq.
3. And then implementation of 3 points:
a. Protect the local population from the insurgents so as to allow them to become independent actors in civil society.
b. Increase capacity and efficiency of government ministries and their integraton with provincial administrations.
c. Purge Iraq’s government and security forces of “sectarian abusers,” replacing them with “Iraqi nationalists.”

The principal authors of this “new” strategy are the US’s much-lauded (by some people, not by me) military commander in Iraq, David Petraeus; the (ditto) US Ambassador in Iraq, Ryan Crocker; and Petraeus’s (ditto) “senior counterinsurgency adviser”, David J. Kilcullen. As Tyson describes it, Kilcullen basically put together the new plan with the help of a team comprised of, “about 20 military officers, State Department officials and other experts in Baghdad known as the Joint Strategic Assessment Team.”
She wrote that “More than half a dozen people with knowledge of the plan” had discussed its contents with her. Most of these people had, she said, requested anonymity “because they were not authorized to speak about it to reporters.” But the team members whom she does quote by name, as giving details of the plan, include Kilcullen as well as the British scholar of Iraqi affairs Toby Dodge. So it seems quite clear that the leaking-in-Washington was part of Kilcullen’s deliberate strategy there.
(I note that Kilcullen is is the gung-ho Australian Army counter-insurgency “specialist” featured by George Packer in one of his recent pieces in The New Yorker… It really is notable that at this stage of the war the Bushites have run so low on their own supply of the relevant expertise– and remain so distrustful of the numerous never-consulted US experts on Iraq and the region– that they feel they need to import these British/Commonwelth types in to tell them what the heck they need to do.)
Pat Lang, over at his blog, notes percipiently that the new “Kilcullen plan” for what the US should do in Iraq seems in many ways to run counter to this plan, which was leaked to David Ignatius in, presumably, the same time period, and which David wrote about in his column in yesterday’s WaPo in these terms:

President Bush and his senior military and foreign policy advisers are beginning to discuss a “post-surge” strategy for Iraq that they hope could gain bipartisan political support. The new policy would focus on training and advising Iraqi troops rather than the broader goal of achieving a political reconciliation in Iraq, which senior officials recognize may be unachievable within the time available.

David doesn’t name any of the sources for his column, or identify them in any way more specific than that they are “senior administration officials.”
Lang writes:

The difference in what is described in these two [WaPo texts] leads me to ask if the two visions of possible futures for America in Iraq are the result of significant disagreements over policy within the executive branch. If that is so, are the contending parties waging proxy-warfare in the press?
If it is not the case that these articles represent some kind of struggle, then the incoherence of substance and unreality of many of the arguments and positions in these papers may indicate a disintegration of thought that would be alarming.

My informed guess on this is that both of Lang’s explanations for what is happening are partly right. It seems clear there is an intra-administration “war through leaking to the WaPo”… Heck, that much seems quite evident, and is a very, very old Washington-insiders’ trick.
But it also seems clear to me that there is “incoherence” and “unreality” both between the two leaked plans and, indeed, within each of them taken on its own.
On Kilcullen and his alleged “expertise”, we need only look at this little quote from him, down near the bottom of the Tyson piece:

“Our notion of ‘reconciliation’ . . . is not necessarily where Iraqis are at right now,” said Kilcullen, explaining that the word has no equivalent in Arabic.

