UNU conference in Amman

The conference is totally awesome. Today we heard an Indian Gandhi scholar called Dr GK Prasad talk about Gandhi’s legacy; veteran US civil rights activist Michael Simmons talk about Martin Luther King Jr; Cathy Gormley-Heenan from INCORE and the University of Ulster talk about leadership in the peace process in Northern Ireland; Vasu Gounden, the Exec. Director of the African Center for Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) talk about his organization’s peacemaking work in DRC and Burnudi; and Ramesh Thakur, the Vice-Rector of the UN University talk about “UN Peace Keeping Operations: Successes/Constraints/Challenges”
It was an incredible feast, both intellectual and inspirational. We were going from 8 a.m. until about 10:30 p.m., so I’m too beat to write more. Tomorrow I’m running the afternoon session along with a (new) friend from Christian Peacemaker Teams called Jan Benvie, who’s here for the four days of the conference between serving in Hebron in southern Palestine, and Suleimaniyah in northern Iraq. After we got back to our hotel this evening, she and I worked some more on what we’re going to do with the session.
More details tomorrow or Monday– or whenever I regain some energy…

Sins of the predecessors

Should the largely pauperized population of today’s Iraq be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in Kuwait and elsewhere that were damaged by Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait?
Should the extremely poor population of today’s South Africa be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in even poorer Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, and elsewhere that were damaged by the apartheid regime’s decades-long aggressions against those countries?
Should the largely pauperized population of today’s Iraq be held responsible for making ‘reparation’ payments to people and institutions in Iran that were damaged by Saddam Hussein’s September 1980 invasion of Iran and the very lengthy war that ensued and that also involved Iraq’s largescale use of chemical weapons against Iran?
I would say that the people damaged in all three of these cases have roughly equivalent moral claims to some form of ‘reparation’. But the problem is, of course, that the people now governing in South Africa (and ‘governing’ as best they can in Iraq) are people who were themselves majorly the targets of the earlier, abusive governments in those two places. So it is hard to see how these new successor governments can be held responsible for the sins of their predecessors… And indeed, in South Africa, the question of the country paying financial recompense to the peoples of Mozambique, Namibia, and Angola has never really to my knowledge come up.
And neither has the question of Iraq paying reparations to Iran.
All of which makes it fairly disquieting for me to have learned recently that the UN Compensation Commission that was established in 1991 with the purpose of “process[ing] claims and pay[ing] compensation for losses and damage suffered as a direct result of Iraq’s unlawful invasion and occupation of Kuwait” has continued until now on its course of turning over to Kuwait and other claimants regular payments funded by the UNCC’s expropriation of five percent of the proceeds of Iraq’s oil exports.
Just yesterday, the UNCC issued a press release describing proudly how in the current quarter it has disbursed $417.8 million to claimants in seven countries. The countries that got the biggest shares of those payments? Kuwait, which got $335.5 million, and Saudi Arabia, which got came in a distant second with $30.3 million.
A factsheet issued by the UNCC some time earlier reported that “Awards of approximately US$52.5 billion have been approved in respect of approximately 1.55 million … claims”, and at that point around $21 billion had been disbursed. As far as I can see from the charts I viewed, the lion’s share of that money has gone to Kuwait.
Now I know Saddam’s regime was bad, and caused much damage to Saudis and Kuwaitis. And it is possible (I suppose) that there, somewhere, some indigent Kuwaitis who benefit a lot from these reparations. But Kuwait’s GDP per capita in 2005 was $17,421. It seems quite crazy to me to expect that Iraq’s hard-pressed people should still today– 15 years after the liberation of Kuwait from Saddam’s rule, and more than three years after Saddam’s overthrow at home– be paying these reparations to Kuwait.
Doesn’t anyone in the international “community” remember the effect the reparations exacted from Germany after WW1 had in helping to incubate Nazism among the Germans? Is this a good way to build stability in the Gulf region today?
[Cross-posted at Transitional Justice Forum.]

The ‘real’ George Bush?

