Counterinsurgency in modern times

I’ve been thinking more about the challenges faced by Gen. Petraeus or any other commander who tries, in the 21st century, to organize a successful counterinsurgency campaign under the circumstances that:

    (1) this commander works within the military of a democratic country,
    (2) the counterinsurgency in question is being waged in another country, (known in COIN parlance as the ‘Host Nation’), and
    (3) the society within which the COIN campaign is being waged has a relatively advanced information/education infrastructure.

Waging a “successful”, military-based (i.e. coercive) counterinsurgency campaign under such circumstances is, I think, impossible.
For a foreign power to use forceful means to affect the political outcome within any given country/society causes a direct clash with the principles of democracy, of sovereignty, and of a respect for basic human rights. (This is even more clearly so when the forceful means in question include means that are directly and permissively lethal, as is spelled out at several points in Gen. Petraeus’s recently published COIN “manual”. See my analysis here.)
Democracy: It is a basic underpinning of the theory of democracy that differences can and must be solved through nonviolent means, including negotiation, bargaining, and the forging of agreement over decision rules. When a powerful foreign power intervenes within the polity of any given nation this sends a powerful message to natinals of that country through the demonstration effect. And it also– under all the theories of counterinsurgency since the dawn of time– results in the arming of one part of the host-nation citizenry against the other, making a mockery of any commitment to “democracy” within the host nation and sowing further grievances and demands for vengeance for, quite possibly, several generations to come.
Sovereignty: People in the human-rights movement in rich western countries often see “sovereignty”– especially the sovereignty of countries in the impoverished, formerly colonized world– as an impediment to the enjoyment of human rights. But the sovereign independence of nations is also an expression of the democracy among peoples; and indeed, there is no possibility for any society to enjoy democratic self-governance so long as vital, national-level decision-making is done or is constrained in any way by foreigners. And while human rights are, certainly, often abused by sovereign governments in many places around the world, there is literally no possibility at all for peoples who are ruled by foreigners to have any assurance that their rights will be respected. When a foreign power conducts and controls the conducting of a COIN campaign within a completely different nation, that is a complete violation of the principle of sovereign independence.
Human rights: Any COIN campaign will almost certainly, by definition, involve infringements on basic human freedoms including the freedoms of assembly, of movement, of political organizing, etc. That’s the case even when they’re conducted “within” nations, e.g. in recent times Northern Ireland, or Nepal. Very frequently the rights abuses involved will be considerably more serious… And this is probably much more likely to be the case where the people doing the COIN don’t identify culturally in any way at all with those against whom they are fighting.
… And thus, we see these dilemmas for a guy like Petraeus who tries to be very smart, very articulate, and very “sensitive”, and who tries to mount a successful COIN campaign on behalf of the US– a country whose people like to think of them- (our-)selves as committed to democracy and human rights. I explored some of those dilemmas a little further in that Jan. 10 blog post I linked to earlier…
I imagine sometimes Petraeus must really envy his counterparts in, say, Russia, who can organize almost whatever they want to in a place like Chechnya without having to worry too much about the effects that revelations from Chechnya will have on their standing back home.
Another thing, too. The Russian commanders in Chechnya don’t have to worry about very much news ever seeping out of Chechnya… Certainly, not as much as Petraeus has to worry about news getting out of Iraq, or the Israelis need to worry about news getting out of Lebanon (last summer), or out of Palestine, today. The development of means of recording like small videocams, small audio recorders, digital cameras, and laoptop computers, and the development of means of disseminating reports and recordings across large distances, mean that fighting a COIN battle in Iraq or Palestine today is a very different matter from, for example, what the British were able to do against the Mau Mau in the 1950s, or the French did against national-liberation “insurgents” in Algeria, or in Vietnam.
(Or, what the British did against the Palestinians in the 1930s, or against the Iraqis in the 1920s… Those campaigns both provide strong and worrying precedents that live on in the folk-memories of their peoples.)
The US forces in Iraq (and perhaps even more so in the more under-reported reaches of Afghanistan) may have tried to undertake some of the very abusive types of action that those earlier imperial commanders did… As their US predecessors also did in numerous wars from the wars against the Native Americans right here “at home”, on through several bloody “small wars” abroad, including in Vietnam and repeatedly, over and over again, in Central America…
But here’s the thing. At some point in history, such wars became politically unwinnable. The British may have “won” on the battlefield in Kenya; and indeed, they ground the Kikuyu insurgents in the north right into the dust as they did so… But still, they had to get out of the country and leave it to become independent. The same with the French in Algeria. As Clausewitz knew, and warned everyone so long ago, the point of military operations is not to win the battle, it’s to win the war. And at some point in the 1950s or so, at the political-strategic level all those “counter-insurgency” campaigns fought around the world by democratic powers were lost.
I was reading this little article, from the January-February 2006 Military Review, that Petraeus submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, in connection with his confirmation hearings there. It’s titled Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq. He sums up his findings there in the following lessons:

    Observations from Soldiering in Iraq:
    1.“Do not try to do too much with your own hands.”
    2. Act quickly, because every Army of liberation [Yes, that’s honestly what he calls the US army in Iraq! ~HC] has a half-life.
    3. Money is ammunition.
    4. Increasing the number of stakeholders is critical to success.
    5. Analyze “costs and benefits” before each operation.
    6. Intelligence is the key to success.
    7. Everyone must do nation-building.
    8. Help build institutions, not just units.
    9. Cultural awareness is a force multiplier.
    10. Success in a counterinsurgency requires more than just military operations.
    11. Ultimate success depends on local leaders.
    12. Remember the strategic corporals and strategic lieutenants.
    13. There is no substitute for flexible, adaptable leaders.
    14. A leader’s most important task is to set the right tone.

