Just World News with Helena Cobban

Is the “Khalilzad Cable“, the full text of which was published by the WaPo today, the present war’s equivalent of the Vietnam War’s “Pentagon Papers“?
Back in 1971, when Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg leaked huge portions of the 47-volume report on US-Vietnam relations commissioned by SecDef Robert McNamara to the NYT and the WaPo, their publication by the two papers sparked a storm of controversy in the US and helped to swing elite opinion massively against the war.
The “Khalilzad cable”, which was sent from Viceroy Khalilzad to Secretary of State Condi Rice just “hours” before the surprise trip that Bush made to Baghdad on June 12, reveals how stunningly unsuccessful all the US’s efforts to stabilize Iraq and build effective, pro-US new security forces there have been. Equally significantly, it also reveals the degree to which Zal Khalilzad, the US Viceroy in Baghdad, is aware of this situation– despite all of Bush’s earnest public avowals that things are going ahead very well in Iraq.
That’s why it deserves to have the same impact within the US policy elite that the Pentagon Papers had in their day.
The text of the cable– marked “Sensitive”, but also “Unclassified”– was given by a person or persons unnamed to brilliant WaPo columnist Al Kamen. The title that Khalilzad put in the “subject” line was this: Snapshots from the Office: Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord.
Okay, the content of what was in the cable was pretty interesting– though not much in it comes as any huge surprise to anyone who’s been following the good Iraqi blogs and good journalism from Iraq over the past few months. But what intrigued me just as much was the context within which Khalilzad was writing it… It seems to be a detailed study of the behavior and attitudes of just nine employees in (I assume from the title) the Public Affairs Office at the “embassy”.
Why did the ambassador spend so much time and effort producing this particular piece of work, I wonder?
I have two suppositions: (1) It’s possible that the “Social Discord” within the PAO had grown to the degree that the office’s work had become noticeably fault-ridden… in which case Condi might well have asked her man there: “Zal, so what the heck is going on in the PAO, anyway?” Or, (2), Zal, last weekend, for whatever reason, might have thought it would be instructive to try to provide Condi with the most firsthand description he could of “How Iraqis Live”… Well, he’s not going to get that from talking to the Iraqi political leaders… and he’s not about to exit from the Green Zone in a disguise like some latter-day Haroun al-Rashid and go out ‘n’ about in downtown Baghdad to see how his subjects are really living there… so the “subjects” of the planned enquiry who are closest to hand seem to be the three Iraqi women and six Iraqi men who work in his own PAO.
(Or, of course, both motivating factors might have been at work.)
Para 4 of the cable is interesting. He writes that the women from the PAO, “also tell us that some ministries, notably the Sadrist controlled Ministry of Transportation, have been forcing females to wear the hijab at work.” This is recounted with the air of being ‘news’– and it indicates that Khalilzad’s best way of learning what’s going on in Iraqi government ministries is to listen to hearsay from the handful of women who work in his PAO?
Similarly, in para 6, Khalilzad once again shows us how reliant he is on indirect hearsay to learn things about life in Iraq that are common knowledge to bloggers, good journos, and human-rights workers within the country:

An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province… ”

Para 11 gives a little snapshot of how terrifying life has become for the Iraqi employees in the US Embassy. It deals with the strong suspicions these employees have about the hostile attitudes of the Iraqi forces personnel controlling the access checkpoints around the Green Zone:

They seemed to be more militia-like and in some cases seemingly taunting. One employee [told us that] guards had held her embassy badge up and proclaimed loudly to nearby passers-by “Embassy” as she entered. Such information is a death sentence if overheard by the wrong people.

Paras 12-15 seem particularly revealing:

12… [O]f nine employees in March, only four had family members who knew they worked at the embassy. That makes it difficult for them, and for us…
13. We cannot call employees in on weekends or holidays without blowing their “cover”…
14. Some of our staff do not take home their American cellphones, as this makes them a target. Planning for their own possible abduction, they use code names for friends and colleaguyes and contacts entered into Iraqi cellphones. For at least six months, we have not been able to use any local staff members at on-camera press events.
15. More recently, we have begun shredding documents printed out that show local staff surnames. In March, a few staff members approached us to ask what provisions we would make for them if we evacuate.