So after his “surprise” press conference with the MSM people Wednesday morning, the Prez had a second gathering, with reps of the avowedly rightwing media, in the afternoon.
Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com wrote about that one, too.
Froomking writes that tellingly, while meeting with people closer to being his partisan soul-mates, “Bush made it clear to this group of supporters that ‘stay the course’ remains his strategy.”
So much for the President’s recent avowals– stridently backed up by spokesman Tony Snow(job)– that his mantra was no longer “stay the course”, and indeed it had been ages since that had ever been his mantra… As I noted here last week: “The President ‘at war’ (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.”
Here’s the longer excerpt from Froomkin:

Continue reading “The ‘real’ George Bush?”

Reidar Visser takes on the ‘Biden Plan’

I’m very happy to publish the following commentary from Reidar Visser. Please disseminate it widely. Be aware that all material published on JWN is published under a Creative Commons license, and be aware of what that entails.
There Is No Biden Plan
by Reidar Visser, October 26, 2006

To an outsider with no particular affection for the foreign policies of either US political party, the chief interest of the mid-term elections lies in their ramifications for the rest of the world. One of the most striking features of current Iraq discussion in the United States is that much of what is being said is based on the false premise that there exists a radical “third way” territorial solution to the Iraq crisis: a tripartite division of the country.
This option, often referred to as the “plan” of Senator Joseph Biden, would involve active American policy steps to bring about a three-way separation of Iraq’s ethno-religious communities – a Kurdish north, a Sunni Arab west, and a Shiite Arab center–south. These entities would form part of a loose confederation, with sharing of oil revenues as the glue that binds the system together. The senator has repeatedly stressed the supposed “constitutionality” of his plan.
The published accounts of this “Biden plan” reveal, however, that it violates the Iraqi constitution in two significant ways. Back in May, Sen. Biden boldly declared that he wanted the establishment of “one Iraq with three regions”. The problem here is that whereas the Iraqi constitution does establish federalism as a general principle of government for Iraq, it leaves the demarcation of any new federal units outside Kurdistan to the Iraqi people – who are empowered to create federal entities “from below”, through referendums. This means that no outsider can dictate any particular future Iraqi state structure – it might be two federal entities, five, or fifteen, or for that matter a unitary rump Iraq federated with a decentralized Kurdistan, all depending on the choice of the Iraqi people.
More recently, Biden seems to have realized this deficiency in his plan, and last month he admitted that “the exact number [of federal states] should be left to the constitution”. Still, he offered the “guess” that there would be three entities. But subtract the guesswork, and the bottom falls out of the plan.
Biden’s second point, oil distribution, is based on his first: he wants to see an agreement on sharing of oil revenues between his three imagined Iraqi sub-communities; presumably this would be inserted in the constitution through the planned revision process. But again, this is in dissonance with the Iraqi legal framework. The revision of the constitution is to be completed before October 2007, whereas no federalization is supposed to take place before April 2008. Hence, the only oil revenue settlement that would be politically neutral and could avoid pre-empting any subsequent popular initiatives on federal entities would be one based on the existing 18 governorates.
The remaining points in Biden’s plan are of less interest, either because they already enjoy cross-party support, or because they will be of limited significance to achieving political stability. “More Aid, But Tied to the Protection of Minority and Women Rights” is all fine, but frankly this is not something that will make or break the Iraqi reconciliation process. “Engage Iraq’s Neighbors” is a good point, but one that already enjoys increasing support among realist Republicans and, reportedly, in the State Department. That leaves us with the final item on Biden’s agenda – withdrawal of US forces – which in turn means that we are back to where we started: if Biden wishes to adhere to the Iraqi constitution, then he simply does not have a policy alternative that is truly distinctive. It considerably weakens the whole American debate on Iraq – and that of the Democratic Party in particular – if an illusory and spurious policy proposal like Biden’s is allowed to remain dominant.
But despite these contradictions, Biden continues his campaign, perhaps believing he can goad the Iraqis into adopting his own ideas. That too is problematic. In today’s Iraq, there exists far more diversity than the simplistic three-community model would suggest, but through his black-and-white discourse Biden bulldozes this pluralism and chases the Iraqis further into the mental prisons of sectarianism. For instance, within the Shiite community singled out by Biden for separate treatment, some voices in fact completely reject the idea of federal subdivisions among the Arabs of Iraq, whereas others are calling for several non-sectarian sub-entities among the Shiites instead of a single unit. (Does the senator know that a single governorate – Basra – holds more than 80% of what he describes as “Shiite” oil reserves?) Why are these groups not to be given a democratic hearing in the new Iraq? Why should they be forced to accepting an ethno-religious formula that could easily produce ethno-religious dictatorships if internal tensions within the federal units (say, Sadrists versus SCIRI) are ignored? It is alarming that on questions like these, people like Sen. Biden should be allowed to muddle Democratic Party discourse (and the US debate in general) by adopting an approach that was fashionable in the times immediately after the First World War but in recent years has been the preserve of neo-conservative fringe writers.
And sometimes there is an even more assertive Biden, one that does not restrict himself to “guessing” the outcome of the Iraqi federalization process. A few days ago, an angry voice could be heard on television: “Like heck we can’t tell the Iraqis what to do.” This was Joseph Biden, the Democratic senator! Yes, it is probably true that, if the United States seriously wishes to enforce a division of Iraq – by circumventing the Iraqi constitution – it has the military capability to do so. But it would be a tragic outcome of the supposed democratization of Iraq if Washington should choose to exit by neo-imperialistically imposing a particular state structure on the country. It would alienate huge sections of the Iraqi population. It would be a gross provocation to most of Iraq’s neighbors, who view a tripartite federation as a particularly brittle state structure and a powder keg in terms of potential regional instability. And it would be the ultimate gift to al-Qaida – who would finally get the manifest evidence they have been craving in order to back up their conspiracy theory of the US as a pro-Zionist force bent on subdividing the Middle East into weak and sectarian statelets. Senator Biden would do well to consider the long-term damage to American interests that would follow from such reactions before he annexes Basra to the Middle Euphrates, merges Diyala and Kut, and rips the heart out of Mosul.

