Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 190 – Info, analysis, discussion

Bush’s new generals in Iraq

Note to readers: This week I started a new arrangement whereby I shall be cross-posting some JWN posts to “The Notion”, a group blog hosted by the venerable New-York-based mag, “The Nation.” My goal is to disseminate my writing more broadly, and bring some more readers back here to JWN. JWN is still absolutely my primary blog. I’ll be putting a lot more things here than I send over there, and also paying a lot more attention to the comments discussions here than there.

Anyway, I posted an early, ways shorter version of this post over at “The Notion” shortly before noon. (One of their requirements is that my posts there be much shorter than many of my posts here turn out to be… Including the present one.)

So anyway, I’ll see how it goes. I just want to assure stalwart JWN folks that my main place is still right here. (And I far prefer the comments discussions here.)

Several people have recently written fairly glowing accounts of the “brainy”
and essentially anti-inflammatory role the US military’s new command team
in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus and his number two, Lt.-Gen. Ray Odierno
, may bring to their work there. Okay, to be fair, most of these accounts
have centered on Petraeus– who has, I should note, long cultivated his relationship
with the press. Thus, we have had
Juan Cole
: “Petraeus is among the real experts on counter-insurgency, and did
a fine job… when he was in charge of Mosul”; and
Trudy Rubin
: “one of the Army’s smartest and most creative generals”, and many others…

However, very few of these people in Petraeus’s personal cheering section
seem to have dug much deeper– either into Petraeus’s own strategic thought,
as reflected in the
new counter-insurgency manual
he helped write during his latest gig as commander of the army’s “Combined
Arms Center” in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; or into the professional record
of the man who will be in charge of day-to-day operations in Iraq under his
leadership, Ray Odierno
.

A first stab at understanding what Odierno might bring to his new job should
start with the record of his service as commander of the 4th Infantry Division
during its time in Iraq, March 2003 through April 2004. The WaPo’s
Thom Ricks wrote a lot about that at the time, and has included a lot of
information about Odierno in his recent book
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
If you have a copy of the book, then go first to pp. 232-4, and then
to pp.279-91. If you don’t have a copy, you could go to that Amazon.com
link there, and do a “Search inside the book” for either “Odierno” or “H
& I”.

H&I, short for “Harrassment and Interdiction”, was just one of the aggressive
tactics Odierno used in the portion of the Sunni Triangle where the 4th ID
was operating…

On p. 234, Ricks refers to an article Odierno later published in
Field Artillery magazine:

He wrote that he often responded with heavy firepower: “We used
our Paladins [155 millimeter self-propelled howitzer systems] the entire
time we were there,” he said [probably, “wrote”, not “said” ~HC].
“Most nights we fired H&I fires… what I call ‘proactive’ counter-fire.”
His conclusion was that “artillery plays a significant role in counter-insurgency
operations.” That assertion is at odds with the great body of successful
counterinsurgency practice, which holds that firepower should be as restrained
as possible, which is difficult to do with the long-range, indirect fire
of artillery.

It should go without saying that there is no such thing as “counter-“fire
that is “proactive”, i.e., pre-emptive. Basically, what Odierno was
writing about there was a mode of operating inside Iraq that included going
around firing wildly with some pretty heavy artillery pieces simply to “harrass”
and, often pre-emptively, “interdict” any suspected or possibly even quite
imaginary opponents. (Okay, that was just about the same thing
that Bush did in ordering the whole invasion of Iraq, in the first place.
To that extent, we could certainly note the unity of approach between
the commander-in-chief and Ray Odierno, at that time.)

Over the pages that followed that quote, Ricks also writes a lot about the
lethal, esclatory excesses committed by one of the brigade commanders working
under Odierno in the 4th ID, Col. David Hogg. That portion of the book
is worth reading, too.

On p.232-3, Ricks writes of the 4th ID under Odierno,

Again and again, internal Army reports and commanders in iterviews
said that this unit– a heavy armored division, despite its name– used ham-fisted
approaches that may have appeared to pacify its area in the short term, but
in the process alienated large parts of the population.

“The 4th ID was bad,” said one Army intelligence officer who worked with
them. “These guys are looking for a fight,” he remembered thinking.
“I saw so many instances of abuses of civilians, intimidating civilians,
our jaws dropped.”

“Fourth ID fueled the insurgency,” added an Army psychological operations
officer…

“they are going through neighborhoods, knocking on doors at two in the morning
without actionable intelligence,” said a senior officer. “That’s how
you create new insurgents.”

A general who served in Iraq, speaking on background, said flatly, “The 4th
ID– what they did was a crime.”

So here’s my question: Why on earth should we be expected to believe that
Ray Odierno– a man who spent the vast majority of his career rising up inside
the “massive land force” portions of the US Army– has had a complete character/professional
makeover since April 2004, and that he is now going to go into Iraq with
Petraeus and conduct any kind of a “brainy”, culturally and politically sensitive
counter-insurgency campaign?

Especially, if we consider Odierno’s record alongside the content in the
new counter-insurgency
manual
that Petraeus has just helped author along with a Marines general. (Ricks’s
book makes quite clear that at the beginning of the current US-Iraq war,
the US Marines were generally much better at counter-insurgency than the
Army… Mainly because the Marines have always planned to operate in smaller
units and “live with the people” as much as possible, while throughout the
Cold War the Army had become accustomed, in Europe, to operating in very
large unites, with very large weapons, and living in a very large and comfortable
encampments… To that extent, for Petraeus to work on this new manual
with a Marines general iindicates that he was trying, a little belatedly,
to get some of the Marines’ parctices and lessons systeamtized also for the
Army.)

