Daawa-Sadr bloc on brink of victory?

In Iraq, it looks as though the Jaafari-Sadr bloc within the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) now seems poised, fnally, to cement its victory in the political battle against the US machinators. That, at least is my reading of what Juan Cole was writing very early today— especially in his commentary on this article in today’s Az-Zaman.
In this context, it occurs to me that the nasty street battles in the Baghdad district of al-Adhamiyeh may just be a fizzling reaguard attempt at divide-and-rule between Sunnis and Shiites, undertaken by (or at the very least, enthusiastically stoked by) the US military authorities as they face the possibility that at the political level inside Iraq they are about to lose their campaign to prevent the Jaafari-Sadr bloc from taking power?
Muqtada Sadr is, of course, a longtime bete noire for the Americans, and continues to be one because of his insistence on seeing a speedy withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq– a program in which Jaafari has reportedly joined him and that has apparently received the strong but quiet backing of the leading Shiite religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The broader Shiite parliamentary bloc, the UIA, is reportedly meeting in Baghdad this morning, and will there decide whether to attend the parliament session scheduled for this afternoon.
In order for Iraq to have a government at this point, under the Constitution adopted last October the following needs to happen:

    (1) The Assembly elected Dec 15– 126 days ago!– needs to convene, and to elect a Speaker and two deputy speakers. The Assembly thus becomes duly constituted.
    (2) The duly constituted Assembly then needs to elect a President (and some vice-presidents?) by a 2/3 majority.
    (3) Within 15 days thereafter, the President names the “nominee” of the largest bloc within the Assembly to be the PM.
    (4) The PM-designate then has 30 days to assemble a government and define its program, before which deadline he (or she) needs to present both the government list and the program to the Assembly and win a simple-majority vote for their approval.

The Zaman report says that the major parties have now agreed on the candidates to put forward for the first of these steps. As Juan translates it, the final agreement on the list has not been reached, but the Sunni “Iraqi Accord Front” has put forward two (alternate) candidates; the Kurdish Alliance has put forward one; and the UIA has put forward three (alternates). Basically, though, it seems the major issues in this political step have now been resolved.
Basic agreement seems also to have been reached regarding step 2, the designation of the President and the Vicer-Presidents. As Juan writes, quoting Az-Zaman:

    [UIA spokesman, Sami] Al-Askari alleges that the United Iraqi Alliance has dropped its earlier opposition to Tariq al-Hashimi, and is now sanguine about his running for vice president. The Shiite UIA candidate will be Adil Abdul Mahdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
    (Cole: I presume that the reemergence of al-Hashimi comes because he has dropped his opposition to Jaafari as prime minister. Al-Hayat says that Dulaimi admitted that the Sunnis of the Iraqi Accord Front had offered to drop al-Hashimi’s candidacy if the Shiites would drop Jaafari. But it was the Shiites who had the upper hand, and they forced al-Hashimi out to make a point, without giving up anything at all. The Shiites played hard ball on this one).

Quoting Sami al-Askari– who is also a UIA MP– Juan continues:

    He said that Iyad Allawi, the secular ex-Baathis Shiite and former interim PM, had no luck in his bid to become a vice president, given these party decisions.
    He said that the Dawa Party [which had earlier indicated that it might consider alternatives to Jaafari] met on Wednesday and took a final decision to back Jaafari for prime minister.

And then, here comes something particularly crucial… Ever since Dec. 15, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani has been the spearhead of the internal Iraqi opposition to Jaafari’s nomination. Indeed, throughout the past four months it’s been hard to say who’s been using whom in the anti-Jaafari campaign, between Talabani and the Americans. Talabani’s opposition to Jaafari has been based on the latter’s reported insistence that Iraq’s internal boundaries not be redrawn in such a way as to give the large, oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the Kurdish Regional Government…
But now, it seems, the Jaafari-Sadr bloc has been able to win out not only over Allawi (who these days is a political lightweight in Iraq, anyway), but also over Talabani. And this, because of the constitutional provision that requires Talabani to get a 2/3 majority in order to win the state presidency that he evidently covets.
Juan continues his rendering of the Zaman piece thus:

    Al-Askari said that the United Iraqi Alliance will do a deal with Jalal Talabani, who wants to be president. Talabani needs a 2/3s majority in parliament to become president, and cannot get it without the United Iraqi Alliance, which has 128 [of the 275] members and has 4 other MPs who have announced that they will vote with it. Al-Askari says that the UIA will only pledge to support Talabani if he retracts his opposition to Jaafari.
    (Cole: The Shiite fundamentalists are in striking distance of having a simple majority in parliament, and are much more united, despite some frictions, than their opponents. It was always the case that if they maintained their unity, they would be able to impose their will with regard to the incumbents of high political positions. The attempt made by US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and former interim PM Iyad Allawi to marshall the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and secular Shiites against Jaafari appears to have been defeated, by simple steadfastness on the part of the UIA.)

