Just World News with Helena Cobban

Lots happening in the world and I’ve been busy doing (gasp!) non-blog things. So I’ll throw together a couple of shorts here before going to get some rest..
First up: the continuing fallout from the ISG report, inside US politics. John Broder and Robin Toner have a good round-up in Sunday’s NYT of the very divisive effect the report has been having within the GOP:

A document that many in Washington had hoped would pave the way for a bipartisan compromise on Iraq instead drew sharp condemnation from the right, with hawks saying it was a wasted effort that advocated a shameful American retreat.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page described the report as a “strategic muddle,” Richard Perle called it “absurd,” Rush Limbaugh labeled it “stupid,” and The New York Post portrayed the leaders of the group, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic member of Congress, as “surrender monkeys.”
Republican moderates clung to the report, mindful of the drubbing the party received in last month’s midterm elections largely because of Iraq. They said they hoped President Bush would adopt the group’s principal recommendations and begin the process of disengagement from the long and costly war. But White House officials who conducted a preliminary review of the report said they had concluded that many of the proposals were impractical or unrealistic.
The divisions could make it more difficult for Republicans to coalesce on national security policy and avoid a bitter intraparty fight going into the 2008 campaign.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, rejected the major recommendations of the group because they did not present a formula for victory. Mr. McCain, hoping to claim the Republican mantle on national security issues, has staked out a muscular position on Iraq, calling for an immediate increase in American forces to try to bring order to Baghdad and crush the insurgency.
…[T]he debate will go to the heart of the party’s identity — and its image as the party of strength on national security — after Mr. Bush’s aggressive post-Sept. 11 foreign policy brought electoral successes in 2002 and 2004 but was profoundly challenged by voters this year.
… Republicans are already engaged in soul-searching over the results of the recent election, trying to figure out how the party can regain the faith of the American people on questions of war and peace.
The ambivalence and introspection were summed up by Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who spoke at length in the Senate this week about the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq but said he could no longer support the status quo.
“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day,” Mr. Smith said. “That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore. I believe we need to figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right. So either we clear and hold and build, or let’s go home.”
The frustration was widespread among Congressional Republicans, some of whom were serving their final days in office this week after an election largely influenced by the public’s unhappiness with the war.

Here’s some more about Sen. Smith, from his home-state’s leading paper, The Oregonian: An editorial there commented that in making his statement in the Senate Thursday night, Smith,

broke ranks with such hawks as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and the president himself. He placed himself among such colleagues as Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who have said the United States must withdraw from Iraq as quickly as possible.
While Smith used blunt language — “let’s cut and run, or cut and walk, or let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we have” — his remarks didn’t signal as abrupt a break as it might have appeared.
He acknowledged Thursday that he had voted to allow the president to invade, that he had hoped U.S. forces would find secret caches of weapons of mass destruction, that he was thrilled by the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and was heartened by the way Iraqis turned out to vote three times in national elections.
But after he visited Oregon National Guard troops near Kirkuk in March last year, he said, “We can be a counterproductive force for Iraqi democracy if we are there longer than is necessary. My own hunch is somewhere between 18 months to two years, the American presence in Iraq will be much reduced.”
It’s been 18 months and the presence hasn’t been reduced at all. Nor is a functional central government much closer to asserting itself. Nor is the Iraqi economy any stronger. Nor are U.S. troops dying any less frequently. And more Iraqis are being killed each month than ever.
As a partial explanation for why he chose to speak now, Smith harked back to his visit to the Kirkuk region. He said one soldier told him: “Senator, don’t tell me you support the troops and not our mission.” That, the senator said, gave him pause.
But 18 months later, with billions of dollars flushed away, thousands more bodies under the ground and no end in sight, the senator’s pause is over.
His comments strengthen his hand in advance of his 2008 re-election campaign. They would seem to place him closer to the position of voters who kicked his party out of power last month and certainly closer to the sentiments of most of blue-state Oregon.
But personal political calculations aside, the timing of Smith’s remarks helped to increase the pressure on President Bush to break with his policies of the last 18 months. The election results, the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary in favor of a man who says America is not winning in Iraq and the arrival of the Iraq Study Group report make this a propitious moment in our political history.
It is a moment when the president must acknowledge what is obvious even to his former supporters in the U.S. Senate. It is time to reset American policy in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
There is more virtue in admitting a mistake than there is in repeating it, over and over.

Well said.

The
ISG report,
released yesterday, did not urge two of the key steps that
I consider essential
if the US is to be able to undertake a troop withdrawal from Iraq that
is orderly, speedy, total, and generous.  It did not urge that President
Bush publicly specify a deadline or timetable for the completion of the US
withdrawal. And it did not urge giving the key role in sponsoring the diplomacy
required to allow this withdrawal to the U.N….  However what it did recommend
was a quantum-leap improvement over the policies still being publicly stated
by the President (and also, over what many of the congressional democrats
have been advocating.)