The whole article there doesn’t get much more profound than that. (In his explanation of #2, he writes, ” in a situation like Iraq, the liberating force must act quickly, because every Army of liberation has a half-life beyond which it turns into an Army of occupation. The length of this half-life is tied to the perceptions of the populace about the impact of the liberating force’s activities… ” I don’t think that at the hearing yesterday anyone asked him specifically if he didn’t think that had already happened… )
I’ve also been reading the answers Petraeus had prepared to questions that the Senate Armed Services Committee’s members had given him prior to yesterday’s hearing. There are some interesting things there– a singal that he’s not necessarily going to go straight against the sadrists in Sadr City, for example… and an admission that the Army is already “stretched and straining”…
But I am really, really disappointed that no-one on the committee had submitted any questions about the grave human-rights implications of the types of “Rules of Engagement” Petraeus was writing about in his manual.
It seems the august senators either don’t “get” the extreme political and moral relevance of that issue, or they prefer not to think about this issue, but instead seek to leave such thinking to the military’s “professionals”. Either way, it seems like a serious abdication of their duty.

Webb 4 President (?)

My neighbor sent me a note last night chiding me for finally taking down my Webb for Senate sign at the end of my driveway, on the eve of Webb pulling his coup within the Democratic Party to deliver its response to the President’s State of his Mind speech.
I lamely replied that oh contraire, I’m just trying to figure out how to recast it as a “Webb for President” poster.
Never mind the media spinmeisters focusing on how well (or not) the President did. And never mind the surreal Anderson Cooper having on two neocon Brigadier Generals who one-upped each other in proclaiming the President’s plan will work, “if only the American people stand behind it.” “Spider” Marks is “certifiable” in my book. He’s been wrong on Iraq for years – so who is pulling the strings at CNN to keep him as their featured military anal-yst?
Ah, but never mind the talking trolls.
In my book, Webb hit another home run tonight. I’d still like to know how the Democrats picked Webb over, say, Obama or Hillary, to give the Democrat’s response to the President. My guess: Nancy Pelosi. Shrewd move. In case you missed it, here’s the transcript.
Ok, so Webb may be the accidental, semi-uncomfortable junior “Democratic” Senator from Virginia. (and a former Reagan era Navy Secretary) I like his refreshing non-style. He beat incredibly long odds last November, when he de-throned Senator George “Macaca” Allen here in Virginia. Not just because Allen couldn’t get his foot out of his mouth, Webb won the ole’ fashioned way…. he held his ground. The neocon chickenhawks couldn’t touch him either – as he wore a pair of his son’s Marine combat boots, every day of his campaign.
Soon after being elected, I admired the way Webb refused to banter with President Bush and his unseemly inquiry into “his boy’s” condition in Iraq. I was so impressed that I kept my Webb sign up – in defiance of Virginia “tradition” to take down political signs the “day after.”
I’m still with the Dixie Chicks; I’m not ready to make nice.
Ok, maybe “J.W.” is a greenhorn to national politics – compared to such “veteran” national political figures like Hillary, Al, John, or Obama…. Imagine how Obama must feel being upstaged by “J.W.” Webb’s 9 minute speech tonight packed in more key zingers than I’ve heard from any of the other Presidential contenders yet, including from my best hope for the Republicans – Chuck Hagel. Maybe I haven’t been listening either.
In Webb’s world, America is in deep trouble, at home and aborad. On the economy, the glittering oil laden Dow Index belies a hidden problem:

When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The stock market is at an all-time high, and so are corporate profits. But these benefits are not being fairly shared. When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it’s nearly 400 times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the money that his or her boss makes in one day.

Continue reading “Webb 4 President (?)”

Released IDF documents reveal ethnic cleansing effort in South Lebanon

HaAretz’s Amos Harel has an informative reconstruction of the decsionmaking last summer within the Israeli General Staff, over crucial aspects of the– failed– war against Hizbullah.
This reconstruction gives a lot more background and context to the chaos and indecisiveness in the decisionmaking that were evident at the time (and that I wrote about in my Boston Review article, here.)
Harel writes:

    The outgoing Chief of Staff Dan Halutz strongly opposed a broad ground operation until the very last stage of the war… even though the two General Staff members also from the air force – Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin and Major General Idan Nehushtan – supported such action. What is surprising is that the two major generals who supported a broad ground offensive at an early stage – Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Kaplinsky and Chief of Operations Gadi Eisenkot – changed their views as the war continued and then hesitated to carry out such an offensive.
    A Haaretz probe in recent weeks has enabled, for the first time, a reconstruction of critical parts of the exchanges during a series of meetings headed by the chief of staff… The General Staff emerges from the exchanges as seemingly confused and hesitant.