In today’s WaPo, David Ignatius came close to joining the “cheering
Petraeus” gang in
this
column, in which his lead was this:

What makes sense in Iraq? The political debate is becoming
sharply polarized again, as President Bush campaigns for a new “surge” strategy.
But some useful military guideposts can be found in a new field manual of
counterinsurgency warfare prepared by the general who is about to take command
of U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Picking up on the widespread “Petraeus as brainiac” theme, Ignatius
quotes approvingly from the quote– from an anoymous Special Forces officer–
that’s the epigraph at the head of Chapter 1: “”Counterinsurgency is not
just thinking man’s warfare — it is the graduate level of war.”

Ignatius also writes,

My favorite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a
big hand in drafting, is a section titled “Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency
Operations.” The headings give the flavor of these unconventional ideas:
“Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be.”
(Green Zone residents, please note: “If military forces remain in their compounds,
they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the
initiative to the insurgents.”) “Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction.”
“Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot.” And this military
version of the Zen riddle: “The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is,
the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted.” (As the host
nation takes control, “Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more
risk to maintain involvement with the people.”)

The abiding lesson of this manual comes in one of Petraeus’s paradoxes,
and it ought to be engraved as the cornerstone of U.S. policy going forward,
regardless of whether there is a troop surge: “The Host Nation Doing Something
Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well.” In making this
point, Petraeus cites the godfather of counterinsurgency warriors, Gen. Creighton
Abrams, who said when he was U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971: ” We can’t
run this thing. . . . They’ve got to run it.”

For my part, I’ve spent some time reading the whole of that crucial, doctrine-defining
first chapter of the manual… And it so happens I have made a few notes
on it, which I shall attach to this post in table form, below.

Bottom lines:

1. Petraeus and his co-authors were spelling out a doctrine
for situations– which perhaps they see as occurring many places in the future,
in addition to Iraq and Afghanistan– in which the US military will be helping
friendly host governments to battle local counter-insurgencies. (None
or almost none of the examples cited in Ch. 1 related to Afghanistan.)

2. The doctrine assumes a wide permission for the US military to “eliminate”
any “extremists” that it judges to be violent and/or unwilling ever to reconcile
with the host government.

3. The doctrine asserts that the US military commanders in any such
situation should lead the whole “COIN” effort, subsuming the efforts of local
US embassy staff, NGOs, and even the host government under their leadership.

4. The manual attempts to engage with fundamental issues in democratic
theory like “the consent of the governed”, the primacy of political
control over the military, and national sovereignty. However,
the US military is what it is; and the manual importantly flunks all these
conceptual challenges.

Final bottom line: Petraus may have tried very hard both to be a brainiac
and to produce a doctrine that allows a foreign occupying force to suppress
the forces of a deeply rooted and very multifacted national resistance movement–
and to do so in a way that looks a little “democratic” and senstive… But
he fails.

What’s more, if it’s going to be Ray Odierno who implements this COIN doctrine
in Iraq, then its failure in practice is likely to swift and fairly decisive.

The table containing my comments on the COIN manual text follows:

Continue reading “Bush’s new generals in Iraq”

How to withdraw from Iraq: The three-step program

So the House Democratic leaders say they want to put forward their own plan for Iraq as a counter to Bush’s? Here is an excellent plan that I have thought long and hard about that I urge them to use.
(Please note that, unlike the vast majority of the people now producing “plans” for Iraq, I have extensive experience in both Middle East studies and strategic studies, as well as the study of peacemaking. Readers might want to see some of what I was writing back in August 2002, Jan. ’03, Feb. ’03, or April ’03 about the US and Iraq….)
So here is my Three-step program for a US disengagement from Iraq:
(1) The President makes an authoritative public statement in which he announces,

(2) The clock starts ticking on the timetable announced by the President. That fact and the other new diplomatic realities created by his announcement all act together to start transforming the political dynamics within Iraq, the region, and indeed the US, as well. The Iraqi parties and movements all have a powerful incentive to work with each other and the UN for the speedy success of the negotiation over the post-occupation political order. They and the UN also start planning for the many tasks of social, economic, and political reconstruction that the country needs. Another important function for the UN will be to resurrect and re-stress the principle of Iraq’s territorial integrity and national soveriegnty against all the pressures that its powerful neighbors may exert in this fragile period. In these months the US troops in Iraq might come under some form of UN command (as happened– imperfectly, but with ultimate success– during an analogous process of a negotiated troop withdrawal in Namibia, in 1989.) But anyway, the US troops’ main mission in this period will be to organize and start implementing their own orderly departure from the country.
(3) On the date certain the last US troops leave Iraq and there is a handing-over ceremony.
… For those who don’t believe such a program is feasible, I’ll just note that when I was growing up in England in the late 1950s and the 1960s this kind of thing was happening almost every week as our “empire” got dismantled. It truly ain’t rocket science.
Iraq is lucky that it has hundreds of thousands of very well-trained technicians, administrators, and other professionals who can– in the right political circumstances– set to work to rebuild their country. They did that successfully after the end of 1990-91 Gulf War, even in the difficult situation of ongoing UN sanctions. (The US should contribute some “reparations” payments to help Iraq’s next reconstruction program along, but should absolutely not seek any control over it.)
Can Iraqis reach and sustain the kind of internal political entente that will allow an orderly, negotiated US troops withdrawal to take place? If they are convinced they can truly regain their national sovereignty through a process like that outlined above, there is no reason to believe that they can’t. Unlike the way Iraq is portrayed in most US media, there is still an ongoing process of cross-sectarian politics underway in the country, alongside the many, more widely publicized, episodes of sectarian killing and ethnic cleansing.
The US and the rest of the international community have a strong incentive to allow (or even quietly help) Iraqis to reach such a withdrawal-focused entente. Apart from anything else, the lives of 150,000 US Americans come close to depending on it.