I consider it extremely important that this document, endorsed unanimously by
this high-level, bipartisan group, came out openly and made statements as
forthright (and true) as the following:

“The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating. There is no
path that can guarantee success… Violence [in Iraq] is increasing in scope
and lethality.”(xiii)

“If current trends continue, the potential consequences are severe” (ix)

 “If the situation continues to deteriorate, the consequences could
be severe. A slide toward chaos could trigger the collapse of Iraq’s government
and a humanitarian catastrophe. Neighboring countries could intervene. Sunni-Shia
clashes could spread. Al Qaeda could win a propaganda victory and expand its
base of operations.” (xiv)

“Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and
their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to
engage them constructively.”(xv)

“The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it
deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There
must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive
Arab- Israeli peace on all fronts.”(xv)

“Current U.S. policy is not working, as the level of violence in Iraq is
rising and the government is not advancing national reconciliation. Making
no changes in policy would simply delay the day of reckoning at a high cost.”(p.38)

The ISG report is not perfect.  But in understanding its imperfections
(as well as its achievements) it’s important to understand what it is, and
what it is not.  What it is, is primarily a very high-level and serious
intervention inside US politics.  From that point of view, it
is barely “about” Iraq at all.  It is much more “about” this group of
senior statespeople trying to grab hold of the wheel of the ship of (the American)
state and slowly drag this lumbering great vessel away from a course that
has been– and still is, to this day– most evidently headed towards a disaster.
 A disaster for all the parties concerned: Americans, Iraqis,
the neighbors of Iraq…  And though I completely understand that it
has always been the Iraqis who have suffered the most from the terrible consequences
of the actions undertaken inside their country by the US military, still, at
this point it is the US government that has the greatest capability to affect
the course of events inside Iraq; so if we want to stop the terrible bloodletting
there the first thing we (US citizens and others) need to do is do
everything in our capacity to change the policies that have until been blindly
pursued by the Bush administration.

Of course, if we had anything like a robust parliamentary system here in
the US, or at the very least a functioning multi-party system, then we could
have expected the kinds of recommendation now being made by the ISG to have
been advocated very forcefully throughout the past 18 months or more by
the opposition party.  But we don’t.  We have had– and still,
until the inauguration of the new Congress will continue to have– a completely
sclerotic and dysfunctional one-party system.  And what’s more,
even once the Democrats come in as the majority party in both Houses of Congress
on January 1, we can know that they won’t be much better than the Republicans
on such key aspects of the policy towards Iraq as the need for diplomacy with powers like Iran and Syria; the need for urgent,  even-handed
engagement in Israeli-Arab peacemaking; or even on troop levels, etc…  So
this is what we have had instead: a high-level, “senior statespeoples’ group” convened
back in March at the initiative of a generally quiet Republican Conghressman
from Northern Virginia called Frank Wolf, who had been shocked by what he
saw in Iraq when he made his third post-invasion visit to the country in September
2005.

For my part, of course I’m disappointed that the ISG didn’t go that important
bit further and endorse both a much stronger role for the UN, and the announcement
of a fixed timetable for the US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Interestingly,
this
report in today’s WaPo tells us that the most serious threat to the unanimity
that marked the group’s final position came precisely over the deadline issue.
 The WaPo reporters cite unnamed “insiders” as saying that ISG member
Bill Perry– a Clinton-era Defense Secretary– had threatened not to sign off on the final
document unless it specified such a deadline.  But–

Former secretary of state James A. Baker III resisted a firm
date, wanting to leave that to the president.

“I’m not going to sign anything that is going to paper over the problem,”
Perry said.

“Well, if that’s the case, that’s the case,” Baker replied.

In the end, though, Baker and Perry walked off together to settle their
differences rather than let them split the commission. With suggestions from
other members, they crafted careful language that they both could support,
a recommendation to pull out nearly all U.S. combat units by early 2008 —
a goal, not a timetable, but a date nonetheless.

So yes, I’m a bit disappointed.  But the much larger point here is
that the ISG has spelled out clearly that there is no possibility of a military
“victory” in Iraq, and that the US’s continued engagement there is inflicting
serious, continuing damage on our citizenry’s interests. (This is, of course,
the classic definition of a “quagmire”.)  Therefore, they rightly conclude
that the administration has to find a way to get the US troops out of the
quagmire that Iraq has become.  And as cool realists capable of
reading and understanding maps (which perhaps our president is not), they all
understand quite fully that no such withdrawal can be contemplated without also having a plan to win the approval of major Iraqi neighbors as Iran, Turkey, Syria,
and Saudi Arabia to the withdrawal plan.

Hence the need for negotiations…

Continue reading “Why I welcome the ISG report”