I did a current on the situation in Basra and how its murky dynamics illustrate how current thinking merely ensures that the war will continue forever.
James Fallows points to an affecting example of China’s continued impoverishment as reason why “who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world” are off-base. And certainly there’s something to that. But in other respects it’s the still-in-many-ways-bleak reality of contemporary China that makes it seem threatening.
If the PRC is such a juggernaut now what’s it going to be like when the average Chinese person is, say, half as rich as the average American? And that China is still going to see itself as a relatively poor country that owes little to the world but is owed much from it. Depending on what kind of things you’re inclined to worry about, that can look like a looming environmental catastrophe, a looming national security catastrophe, or probably one of any number of other kind of catastrophes. Of course the flipside is that it’s also a great opportunity for a huge number of people to escape grinding poverty. As such it’s difficult for me to let my outlook be dominated by worry. But I think I do see what the worriers are worried about.
Speaking to the conservative Young America Foundation at George Washington University last Friday, Karl Rove adamantly defended John McCain’s remark that the U.S. should stay in Iraq for 100 years, claiming that McCain’s been taken out of context:
What Senator McCain was talking about was the projection of American power to maintain stability in a dangerous and difficult part of the world. And he was precise and detailed in his explanation.
The conservative establishment has rallied around a similar interpretation of McCain’s “100 years” remark. In the Washington Post last Friday, Charles Krauthammer called the claim that McCain wants to fight in Iraq for 100 years “a dirty lie.” Krauthammer wrote that Iraq would become, like neighboring Kuwait, a place from which the United States currently “projects power and provides stability for the entire Gulf and for the vulnerable U.S. allies that line its shores.”
In this morning’s New York Times, Bill Kristol praised McCain for choosing “to tell Americans the hard and unpopular truths that we’ll be there [in Iraq] for a while, and that there’s no sacrifice-free path to defeating our enemies and securing a lasting peace.”
National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez suggested that McCain’s remark was “sensible,” and that the attacks indicate that Democrats “don’t get the war we’re in.”
Of course, the opposite is true. It’s Karl Rove who doesn’t get that we weren’t mired in a German civil war five years after the end of World War II. It’s Charles Krauthammer who doesn’t get that Kuwait is not Iraq, and that if we’d spent years bombing their country and kicking down their doors in the middle of the night, the Kuwaitis would want us to leave, just as the Iraqis do. And it’s John McCain who doesn’t get that his neoconservative vision of using Iraq as a base from which to project U.S. power is a fantasy, because he doesn’t get that any Iraqi government that agrees to a hundred-year U.S. presence in Iraq will never be seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people, and thus will require the presence of U.S. forces to ensure its government. But we already know that “that’s fine” with John McCain.
McCain has tried to explain his 100 years remark by saying that “the war will be over soon“:
…Although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years. But it’ll be handled by the Iraqis not by us. And then we decide what kind of security arrangement we want to have with the Iraqis.
It’s unclear, exactly, how McCain differentiates between “the war” and “the insurgency,” or when he thinks the insurgency will end so that the hundred years of peace will begin.
It seems that DARPA is developing some kind of robotic attack insects despite clear indications that military robots will rebel and seek to enslave/exterminate us. The defense establishment’s continued ignorance of the basic canons of sci-fi films is genuinely appalling.
Just as a reminder of how absurd the notion that we need to stay in Iraq indefinitely to somehow curb Iranian influence, note that it took an Iranian general to help resolve the fighting in Basra. Ultimately, all that Iranian influence in Iraq shows is how badly we need to make some effort at a diplomatic opening with Iran. At the end of the day, we have very compatible interests in terms of wanting to fight al-Qaeda and ensure that oil general flows out of the Persian Gulf.
There was a time when I never could have imagined I’d be reading stuff like this about my own country:
At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America’s shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.
Read the whole thing; I don’t really have the heart to make a witty remark.
As best I can tell nobody’s quite sure what’s happening. Sadr offered a cease-fire, and a government spokesman kinda sorta appeared to accept the terms, but the fighting continues and it remains a bit unclear who’s in control of which forces or what this is even about. What seems certain, though, is that Maliki badly miscalculated his ability to crush Sadr and is prepared for some kind of climbdown far short of his initial demands.
One thing to keep in mind about the repeated failures of our effort to train Iraqi security forces is that it’s always been a bit odd to think of this as a situation where more/better training is actually what’s needed. At the end of the day, whatever the shortcomings of our training and equipping mission in Iraq, after all, it’s better than anything the Mahdi Army or the domestic Sunni Arab insurgency or AQI or the Badr Organization has. The issue is one of politics, legitimacy, motivation, and leadership.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s men aren’t well-trained or especially disciplined, but they are fighting for a cause they believe in and that’s at least a first step toward creating an effective military force. No American-led training program is going to be able to make up for that kind of shortfall in the political legitimacy of the central government.