Harel appears to base much of his report on actual transcripts of some of the key meetings, though he nowhere provides any sourcing or provenance, or even any comments about that matter. We have to take his account on trust.
The article is all extremely interesting. But the most disturbing part is his account of a key July 16 meeting about the possibility of trying to seize the substantial southern town of Bint Jbeil (normal population: around 30,000 souls):

    on July 16, Bint Jbail is raised for the first time as a target for a possible IDF operation. Major General Benny Gantz, head of the ground forces, makes the recommendation to the chief of staff. “Hassan Nasrallah’s victory speech [in May 2000 after the IDF’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon] was made in Bint Jbail. We must dismantle that place, it is a Shi’ite place – and they must be driven to the North. I would even consider a limited ground operation in this area, which can be held.”
    … The former chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon, emphasized the need to “stamp the psyche” of the enemy. [That was favorite theme of Ya’alon’s, with regard to the Palestinians, back when he was still chief of staff… You’ll note that though his approach inflicted horrendous damage on the Palestinians, for some reason it still failed to persuade them to ‘cry uncle.’ Perhaps Ya’alon lacks any capacity to learn? ~HC] He was talking about the importance of symbolism. It turns out that in the second Lebanon war the “stamping” happened to us. The focus on the damage to symbols emerges over and over throughout the war. The fact that Bint Jbail, a Shi’ite town, became a bloody trap and the Golani Brigade suffered eight dead on the morning of July 26, only intensified the IDF’s obsession with the place.

Harel has long excerpts from what appears to be the transcript of a crucial meeting July 26– a day when the IOF suffered a particularly bloody setback in Bint Jbeil. He notes that during that meeting,

    The chief of staff reiterates the possibility of intensifying the air operation, including the targetting of civilian infrastructure in Beirut.
    “I intend to put this once more on the [government’s] table. I say that before we start moving divisions, [to the rivers] Awali, Zahrani, Litani, it does not matter. We must bring Lebanon to a different place.”

Throughout Harel’s account you can certainly see the deep indecisiveness that was reigning in the General Staff. He gives no sign of what was going on at the political level at that time, or in the interface between the two. Those meetings would be interesting to learn this much about, too.
But at the end of the day it is the frustration these guys feel that comes acorss the strongest.
He concludes with this utterance that military intelligence chief Amos Yadlin reportedly made on July 28:

    On the matter of the Katyushas, we must show that it is possible to defeat this thing, otherwise it will follow us for years. Apparently this can only be done on the ground … Come on, our fathers beat all the Arab states in six days and we are not able to go in with two divisions and finish off [the area] south of the Litani?”

Grave implications of the Karbala raid

It seems the US authorities were not eager for the US public (or anyone else) to know the details of the lethally effective raid mounted against US occupation forces in Karbala last Saturday.
These details clearly indicate the size and creativity of the unit that undertook the attack, as well as the existence of significant collaboration between the anti-US attackers and members of the “Iraqi security forces” who were co-deployed with the targeted Americans at the “Provincial Joint Coordination Center” (PJCC) in Karbala.
There are a number of significant layers to this story. One is, it seems, the ineffectiveness of the attempt the US forces have been making to establish “information dominance” over the whole of the Iraqi area of operations…
But first, let’s go to what today’s WaPo story reported about the raid:

    The armored sport-utility vehicles whisked into a government compound in the city of Karbala with speed and urgency, the way most Americans and foreign dignitaries travel along Iraq’s treacherous roads these days.
    Iraqi guards at checkpoints waved them through Saturday afternoon because the men wore what appeared to be legitimate U.S. military uniforms and badges, and drove cars commonly used by foreigners, the provincial governor said…
    After arriving at the Provincial Joint Coordination Center in Karbala, 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, the attackers detonated sound bombs, Iraqi officials said. “They wanted to create a panic situation,” said an aide to Karbala Gov. Akeel al-Khazaali, who described the events with the governor’s permission but on condition of anonymity because he fears reprisals.
    The men then stormed into a room where Americans and Iraqis were making plans to ensure the safety of thousands of people expected to visit the holy city for an upcoming holiday.
    “They didn’t target anyone but the American soldiers,” the governor’s aide said.
    After the attack, the assailants returned to their vehicles and drove away. It was unclear how many people participated, and the men’s identities and motive remained unclear, but the attack was particularly striking because of the resources and sophistication involved, Iraqi officials said.
    The men drove off toward the city of Babil, north of Karbala, where they shot at guards at a checkpoint, said Capt. Muthana Ahmad, a police spokesman. Vehicles later recovered contained three bodies and one injured individual. The U.S. military took possession of the vehicles, the spokesman said…
    Saturday’s attack appeared to present a new danger to authorities in Iraq: assailants who disguise themselves as officials and travel in convoys.
    “The way it happened and the new style, the province has not seen before,” said Abdul al-Yasri, head of the provincial council in Karbala.