Actually– and this is me, Helena, now– Zal Khalilzad’s attempt was broader than that: he was openly trying to split the UIA down the middle and build up supprt within it for Adel Abdul-Mahdi as the PM candidate. But he failed miserably, winning only three open expressions of opposition to the Jaafari candidacy from all those 128 UIA MPs.
H’mm, those three pro-US “heroes”, whose defections from the pro-Jaafari camp were breathlessly reported by the US media just 2-3 weeks ago, have been staying remarkably quiet recently…
So yes, it has been the UIA’s remarkable defense of its internal unity that has been decisive. As for the success of the Jaafari nomination in the Assembly, it requires of course only 138 votes. The non-UIA parties are not nearly as united as the UIA, and I have always been confident that if the UIA could remain substantially united– as it has– then it would have no trouble finding the other 10 votes of support that it needs. I believe Mithal al-Alusi, a respected political indpendent, has already promised his support.
Also, as Juan notes, once Jaafari becomes reinstated as PM, he’ll have a huge budget (= jobs, patronage) to control, so members of many parties will be lining up to join his government.
… Well, if the political knots over Tarek al-Hashemi and Jalal Talabani’s nominations have really been resolved as per Sami al-Askari’s reported comments, then we could see pretty rapid progress toward formation of a Jaafari-led government. However, even if Jaafari in person is not reconfirmed as PM, I think it has been demonstrated pretty clearly that the balance of political power within the UIA remains strongly with the Daawa-Sadr bloc rather than with SCIRI and the pro-Americans inside the UIA… So even if Jaafari does step down (and I think this is a very remote possibility) then his replacement as UIA nominee will still be someone from the Daawa-Sadr bloc who can be expected to follow exactly the same, firmly pro-withdrawal policy.
Which raises the nasty prospect that the US-stoked violence in Adhamiyeh might not be the last attempt at stoking such violence?
Indeed, as Dahr Jamail has noted, the US policy of stoking/enabling sectarian violence to occur, and then offering to step in to the victimized community to help “root out the troublemakers” does sound awfully like a cheap mafia proitection racket, doesn’t it? (Hat-tip to Today in Iraq for that link.)
… All of which makes me really glad that no less a figure than Muqtada Sadr is expected to come here to Jordan for Saturday’s “religious reconciliation in Iraq” meetings that are being convened by King Abdullah with backing from the Arab League.
From the few interactions I’ve had with Jordanians here– mainly professors– I would say there is some serious concern among at least those non-governmental Jordanians that the Shiite Iraqis are somehow “not Arab”, or even that they are all “Iranians”. This is very similar to the anti-Shiite propaganda that was stoked by Saddam Hussein in his time, and if you read the comments that Zeyad of Healing Iraq reported, from “people in the street” in Adhamiyeh in recent days, it also seems pretty widespread there, too.
Jordan, like most other Arab countries, has a strong majority of Sunnis in its national population (and almost 100% of its Muslims are Sunnis). In fact, Iraq, Bahrain, and Lebanon are the only three Arab countries that have a majority of Shiites among their Muslim populations. Anyway, amongst many– but notably not all– Sunni Arab communities and individuals there is considerable distrust of Arab Shiites as conmstituting some kind of possible “fifth column” for an Iranian influence that is seen by many ethnic Arabs as threatening and, well, “different”.
Muqtada Sadr is a clearly Arab and very strongly Iraqi-nationlist Shiite political leader. That’s why it’s good that he is coming to Jordan, and I hope he can do something to reassure Jordanians and other Sunni Arabs that they and their Sunni co-believers inside Iraq have little to fear from the Sadr-Jaafari alliance.
Interestingly, Ayatollah Sistani had been the main Iraqi Shiite personality invited to attend. He sent his regrets– and may well have given his imprimatur to Muqtada’s plan to come, instead. I imagine Sistani is very, very wary of leaving Iraq at this time. The last time he left it– for “heart treatment” that the British doctors said he really needed to have– was in August 2004; and on that occasion the US and UK forces took the opportunity to launch an attack against Muqtada’s forces… Better to stay at home in Najaf this time round, I think…

Analogizing Iraq: not Vietnam, but USSR in Afghanistan?

At the UNU reception here yesterday, my Afghan-Australian colleague Amin Seikal made a comment that I found very thought-provoking though it’s probably something other people have thought a lot more about previously, than I have. We were talking informally about Iraq. (This was shortly after my lengthy, canapé-balancing chat with Queen Noor.) Anyway Amin and I were talking about best-case and worst-case scenarios for the upcoming US withdrawal from Iraq…
He said that the Bushites were presumably looking for a withdrawal with some shred of honor. I said they would more likely, at this point, be looking for a withdrawal in which the degree of dishonor was minimized. He said, “Yes, we should be looking most closely at the analogy with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan– not at Vietnam.”
The Soviet army first went into Afghanistan in force in December 1979. This, from Wikipedia, about the events that led up to their withdrawal nearly a decade later:

    Informal negotiations for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan had been underway since 1982. In 1988, the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the United States and Soviet Union serving as guarantors, signed an agreement settling the major differences between them known as the Geneva accords. The United Nations set up a special Mission to oversee the process.
    In this way, [Soviet puppet PM Mohammad] Najibullah had stabilized his political position enough to begin matching Moscow’s moves toward withdrawal. On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced.
    Among other things the Geneva accords identified [mandated? ~HC] the U.S. and Soviet non-intervention with internal affairs of Pakistan and Afghanistan and a timetable for full Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan by February 15, 1989.
    Just over 15,000 Soviet troops were killed from 1979 through 1989, in addition to many hundreds of vehicles and aircraft destroyed/shot down. An estimated one million Afghans died as a result of the invasion during this period.