What a supercilious ignoramus! Of course Arabic has a word for “reconciliation’. Indeed, it has at least two very valuable words in this field– sulha for the process by which reconciling is achieved in traditional Arab societies, and sulh for the resulting state of being-reconciled…. So here is David Kilcullen, a man who makes a great point about really “knowing your enemy” and understanding any foreign culture in which you do counter-insurgency work. And he’s been working with the US military on Iraq-related things for how long now? But still, he makes this really elementary mistake and talks about these things in this really patronizing fashion…
Reminds of whichever other Bush administration flunky it was who said in a similarly supercilious way that “the French don’t even have a word for entrepreneur!”
Anyway, enough about Kilcullen and his pretensions to expertise… My bottom line for both these “plans” being (competitively) leaked around Washington is that while they have some good and constructive elements to them– especially inasmuch as they stress the importance of political rather than purely military ways to deal with the imbroglio in Iraq– still, they are both far too little, far too late.
Too little, how?
Primarily, because neither of them– nor indeed, most of the discussion on Iraq policy taking place in Congress these days– has gone nearly far enough to recognize that there really is no way for the US to avoid a disaster in Iraq that does not also involve committing to a much more international framework for defusing the current tensions in Iraq and starting to fashion a new security regime for the broader Gulf region.
Ignatius’s anonymous leakers did at least say that, “The post-surge policy would, in many ways, track the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, which senior administration officials say the president now supports.”
(Whew! If that’s so, wouldn’t it be, like, just about five months of bloodshed too late for Bush to have finally come around to that position??)
Baker-Hamilton did, of course, urge a noticeably more multilateral approach to Iraq than the almost undiluted US unilateralism that the administration has pursued until now… But even Baker-Hamilton did not go where I thought it– or any other workable plan– needs to go, which is to say that only the United Nations has the global legitimacy and reach that are now required to frame a workable de-escalation in Iraq, including an orderly US troop withdrawal from the country.
And too late, how?
People might take a good look at this little doc that fell into Pat Lang’s hands recently. It’s an unclassified, internal staff notice for the “US Mission in Iraq”, dated May 21, 2007. It’s on this topic:

Due to a theater-wide delay in food delivery, menu selections will be limited for the near future… [S]hould the food convoys be delayed further, DFACs will be required to serve MREs for at least one meal out of the day…

There’s some significant context to this problem. Throughout history, the distinctive topography of Mesopotamia has frequently stymied the commanders of foreign invading forces. When I first started thinking about what it would take to sustain a large-scale US occupation force in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion, it was immediately clear to me that the logistics of resupply would be a major, major challenge.
In Vietnam, after all, the US Navy more or less had command of the oceans and was able to maintain ports and depots all along South Vietnam’s lengthy coastline. But in Iraq? They have to bring everything in either through the bottleneck of Kuwait, or with much more difficulty along lengthy (and frequently unsafe) roads through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Turkey. Moreover, this is an army that (1) is absolutely not designed to “feed off the land” wherever it is, but relies on its own supplies for everything, up to and including bottled drinking water, and (2) likes to live well, even in the field… I note that the authors of this latest “MREs” memo felt they had to apologize that for many soldiers in the field, “Fresh fruits and salad bar items will… be severely limited or unavailable.”
More recently, when I’ve been thinking of the possible forms a “catastrophe” for the US force presence in Iraq might take, I’ve thought more in terms of a massively lethal incident of physical violence like the 1983 truck bomb in Beirut… or perhaps a huge crowd of unarmed protesters marching resolutly toward a US base somewhere and getting mown down by nervous perimeter guards, in large numbers, and in front of t.v. cameras…
But maybe we need to go back and look again at the possibility of very serious, near-catastrophic supply-chain problems. What if not just the salad-bar items but also the troops’ drinking water, fuel, MREs, and ammo start to run very low indeed?
Are we talking about the possibility of a “Siege of Kut” type situation developing for the US troops in Iraq?
In that WW1 engagement, some 23,000 British Empire forces– most of them, I believe, Indians– were killed and wounded before, finally, Gen. Townshend surrendered to the Ottomans. I sincerely hope that, if the US forces’ supplies run low, they won’t wait till they reach anything close to those kinds of casualty figures before they do the right thing and request the UN to help them negotiate an orderly exit from all of Iraq.
Until we see our leaders finally acknowledge that they can’t disengage from Iraq without U.N. help, extreme skepticism will still be called for. All these leaks about this “new” US plan or that one will just be political spin and window-dressing.

I’ve been really busy. No time recently, alas, to blog. I’ll resume as soon as I can. Meantime, this thread is for discussing Iraq.