I don’t know how long that PJCC had been operating in Karbala… Or indeed, if it is still operating today? But very evidently, what happened there Saturday was a massive breach of security… And the fact the assailants were able to drive their multiple vehicles out of the compound after the attack without incident indicates– perhaps even more strongly than the fact that they were able to get into it so easily– that they most likely had a number of confederates among the Iraqi security personnel working there.
Which presumably was a major reason why the US authorities in Baghdad did not want to divulge the details of the attack too widely.
The US military’s press release about the attack, issued yesterday, said only this:

    The Provincial Joint Coordination Center (PJCC) in Karbala was attacked with grenades, small arms and indirect fires by an illegally armed militia group Jan 20. Five U.S. Soldiers were killed and three wounded while repelling the attack.
    Initial reporting by some media outlets indicated falsely that the attack was conducted by Coalition forces…
    “The attack on the Karbala Provincial Joint Coordination Center was aimed at Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces working together toward a better future for the citizens of Karbala,” said Lt. Col. Scott R. Bleichwehl, Spokesperson for Multi-National Division-Baghdad.
    The location has been secured by Coalition and Iraqi security forces…

Today’s waPo account says this:

    U.S. military officials said Sunday that they could not discuss the attack in Karbala in detail because it remained under investigation. But they said the version of events provided by the governor’s office was consistent with their preliminary findings.

This a serious admission. It is an admission, in effect, that Bleichwehl and his fellow officers– who are, of course, extremely strongly concerned about the wellbeing of all the US soldiers in the field in Iraq– are unable to hide the fact that some members of an Iraqi unit co-deployed with those Americans were most likely complicit in the anti-US action, while the others were either unwilling or unable to intervene to foil the attack.
Bush’s new “surge” plan for Greater Baghdad– and the whole of the US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq– depends crucially on effecting a large increase in mthe numbers of US soldiers co-deployed with members of the “Iraqi security forces.”
But the news from Karbala– which is only the latest, though perhaps the most serious, incident in which Iraqis co-deployed with Americans have apparently given aid to anti-US attackers– is likely to make the US commanders in Baghdad, Qatar, and Washington more wary than ever about such co-deployments. “Force protection”, that is, the protection of the lives and wellbeing of their own soldiers, has been the overwhelming mission of the US deployment in Iraq all along, and has been pursued even at the cost of risking the lives of much greater numbers of Iraqi soldiers or civilians.
Given the US public’s strong concern about US casualties, this emphasis on force protection is, perhaps, politically understandable. In announcing the most recent “surge”, Bush has tried to signal that the US public might need to accept that there could be some increased US casualties during its early phases– but he “promised” us, as well, that these would not last for long…
But all in all, for the Bushites, it’s an extremely inopportune time for detailed news about an attack like the one in Karbala to get out and be disseminated to a wide US readership.
And yet, they proved unable to suppress the news. This, primarily because the Karbala provincial governor was apparently unwilling to participate in their cover-up…
Which is an indication of the Bushites’ large and continuing political problems in Iraq, as well.
Update, Mon. 4:45 p.m.:
IraqSlogger had these additional details, from Az-Zaman:

    According to Az-Zaman, the armed men who executed the operation wore the uniforms of the American Army, and rode in ten GMC jeeps. After the operation, the American forces prevented the governor and the municipal board members from entering the hall, but the governor held a press conference in his home, where he described the attack and said that the armed men came from “a neighboring province”. Az-Zaman interviewed a guard in the Police building who said that the attackers “came in an official visit”, but when they were intercepted, the attackers “took the weapons and phones” of the guards and asked them to lie on the ground. The guard added that the attackers executed the operation and left in a short period of time, destroying an American Hummer before they departed. The Americans were in yard of the building when the attack occurred, and no casualties were reported among the attackers, the newspaper added.

Soldiers and clowns in Tuwani, Palestine

This, from Art Gish, with the Christian Peacemakers Teams in At-Tuwani, Palestine:

    18 January 2007
    Israeli peace activists brought four clowns to the Palestinian village of At-Tuwani this morning to give a performance at the school. Just before the performance began, Israeli soldiers also entered the village. This was the same group of soldiers who have accompanied Palestinian school children past the Ma’on settlement for the past few days. The soldiers seemed angry and concerned about a van parked in the village.
    The soldiers arrested the driver of the van, with his wrists tied behind his back. The soldiers were rude, arrogant, and aggressive, but not physically abusive. Soon the soldiers were surrounded by a dozen village women, including an elderly woman who lectured them in Arabic. I felt sorry for the poor soldiers. They seemed frightened. They ordered everyone to move away, but the villagers only moved closer. Not one person obeyed any of the soldiers’ commands. They were practically powerless. What can one do, even if armed with an M-16, when no one will comply with one’s orders and one is being filmed? They moved the handcuffed young man to the other side of the jeep, but the women also moved to the other side of the jeep. The village women were calm, but strong.
    After about ten minutes, the soldiers put the man into the back of the jeep and drove away. I was worried. What would they do to him? They drove to below the village, stopped, and released the man. I was upset with the whole scene, but realized the Palestinians were calm. Their faith [is it faith or experience] is deeper than mine. They consider the soldiers to be ignorant and crude, and are not surprised by how the soldiers act.
    I headed toward the school to watch the four clowns do their acts for the children, who loved every minute of it. These clowns came to the village with a different attitude than did the soldiers. They came in friendship, without guns, and received a positive response. The contrast was striking. I wondered, “Are the people who sent the young soldiers here really that ignorant and naïve, that clueless about what makes for peace?” The clowns may have been silly, but their actions were profound.