Not all was roses, of course, after that withdrawal– either for Afghanistan or for the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, the attempts to build a stable government all faltered; the country collapsed into terribly damaging civil war; and the “victorious” west just abandoned it and allowed it to continue on the downward spiral that eventually resulted in the Taliban coming in and being seen by many Afghan nationals as a force that could at least bring an end to the rampant warlordism throughout the country…
And for the Soviet Union, the puncturing of the Soviets’ regime pride in Afghanistran, as well as the massive drain that the hopeless war had constituted on the Soviet budget, both alike contributed the further unraveling of Soviet power, and the the dismantling first of all of the Warsaw Pact (November 1989), and then of the Soviet Union itself, in 1993.
Sic transit gloria mundi. I certainly wish a much better outcome than that for both the Iraqi and the US citizenries. As for the Bushites’ project of extending and maintaining US hegemony over this vital portion of the world– that should be ended as soon as possible.

Palestinians and Jordan

I had a coffee today with an old friend of our family who is a Palestinian who was born and grew up in one of the great cities of the West Bank, graduating high school there in the early 1950s… That was shortly after the Jordanian King annexed the (previously Palestinian) West Bank to the East Bank land of (Trans-)Jordan that had been allocated to the Hashemites in the great post-WW1 carve up of the Arab-populated Near East.
In those post-annexation days, the official ideology was that “West Bankers” and “East Bankers” had all alike come together within the single happy family of “Jordan”.
Our friend had some politically colorful years in his young manhood there. But by the mid-1960s he’d decided to throw his lot in with the monarchy… and he stuck to that position, through Jordan’s “loss” of the West Bank to Israel in 1967 and even through the brief but lethal civil war that broke out in Jordan in September 1970, after King Hussein decided to expel the Palestinian guerrilla groups that were starting to sink some serious roots inside his kingdom. (Especially near the Jordan River.)
As he told me today, his judgment at the time was that “It would be far easier for us Palestinians to take our Palestinian state from Jordan than directly from Israel. So let Jordan get the land away from Israel and then we can discuss its future with Jordan.” Not a crazy judgment– but diametrically opposed to the tactics being pursued by Fateh and its allies at the time.
So he rose impressively high in the King’s service. But as he told me today, “About 20 or more years ago, the King started blocking Palestinians systematically out from access to the kingdom’s pathways of advancement.” Jordan is a very state-centered country, one in which the main way in which young men can get jobs or technical training or access to edication is through either the army or one of the other branches of the state…
So at that point (and I should check with him again, exactly when he thinks that started happening), he said that these pathways started being blocked to the Palestnians– who nowadays make up around 65% of the national population. “We have now had a complete social restratification here,” he said.

    The Palestinians in Jordan used to be the ones who had a good education, good skills, ran the companies, had access to capital. And the Jordanians were poor. Now, apart from a few very rich Palestinians who just look out for themselves, the opposite is true. It’s the Jordanians who have the state jobs, the education, the social status, all of that. And it’s the Palestinians who are poor. And the thing is, the Palestinians here don’t protest!

He had an explanation for that, too, saying the regime seemed to have done an excellent job of “divide and rule” among the Palestinians. “There is not one Palestinian community here; there are five,” he said.

    The first are the ones like me: people who came to the capital for jobs and advancement between 1950 and 1967. The second are the ones who’d fled here as refugees in 1948… The third group are the ones who came as refugees during and after the 1967 war– and even that group is divided into two: those who have rights to jobs and benefits, who have a yellow ID card, and those who don’t, who have a green card. The fourth group is the Palestinians from Gaza who ended up here. nd the fifth are the Palestinians from the Gulf– mainly Kuwait– who fled here during and after the Gulf War of 1991.
    Some of those Gulf Palestinians had money and resources– but what they totally lacked was any concept of acting like a citizen– in terms of participating in the work of professional unions, or lobbying for their rights, or joining any political organizations… All they had was the concept of being ‘residents’, that they had learned from being in the gulf. I can tell you– I was there for a while, too. I know what it’s like. Every year you’re terrified that your residency rights will be revoked, and it just gnaws and gnaws at you, and you’ll do anything to please the boss just so you can get your renewal.
    And they brought that mentality here, to Jordan. Even though they have Jordanian nationality and can’t be thrown out of here the way they were from the Gulf, they still think like that…

He noted that among the “Jordanians” (East Bankers), the regime has also played a clever game of divide and rule– but in this case, doing so among the reported 1,100 clans and tribes that make up the country.