Spencer Ackerman: “Since he began running for president, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has embraced President George W. Bush’s foreign policy. He has done so for a simple and understandable reason: it was McCain’s policy first.” You’ll be reading more on this from me coming soon to a magazine near you, but yes — Bush’s worst moments have come when he’s embraced an approach to foreign policy that McCain’s been pushing for over ten years now.
Some very smart stuff about Iraq from Zbigniew Brzezinski a man who’s not without his flaws, but whose Iraq advice we certainly should have taken in 2002-2003 then again in most every single one of the intervening years. A couple of key points:
The contrast between the Democratic argument for ending the war and the Republican argument for continuing is sharp and dramatic. The case for terminating the war is based on its prohibitive and tangible costs, while the case for “staying the course” draws heavily on shadowy fears of the unknown and relies on worst-case scenarios. President Bush’s and Sen. John McCain’s forecasts of regional catastrophe are quite reminiscent of the predictions of “falling dominoes” that were used to justify continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Neither has provided any real evidence that ending the war would mean disaster, but their fear-mongering makes prolonging it easier.
I was thinking about this the other day as I found myself reading something about the tragic Lyndon Johnson administration. And it’s really worth focusing on. The right has made a lot of hay out of the fact that some anti-war types to some extent understated the extent to which a North Vietnamese victory would be a humanitarian problem for many South Vietnamese people. Much less hay has been made out of the fact that the hawks had been quite literally arguing that there was a straight line between the Communistification of Vietnam and then the inevitable spread of Communism to Malaysia, Indonesia, all of Asia, and soon enough the United States itself. The argument really was that we had to fact them over there or else we’d be fending them off from our very shores.
And it was ridiculous and remains so today. And yet the essence of the case for staying in Iraq indefinitely really does hinge crucially on these lurid worst-case scenarios. And it’s true — if we leave Iraq in the most irresponsible manner possible and we suffer from a lot of bad luck and everything that could go wrong does go wrong and we don’t respond to events intelligently, then these terrible outcomes might happen. But that’s no reason to stay in Iraq forever — if we stay and everything goes wrong, that’ll be terrible, too.
Now as Zbig says, a serious effort to get out of Iraq is going to require a political and diplomatic component as well as the mere absence of U.S. troops. One of the good things about the Responsible Plan for Iraq from Darcy Burner and other House challengers is precisely its recommendation of the need for this kind of diplomatic engagement, which really is crucial to trying to minimize the inevitable fallout from the United States doing what needs to be done in military terms. I would note that on the diplomatic front, it’s probably easier to get Iraq’s neighbors to contribute constructively to stability in Iraq once we’ve decisively decided not to run together “stability in Iraq” with “Iraq becomes base for U.S. power projection and mad schemes to overthrow all the governments in the region.”
It seems that the situation in Somalia has completely collapsed. The Washington Post sees insurgents on the march and notes that “on Tuesday, 40 aid groups delivered a statement to the U.N. Security Council, which is discussing Somalia this week, warning of an “impending humanitarian catastrophe.” Too bad the United States decided to help provoke this latest round of fighting and anarchy by supporting an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.
About half of what I know about the Horn of Africa I learned from reading Jeffrey Gettleman articles so I shouldn’t be too hard on him, but it was a little odd to read that when the TFG “came here to the capital 15 months ago, backed by thousands of Ethiopian troops, it was widely hailed as the best chance in years to end Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war, chaos and suffering.” Certainly, to me it looked like the best chance to restart Somalia’s ceaseless cycles of war, chaos, and suffering and I recall it looked the same to John Judis, to the International Crisis Group, and many others. Meanwhile, in addition to contributing to massive suffering in Somalia we’ve for no real reason picked a fight with a local Islamist movement that showed no particular sign of wanting to fight the United States.
With U.S. forces joining the fight against the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, the Bush administration’s current Iraq policy is to back the Iraqi political faction (led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim) most closely allied to Iran against the faction of Muqtada al-Sadr. Sadr’s nationalist credentials have proved a difficult hurdle for former exiles Maliki and Hakim, and their parties haven’t been able to establish much political support in Iraq both because of the Iraqi government’s continuing corruption and failure to deliver basic services, and because they are seen as puppets either of Iran or the U.S., or both. The U.S. likes them, though, because they bless the U.S. presence in Iraq. And the U.S. dislikes Sadr because he has, since the 2003 invasion, consistently demanded a U.S. withdrawal.
As to why the Maliki government decided that now was the time to go against Sadr’s loyalists, it might have something to do with Dick Cheney’s visit to Iraq a few weeks ago. Here’s why:
On February 13, after a long, bitter debate, the Iraqi parliament passed a package of three laws dealing with the budget, amnesty for detainees, and a provincial powers law that “paved the way for elections in October.” The legislation was hailed in the U.S. media as a major political breakthrough.