Chronicle of a debacle foretold

The waPo’s Michael Abramowitz and Peter Baker have apparently been partially anointed by the Bush White House as its current chroniclers of choice. And thus, in today’s Wapo, we have their “authorized by the White House” version of how Bush undertook the allegedly extensive “policy review” that resulted in the current escalation plan.
The short version of the story of this policy review would be “ABB”: that is, “Guys! Cobble together a policy that is Anything But Baker-Hamilton”. But I guess the White House spinmeisters wanted to craft a longer, slightly more compelling narrative for it that would make their boss look deliberative, decisive, and wise…
And so we have “A&B”, Abramowitz and Baker.
They write:

    A reconstruction of the administration’s Iraq policy review, based on more than a dozen interviews with senior advisers, Bush associates, lawmakers and national security officials, reveals a president taking the lead in driving the process toward one more effort at victory — despite doubts along the way from his own military commanders, lawmakers and the public at large.

The main official whose words are quoted by name in the article is Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley. So this really is the “authorized version” of the chronicle.
About the most significant aspect of A&B’s narrative is that, in their attempt to make Bush look “decisive” and “leaderlike”, they make Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki look like a pathetic US cat’s-paw… This, in contradiction of the official administration story so far wherein Bush is sending in the surge in troops “in response to a request from the Iraqi government.”
Right there at the top of theie story, A&B write that when Maliki and Bush met in Amman on November 30, Maliki formally presented– Power Point slides and all!– a proposal whereby US troops would

    withdraw to the outskirts of Baghdad and let Iraqis take over security in the strife-torn capital. Maliki said he did not want any more U.S. troops at all, just more authority.
    The president listened intently to the unexpected proposal at their Nov. 30 meeting, according to accounts from several administration officials. Bush seemed impressed that Maliki had taken the initiative, but it did not take him long to reject the idea.

So much for Iraqi “sovereignty.”
Later, A&B tell us of Bush that,

    He never seriously considered beginning to withdraw U.S. forces, as urged by newly elected Democratic congressional leaders and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. And he had grown skeptical of his own military commanders, who were telling him no more troops were needed.
    So Bush relied on his own judgment [oh my G-d, what a terrifying thought… ~HC] that the best answer was to try once again to snuff out the sectarian violence in Baghdad, even at the risk of putting U.S. soldiers into a crossfire between Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. When his generals resisted sending more troops, he seemed irritated. When they finally agreed to go along with the plan, he doubled the number of troops they requested.[!!!]
    It was a signature moment for a president who seems uninfluenced by the electorate on Iraq and headed for a showdown with the new Democratic Congress. Presented with an opportunity to pull back, Bush instead chose to extend and, in some ways, deepen his commitment, gambling that more time and a new plan will finally bring success to the troubled U.S. military mission.

These nearly always unnamed “senior Bush advisers” etc who are quoted by A&B admitted to the chroniclers, however, that along the way they– though not, of course, their extremely wise and omniscient boss– had made at least two key errors of political judgment.
One was regarding US politics, where,

    They understood that many if not most Democrats would not welcome a troop increase but thought at least some would grudgingly go along — not anticipating what ended up as near-universal opposition by Democrats and visceral anger even among some Republicans…

And the other error was regarding Iraqi politics:

    By early fall, even as Bush was on the campaign trail accusing Democrats of defeatism, he and his senior advisers were coming to the conclusion that his core assumptions were wrong. The political process would not lead to security in Iraq. In fact, it would have to be the other way around. And they started to doubt the advice from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and senior commanders in Baghdad that troop levels were adequate to contain the violence.
    “It was pretty clear when you started to look at our assumptions, many of them just weren’t right,” said a senior administration official, who like others discussed internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

And thus, as we have seen, the “way forward” to the surge involved, right after the November 7 elections, Bush firing Rumsfeld and the two senior commanders in Iraq.
A&B describe how the White House’s “Iraq policy review” picked up steam after the election:

    The Bush team concluded that the previous Baghdad security plans had failed for four reasons: The Iraqis never took ownership over security, Maliki placed political constraints on military operations, there were not enough reliable Iraqi and U.S. forces, and there was no serious effort to rebuild areas taken back from insurgents or militias.
    Bush spent hours in conversation with Maliki, on the phone and in videoconference, probing to determine whether he could count on the prime minister. “The president decided we need to bring this issue to a head,” one senior adviser said. “We need to clarify whether this government is really a partner or not.”

A&B write that one “problem” for Bush,

    was that the military did not necessarily want more troops. Army Gens. John P. Abizaid, the Middle East commander, and George W. Casey Jr., the commander in Iraq, opposed an influx of U.S. forces because they were unconvinced it would change the dynamics on the ground.
    Resistance from Casey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff flared throughout the process. On Dec. 13, Bush went to the super-secure “tank” at the Pentagon to listen to his top generals, only to walk away convinced that some of them were trying to manage defeat rather than find a way to victory.
    Bush decided to placate some of the concerns expressed by the generals about the overextended military and told The Washington Post six days later that he would expand the size of the Army and Marines. When Gates went to Baghdad that week, he came back with Casey’s agreement for more troops based on the understanding that the commander would no longer be held back by the Iraqi government and that the United States would address the country’s economic needs.
    “He was not overriding his commanders,” one Bush aide said of the president. “But he was pushing them to identify what went wrong and what do we need to change what happened.”