    Besides, the ‘Jordanians’ have a fear of losing what they have now, in terms of access to resources. So of course they don’t want to see a democratic opening here, because then they would have to share more equally with the Palestinians.
    And the Palestinians here have a fear of losing more than what they’ve already lost. So that’s why you don’t see them protest more, why you don’t see them doing any political organizing.
    But on both sides, what the regime is able to play on, is a fear of loss…

Along the way there, I should note, the late King Hussein also made a significant change in the way he looked at the West Bank– the territory that had been annexed back in 1949 by his grandfather. Forty years later, in 1989, Hussein publicly divested himself of any claim to rule the West Bank, to represent its people, or to take responsibility for its fate. He did that in response to the “Declaration of (Palestinian) Independence” that Yasser Arafat had promulgated in late 1988. In 1993, when Arafat and the Israelis negotiated the Oslo Interim Accord, the Palestinian residents of both the West Bank and Gaza were given Palestinian ID cards and Palestinian passports. The Jordanian passports that West Bank-resident Palestinians had previously held were all taken away from them… So I think it really does matter some whether Hussein started his “Jordanianization” program of the army and the civil service before or after that point.
One other thing I noted about our conversation. Completely gone from our friend’s conversation was any use of the once-common terms “West Bankers and “East Bankers”, to denote those two different subsets of the Jordanian citizenry. Now, it was all “Palestinians” and “Jordanians” that he talked about… Implying, of course, that the people here of West Bank origin aren’t really considered to be “Jordanian” at all. Complex things going on…
Anyway, I didn’t have too much time to ask him about the party-political status of the Palestinians here. He did say he thought Fateh was a completely spent force… but I wish I’d probed him more on what he thinks of Hamas’s political organizing efforts here right now.
(I see that yesterday, a Jordanian government spokesman claimed that the security services recently intercepted a shipment of arms of explosives that, he claimed, Hamas was trying to smuggle into Jordan… and because of that, the kingdm has canceled a visit by Hamas Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar that was planned for today. This looks like a pathetic pretext– used, presumably, to hide the fact of the regime’s having caved in to US pressure on the matter, as Egypt also did, last Friday. The English-language carried the arms-smuggling allegations as its big lead story– sending a clear message of “We’ve complied!” to the Americans, no doubt. But the picture of the arms they claimed to have intercepted was truly pathetic: two semi-automatic rifles, one aged machine gun, about 60 bullets, and two of what looked like mortar rounds. Hamas, not surprisingly, denied the allegation.)

Political revocation of Palestinians’ residency rights in Jerusalem

The Israeli government has decided it will try to take away from the four elected Hamas lawmakers who are residents of Jerusalem the ID cards that allow them to live in the city of their foreparents.
Political revocation of people’s rights to reside in their ancestral cities… Does this not a strike a chord of memory with many Jews? Where might it end?
Israel claims the step is “in response to” the ghastly terror attack that on Monday killed nine people in downtown Tel Aviv. The Israeli government makes no claim that the four legislators are in any way criminally linked to the perpetrators of the terror attack, which was claimed by the Islamic Jihad organization. But Hamas had failed to denounce the attack, arguing that it constituted “legitimate self-defense.”
I happen to strongly disagree with the Hamas leaders’ argument on that score. But still, it seems to me that for the Israeli government to turn round and, in effect, expel these elected Hamas lawmakers from their home city simply because their party has failed to jump through a rhetorical hoop established by the Israeli government is a quite unjustifiable action… There are fears, too, that it could be the lip of a much larger-scale “slippery slope” of anti-Palestinian ethnic cleansing from Jerusalem.
The Palestinian Justice Minister has said he will appeal against the Israeli ruling to the International Court of Justice. I’m not sure whether (a) the PA has standing as a plaintiff at the ICJ, which only hears cases brought by established governments, and (b) whether this is the kind of case–involving, as it does, individuals, albeit lawmakers– that the ICJ would hear anyway?
First, anyway, the threatened MPs will be appealing to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, I see from HaAretz that four Palestinian-Israeli Members of the Israeli Knesset went to visit three of the threatened Hamas lawmakers today, in a show of solidarity.

UNU symposium, war, peace, etc.