On February 27, Iraq’s three-man presidency council then vetoed the provincial powers legislation, putting a serious crimp in the “political progress” narrative. The person who insisted on the veto was Shia Vice President Abdul Mehdi, a member of ISCI, because his party understood that they were/are not yet in a position to defeat the Sadrists (or Fadhila, a Sadrist offshoot powerful in and around Basra) in elections, and stood to lose big.
On March 21, the presidential council reversed its veto of the provincial powers law.
Given Maliki’s dependence on the U.S. for the survival of his government, I’m skeptical of claims by the Bush administration that “Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting” them. At the risk of offering a conspiracy theory, it’s very possible that, in exchange for withdrawing the veto and giving Bush something which he could present to Americans as “progress in Iraq,” Cheney gave a nod to Maliki and his ISCI allies to try to get by force what they knew they could not get by ballot: Victory against the Sadrists.
That’s not working out so well. The last four days of intense fighting have shown just how tenuous were the successes of the surge, and how dependent these successes were upon the willingness and ability of Muqtada al-Sadr to keep his movement in check.
A February report by the International Crisis Group correctly predicted this outcome:
The U.S. response [to Sadr's cease-fire]– to continue attacking and arresting Sadrist militants, including some who are not militia members; arm a Shiite tribal counterforce in the south to roll back Sadrist territorial gains; and throw its lot in with Muqtada’s nemesis, ISCI – is understandable but short-sighted. The Sadrist movement, its present difficulties aside, remains a deeply entrenched, popular mass movement of young, poor and disenfranchised Shiites. It still controls key areas of the capital, as well as several southern cities; even now, its principal strongholds are virtually unassailable. Despite intensified U.S. military operations and stepped up Iraqi involvement, it is fanciful to expect the Mahdi Army’s defeat. Instead, heightened pressure is likely to trigger both fierce Sadrist resistance in Baghdad and an escalating intra-Shiite civil war in the south.
Despite Bush’s praise for Prime Minister Maliki’s “bold decision…to go after the illegal groups in Basra,” presenting this as “the Iraqi government against sectarian militias,” is wrong. This is another episode in an intra-sectarian conflict that has gone on since 2003, with different Shiite militias competing for the spoils on behalf their respective political machines.
As Eric Martin points out, despite Maliki’s claim that his goal is to rid Basra of militias, Iraqi security forces have focused on one militia: The Mahdi Army. ISCI’s militia, the Badr Organization, (which was founded in Iran and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) has largely incorporated itself into the Iraqi Security Forces, and has elements acting independently as well as under the aegis of the Iraqi state, both of which are fighting together in Basra against the Mahdi Army. This is clearly a(nother) misguided attempt to crush Sadr, and, it seems likely that, as in previous episodes, he will win simply by not losing.
UPDATE: Ilan Goldenberg is skeptical of the Cheney Theory, pointing to the Washington Post’s note that “Maliki decided to launch the offensive without consulting his U.S. allies, according to administration officials.” Ilan writes:
Still, the reason I don’t buy this theory is that the timing makes no sense whatsoever from a domestic political perspective. If there was a quid pro quo, the Bush Administration would have asked for a waiting period until after the Petraeus Crocker testimony. Why go with such a high risk operation a week before the progress report to Congress? Makes no sense. This Administration is pretty incompetent about a lot of things, but for the most part they seem to understand political timing.
Eric Martin is skeptical of Goldenberg’s skepticism and writes:
It is…entirely possible that the adminstration official quoted in the article was telling the truth…as she/he knew it. There has been a perculiar pattern of secrecy within the Bush administration (not just vis-a-vis outsiders) such that the Secretary of State might be pursuing some policy without telling the Secretary of Defense or Vice President, and vice versa (with the POTUS included on a need to know basis – which is rarer than it should be).
What to think of “Conditional Engagement”, the brief policy memo from Colin Kahl and Shawn Brimley of CNAS. Well, I’m not as skeptical as Kevin Drum. In essence, what I take them to be saying is that we should probably leave Iraq but if upon taking office the new President finds that key Iraqi politicians are all prepared to produce the pony we need then we ought to be willing to stick around. You can count me as very skeptical that this strategy would, in fact, produce a pony which is why I put emphasis on the idea of packing up our bags and going home but I don’t think I disagree with their literal claim.
Now of course a lot comes down to the details. But beyond the details, a lot comes down to the purpose here. Do Kahl and Brimley really intend to quit Iraq if/when the pony doesn’t materialize? Or is the real point here just to generate “a nuanced middle position between ‘all in’ or ‘all out’”? Certainly, I’ve had about enough of policymaking where we decide first to find a nuanced middle ground and then second sketch out what that nuanced middle ground means. It seems to me that a lot of efforts have been expended essentially with the goal of avoiding the DFH conclusion that we ought to leave Iraq at all costs.