Of course he was overriding his commanders. But they pushed back just a tiny bit, and got something they wanted out of that negotiation. Namely, an assurance that the US troops in Iraq “would no longer be held back by the Iraqi government.”
However, even having Casey’s agreement for some increase in troop levels, Bush continued to hold out for an increase even larger than Casey had agreed to:

    Bush had already decided to replace Casey with Petraeus, and through intermediaries the president reached out to Petraeus, who was supportive of more troops than Casey requested.
    So the president reversed Casey’s plan, deciding that all five brigades would go to Baghdad in a phased deployment. “The president came out and said, ‘Let’s err on the side of making sure they have everything they need,’ ” said a senior official.

So there is the political insiders’ “backstory” on this horrendous debacle of an escalation that is about to unfold.
… And if we should want an additional indicator of just how truly reckless this surge policy is, we could note that even that old hawk Henry Kissinger today came out in the WaPo with a lengthy peroration that was unprecedentedly critical of it.
I guess Henry’s deal with the many newspapers that carry his opinion columns is that they not make the texts available on the web, and I’m afraid I don’t have time to type in very much of what is in his piece today. But he warned explicitly that, “These circumstances have merged into an almost perfect storm of mutually reinforcing crises… ” [both within and beyond Iraq.]
Henry is also urging that the administration needs to talk with both Iran and Syria…
So if even he is this worried about the situation and about the way the Prez’s present policy feeds into it, then the rest of us should certainly be scared about its recklessness… Very scared indeed.

Empire then and now

The British historian Elizabeth Monroe must have been born in about
the same year as my father– 1910.  I have Monroe’s1981 book
Britain’s Moment in the Middle East, 1914-1971 here
in front of me, and in the bio note it says , “After serving on the staffs
of the League of Nations and Chatham House, she obtained a Rockefeller Travelling
Fellowship in 1937 for study in the Mediterranean area.” (After that, she
headed the British government’s Middle East Information Division during
World War 2; then she was ME correspondent for the Economist
for 15 years before settling down at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, to
write history.)

My father, James (JM) Cobban, gained his degree from Cambridge in Classics
in, I think, 1933.  Then in 1935 he published his first book,
Senate & Provinces, 78 -49 B.C.; Some aspects of the foreign policy
and provincial relations of the senate during the closing years of the Roman
Republic.  

I have that in front of me, too, along with another volume that
I inherited from my dad’s estate after he died eight years ago.  It’s a
volume by Percy Sands, who had been my dad’s Headmaster at the Yorkshire Dales
“public” (i.e. private) school where he spent nine of his most formative
years. Many decades later JM would tell me that Sands had been his most important role model as he grew up. And as I look at Sands’ book today I see that on his book’s title page– as on my father’s–
it notes that this piece of work in ancient history won Cambridge’s 
“Thirlwall Prize” for history.

Percy Sands’ book was published in 1908.
 Its title was The Client Princes of the Roman Empire.
under the Republic

Why am I telling you all this?  Well, mainly to demonstrate that the kinds of quandary George Bush faces in the
Middle East are not new… Not new at all!  Indeed, many whole sections
of Sands’ book The Client Princes could be applied
almost exactly to situations in the US empire today.  (Remember, too,
that a number of the “provinces” and the “client princes” written about in his book, as in my father’s book, were in what we now think of as the Near, or
Middle, East.)

One example of the similarities then and now:  Sands’ Appendix B cites
both Latin and Greek sources to provide evidence of more than a dozen instances
in which various client kings (read “Ahmad Chalabi”, etc) had bribed
men of presumed influence within imperial Rome…

And then, in his final chapter Sands segués effortlessly from
his consideration of client-center political relationships within ancient
imperial Rome to client-center political relationships within the then-contemporary
British Empire.

In his Section 90, for example, he writes:

Continue reading “Empire then and now”

Moqtada’s interview at La Repubblica, translated

    Here is a translation of Moqtada’s interview with La Repubblica, contributed to JWN’s comments section earlier today by “JHM”, who modestly writes, “Please let me know if there is something wildly wrong with the translation.”
    I gratefully say, “Thanks, JHM!”