(Apologies to readers that the first version of this post was badly edited… It’s hard to do all this on my modestly-sized laptop…. Now, it should be better. ~HC)
So the United Nations has its own university… Who knew? I gather from some comments made here on JWN earlier that some (or perhaps even many) among my readers did not…
Actually, that’s not totally surprising, since UNU actually does most of its work in very technical fields, as you can see if you scroll down on this web-page to the list of UNU’s research and training centers and programs. These centers and programs do some much-needed work in helping to build the capacity of (especially) low-income and medium-income nations in the various technical fields covered. But if you’re interest is a more general one in global issues and global relations, you may well not have noticed their work.
So the symposium I was at yesterday was held to celebrate the opening of a new building for UNU’s International Leadership Institute here in Amman, Jordan. It’s a little hard to explain what the ILI does, especially since their website appears to be down right now… But I’m reading from a brochure here, that says, “Over the last five years, the Institute has hosted over 300 mid-career professionals from 93 different countries in local, reginal, and global leadership education and practical leadership programs… ”
I should also confess I find the concept of “leadership”, simpliciter, to be either fairly mystifying or fairly scary. (Fuehrerheit, anyone?) It is also, quite frequently, defined in a strongly male-gendered or otherwise elitist and exclusionary way. The best form of leadership, surely, should be leadership to do something— that is, to reach a goal that is mutually agreed by all participants in the venture, that is clearly defined, and (obviously) constructive. It should also be a form of leadership that has transparency and accountability mechanisms built in… Anyway, there’s my two cents’ worth on the topic. (For now.)
So, the symposium yesterday was interesting. Hamid Zakri, the head of the Yokohama-based UNU Institute for Advanced Studies (in eco-restructuring, as it turns out) gave a talk on biodiplomacy. I learned more about the topic than I had ever known before, or indeed, than I had ever known existed… The Rector of the UNU, Hans van Ginkel, gave a talk about its history. The former Jordanian Prime Minister Abdel-Salam al-Majali– who’d been a big force behind the establishment of the institute in Jordan– gave a talk about his vision of leadership education. The UN “chief of Mission” in Amman, Christine McNab, gave a helpful talk about her view of leadership, likening it to being the conductor of an orchestra who encourages the individual players to do their own best interpretations of a symphonic piece while creating something even larger out of the sum of the parts of their efforts…
But the two presentatins I found most interesting were those by UNU Vice-Rector Ramesh Thakur, someone whose work I’ve long admired, and by Amin Seikal, of the Australian National University.
Amin, who grew up in Afghanistan, talked about democratization in Muslim Middle Eastern countries. His lecture came immediately before mine, so I didn’t ake notes. But basically, he was pessimistic about seeing any rapid leaps toward democracy in the region; he noted the anomaly of the US pushing for democratic elections and then rejecting the results; and he concluded by saying that most Muslim ME countries still needed a lot of work in the development of civil society before we could expect much pgoress in democratization.
Ramesh’s talk was about UN reform and its role in boosting peace and development. He said he would send me a written version of it sometime (which I’ll post here). In the meantime, here are some of the main points from the notes I took:

Continue reading “UNU symposium, war, peace, etc.”

Travel, minor frustrations, etc

This morning I’m in Charles de Gaulle airport en route to Amman for the UN University event there. I should start working on the lecture I’m to give, eh?
Actually, one of the greqt things about this blog is that serves as warm-up exercises for my thinking… So when I have a big deadline due I can review things I’ve written here recently and bingo, up pops the topic and the way to qpproqch it;
Yesterday, JWN was down for q good part of the day. I’m really sorry about that… I don’t know what hqppened. I fired off an email to the owner of the hosting service, qnd eventuqlly it cqme bqck up. I was sitting in Atlqntq qirport there composing those three posts offline.
Today, as you can see, I’m struggling with a French-lqnguqge keyboard here… Instead of starting off QWERTY it starts off AZERTY, and my brain and fingers find this hard to handle.
Au revoir and ila-l-liqa’.

Rumsfeld: ‘kinetic’ and out of control

Jim Hoagland has a ‘reported’ piece
in the Outlook section of today’s WaPo  that should be deeply
disturbing both to US citizens and to the rest of the world.  It’s
about the Bush administration’s  management (and mismanagement) of
the ‘Global War on Terror’. 

The scariest part of it is his reference to Rumsfeld’s continuing
insistence that the Pentagon be allowed to undertake what his people
euphemistically called “kinetic” operations anywhere around the world
without those teams coordinating their actions with either the local US
embassies (and their bosses back home in the State department) or with
the CIA.

Hoagie helpfully tells us that in today’s Washington, “kinetic”
actually means “war-like”.

Regarding the ongoing turf war between Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and (mainly)
the State Department, Hoagie writes:

The quest for a master plan for
counterterrorism originated in the
need to update or change pre-9/11 laws, presidential policy documents
and bureaucratic structures that treated international terrorism
directed at Americans primarily as a law enforcement problem, not as a
global struggle to be won on foreign battlefields with arms and ideas.

That
review stretched over two years in one form or another and appeared to
have been completed when NSPD 46 [that’s National Security Presidential
Directive] was formally adopted behind closed
doors by the Bush national security team one week before the public
release on March 16 of the administration’s National Security Strategy.
In fact, some crucial unresolved disagreements were simply passed over
in the interests of a show of consensus on “a statement of
aspirations,” in the words of one participant.

The most
contentious issues — particularly how far the Defense Department
should go in carrying out Bush’s direct order to “disrupt and destroy”
jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or
neutral countries — were left to be dealt with in annexes that are
being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA…

The struggle for
control was absent in the emergency days after 9/11, when Bush gave the
“disrupt and destroy” order to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
That was followed by an “AQSL Ex. Ord.” — a directive that bin Laden
and 10 other members of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership be brought to
justice by all necessary means, “dead or alive,” as Bush said.