US service members call for end to Iraqi occupation

This is important. It’s a report on Raw Story that tells us that 346 service members, 125 of whom are on active duty, have now joined a call to end the US occupation of Iraq.
The organization Appeal for Redress is organizing this petition.
Here is the text of the petition:

    As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

If you know any service members who might want to sign, send them to the website, pronto!

Bush administration in Iraq: Recognizing the inevitable

Bush called a “surprise” press conference at short notice this morning. For the WaPo’s Bill Branigan the main story was that Bush said,

    … he shares the American public’s dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq, but he warned against succumbing to “disillusionment” about the U.S. purpose there and expressed confidence in both Iraq’s prime minister and his own defense secretary.

Here’s the official transcript.
(I don’t have time to read the whole thing. I’m about to go to the airport to travel to Amman for a week.)
In addition to having its main newspaper, the WaPo also runs a website called washingtonpost.com that carries most of the deadwood paper’s content and also– slightly confusingly– content from some of the website’s own writers. These latter include the site’s “White House” correspondent Dan Froomkin, who often puts good things up on his pages. Today, for example, he had his own quick account of the Bush press conference and the circumstances in which it was held, along with an excellent compilation of some of the best of the recent political reporting in the big MSM.
And almost immediately after posting that on the site, Froomkin ran a “live online” discussion about current events. He made this really interesting observation there:

    Qun. from White Plains, N.Y.: I believe Mr. Bush was quoted earlier this weeks as having said “I never said ‘stay the course'” Why is the press not addressing this aggressively as a glaring example of the president”s knowing and willful distortion of reality?
    Dan Froomkin: Oh but they are! With truly surprising vigor! See my columns today, and yesterday , and Monday.
    In fact, a keen observer called me just yesterday to see if I could explain the vigor, given the many other similar opportunities that the corps has passed up. I don’t have a firm answer, but in my October 11 column, I wrote about how Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” had finally convinced establishment Washington that Bush has a serious credibility problem.