“A Secret Army Against Us, But the Shiites Will Know How to Fight Back”
by Renato Caprile [correspondent of La Reppublica of Rome]
He feels stalked and goes into hiding. He sleeps no more than one night in the same bed. Some of his most faithful allies have already turned their backs. He has even moved his family to an undisclosed location. Muqtada al-Sadr feels that the end is near. Enemy forces, forces infiltrated amongst his own people! Yet for him it is not about al-Málikí, whom he considers little more than a puppet, so much as about ’Iyád al-‘Alláwí, the former prime minister, whom the Americans have never stopped aiming [to empower]. He [‘A.] is the true director of the operation which proposes to wipe him [S.] off the face of Iraq, him and his Mahdi Army.
[Q1] How is it that al-Málikí, who up until a short time ago even saw to it that there were six ministers of your movement in his cabinet, is suddenly so aware that the religious militias, and especially yours, are the true problem that must be solved?
[A1] Between me and Abú Asárá [al-Malikí] there has never been much good will. I have always suspected he was up to something and I never confided in him. We only met a couple of times. The last time he said to me, “You are the backbone of the country,” and then went on to admit to me that he was “obliged” to fight. Obliged, you see?
=
[Q2] The fact remains that he is on the brink of [?] unleashing an iron fist against his own people.
[A2] It is effectively unleashed already. Yesterday evening they arrested four hundred and some of my people. It is not we that they wish to destroy, it is Islam. We are only one obstacle. For the moment we shall offer no resistance.
=
[Q3] Do you mean you are going to disarm?
[A3] The Qur’án forbids killing in the month of Muharram [21 January through 18 February 2007]. So they’ll do all the killing then. There is no better time for a true believer to die, Paradise is guaranteed. But God is merciful, we are not all going to die. After Muharram, we’ll see.
=
[Q4] Some claim that the army and police have been extensively infiltrated by your men and that the Marines by themselves will never manage to disarm you.
[A4] It’s really exactly the other way around: it is our militia which is swarming with spies. It doesn’t take much doing to infiltrate an army of the people. It is precisely those people who by soiling themselves with unworthy actions have discredited the Mahdi. There are at least four armies ready to unleash themselves against us. A “shadow” about which nobody ever talks, trained in great secrecy in the deserts of Jordan by the American armed forces. On top of that, there is the private army of Allawi, the unbeliever who will soon succeed Maliki, which stands ready at the al-Muthanná military airport. On top of that, there is the Kurdish _peshmerga_ and finally the regular American troops.
=
[Q5] If what you say is true, you have no hope of resisting.
[A5] For all that, we are still who we are. [Commenter Christiane renders the foregoing as “”We are many, too.”] We represent the majority of the country that does not want Iraq turned into a secular state and a slave of the Western powers, as Allawi dreams to the contrary.
=
[Q6] For a week now you have been officially targeted. The regime claims that without their leaders the religious militias are much weaker militarily.
[A6] I am well aware of it. That is why I have moved my family to a safe place. I have even made a will and I continually move around so they have trouble knowing exactly where I am. But even should I have to die, the Mahdi would continue to exist. Men can be killed, but not faith and ideas.
=
[Q7] It is said that you were present in the crowd at Saddam’s execution. Is that true?
[A7] It’s utter nonsense. If I had been there, they would have killed me also. As for Saddam, I’m certainly not going to cry for the man who massacred my family and my people by tens of thousands. The only thing is, I would have executed him in a public square so that all the world saw it.
=
[Q8] If you were not there yourself, do you deny that there were a lot of your men in that room?
[A8] No, they were not my men. They were people paid to discredit me. To make me look like the person really responsible for that hanging. Listen to the audio again, the proof is that in reciting my prayer they left out some basic passages. Stuff that not even a child in Sadr City would ever have done. The object was to make Muqtadá look like the real enemy of the Sunnis. And they’re getting away with it. At a time when I have been received with full honours in Saudi Arabia! But suddenly after that show under the scaffold, my spokesman al-Zarqání, who was on the pilgrimage to Mecca, has been arrested. A subtle way to let me know that I am no longer on their list of friends.
=
[Q9] In any case, the war between you and the Sunnis goes on.
[A9] It is true that we are all Muslims and all sons of the same country, but they must first distance themselves from the Saddamites, from the radical groups, from men like Bin Ladin, over and above just repeating their “No” to the Americans. The only thing that will be enough is for their ulema to accept our conditions [and issue a fatwa against killing Shiites]. So far they have not done so.
=
[Q10] Perhaps there will be nothing but bloodshed in Iraq’s future?
[A10] If the future is a country split three ways, I see no alternatives. And that is what Bush wants, so as to have better control. It is certainly not what the Iraqis want. In my opinion, there is only one possible way to arrive at a solution: immediate American withdrawal.
——————
Update Saturday p.m.: Christiane just sent me a great document that’s a three-column tabulation of the Italian original, JHM’s translation, and her own. It’s a Word doc. She has picked out in red the few points where she feels JHM probably misunderstood the Italian, but says in an accompanying email that she thinks his English is far better than hers. Thanks, Christiane, and thanks again, JHM. You’re once again showing us the great information-leveraging power of the internet.