That
was the seed from which grew a broader plan of attack against
al-Qaeda’s networks, other jihadist bands and the jihadist ideology
that loosely unites them. But as the extremist Islamic movement
metastasized through the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Rumsfeld is said
to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer
definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its “kinetic”
missions abroad.

“This war erases that old bright line
between
conventional warfare and diplomacy,” one official told me. “It has
moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of
escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today’s
mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We
can’t use old thinking and win. We can’t wait and win.”

A State
Department official put it differently: “We have been through the
immediate responses we can make and are now in a moment of looking
around, of focusing on the long term. It is important to assign the
right roles and responsibilities to the government agencies that will
lead the war on terror.”

I’ll just pause here and note that Hoagie, who worked as a reporter
for some 20 or more years before he moved into the ‘opinion’ department
of the paper, provides no named sources for any of his quotes at
all.  And since he was from the old school of “Daddy knows best”
journalism, he doesn’t even see the need to give any resons for the
anonymity.  (Current practice on the new spages of the NYT, for
example, is to write something like, “a source who agreed to speak only
on conditions of anonymity said… “)

Anyway, even though Hoagie’s attribution to sources is
old-fashioned, and even though I have disagreed with just about all the
opinions he’s
expressed, especially his flag-waving support for the invasion of
Iraq– despite those things, it strilkes me he does know and talk to
some interesting people inside the administration… So it’s good he
deigns to share some of what he learns with the WaPo’s readers, anyway.

So anyway, getting right back to his story there:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
stated her department’s concerns … bluntly during a
videoconference linking Bush’s top aides in mid-January. Letting the
Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador’s control to roll up
extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy “almost
exclusively kinetic” — that is, warlike — she argued, to Rumsfeld’s
discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official
involved in the meeting.

In testimony before the House Armed
Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State
Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public
reference to the State Department’s continuing desire to change
relatively little. “Our best means of countering the multilayered
terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency
Country Teams operating under the ambassador” in “an intimately
connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we
have made progress,” he noted.

They are not there yet, in large
part because far-reaching
proposals from the Pentagon to find and deal
with Islamic extremists in a systematic way — “so that we are
not
chasing rabbits,” said one official — have stirred opposition from the
State Department and the CIA, which fear losing primacy abroad through
the militarization of foreign policy and intelligence operations.

The
New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger
conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to
the Pentagon’s use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special
Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist
networks.[‘Countering’… Now there’s
another intriguing euphemism, don’t you think? ~HC] They work
with local security forces or
on their own in
countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as
Somalia.

“At this point, this would probably
amount to maybe 60
guys in 20 countries,” said one official. Added another, “It works in
the field in most cases, but creates more hierarchal trouble than it
should back here.”

Hoagie finishes the piece by noting that, despite wobbling on the issue
last year, Bush has now decided to “stand firm” with his designation of
the struggle his administration is engaged in as a “Global War on
Terrorism”. 

So the GWOT lives!!! And the rest of us should be very, very
scared…  Scared of those “Military Liasion Elements” who are
apparently roaming round the world, sometimes “liaising” with other
government’s forces and sometimes not… but rarely, it seems, liaising
in any serious way with the political branch of the US presence in the
country, i.e., the local US Embassy.  And scared too– most
especially if we are US citizens– by the continuing signs of disorder,
mismanagament, and factionalism inside and at the heart of the Bush
administration.

Indeed, Hoagie starts his piece with this:

Four years and seven months after
al-Qaeda’s attack on the American
homeland, more is missing than Osama bin Laden. The Bush administration
still struggles to agree on how to carry out its secret blueprint to
fight the global war on terrorism…

This, from the same guys that brought us the chaotic and dysfunctional
“response” to last September’s Hurricane Katrina.  Except you’d
kinda think that when the challenge they’re facing is the major
challenge the nation faces (or so we have repeatedly been told) in the
field of national security, they’d try to at least get their lines of
responsibility and their basic game plan quite clear, wouldn’t you?

I don’t know, to be frank, which to be more scared of: the Bush
administration pursuing its belligerent (oh, sorry, make that
“kinetic”)  plans all around the world in a focused and
well-coordinated fashion–  or them doing the same thing but in a
chaotic, hopelessly inefficient, but also potentially quite
unsupervised mode…

I think, the latter.  God help us all.

Violence and tragedy in Egypt

The inter-communal violence in Egypt is just ghastly.  Friday, one
or more knife-wielding attackers attacked worshippers in three Coptic
churches in Alexandria, Egypt, killing one worshipper and injuring 16
others.

Members of the very ancient Coptic Church make up about 10 precent of
the Egyptian population. (Did you know that our word “Egypt” actially
derives from the word “Copt”?)

Saturday, the violence escalated some… and it got even worse today,
Sunday.  According to this
AP piece from Alexandria, about 2,000 members of the riot police
had surrounded  the Saints Church in the downtown area–
presumably, “for the protection of the church community”.  It
seems that Muslim rioters had surrounded the police cordon, though
that’s not clear… But anyway, in inter-communal clashes that
accompanied Saturday’s funeral of the man killed on Friday, one Muslim
was reportedly killed.