This is mind-boggling. Froomkin is simply assuming that the MSM press corps is part of “establishment Washington”– actually, not an unrealistic assumption, in general– and then saying that “establishment Washington” needs to get some kind of permission from Bob Woodward before it asks the tough questions about Bush’s credibility…
Better late than never I guess.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading this latest Woodward book. It has some interesting things in it, to be sure. But the guy’s narrative skills are not particularly good. Indeed, one of the least satisfying aspects of the book is that he just skips over a whole lot of things that he’d written about in his first two– much more laudatory– books. So it’s not a “complete” story at all. What somebody needs to do some day is to go back and put all of his accounts of this period together, into a single account– and also, crucially, to pull out all the glaring dissonances between the kinds of laudatory things he was publishing three or four years ago and the ways he describes almost exactly the same incidents today.
Oh well, the main story these days is still an intriguing one to follow: President Bush and his senior cabinet members struggling to come to terms– somehow!– with the collapse of their massive and very, very harmful project in Iraq… And to do this in a way that will minimize the damage the GOP suffers at the polls November 7.

Zeitgeist shift among Iraqis, too (of course)

A really revealing round-up of the views of many Iraqi bloggers was published last week by the currently exiled Iraqi blogger “Treasure of Baghdad”– ” A young reporter from a destroyed country where truth is lost and lives of the innocent are mixed with their blood.”
ToB asked Iraqis who blog in English a standard set of questions, and on October 18 he published the 16 sets of answers he’d received. They are all well worth reading. His fourth question was: Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?
Of those 16, eight said clearly it was not worth it; six gave answers expressing uncertainty; and only two said Yes, it was worth it.
It’s not clear to me how many of these bloggers are currently living inside Iraq– some are, some aren’t– or how many had been exiles from Iraq prior to March 2003. But the fact that they blog so articulately in English, and have enough access to internet connections that they can blog with, apparently, some regularity indicates to me that either they are currently living in exile or that if they are still resident in Iraq, then they are most likely from better-off segments of Iraqi society.
In other words, these are people who should have been the natural allies of any credible democratization project inside Iraq. Some of them, like Najma of A Star from Mosul, admit to having changed their views on the value of the US invasion– towards a more critical view of it– over the past three years.
Also Zeyad, who has a pretty famous blog called Healing Iraq, did not “come out” as an open critic of the US invasion of his country until the day after ToB published his survey. In that latter momentous post, Zeyad wrote:

    Another close friend of mine has been killed in Baghdad. We had lunch together in Baghdad just days before I left.
    I can’t concentrate on anything any more. I should not be here in New York running around a stupid neighbourhood, asking people about their ‘issues’.
    I now officially regret supporting this war back in 2003. The guilt is too much for me to handle.

(Hat-tip for Christiane for sending me to that post and through Healing Iraq to everything else mentioned here.)
In his answer to ToB’s question, “Do you think the war was worth it or not? Why?” Zeyad had answered only, “I’m afraid to answer that question.”
The Iraqi blogosphere is, of course, an area of discourse that has expanded tremendously since the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Prior to his toppling there was already, however, the redoubtable Salam/Pax blogging his way through the last days of Saddam’s rule and through the whole invasion. Salam hasn’t posted anything at all since July 18 on his current blog, which he’d renamed at some point The Daily Absurdity Report..
Amid all the terrible stories about the assaults against gay people in today’s Iraq– and the fact of his ‘out’ gayness– I just hope (a) that Salam’s safe, and probably also (b) that he is no longer in the country.
Regarding my own two long-favored Iraqi bloggers, Riverbend and Faiza, Riverbend had a 2.5-month hiatus there before her most recent post on the Lancet study. And Faiza’s been uncharacteristically quiet recently, too. She wrote this long post, in Arabic, on September 30; but nothing since.
Here’s how she started the post:

    I have stopped writing on my website for a while now…
    And the reason is perhaps; because I was occupied working with the Iraqis who fled the hell of life inside Iraq, or perhaps that I was bored from the same talk about the painful reality that is going on for more than three years, until I no longer like to talk, as if repeating the same words, uselessly.
    Iraqis are still dying everyday; killed by trapped cars, sectarian militia, and death squads who carry out random assassinations on the streets. Or they die by assassinations organized against every nationalist or cultured Iraqi, against every scientist, doctor, or university professor…
    There is someone out there who decided to assassinate everything in Iraq, everything that moves on the land of Iraq, and bears the Iraqi identity…
    A Sunniey or a Shia’at, rich or poor, a Muslim or not a Muslim, cultured or not, with or against the occupation; all these are targets, and dead bodies are filling the streets, eaten by dogs…
    And Bush is still living in his delusions, giving speeches about imaginary victories in Iraq. Is he fooling himself, or his people?
    Perhaps both. This is what tyrants do, all over the world.
    If Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, this Bush is no less a tyrant…

And near the end she tells this story:

    I started working with Iraqi non-governmental organizations who work in Human Rights affairs. We receive here dislodged people from Iraq, who were threatened with death for sectarian reasons, by the death squads and the new death militia which the occupation policy spawned, to rip apart the Iraqi’s unity.
    We collect donations from here and there, so we can provide for them some lodgings, cloths, and the least minimum level of a good life.
    ((Welfare shall remain in my nation until the Day of Judgment)) says the Holy Prophet, (may the blessings of God be upon him).
    And from Baghdad, I have a short, sad story, but one which I consider to be a model for the stories of sadness from Iraq.
    Some six months ago, one of our neighbors was assassinated. He used to work as an officer in the Iraqi Army. I wrote about him at the time.
    He had a wife and two sons, (five and four years), Ahmad and Muhammad.
    The wife, I don’t know why, lost her mind, and killed herself one month ago, in her sadness for her husband.
    The children remained with their mother’s mother; a lonely, poor old woman. Their father’s kin are in Samara, where two of their uncles were killed, their grandfather was arrested, and the rest of their uncles are detained by the occupation forces.
    My friends and I made an agreement to send them cloths and presents from time to time…
    If I was living in Baghdad, I would have brought them to my home, to live with my family.
    The Holy Prophet says: ((I, and whoever supports the orphan, are in heaven)), (may the blessings of God be upon him).

People who want to explore the recent work of Iraqi bloggers some more can find a good portal to this in this round-up from last week by Salam Adil. Salam Adil, btw, is a nom-de-plume. It is also Arabic for “A just peace.” Wouldn’t that be a great thing for Iraqis– and Palestinians and Israelis and all the peoples of the Middle East– to achieve.

Elections and post-conflict tasks: Iraq and elsewhere

Juan Cole had a quick link to this piece by Robert H. Reid in yesterday’s Guardian. Reid argued there that,

    The search for an end to Iraq’s violence is being complicated by an electoral system that empowers religious and sectarian leaders who see little gain in offering concessions to rivals or cracking down on factions that put them in power.
    That makes it tough for the U.S. to steer Iraqi leaders toward the kind of political compromise that American military commanders believe is the only way to guarantee long-term stability.

He quotes the (American neo-con) analyst Michael Rubin– who had been a political advisor in an earlier portion of the US occupation rule in Iraq— as now criticizing the proportional representation electoral system that the US introduced there:

    “The problem with proportional representation … is that it encourages populism and empowers ethnic and sectarian leaders. It encourages politicians to be more accountable to party leaders rather than their constituents,” said Michael Rubin, a former political adviser in Iraq.