Congress moves toward confronting Bush on the war

So it seems that the Democratic Party leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives have finally “gotten” at least a portion of the antiwar message the voters sent last November?
Yesterday, that renowned control freak (but also, very savvy pol) Nancy Pelosi announced that she has abandoned the plans she’d earlier laid to focus the much-touted “first 100 hours” of the new House’s legislative work completely on some long overdue pieces of domestic legislation. Now, as Jonathan Weisman reports in today’s WaPo, the congress’s new leaders,

aggressively confronting administration officials this week in a series of hearings.

Good political antennae there, Ms. Sanchez!
The Senate is also planning Iraq-related hearings this week. The Foreign Relations Committee under new chair Joe Biden will start its hearings Wednesday and will call Rice to testify Thursday. The Armed Services Committee will call Robert Gates in to testify Friday…
Earlier, Democratic leaders had said they would not use the powers they have under the Constitution to cut the funding for the war. But in an interview with CBS talkshow ‘Face the Nation’ yesterday Pelosi made a clear distinction between the funding for the troops that are there now, and those whom Bush is reportedly planning to add to their number in the surge/escalation he is expected to announce on Wednesday.
Pelosi made clear to CBS that she’s not saying a complete ‘No’ to the deployment of the additional troops. But, she said, the President “is going to have to justify [the new deployment] and this is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions.”
Indeed, any degree of real congressional oversight of his war plans is very new for Bush.
There is more caution, however, from Sen. Biden. Over in this WaPo article, Ann Scott Tyson notes that Biden told an NBC talkshow yesterday,

that it would be unconstitutional for Congress to authorize the war but then cap troop levels or cut funding for specific items. Biden said any troop increase would be “a tragic mistake . . . but as a practical matter, there is no way to say, ‘Mr. President, stop.’ ”

Well, Congress could always think about revisiting the terms of that old, October 2002 war-allowing resolution, built as it was on the whole argument about the threat from (the late) Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) WMDs… But of course, we have to take into account that Biden is also– as he confirmed there yesterday– definitely planning to run for president in 2008. So it is quite likely that his vanity in that direction and the political timorousness associated with running for prez may get in the way of him going into any principled, forthright confrontation with Bush over the war…
In general, the Democratic leaders of the senate are (a) in a tighter position from the votes viewpoint, and (b) less energized by the antiwar “Spririt of November 2006” than their House colleagues. (Especially since only one-third of the Senators have to go to their home districts and engage fully with the voters in election races in any given election year; though all the members of the House have to do that every time.)
But still, this looks like an epoch-making week ahead in Washington.

Washington’s ‘benchmarks’ for Maliki: Threatening what?