Washington’s shaky political house in Baghdad

I honestly can’t decide whether it’s hilariously funny or just plain downright tragic, the extent to which the Bushites’ have built their entire political “house” in Iraq on a foundation long ago laid and since then assiduously maintained by Teheran and Damascus.
Honestly, has nobody among the Bushites ever noticed this?
* There, back in the day, was Ahmed Chalabi, back in February and March 2003, going back to Iraq as the US-sponsored “liberator”– but travelling there via Teheran, where he held close consultations with the regime’s intelligence people.
* There has been Jalal Talabani, now the US-installed “President” of Iraq, visiting Syria over the past few days–m the first visit by an Iraqi head of state to Syria in over 30 years. The trip is scheduled to last six days. Talabani made the gracious gesture of traveling to the Asad family’s home village of Qardaha to visit the tomb of the late president Hafez al-Asad… Yes, that would be the same Hafez al-Asad who gave Talabani refuge for roughly 15 years, from 1975 through 1991.
* And there is SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim, long puffed up by the Bushites and their obedient press corps as “the strongest Shiite politician in Iraq”, etc. The same man whom the Bushists were hoping– along with his always politically malleable sidekick, Adel Abdul-Mehdi– would help them organize the anti-Moqtada, anti-Maliki ‘coup’ they were planning a few weeks ago… And there he was, yet again today, still whingeing publicly about the US forces’ “arrest” (or actually, capture) of five employees from Iranian consular offices in northern Iraq last week.
… Well, we can forget for now (but probably not forever) about Chalabi. But let’s just look at the positions now being espoused by the kingpins of the US political “plan” in Baghdad: Talabani, Hakim, or, for example, Iraq’s ethnic-Kurdish Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari (who on Sunday told the BBC that Iraq needs a constructive relationship with Iran); or, come to that, PM Maliki himself….
So where are there any “converts” at all within the Iraqi political firmament for the Bushists’ plan for Iraq, namely that a firm battle has to be fought inside Iraq,and the broader region, against both Iran and Syria?
There are none. (AP’s Robert Reid, from Baghdad, has also made this point well.)
The Bushists’ anti-Iranian, anti-Syrian political plans for Iraq are built on sand.
This quite evident idiocy of the political dimension of the Bushists’ “Anything But Baker-Hamilton” plan for Iraq means that no level of military expertise– whether in the area of counter-insurgency or in any other kind of operations– can bring about “victory”.
(War, after all, being “an extension of politics by other means.” D’you think Bush has ever heard about that?)
And that makes the decision to pour an additional 21,500 US service-members into the imbroglio in Iraq even more unforgiveable.

Good cop/ bad cop???

Down near the bottom of his blog post today, Juan Cole wrote this:

    Al Franken had me on his radio show on Air America Tuesday and suggested that Congress and Bush could play bad cop, good cop with PM al-Maliki. As I understood the argument, he suggested that Congress cut off funding for the extra troops such that it would run out by the end of this summer. Bush could then tell al-Maliki that there has to be substantial progress on curbing militias and national conciliation by then, because Bush can’t guarantee a sustained US commitment now that his party has lost Congress. I told Al that his plan sounds good to me. I do think a lot of the problem here is that the top Shiite and Kurdish leadership doesn’t feel a need to compromise with the Sunni Arabs because they know if the latter make trouble, the US will deal with them. They might not be so cocky, and might compromise more readily, if they thought they’d have to fight them themselves.

Why do I find Juan’s position there so politically naive and so morally troubling??
Politically naive:
(1) Juan– and also his host there, Al Franken– both seem to have bought, hook, line, and sinker the whole (administration-propagated) narrative that portrays what is going on in Iraq as exclusively a power-play between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds– one in which the “poor beleaguered Americans” find themselves caught in the middle, earnestly and benevolently trying to establish the optimal “balance” among those wild and unpredictable local forces… (See my analysis of the manipulative and politically inspired roots of this narrative, here.)
(2) Juan also apparently believes that threatening to withhold US troops from Iraq is a threat that can force Maliki to comply with US wishes on the political front??? But as I noted here, that’s a totally non-credible threat. Maliki wants the US troops to leave. How come Juan doesn’t seem capable of factoring that into his calculus? It’s true that Maliki seems like a timorous, diffident political figure; and it’s quite probable that the US have given him all kinds of cash inducements while he’s been PM, to get him to stay “on the team” with their plans. But despite all such inducements he– and more importantly the political coalition of Daawa and Sadrists of which he’s a member– have all remained committed to a speedy and total US withdrawal from Iraq.
So all this business about “the top Shiite and Kurdish leadership … might not be so cocky, and might compromise more readily, if they thought they’d have to fight them themselves” bears what kind of relationship to political reality there in Iraq??
Morally troubling:
(1) So we have a large and well-grounded political movement in this country that’s getting closer and closer to (a) bringing the Bushites into some form of accountability re their handling of the war, and (b) forcing the administration to withdraw from Iraq completely…. And Juan– and apparently also Al Franken– wants to compromise and blunt this movement by having it enter into some form of intentional and neocolonialist coalition with Bush on his handling of Iraq?
(2) And to do this, moreover, by explicitly joining with the Bushites in the “divide and rule” game they’ve been playing inside Iraq since April 2003, whereby they try to dole out incentives and very lethal punishments in such a way that it divides the Iraqi groups against each other and deliberately attempts to suppress the (still existing) nationalist Iraqi movement whose major leitmotif is “end the occupation”??
(3) Just the bullying language Juan uses there is a giveaway… “Bush could tell Maliki…” “if they make trouble, the US will deal with them…” et., etc.
… Honestly, I can’t imagine how someone like Juan Cole , whose probity and good intentions I generally strongly admire, has gotten anywhere near expressing support of this “good cop/ bad cop” idea. We in the US who are deeply disquieted over the tragedy that our government’s actions have inflicted upon the people of Iraq should do our utmost to reverse the administration’s policies as fast as possible. That is, to lift the yoke of ill-considered occupation and brutal “counterinsurgency” off the Iraqis as soon as we can.
“Good cop/ bad cop” sounds like a recipe only for continued colonial-style manipulation of the Iraqis’ tragic fate by Americans.
And I can’t understand why Al Franken– whose reported credentials as a “leftist” are actually much stronger than Juan’s– would have any truck with it, either.