Well, yes and no. It is not as if the main alternative to a nationwide p.r. system– that is, some form of a constituency-based system, with either single-seat or multi-seat constituencies– may have been any better for Iraqis. In those systems you are more likely to get a “winner takes all” outcome. And it was always very unlikely indeed, in the very fragile political environment created in Iraq after the American occupiers had not only removed Saddam but also dismantled all the main institutions of national governance, that a constituency-based system would have served the interests of stability in Iraq any better than a national p.r. system.
The central political problem in Iraq by the summer of 2003 was how the Iraqis could conclude the kind of national political compact needed to act as the foundation on which they could quickly reassmble their national institutions.
Roland Paris recently published a very important book called At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict in which he studied the various attempts made to build stable post-conflict orders in 14 countries wracked by civil strife in the 1980s and 1990s. One of his big conclusions was the need, in general, to aim at achieving “institutionalization before liberalization”.
He summed up this approach in six important lessons (p.188):

    1. Wait until conditions are ripe for elections
    2. Design good electoral systems that reward moderation
    3. Promote good civil society [with a warning there, that not all “civil society” is in fact good.]
    4. Control hate speech
    5. Adopt conflict-reducing economic policies
    6. The common denominator: Rebuild effective state institutions

This list is, in my judgment, an excellent one. Of these steps, the US occupation authorities in Iraq only ever really tried to work on #2– by using a p.r. system instead of a winner-takes-all system. Meantime, they were acting determinedly against Paris’s recommendations as regards #1, #5, and especially #6.
I readily confess that back in 2004, when Sistani was calling for quick elections as a way to facilitate the quick exit of the US troops from the country I thought that was a good idea (and wrote so, many times, here on JWN.) However, it is now quite clear that that whole string of electoral “events” that were orchestrated by the occupation authorities between then and December 2005 never resulted in brokering and cementing the key political compact required within Iraq; nor did they succeed in providing a basis for the rebuilding of effective national institutionshin the country; and nor, finally, did they pave the way (as Sistani had hoped) for a speedy and orderly withdrawal of the US occupation presence from the country.
Back in 2004, I had hoped that speedy elections inside Iraq could play the same role there– in helping to midwife a basically peaceful transition from a non-representative, minority regime to one of full one-person-one-vote democracy– that nationwide elections had played in midwifing an transition of just such a nature in South Africa, back in 1994.
I think that far and away the main factor that was missing in Iraq in 2004 and since, that had been present in SA in 1993-1994, was a substantial degree of insulation of the country’s national politics from any influences from outside, meaning that all the players within the South African system realized that, for their own longterm survival, they needed to find a way to deal with each other, without having any option of using an outside force as a crutch. There were other differences, too, of course; but that was certainly the main one.
So now, all these three main challenges for Iraqis still remain: to find that internal political compact; to rebuild the country’s institutions; and to get rid of the occupying forces.
Right now, it does look as if, acting from purely domestic-US political motivations, the Bush administration may well be planning at least a substantial drawdown of the US deployment within Iraq. (And if we anti-occupation forces can keep up our pressure, there’s a good chance we can force them to undertake a complete withdrawal fairly soon, too?) So as the US footprint within Iraq shrinks, will the political forces inside Iraqi society be able to find the national-level internal political compact that will allow them to start rebuilding their country together? I certainly hope and pray that this is still possible. It won’t be easy– mainly because of the terrifying divisiveness that the US presence there has sown over the past 42 months.
But it’s not impossible.
And then, once Iraqis have made some good progress in rebuilding their core national institutions, perhaps one day in the future they can have some truly democratic national elections, whenever they themselves are ready for them… And by “truly democratic elections”, I’m not just referring to procedural issues like the nature of the electoral system or whether all parties have been given a fair chance at campaigning… I’m talking about elections that are not held under the heel of an occupying army, and elections that generate a national leadership that is connected to, and will accountably assume responsibility for a set of real, existing instruments of national governance.
As opposed to all the Potemkin elections that have been held in the occupied country so far.