Then, there are some paras where Zal tells Condi what he has learned about general security conditins in the area around Baghdad from these PAO staff people:

20. Since Samarra [i.e. the late-February bombing of the mosque in Samarra]… [o]ur staff– and our contacts– have become adept in modifying behavior to avoid “Alasas,” informants who keep an eye out for “outsiders” in neighborhoods. The Alasa mentality is becoming entrenched as Iraqi security forces fail to gain public confidence.
21. Our staff report that security and services are being rerouted through “local providers” whose affiliations are vague. [Or perhaps your staff know but don’t want to tell you, Zal? Had you thought of that?]… Personal safety depends on good relations with the “neighborhood” governments, who barricade streets and ward off outsiders. The central government, our staff says, is not relevant; even local mukhtars have been displaced or coopted by the militias. People no longer trust most neighbors.

And finally, in para 23, Zal does reveal that he’s not quite sure how much he can trust even these staff people: “Employees are apprehensive enough that we fear they may exaggerate developments or steer us towards news that comports with their own worldview. Objectivity, civility, and logic that make for a functional workplace may falter if social pressures outside the Green Zone don’t abate.”
So okay, at the next press briefing at the White House or the State Department, let’s hear some of those reporters asking the Prez, or Condi, or their flaks: “So really, how are things going in Baghdad? And do you judge that Ambassador Khalilzad is an experienced and well-informed judge of the situation there?”
My judgment from all the above– assuming the cable as leaked and published is genuine (and I assume the WaPo would have done much to authenticate it before they published it)– is that things are even more precarious for the US position in Iraq than I had previously thought… It seems to me that Khalilzad and his staff there are hanging on by a hair. And what’s more, he seems to understand this– and to be eager to warn Condi about just how bad things are… And this, apparently even after he’d gotten the good news about the killing of Zarqawi and Maliki’s completion of forming his government…
(We have also, earlier, seen Khalilzad or his staff people telling the NYT’s John Burns that of course it was the US Viceroys in Baghdad before him who made all the big mistakes… not him, at all.)

Our esteemed colleague Reidar Visser has two good new entries on his website: this on the federalism issue in Iraq, and this on the latest cabinet appointments there.
I don’t, alas, have time for any prolonged comment on these really interesting essays here, and I note that both of them contain a wealth of well-organized information and analysis that’s just about impossible to come by anywhere else (or at least, anywhere else in the English-speaking world.)
I hate to make a critical point. But I note that in the “federalism” piiece he writes:

A second group of federations are those that have been deliberately “designed”, often after a period of political upheaval and regime breakdown. Examples of this include post-war Germany, South Africa after apartheid and Ethiopia in the democratic era…

But today’s South Africa is really not a federal state in any sense in which I understand the term. It is a determinedly unitary state. The nine provinces in South Africa were deliberately– and as the result of a lengthy political process– deisgned to be purely administrative units, and not units that in any way embodied any ethnic or cultural particularity… And similarly, the ethnic and linguistic particularities in the state have no defined geographic basis (such as they have in, for example, Belgium.) That, though many Afrikaners and some, though by no means all, of the people who had previously been “citizens” of the Bantustans might at some point have been open to the idea of having ethnically based subunits within a broader South African federation.
For me, South Africa is a fascinating example of a state that, though unitary, is still intentionally dedicated to the goals of multi-culturalism and mutli-lingualism. It could therefore stand as a great example to either an Israeli-Palestinian unitary state in the future, or more immediately to the Iraqi state today. (Or indeed, to the US… )
Well, that’s just a small criticism. Clearly, I need to go and read both of Visser’s essays much more closely when I have the time.
I also note, regarding the relevance of the “Spanish example” that he cites for a possibly multilingual state, that that did not become possible for Spain until the internal linguistic-cultural issues had a chance of becoming “diluted” within the broader impulse of Spain’s assimilation within the broad, peaceable, democratic polity of the EU. But this is far from being the case in Iraq regarding, for example, the Kurdish question…
Lots of food for thought, though.