The AP reporter, Omar Sinan, described the scene around the church thus:

Police fought back against Coptic
Christians, who were encircled by
a security cordon around the Saints Church … after
hurling stones and bottles from inside the police line. Fellow
demonstrators tossed Molotov cocktails from the balconies of nearby
buildings.

Police could be seen repeatedly beating a
boy of about 12, who was
among the crowd of Coptic young people who fled into the church,
slamming the doors behind them, or dashed down narrow streets
surrounding the church. Most of the protesters were between the ages of
12 and 25.

Later, a huge mob of what appeared to be
Muslim protesters charged the police cordon from the other side.

Mustafa Mohammed Mustafa, a Muslim
Brotherhood parliamentarian, said
a 24-year-old Muslim died early Sunday of wounds from a beating by
Christians during rioting Saturday…

Sirens blared as ambulances raced toward
the scene. Armored police
vehicles surrounded the church as tear gas fumes sent protesters
fleeing down narrow streets in the neighborhood.

It all sounds so ugly and so terrifying.  Sectarian clashes
are., sadly, not at all a new thing in Egypt…  But nearly every
time it happens the actions of the police seem to inflame tensions even
more.  I think the police needs to have much better training in
crowd control.

But ithe political situation in the country also needs some much
broader attention, too.  How can you have a police force that
treats people humanely and with dignity if the political system as a
whole is one that treats the average Egyptian like the downtrodden
subject of a Pharaoh?

Anyway, I was reassured to read at the end of that AP piece that,

Police said Alexandria Gov. Mohammad
Abdel Salam Mahgoub and local
politicians were trying to calm the situation with the help of the
powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

The MB is still  actually outlawed in Egypt.  But if the
government folks think the MB can help to calm the situation, then
certainly it should be brought into the process.  It occurs to me,
too, that leaders from within the Coptic community need to brought in
to help calm things down, too.

Clark and Simon against attacking Iran

Richard Clarke and Steven Simon have a very significant op-ed
in today’s NYT that argues forcefully against the idea of the US
bombing Iran in attempt to halt the Iranian nuclear program.

The piece is significant mainly because of these two men’s
credentials.  Clark is the fairly famous guy who was national
coordinator for security and counterterrorism in both the Clinton and
the early GWB administrations, and Simon was senior director for
counterterrorism in the Clinton-era National Security Council.

They build on the experiences they both went through dealing with the
Iran issue in the mid-1990s, noting that on that occasion: “In essence,
both sides looked down the road of conflict and chose to avoid further
hostilities.”

And they conclude this about the present situation:

Now, as in the mid-90’s, any United
States bombing campaign would
simply begin a multi-move, escalatory process. Iran could respond three
ways. First, it could attack Persian Gulf oil facilities and tankers —
as it did in the mid-1980’s — which could cause oil prices to spike
above $80 dollars a barrel. [Or,
much more ~HC]

Second and more likely, Iran could use
its terrorist network to
strike American targets around the world, including inside the United
States. Iran has forces at its command that are far superior to
anything Al Qaeda was ever able to field. The Lebanese terrorist
organization Hezbollah has a global reach, and has served in the past
as an instrument of Iran. We might hope that Hezbollah, now a political
party, would decide that it has too much to lose by joining a war
against the United States. But this would be a dangerous bet.

Third, Iran is in a position to make our
situation in Iraq far more
difficult than it already is. The Badr Brigade and other Shiite
militias in Iraq could launch a more deadly campaign against British
and American troops. There is
every reason to believe that Iran has
such a retaliatory shock wave planned and ready.

No matter how Iran responded, the
question that would face American
planners would be, “What’s our next move?” How do we achieve so-called
escalation dominance, the condition in which the other side fears
responding because they know that the next round of American attacks
would be too lethal for the regime to survive?

Bloodied by Iranian retaliation,
President Bush would most likely
authorize wider and more intensive bombing. Non-military Iranian
government targets would probably be struck in a vain hope that the
Iranian people would seize the opportunity to overthrow the government.
More likely, the American war
against Iran would guarantee the regime
decades more of control.

Good judgment there, guys.  You don’t have to “love” the mullahs
who rule in Teheran to reach this conclusion…  You just need to
have some basic grasp of the realities of regional and global power
dynamics.

Of course, what they didn’t do in their article, which I wish they had
done, was point out that even if using a bombing campaign or other
major military escalation against Iran is a really, really bad option–
still, there are other options which might help people deal with
concerns they (we) still have about the Iranian nuclear program…. As
I have noted here on a number of occasions, there are a number of
urgent diplmatic paths that need to be followed.  One is working
intensively through and with the IAEA.  Another is opening
diplomatic talks with Teheran with an open-ended agenda to include the
nuclear question along with others…

Do I think these are the kinds of “diplomatic” options that the Bushies
are now pursuing?  No, sadly, I don’t.