Zeitgeist shift in DC on Iraq

Well! The WaPo has now finally come to roughly the same position regarding the US presence in Iraq that Juan Cole was espousing in June-July 2005. In a key editorial today, the paper’s august editorial team argued,

    PRESIDENT BUSH said this month that he was willing to “change tactics” in Iraq if U.S strategy was not working. We believe the time has come for such a change. The Iraqi coalition government that Mr. Bush has been counting on to forge political compromises and disarm sectarian militias doesn’t seem to have the strength to carry out either mission. A U.S.-led attempt to pacify Baghdad by concentrating forces in the capital has failed, while contributing to a grievous spike in American casualties. Support for the war is rapidly slipping, in the country and in Congress; a congressionally mandated commission is likely to recommend a new course sometime after next month’s election. Mr. Bush would be wise to act sooner than that: The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq needs to be addressed urgently…
    A revised U.S. strategy must aim to jump-start political accord and militia disarmament. But it must also provide for the possibility that decisive progress will not be achievable soon…
    But if, as appears more likely, Iraq’s civil war deepens and spreads, the United States should abandon attempts to pacify Baghdad or other areas with its own forces. It should adopt a strategy of supporting the Iraqi government and army in a long-term effort to win the war… A reserve force of U.S. troops could remain as a guarantor against a military victory by insurgents and as a rapid reaction force that could strike al-Qaeda targets.

The editorial then plainly raises the possibility of failure:

    “A change of course won’t necessarily rescue the U.S mission in Iraq.”

It ends with this plaintive (and fairly unrealistic) little bleat: “But there remains a chance the government could gain control over the country. As long as that prospect exists, the United States has a moral obligation and a practical interest to remain in Iraq.”
The clear implication there being, of course, that once it is clear there is no chance that the Iraqi government can “gain control over the country”, then it will be time for the US forces there to head for the exits, fast.
(So why not go straight to a “speedy, complete, orderly, and generous” withdrawal plan such as I have been advocating for some years now? H’mmm.)
But anyway, we do need to recognize the depth and importance of this shift in the WaPo’s position, especially given the intense degree to which the WaPo and its editorial board were cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq throughout 2002 and 2003, and have been supportive of the administration’s general policy there ever since.
And another indication of the current zeitgeist shift: Right opposite the editorial itself we have the latest signed column by Jim Hoagland (who had probably also helped to write the editorial.) Jim had been one of the biggest members of the mainstream commentatoriat beating the drums for the war back in 2002. Now, here’s what he wrote today:

    The bloody chaos of Iraq under U.S. occupation is shaking Western governments into sobering reassessments of that conflict and of war itself. More urgently, some of these governments have launched tightly held contingency planning for the consequences of a possible American failure in Iraq.

He wrote of,

    the gathering sense at home and abroad that the administration is belatedly engaged in a search for a political-economic exit strategy. Such a strategy would quickly reduce the role of U.S. combat troops in Iraq and gradually increase the economic involvement of other countries, including Iraq’s neighbors.

He gives no clue, of course, as to how you get the “neighbors” to start picking up the economic costs of running Iraq without also giving them a share of the political/diplomatic decisionmaking. But maybe this is the way Hoagie and his friends in the administration might be hoping to “package” a move to involve the neighbors in Iraq-related consultations, for the benefit of a US audience? I doubt that Iran, Syria, and other Iraqi neighbors who have been systematically belittled and in many cases outright opposed by Bush for the past 6 years would be ahappy to participate in this project on quite those terms.
Then, he writes this:

    military leaders and diplomats in Western capitals are not waiting for the Baker and U.N.-sponsored efforts to conclude before they assess the mistakes, poor strategy and changing conditions of warfare that have brought U.S. forces face to face with the bitter prospect of having to withdraw, mission unaccomplished…
    The need for changes in practice and doctrine was reinforced by Israel’s inconclusive July-August war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, a classic guerrilla force that also possesses a strategic missile arsenal capable of damaging and shutting down entire Israeli cities…

Oh, I have to say that it is fine spectator sport to watch Hoagie squirming as he starts to come to terms with some of these harsh (for him) political and strategic realities.
Then, right under him, we have veteran (paleo-)conservative George Will posing some questions that he thinks Jim Baker’s Iraq “Study” Group ought to be asking the Bushites. The first of them is this:

    * What are 140,000 U.S. forces achieving in Iraq that could not be achieved by 40,000?
    * If the answer to the first question is “creating Iraqi security forces,” a second question is: Is there an Iraqi government? In “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward quotes Colin Powell, after leaving the administration, telling the president that strengthening Iraq’s military and police forces is crucial but that “if you don’t have a government that you can connect these forces to, then, Mr. President, you’re not building up forces, you’re building up militias.” And making matters worse.

Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Will concludes with this:

    On Sept. 19 Hamilton said that “the next three months are critical.” On Oct. 5 Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that the next “two or three months” are critical. If only the worsening insurgency were, as the president suggested Wednesday, akin to North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive. The insurgency is worse: Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnam. [But a political victory… ~HC] The president says the war in Iraq will be “just a comma” in history books, but by Nov. 26, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with the Study Group’s recommendations due, the comma will have lasted as long as U.S. involvement in World War II.

And so, as the Democrats continue to edge closer and closer to looking able to take one or both houses on Congress on November 7, we should ask, will the Democrats’ policy on Iraq be any better?
A first answer to this would, honestly, have to be “No.”
On that same op-ed page, veteran WaPo political commentator David Broder writes about a conference call that Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, both longtime members of the Armed Services Committee, held recently with a number of reporters.
He wrote:

    Reed, who has made many trips to Iraq and returned just weeks ago from his most recent visit, described the “very, very difficult situation” he found there. “We have to begin to work toward redeployment without setting a timetable,” he said. “We have to start laying out some red lines for the Iraqis . . . give them some clear goals we want them to achieve.” They need to set plans for disarming militias, conducting elections at the provincial level and spending some of the funds being hoarded in Baghdad on better services for the people, he said.
    Implicit in their comments is a belief, based on their firsthand observations, that the current rulers in Baghdad have a different agenda for themselves than the Bush administration’s bland assurances suggest. As Levin put it, “Our only leverage for change is to force the politicians in Iraq to realize we’re not there as their security blanket. When they recognize that reality, they’re more likely to make the necessary compromises on sharing of oil revenues and sharing power. The prospect of losing us as their personal security blanket will focus their minds.”

This is extremely close to where the administration’s current policy is– if not identical with it. Today’s news pages are all full of reports that the Bushites have decided to establish “benchmarks” and whatever for the Maliki government to live up to in Iraq… This is nearly all, at this stage of how bad things are in Iraq, meaningless posturing before the US voters. (And quite likely to backfire badly with Maliki and others who might consider this as a quite unwarranted form of US bullying, not to mention unwarranted intervention in Iraq’s internal affairs…)
Also, at one level, it’s a hilariously misdirected “threat”. “Look here, Maliki, you better do as we tell you, or otherwise we’ll– well, we’ll do just exactly what you, your party, and the vast majority of Iraqis want us to do.”
Monty Python does the governance of Iraq.
But Broder continues with the crux of why these two senior Democratic good ol’ boys are so disappointing:

    When the senators were asked if a Democratic majority in the House or Senate would force the issue in Iraq by threatening to cut off funds for the war, they quickly ruled out any such action. Levin said that a simple resolution recommending to the president that he set a date to begin redeployment might do the trick.

Cutting off the funding for the war in Vietnam was, of course, the only way that Congress was able, back in the day, to end the militaristic madness there. And these guys want to “quickly rule out any such action” even before they’ve even come anywhere near any taste of real Congressional power?
Almost beyond belief.
So am I still motivated to help elect this bunch of Democratic Party rascals to office? Yes, I am. The most important thing is still to send a strong anti-war message to the Bushites. After that we can get to work on these lily-livered Democrats– and some Dems, actually, have positions that are far better than those articulated by Levin and Reed.
Plus, if the Democrats get control of even one of the houses of Congress, they can start to win some real form of accountability from the administration by holding authoritative hearings into so many different aspects of the administration’s policy at home and abroad.
What is intensely noticeable to me, meanwhile, is that even in the absence of any decent leadership on the war issue from our so-called “opposition” party here, the zeitgeist in the country has been turning so strongly against the war over the past few weeks.