Many voices in the US policymaking elite currently like to couch their discussion of the country’s Iraq policy in terms of establishing firm “benchmarks” for Nouri al-Maliki’s government in Baghdad, with the threat that–
What?
I find this “benchmarks” aspect of the US policy discourse by turns hilariously funny, tragically misguided, or just plain mystifying.
There are two issues here. The first has to do with the US claim that it has any right at all to establish “benchmarks” for what most of these same people (and certainly the ones inside the Bush administration) also claim is the “soveriegn government” of Iraq. Well, many JWN readers may agree with me that the latter claim is quite unfounded– Iraq is still, in fact and under international law, still a territory under foreign military occupation. But it’s kind of interesting to note the contradiction between that and the other claim, anyway? (If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps logic is the second?)
The second issue is one in pure political realism. Like “benchmarks” in many other contexts, these ones come with an associated threat of some kind of sanctions to back them up. I used to establish “benchmarks”, for example, regarding the school performance of my son when he was still a teenager… along with threat that if he failed to meet them there would be some kind of sanction against him.
But if “PM” Maliki fails to meet the “behcnmarks” being discussed by Washington– what then?
As I see it, the strategic “thinkers” (hollow laugh permitted there) inside the Bush administration may have had two different kinds of sanction in mind. The first, that if Maliki doesn’t dance completely to their tune– by joining the campaign to isolate and suppress the Sadrists, for example– then, fairly evidently, they were planning (and indeed, almost openly threatening) to unseat him.
The original version of that plan relied on building up a credible threat that an alternative player within the Shiites’ broad UIA alliance– SCIRI’s head, Abdul-Aziz Hakim– could build a parliamentary coalition strong enough to outflank the Maliki-Sadr bloc. That plan got stymied by the firm edict that the UIA/Sistani issued on December 23rd, to the effect that the Sadrists were still a full and protected part of the UIA alliance, and that Hakim had better stop playing his dangerous games with the Americans. Hakim apparently bowed to that.
Possibly, the US overlords in Baghdad have plans for other schemes whereby they could mount a credible “unseating”-type threat against Maliki. A coup led by Iyad Allawi, perhaps? (Not very credible, imho: Allawi and which army?) Still, as I said, logic and rational assessment/reasoning are not exactly the hallmarks of this bunch of increasingly tired and desperate rulers in Washington.
But I said there were two possible kinds of sanction with which the Americans might be backing up their demand to Maliki re the “benchmarks.” The other one, which has also been heard from Washington in recent weeks, is of the order of “If you don’t dance to our tune we’ll pack up and leave you and your country to its fate.”
This threat has some credible aspects, and some non-credible aspects (but more, I think, of the latter.)
Credible: that the US citizenry and leadership may indeed be getting very near to the point of deciding to simply “pack up” and leave Iraq; and also, that the situation inside Iraq does indeed currently look quite horrible and may continue to be equally– or even more?– horrible for at least a while after the American troops leave.
Non-credible (as a threat against Maliki, at present): the fact that he actually does want the US troops to leave— and has said this on a number of occasions. So to wield this as a “threat” against him has strong tragico-farcical aspects to it.
Now it’s true that neither Maliki nor, as far as I can figure, any other Iraqi at all wants the US troops to leave in such a way that there is a bloodbath after they leave. And it’s also true that some of the presently reported US plans– such as bringing large units of Kurdish pesh merga down to Baghdad to help with the planned next “clean-up” there– may threaten to do just that.
It is also true both that there is already an extremely lethal cycle of Sunni-Shiite sectarian fighting underway throughout many areas of Greater Baghdad as well as in other areas… and, equally importantly, that this cycle of violence is being fed– from each side– by the irresponsible fear-mongering and incitement of powerful neighboring nations.
So the threat of a massively escalating fitna (that is, complete and perhaps genocidal socio-political breakdown) inside Iraq after a US withdrawal is not entirely an empty one.
But here’s the thing: Such a breakdown inside Iraq will also massively burn the US troops as they attempt to leave the country and is therefore completely against the interests of any any responsible US leader or politician.
I can’t stress that point enough.
If there is a complete fitna inside Iraq, moreover, it will not be limited to there, but will affect the (pro-US) status quo interests throughout the whole region. And though there may be an irresponsible few among the neocons or others who might not be disturbed by the prospect of a broad Sunni-Shiite sectarian war starting to rage across great portions of the Middle East (just as many Americans and other westerners did not mind much– or even were quietly happy– when Iran and Iraq slugged it out in very damaging regular warfare for eight years in the 1980s)… still, to do anything at all that allows such a broad, and always unpredictable, conflagration in the region today would be (a) the height of callousness and cruelty, as well as (b) extremely damaging to the interests of the US citizenry for many decades to come.
Therefore, I cannot imagine that anyone in the US policy discussion would be prepared even to contemplate scenarios that would involve “heating up” the sectarian tensions inside Iraq in the context of a simultaneous attempt to withdraw from it.
As I’ve written many times before, it is in the strong interests of the US citizenry that our leaders choose as quickly as possible the path of a troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, orderly (and generous.) Any kind of orderly withdrawal will rely on there being inside Iraq some form of at least minimal intra-Iraqi consensus that will allow this withdrawal to take place. It is therefore in our interests as US citizens to urge our leaders to do all they can to help the Iraqis to build that consensus.
A chaotic withdrawal-under-fire as Iraq burns is in absolutely nobody’s interests at all.
… Which leaves the Bush administration with what as a credible threat to back up any “benchmarks” it lays down for Maliki? Well actually, nothing at all. But here’s the other little-discussed aspect of this whole “benchmarks for Maliki” discussion: Maliki himself is, at this point, just about irrelevant.

Dave Zarembka on “Healing from slavery, war, and genocide”

David Zarembka is the coordinator of the African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI) of the Friends Peace Teams. He has been involved with peace work in Africa since 1964. Recently, he sent me the text of an extremely insightful lecture he gave last October, titled Healing from Slavery, War, and Genocide: Lessons from John Woolman and Friends in Rwanda and Burundi.
(That latter link there is to a beautifully formatted PDF version of the text. If you want an HTML version that is faster to download, but is largely unformatted and therefore harder to read, you’ll find it here.)
I’ve known Dave a few years now. Like me, he’s a member of a Friends Meeting (Quaker congregation) that’s part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Unlike me, he’s devoted large portions of his life to fully living out the traditional Quaker testimonies of peace-seeking and simplicity. For the past eight years he’s been working with the thousands of Quakers who live in the violence-wracked areas of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, helping build up their capacity to do effective peacebuilding work in the extremely difficult circumstances in which they live. (You can find more information about the Quaker congregations in Africa here.) Dave, and other members of the US-based organization Friends Peace Teams, have done this by establishing and running AGLI; and in the course of this work Dave has been traveling to the AGL region twice a year or so since 1998.
The Woolman lecture is, largely, Dave’s reflection on what he has learned from this work. The whole text of the lecture is very worth reading. It contains many great stories, some deeply spiritual testimonies (and some fond things Dave says about his daughter Joy Zarembka, who’s a hardworking anti-slavery campaigner.) But at the end of the lecture, Dave sums up the lessons he has taken from his experience working with his Central African colleagues in AGLI:

All this is deeply in the spirit of John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker in what later became the US who was an early campaigner against slavery and a witness to the disastrous effects European colonization was having on the native peoples of North America.
I have been thinking a bit about putting a Paypal button onto this blog, and inviting readers to contribute to some of the expenses I have in my work on it. I might still do that at some point. But right now I would prefer to urge you to consider digging as deep as you can to contribute to Dave’s work with AGLI. You can do so securely online, by clicking HERE. (Or if you prefer to send a check, you’ll find the address for that on that page, too.)
And Dave: thanks so much for what you and your colleagues there at AGLI do. It is truly transformational and inspiring.

