Just World News with Helena Cobban

You can now find my CSM column dated for Thursday November 13. It’s here. In it, I argue:

Vietnamization, like Iraqification, was accompanied by a lot of rhetoric about “democratization. “But because it was rushed, politically driven, and pursued unilaterally by the US according to US timetables, Vietnamization was a dangerous fiasco for most of the people of Vietnam and helped usher in the period of abusive communist rule that followed. It “succeeded” only in that it helped Nixon win reelection in 1972.
In Iraq, the stakes are even higher than they were in Vietnam. That’s why a botched “Iraqification” that is pursued nearly unilaterally by a rushed, politically driven US is in the interest of absolutely no one. But I truly don’t think that a successful Iraqification can happen if Washington continues trying to do it under its own almost unilateral control.
For everyone’s sake, the UN has to be invited to take over this vital process. The UN alone – not NATO, not the present US-led coalition – has the international legitimacy, and can command the international resources that are needed to get this job done.

But read the rest of it as well, and send your comments in HERE.

I’m just in the middle of writing a CSM column about the dilemmas of “Iraqification” of the administration in Iraq. And suddenly I thought well heck, what if what’s really happening in the world should actually be called the “Iraqification” of the administration in Washington DC?
Meaning, that we’re getting increasingly closed-door, Orwellian, crony-istic, anti-democratic decisionmaking right here in the US, never mind what’s happening in Iraq.
But then I though, nah– that is really not fair to the Iraqis, to paint them all with a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brush… “Saddamization” of Washington DC, perhaps? Nah, that’s too extreme. Something in between, though…

ABC News broke the story Wed. night, then the NYT had it in more detail today: that the Bushies turned down what looked like a last-ditch, groveling offer from Saddam that would have met most or virtually all of the US’s pre-war demands.
According to both those versions of the story, Saddam was offering to let “2,000 US agents” comb his country for evidence of the WMDs. Plus, the NYT said he had offered to cut cosy deals with the US on access to Iraqi oil and also to hold elections within two years.
So the Bushies turned down the offer. It seems they were determined to fight their war.
(Some important details of the story– those concerning the holding, though not necessarily the content, of the back-channel contacts– were confirmed for both news outlets by Richard Perle, to whom the contacts had been directed.)
Why did Imad Hage, the key Lebanese-American business executive who was the key go-between, suddenly spill the beans to the US media? One clue may come from the fact that Mike Maalouf, a Lebanese-American who was then working in Doug Feith’s office in the Pentagon and who was apparently involved in the contacts along with Hage, has in the interim been “put on administrative leave.”
Maybe these two guys want the folks in the Pentagon to know that they have plenty of information and are not afraid to use it?
But here’s another interesting wrinkle, too. AFP reported today that the Hage’s key Iraqi intermediary, Tahir Jalil al-Habbush al-Takriti, described as Saddam’s intelligence chief, had been suborned by the Americans somewhere along the way. (Maybe through the contacts with Hage? Separately? Who knows?)
According to this AFP story– which my spouse sent me off the ‘net, but I can’t find a URL for it yet– this Habbush was one of four top regime people who were due to meet with Saddam at a restaurant in the Mansouriyeh district of Baghdad on April 9. But Habbush never turned up. Saddam, fearing that Habbush had betrayed him, high-tailed it away from the location– and 15 minutes later the whole place went up in smoke after having that really heavy US bomb dropped on it.
The AFP story is sourced to a “former government official” in Iraq.
The story then quotes three former government officials as saying that Habbush “was evacuated by the US forces as soon as they entered Baghdad, along with other members of the former regime who collaborated with the United States.”
So the small question here is “How long had Habbush actually been on the payroll before April 9?”
But the big question still has to be, Exactly who was it in the Bush administration who put his (or her) foot down on any further exploration of the intriguing negotiation being offered by Hage? Was it Perle himself? Or had he taken it to Rumsfeld or the Prez then one of them turned it down?
Whoever it was made that tragic call is probably– or let’s hope so– having serious regrets right now.
Maybe in light of the scale of the tragedy in Iraq since March, the whole lot of them should just resign.

Fareed Zakaria had an op-ed in today’s WaPo titled “Iraqification: Losing Strategy”.
He’s right in some respects. As when he argues, ” This new impulse has less to do with Iraqi democracy than with American democracy. The president wants to show, in time for his reelection, that Iraqis are governing their affairs and Americans are coming home.”
He also may be somewhat right when he predicts: “Iraqification could easily produce more chaos, not less.”
For an eery possible precedent here let me take you back to Lebanon, early 1984. The French and US “peacekeepers” there had been very badly battered by the suicide bombings Shi-ite extermists had launched against their positions in the city in 1983… In early February, the French troops were regrouping for more effective defense. Ever since September 1982, the US had been trying to rebuild the Lebanese national army, which had falledn apart during preceding years of civil-war fighting.
By February 1984, the US hoped it had cobbled together enough of a Lebanese army to fill the holes being left by all the peacekeepers who were so eager to regroup. Their man, Ibrahim Tannous, the Christian extremist army commander, had promised them he had many well-staffed, well-trained new units.
Thing was, though, most of the foot-soldiers in that army were Shi-ite Muslims. On Feb. 5, 1984, the order came for the army to deploy into an area that was a stronghold for some anti-government Shi-ite militias. And guess what?
You can read all about it on pp.204-205 of my book The Making of Modern Lebanon:

At this stage, [the then-ascendant Shi-ite leader Nabih] Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did–in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon…

You reckon the man whom “Yankeedoodle”, the author of the great Today in Iraq blog calls “Lieut. AWOL” ever read my book? (Or any book?)
But back to Zakaria. Where I think he’s wrong is where he says, “The first task of winning the peace in Iraq is winning the war — which is still being waged in the Sunni heartland… [W]hatever it takes, the United States must do it.”
Actually, I think he’s wrong on two counts there. The first is that it is not the case that “the US must do it.” We do still, after all, despite the best efforts of John Bolton and the other members of the Bush administration’s other bash-the-UN brigade, have a viable (if battered) United Nations– and its legitimacy inside Iraq and around the world is still considerably higher than that of the USUK coalition.
Plus, it is actually not the case that the battle that counts in Iraq is the one in which the US forces are currently engaged, inside the Sunni heartland.
The one that really counts is the battle for the allegiance of the country’s Shi-ites. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, Shi-ites make up around 60-65 percent of the national population. And though they have numerous internal and external problems of their own these days (as Berri’s people did in Lebanon in 1983-84), still, at the end of the day their community can be expected essentially to stick together and make up by far the largest power bloc inside Iraq.
Right now, I’ll bet most of them are just happy as clams to see their two traditional opponents– the US and the Iraqi Sunnis–slugging it out with many casualties a little further to the north.
Indeed, I’d go as far as to say that that is the “triangle” that really needs watching inside Iraq these days: the triangle of competition between the Sunnis, the Shi-ites, and the US forces. Not the merely geographic “Sunni triangle” that everyone in the mainstream media sounds off about as though they know what they’re talking about…