Rumsfeld and the cautious generals

President Bush came out swinging yesterday to offer what WaPo reporters called, “an unequivocal vote of confidence in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.”
And to show just how seriously he considered this matter, he even took time out from his long weekend to issue a special statement denying claims that Rumsfeld completely ignored the professional advice he’d gotten from the generals in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq and at several stages since…
This brass-vs.-suits contest inside the Pentagon over the conduct of the Iraq war is not a new issue Check for example this JWN post from November 2003.
What is new is the willingness of small numbers of retired US flag officers to come out publicly not just to criticise Rumsfeld but also to issue a four-year-overdue call for his resignation. The IHT yesterday identified a fifth retired general who had done this.
But here’s the thing. There are literally hundreds of serving flag officers in the four branches of the US military. (If someone has time to verifiably research the exact number that would be grand: just post the number and a link in the Comments here.) David Ignatious wrote in yesterday’s WaPo that,

    When I recently asked an Army officer with extensive Iraq combat experience how many of his colleagues wanted Rumsfeld out, he guessed 75 percent. Based on my own conversations with senior officers over the past three years, I suspect that figure may be low.

So my question– and okay, I know it’s not totally original– is why have so few retired officers and zero serving officers gone on the record publicly with deep-rooted criticisms of Rumsfled’s conduct of the war?
I think an answer needs to be built from a number of components… One of these is of course that we have a valuable and long-engrained system in the US of civilian control of the military.
That’s grand, and it’s a basic component of democracy. I am totally not calling for a military coup here!
But still, even within that system, there has to be a way for basic professional expertise to be made available to the (civilian) policymakers at all levels in a purely professional and unpoliticized way. Shinseki tried to do that, and was canned. He was then replaced as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the nation’s top military officer) by two Rumsfeld yes-men in turn, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and then Marines Gen. Peter Pace.
Rumsfeld, of course, is the person who makes the recommendation to the White House regarding who to nominate for that job. So he has made it crystal clear that he only wants a yes-man in the job.
There are other powerful ways in which the country’s top officers are trained (or “incented”) to be loyal yes-men, too. One of course is the whole tenor of basic military training, which is such as to inculcate and value the blind following of orders and the setting aside of personal considerations and analyses… (But then, regarding operational matters, the military wants to encourage innovative, out-of-the box thinking in mid-level officers… So there’s quite a bit of a tension there.)
And then, there’s the pay structure. And not just the structure of the pay and benefits for serving officers, which already and understandably incent people toward behavior that will ensure promotion, but also– and this is crucial for top-rank people coming near the end of their careers– the structure of the military pension scheme in which an officer, once retired, will then find himself for the rest of his (or her) life.
Expectations about pension levels have been mentioned by many reporters when discussing the very cautious behavior of the highest-ranking officers… So I thought I’d go over to the DOD’s Final Pay Retirement Calculator to see what difference it would make for me, if I were a senior-level officer coming toward the end of my career in, say, 2010, having served for 30 years at that point… (I kept the default “expectations” regarding inflation rate etc that are given in the bottom half of that web-page.)
So I found out there that if I retired in 2010 as a Colonel (O-6), my monthly pension would be $7,609. Not shabby at all– especially given the many other perks and benefits that military retirees get in this country, to say nothing of opportunities for lucrative consultancies, etc…
Ah, but if I’d been a loyal officer and got to retire at O-7 level (Brig.-Gen.) level in 2010, instead, then I’d make $8,664 per month. ($12,660 more per year.) But if I’d been even more “loyal”– to my superiors, to the Secretary of Defense, etc– I might be an O-8 (Maj.-Gen.) and pull in $9,767/month instead (a further increase of $13,236/yr.)… Or an O-9 (Lieut.-Gen.), and retire at $10,780/mth…. or an O-10 (full Gen.) and get $10,901/mth.
I have to tell you a few things here. Firstly, the incentive is certainly there for a serving high-rank officer “just to keep quiet for a couple of further years” as s/he heads toward retirement… and certainly to avoid doing anything dramatic that might force him/her to resign from the force at the existing rank, if need be, in order to protest the policy. And also, to do nothing that might jeopardize that vital next promotion, that could– over the course of 35 more years of life after retirement– add up to huge amounts of actual $$$.
Second, I find all these retirement levels (and all the pay levels for still-serving officers at the top end of the scale) quite obscenely high. The serving generals in this country live very nicely indeed, with all kinds of country clubs, subsidized housing and transportation, tax breaks, etc… They form a special class of pampered and very powerful individuals who nowadays roam the world trying to run programs and projects in scores of different countries… And when they retire, many of them find well-paid additional jobs inside our country’s bloated military-industrial sector.
I, with my pathetic little income as a writer, have to subsidize all that? (FCNL tells us that 42 cents of every dollar I in taxes goes to the military now.) And the grunts out there in the field risking their lives in obedience to Bush’s scary and destabilizing war plans are supporting the generals’ lifestyle, too.
So the very least we should all expect from these guys, given how nicely we are all treating them, is that they should candidly give the country and its citizenry their best professional estimate of whether a proposed war-plan will work, or not.
Shinseki tried to do that, and got canned for it. But why have we not seen any other generals trying to “storm the ramparts of the SecDef’s office” since then?