New Congressional leaders weigh in on Iraq

This is good news! Okay, not perfectly wonderful news, but still, something definitely worth applauding.
Today, on their second day in office Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged the Prez not to proceed with his plans for a “surge” in the US troop level in Iraq:

That report there, by the WaPo’s Bill Brubaker, also noted that just a few blocks away, Sens John McCain and ‘Holy’ Joe Lieberman were telling folks at that nest of unreconstructed neoconnery the American Enterprise Institute of their continued support for the “surge.”
Bush is now supposed to announce his “new and improved” Iraq policy next Wednesday.
The announcement about the Reid-Pelosi letter comes one day after Sen. Joe Biden, the incoming (Democratic) chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler,

that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will “be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof,” in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.

Kessler said that Biden outlined his plans for the committee’s work,

including holding four weeks of hearings focused on every aspect of U.S. policy in Iraq. The hearings will call top political, economic and intelligence experts; foreign diplomats; and former and current senior U.S. officials to examine the situation in Iraq and possible plans for dealing with it. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will probably testify next Thursday to defend the president’s new plan, but at least eight other plans will be examined over several sessions of the committee.

(Eight other plans? Is that serious?)
Anyway, more Kessler:

I disagree strongly with Biden’s statement there’s nothing the U.S. Senate can do “to stop a president from conducting his war.” Of course there is– if the opposition to the Prez has a strong enough base in the Senate. It can start blocking or short of that strongly conditionalizing the White House’s war-related funding requests. Or it might even revisit the war-enabling resolution that was passed with such indecent haste back in October 2002, but that was entirely premised on the fear of what the Bushists claimed at the time was “slam-dunk” evidence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs…
And then, look at Biden’s argument. He says he’s hoping to win over Republicans to his (currently) war-skeptical viewpoint. All well and good. I am all for that. Indeed, um, some of them were there before he was. But say he does manage, even before next Wednesday, to put together a strong coalition in the Senate that opposes the surge, which is still quite conceivable– then what does he plan to do with that coalition?? Stand up and say, “Mr. President, I’ve renounced my recourse to our constitutional power of the purse in all matters including funding the waging of war, but I’m standing here with this veto-proof coalition of folks who want to block your very costly and reckless plan for a surge, and– ”
And what?
The WaPo’s veteran African-American columnist Eugene Robinson wrote in today’s paper,

Looks like maybe Reid and Pelosi read that, and paid good heed?
Meanwhile, for more background on what the war has already cost the US public so far, we can head quickly over to David Ignatius’s column today:

Using figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office, Ignatius looked first at the tax cuts the Prez has implemented– with the help of his GOP enablers in Congress– since 2001:

The year Bush really busted the budget was 2003, when he embarked on a costly war in Iraq that wasn’t funded by a tax increase.

$221 billion in 2005 and $245 billion in 2006

So okay, the Medicare/prescription drug benefit increase has been considerably less of a financial burden than the war. Let’s keep our eyes on the war figures, right?
David again:

And so, keeping our eyes on the many costs of the war– both economic and non-economic– let’s see what happens to this “surge” proposal within the next five days.
I think all US citizens should just simply redouble our efforts to contact our representatives in Congress and the senate with the simple and strong message “No surge! Start planning the total troop withdrawal now!” Plus of course, “No new war against Iran or anyone else!”

Iranians’ views of Saddam’s hanging

Most news accounts of the reaction of Iranians to Saddam Hussein’s hanging have spoken of the glee with which Iranians at many different levels of society greeted the news. For example, AFP’s Hiedeh Farmani wrote from Tehran that,

Etc., etc.
But here is a different reaction, from Karim Sadjadpour, who is the chief Iran-affairs analyst for the International Crisis Group:

I can only imagine what a Sunni Arab feels

I have always had respect for the intellectual level of Sadjadpour’s work as an alayst. I think that this latest comment of his– which was made to a private group and is reproduced here with his permission– shows that he brings a noticeable level of humanistic understanding to his work, too.

Musical (deck-)chairs in Bush’s running of Iraq policy

The Bushists have been leaking news of a fairly large number of upcoming personnel changes, amny of which have to do with the implementation of their Iraq policy. In the BBC‘s account of these, they will be:

Adm William Fallon

Lt Gen David Petraeus

Zalmay Khalilzad

Ryan Crocker

Michael McConnell

John Negroponte

In addition, Harriet Miers has announced her decision to step down as White House counsel.
To me, the most significant of these is the naming– for the first time ever– of an admiral to head Centcom. This makes it look far more likely that the focus of operations of this gigantic, multi-service “regional command” in the coming weeks and months will be on a strategically sensitive zone in its area of operations that has a large coast-line.
Iran, anyone? Pakistan?
(Or perhaps Fallon’s main job will be to organize the flotilla of small boats needed to execute a Dunkirk-style withdrawal-under-fire from that tiny piece of Shatt-estuary where Iraq debouches into the Gulf? Nah, I don’t think so.)
For some reason Juan Cole, who has never spent much time in Washington, felt moved to pen this breathless appreciation for the “new” personnel:

These are competent professionals who know what they are doing… I wish these seasoned professionals well. They know what they are getting into, and it is an index of their courage and dedication that they are willing to risk their lives in an effort that the American public has largely written off as a costly failure…

Of course, if Zal Khalilzad is going to be so wonderful at the UN, how come he wasn’t terribly successful inside Iraq? (And another question about Zal. Should we presume he’ll be sworn into his new job on a Koran? What will our IslamophobicRep. Virgil Goode– also, like Zal, a very conservative Republican– have to say about that? Especially since Zal falls into the category to which Goode takes particularly strong exception: Muslim Americans who are also immigrants… )
Oh well, Virgil Goode is really small potatoes in this whole story, I know.
Meanwhile, back to Washington: Dan Froomkin of Washingtonpost.com, who understands the relationships within the nation’s policymaking elite a whole lot better than Juan Cole does, gives Bush’s present round of personnel changes this, rather different reading:

A purge of the unbelievers.

are jettisoned for having shown a little backbone in their opposition to Cheney and Bush’s politically-motivated insistence on throwing more troops into the Iraqi conflagration.

In my view, having yet another such large round of personnel changes also falls into the meta-narrative of a tired, confused, hacked-out administration desperately shuffling the deck-chairs on the Titanic one more “last” time before– well, before who knows what?
I have recently been working my way through reading Thomas Ricks’s recent book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks, who’s the WaPo’s chief Pentagon correspondent, goes into searing detail on the incompetence and internal disarray in the Bushists’ handling of every single stage of the Iraq imbroglio. Of course, I’ve read his waPo pieces on many of these incidents before. (He discloses a lot more of his material along the way, in the form of good, straightforward reporting, than Bob Woodward has done for a long time.) But Ricks has also done a good, basic job of pulling all these vignettes together in the book and starting to apply some higher-level analysis to them.
One big theme that comes through the book is how the instability in terms of personnel and entire groups of personnel that marked all aspects of the US administration of Iraq served– and to this day still serves– to compound the mistakes and incompetence displayed by the US national command authorities at the highest level.
On a parallel note, one of the main things that came through my reading of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial was the continuing administrative chaos in just the Washington end of things… To the extent that the various “players” in DC, distrusting each other and everything they were hearing from the field inside Iraq, would have to very frequently either undertake “fact-finding” trips of their own to Iraq, or find a trusted sidekick to do that for them. At times, it seems they were all criss-crossing with each other as they darted in and out of Baghdad airport. And distrusting each other quite a lot, it seemed. Ricks also makes a big point about the debilitating effect of the fragmentation of command at the military level.
… And so it goes on. I have no reason to believe that this latest round of personnel changes will have any great effect on either (a) the content of a policy that still seems to to be in a strong “state of denial” about the depth of the strategic setback the Bushists have already walked into inside Iraq, or (b) the incompetent administration of that policy, relying as it has to a quite unprecedented and extremely counter-productive degree on “market-based approaches”, pure ideology, and recklessness, rather than any model of sound, conservative strategic planning.
Watch for icebergs ahead.

Iraq: Battle of the narratives

And you thought the war in Iraq was about weapons and armies? No, indeed not. Weapons and armies and such things in the physical world are the tools; but what is really happening in Iraq– as in any civil war, war of insurgency, or similar lengthy inter-group conflict– is primarily a battle of narratives. What each of the parties is seeking to do, basically, is find a way to organize the widest possible coalition of followers around their particular version of “the Truth.”
So what are the major narratives being fought over there? Here’s a first cut at describing the four biggest ones among them:

The Bushists’ narrative (version 78.6, or so)

They would have everyone– Iraqis, the world, but most particularly the US citizenry– believe that what is “at stake” in Iraq is a broad battle between “moderates” (= the good guys) and “extremists” (= the bad guys.) Okay, I know this is extremely thin as an organizing concept. But it’s the best they can come up with after nearly four years of hard slogging inside Iraq, with a huge amount of attrition and/or turnover along the way among their top administrators there. Also, all their previous narratives proved quite useless. Remember “democrats vs. dead-enders” and all those earlier fizzlers?
These guys are tired. And it certainly shows.
Their most recent attempt at a version of the “moderates vs. extremists” narrative was designed explicitly to isolate Moqtada Sadr (= “extremist”). It relied, however, on a major logical and factual flaw. Since the attempt to isolate Moqtada relied on splitting the UIA, the broader Shiite alliance of which he is an important part, the Bushists needed to define their chosen tools within the UIA as “the moderates.” But Abdul-Aziz Hakim, his SCIRI party, and their associated Badr militia are far, far from being in any recognizeable way “moderate”. There is, indeed, considerable evidence that they are significantly more brutal (and also significantly more pro-Iranian) than the Sadrists…
Go figure.
Washington’s isolate-Moqtada plan was fairly definitively blocked by Ayatollah Sistani just before Christmas. Might the whole sad concept of the presently mooted “surge” be related to yet another attempt to revive it?
And then we have…

The militant Sunni/Arabist narrative

This one– peddled furiously by many Sunni Arabs outside Iraq and some inside Iraq– describes the battle in Iraq as one of defending this eastern bulwark of the Arab (and Sunni) world against the looming power of the Shiites, all of whom are described in the more extreme versions of this narratives as somehow secretly either ethnically Persian or anyway controlled by Iran.
Badger recently had a great quote representing this view: something that Sunni Iraqi pol Admnan al-Dulaimi was quoted as saying at the Istanbul Conference, Dec. 13-14:

“[There is a] Shiite, Safavid, Persian, Majousi [i.e., related to the Magi] threat originating in Iran and aiming to consume all of Iraq, and after that neighboring countries including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, by way of reviving the dream of a new Persian empire.”

Whew! All those four attributes coming together into a critical mass of pure threat there. Talk about rhetorical overkill. However, as As’ad Abou Khalil and many others have noted, this kind of reetoric is being very widely propagated by the Saudis and their media.
In some versions of this narrative, the Iranians are seen as having come together with not only the US but also the Israelis to attack core values and assets of the (Sunni) Arab nation in Iraq.
(Go figure.)
Another attribute of this narrative is that it systematically tries to deny the “authenticity” of most or all Shiite Iraqis by claiming that they are all, somehow, actually ethnic Iranians– not Arabs at all!– and therefore they don’t deserve to have their views as Iraqis taken seriously.
(I suppose a next step in pursuit of this move to marginalize Iraq’s many millions of, yes, ethnically Arab citizens of the Shiite faith from the national discourse would be to seek to expel them physically from the country. The Sunni militants are not strong enough to propose this yet, though of course they have ethnically cleansed many thousands of Arab-Iraqi Shiites from mixed neighborhoods; and some of them have maintained a horrendous campaign of pure, anti-civilian terror against Shiite Iraqi communities throughout the past 30 months or so, using car bombs, individual suicide bombers, truck bombs, etc.)

The militant Shiite narrative

This one, too, has its more hardline propagators mainly outside Iraq, but also a number of propagators inside the country. It holds that the major threat to Iraq comes from the “Wahhabists”– a term that is used to describe either just the most militant of the Sunni activists or, in a more extremist version, just about all the Sunnis in Iraq.
Note that here, as with the use by Sunnis of terms like “Persian, Safavi, Majousi”, one clear intention is to deny the opponents’ “authenticity” as Iraqis, by pinning on them a label associated with an outside power. In this case, Saudi Arabia.
Some Shiite militants also use the terms “Al-Qaeda”, “Salafists”, or “neo-Baathists” as ways to deny the authenticity and legitimacy of Sunni Iraqis as Iraqis.
Here is a classic example of a writer who in September 2005 sought to delegitimize the (actually, not unreasonable) reservations that many Iraqi Sunni politicians were expressing at the time to the Iraqi constitution, by describing the these politicians as “Wahhabi” and “Salafist”. Note that the writer of this article is himself Iranian, not Iraqi at all!

The Iraqi nationalist narrative

This narrative is harder to find represented in the western media than any of the three narratives listed above. (No surprise there.) It holds, as a fundamental tenet, that the continued US occupation is the root cause of Iraq’s current woes and therefore has to end; and that, while there are many grievances between different groups inside Iraq, these can be resolved among Iraqis themselves.
People who advocate the Iraqi nationalist view can be seen as differing on the legacy of Saddam’s rule. They may have some distrust of some or all of Iraq’s neighbors. They hold to a concept of “Iraqi-ness” that may or may not actively embrace the Kurdish roots of a large segment of Iraqis, but that attempts strenuously to maintain or build unity between ethnic-Arab Iraqis who are Sunnis and those who are Shiites, and between those who are more Islamist and those who are more secular (though the latter are a dwindling breed.)
A couple of examples of the Iraqi-nationalist narrative… The first comes from the Association of Muslim Scholars’ Harith al-Dhari, also speaking at that Istanbul conference. He was reported as saying there,

There are both Shiites and Sunnis on the one side under a single banner, and on the other side, arrayed against them, is the Occupation along with its Iraqi agents, aiming at the realization of its colonialist aims.

The second is from the Sadrists’ Baha al-Araji, in the interview that Foreign Policy published recently:

Note, with respect to Shiite proponents of the Iraqi-nationalist narrative, that Araji is not the only one who expresses some distrust of Iran… And some Iranians seem completely to reciprocate that level of distrust.
On January 2, the Tehran Times ran an intriguing piece of commentary. It was by Hassan Hanizadeh, who was the same person who authored that anti-Wahhabi diatribe I referred to above. On January 2, Hanizadeh criticized the Sadrists by name, describing them as acting as, effectively, dupes of hard-line Sunni politicians intent on splitting the UIA:

There are some other notable features of this Hanizadeh op-ed, including that he mirrors the Bushist narrative regarding Iraqi politics in some significant ways! For example, when he says that the UIA is “led by Abdul-Aziz Hakim”, and when he seeks to demean and diminish Moqtada Sadr by referring to him dismissively as “a young cleric.”
Hanizadeh’s argument is also notable when he says it was the Sadrists who sought to break the UIA’s ranks (by going into an alliance with those Sunni trends), whereas what seemed to me to have happened was that it was the Bushists and Abdul-Aziz Hakim (joint darling of both the Bushists and the mullahs in Tehran) who were explicitly trying to break UIA unity by getting the UIA to repudiate Moqtada…
Interesting, huh?
I should send a quick hat-tip to Juan Cole for linking to that Hanizadeh piece. But I don’t think he gave it the attention or the context that it deserved.
We should also keep in mind about the UIA’s eminence grise, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, that though he– like some other members of the clerical class in Iraq, but unlike the vast majority of the country’s Shiite believers— is actually by ethnicity an Iranian, still, he has very significant religious, political, and philosophical differences with the mullahs in Teheran, and centrally over the concept of wilayat al-faqih. Yet another non-trivial wrinkle there.
Anyway, I just want to finish this post with a few quick observations.
(1) In the present situation in Iraq, the two main narratives that I see as competing for the hearts and minds of (Arab) Iraqis are not the two sectarian narratives described above, but rather, the Bushist narrative and the Iraqi-nationalist narrative.
The advocates of each of these two large competing narratives are currently fighting to manipulate the loyalties of the Iraqi supporters of both the sectarian narratives in the direction they want them to go.
In the case of the Iraqi nationalists they want and need to win to their own cause the loyalties of Iraqis who might currently be supporters of one or the other sectarian narrative.
In the case of the Bushists, they want to enlist as many Arab Iraqis as they can to their “moderates vs. extremists” narrative. But even the very dumbest Bushists must understand there is little likelihood of achieving a winning coalition in that way. So more than that, they are probably seeking to pump up both the two sectarian narratives, as a way of minimizing the support for the nationalist narrative, and then to let the proponents of the competing sectarianisms escalate their conflict against each other in a perpetuation of the classic divide-and-rule tactics Washington has been pursuing inside Iraq since April 2003.
(Although, as I have noted elsewhere, this is a very shortsighted thing to do, and will result in far higher risks for the widely dispersed US troops inside Iraq, whether Washington’s desire is for those troops to leave quickly or to stay in Iraq for a fuurther period.)
(2) This is far from the first time that a “battle of the narratives” of such broad and far-reaching proportions has been at issue during a bloody and very lethal battle in that region. Back in 1980 after Saddam launched his extremely aggressive and ill-starred invasion of Iran, there were huge questions about the loyalty to their respective national capitals of (a) the millions of ethnic-Arab Shiites of Iraq, and (b) the millions of ethnic-Arab Shiites of the south of Iran. But it was the citizenship that members of each of these groups had at that time won out over, in the case of the Iraqi Shiites, their sectarian sentiment, and in the case of the ethnic-Arab Iranians, their ethnic identity.
(3) A “battle of the narratives” is not won with tanks, aerial bombardments, or troop surges– though the arrival of additional large numbers of US troops might well end up tipping the balance in favor of the Iraqi nationalists. But basically, a battle of the narratives is won through effective political work.
(4) As noted here previously, the vast majority of the western MSM has ignored or systematically the Iraqi nationalist narrative. This is most likely through some combination of (a) their unfamiliarity with Iraqi politics, (b) their susceptibility to, and in many cases reliance on, the Bushists’ spin, and (c) intellectual laziness. Over the past year or so, Juan Cole has not been a particularly helpful guide to these matters.
(5) The behavior of the onlookers, and perhaps some officials, at Saddam’s hanging was extremely undignifed, and his trial blatantly unfair. But for many Sunni Arab commentators and US commentators now to pile onto Moqtada al-Sadr and blame him for everything that went on there is quite outrageous. (Also, the phsyical manner of the hanging itself was “executed” quite professinally, unlike in Nuremberg where the dying men twisted on their ropes for 20 minutes before they finally expired.)
Look, the whole trial proceeding was presided over at one scant remove by the Americans– and now they want to use this as a pretext to gin up self-righteous criticism of Moqtada Sadr??

About that Jefferson Koran

Yes, “Virgil,” it’s true: There is a Jefferson Koran.
When and why?
In the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library rests the original Virginia Gazette Daybook – a fascinating account book of that bookseller’s customers in the Virginia Colony capital town of Williamsburg.
For October 5th, 1765, the Gazette Daybook clearly records a purchase by the second customer of the day: a 22-year-old law student named Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson made a single purchase: George Sale’s two-volume translation and introduction to “The Koran, Commonly Called the Alcoran of Mohammed.”
In a recent article in Early American Literature, Kevin Hayes suggests that Jefferson had multiple reasons for buying a Koran, ranging from preparations for the bar exam, to his broader interests in natural law to the history of religion.
(As may pleasantly surprise some), the most frequently cited source in Jefferson’s legal writings was Pufendorf’s 1672 classic, Of the Law of Nature and Nations.
As Pufendorf cites multiple precedents from the Koran on various civil and international legal issues, It was quite “natural” for Jefferson as an advanced student of laws, not just of one nation but of the world, to study the Koran, especially one which included detailed comparative comment by a distinguished British lawyer, George Sale.
The following introductory passage from Sale no doubt was a selling point to Jefferson:

If the religious and civil Institutions of foreign nations are worth our knowledge, those of Mohammed, the lawgiver of the Arabians, and founder of an empire which in less than a century spread itself over a greater part of the world than the Romans were ever masters…. Since students of law study legal precedent from ancient Rome, they should also study precedent from a society with an even greater reach than Rome.

Flash Forward:
241 years and 3 months later from the day Jefferson first purchased it, Jefferson’s Koran was delivered from its current home at the Library of Congress to the House of Representatives. There, it served as the holy book upon which America’s first Congressperson of the Muslim faith, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, took his ceremonial oath of office.
I already wrote here about the controversy over Ellison’s desire to use a Koran for his ceremonial oath, and specifically about Virgil Goode’s bizarre letter and contentious press conference about Ellison’s wishes.
Among the press conference lowlights, Virgil Goode declared that he wouldn’t use the “Q-Ran” for his oath taking; denied he was a racist, characterized all Muslims as inherent threats to American values; ducked the core question of whether Ellison has the right to take an oath on whatever book he wishes, and refused to apologize to Ellison or anyone else.
In my annotated transcription of Virgil’s “bad” performance, I suggested that Congressman Goode might benefit from re-studying his basic Virginia civics, particularly the most famous person ever from his district – Thomas Jefferson.
On Jefferson’s tombstone at his Monticello home, Jefferson’s requested epitath cites three great accomplishments in his life:

Author of the Declartion of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia.

That Jefferson was America’s third President is not mentioned.

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