So I’m skeptical. But I’ll be interested to see the longer version, because I don’t have a huge literal disagreement with what they’re saying and it sounds like the new report will be a big step in my direction relative to where “Phased Transition” had positioned CNAS.
Dean Barnett takes a butterknife to an intellectual knifefight with Spencer Ackerman over “The Obama Doctrine.” Of course, it’s precisely the fact that Obama’s approach to al-Qaeda is antithetical to The Weekly Standard‘s bluster and ignorance approach that makes him an appealing figure.
Charles Krauthammer, “The Shiite ‘Menace,’” The Washington Post, May 2, 2003:
Before the war even began, the critics were predicting that Iraq was going to be the Bay of Pigs (plus “Desert One, Beirut and Somalia,” said the ever-hyperbolic Chris Matthews). A week into the war, we were told Iraq was Vietnam. Now, after the war, they’re telling us that Iraq is Iran — that Iraq’s Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic.
The critics were wrong every time. They are wrong again. Of course there are telegenic elements among the Shiites who would like fundamentalist rule by the clerics. But even the majority of Iranians oppose the rule of the mullahs and consider the Islamic revolution a disaster. The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.
These days, of course, Krauthammer would have nothing but scorn for anyone who doesn’t want to see American troops fighting, killing, and dying for an indefinite period of time all for the sake of SCIRI’s hold on power.
Tom Lee says we need to worry less about the over-hyped robot threat and focus more attention on the menace of pirates. I’m afraid, however, that as Tom ought well know, many of his precious Google Trends hits for “pirates” aren’t about honest-to-God, parrot-wielding pirates at all, but rather “intellectual property pirates” and other such metaphorical pirates. Why Tom would choose to act as a dupe of Big Content and continue to leave the nation defenseless against the robot threat I couldn’t quite say. Maybe someone needs to tell the world that his girlfriend’s a cylon!
Photo by Flickr user jylcat used under a Creative Commons license
New York Times: “Mr. Bush also accused Iran of arming, training and financing the militias fighting against the Iraqi forces.” Would it have killed the Times to point out that Iran is also arming, training, and financing the militias fighting alongside the Iraqi forces? After all, the government of Iran has extremely cordial relations with the government of Iraq and our main militia allies in Iraq were literally created in Iran by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This context certainly seems relevant.
Meanwhile, is there any real precedent for the sort of repeated misstating the identity of the enemy that we’ve seen from the Bush administration? Recall that it took years for the administration to grudgingly acknowledge the existence of a non-AQI Sunni Arab insurgency even though this insurgency had long been the US military’s primary adversary. But now we’re supposed to believe that everyone we and our Iranian-backed allies fight are Iranian. Sure.
If you read this Washington Post account of fighting in southern Iraq a couple of things become clear. One is that the United States is deeply involved:
U.S. forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting.
The other is that nobody in U.S. policymaking circles really thinks we have a dog in this fight:
The U.S. officials, who were not authorized to speak on the record, said that they believe Iran has provided assistance in the past to all three groups — the Mahdi Army; the Badr Organization of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, Iraq’s largest Shiite party; and forces loyal to the Fadhila Party, which holds the Basra governor’s seat. But the officials see the current conflict as a purely internal Iraqi dispute.
Some officials have concluded that Maliki himself is firing “the first salvo in upcoming elections,” the administration official said.
Basically, we have our troops, risking their lives and killing people and all for the sake of helping some Iranian-backed militia groups fight some other Iranian-backed militia groups and, yes, the groups we’re supporting initiated this battle without clearing it with us. But we need to back them, because George W. Bush has staked his precious credibility on his alliance with Nouri al-Maliki, so if Maliki says American blood and treasure will be expended fighting the Mahdi Army, then so it shall be expended.
Alternatively we could just leave and let this people sort out their own problems.
Here’s a nice rundown of the Clinton campaign’s Northern Ireland mumbo-jumbo. I think what her husband’s administration did there was a very legitimate achievement and very much highlights some of the shortcomings of the George W. Bush approach which has no comparable examples of constructive U.S. engagement in the troubles of the world. It also highlights John McCain’s catastrophically poor understanding of foreign affairs as, at the time, he denounced the Northern Ireland initiative as a sellout of a key U.S. ally doomed to failure.
So it’s not a bad issue for Clinton to raise, in its way. But she wants to raise it as an example of her personal foreign policy chops and the evidence just isn’t there. It’s normal for a new president to have little direct foreign policy experience, and either Clinton or Obama would fit that bill. But Clinton seems determined to pretend she’s some kind of seasoned hand that she isn’t.
Eric Martin has some further context for the 2007 SCIRI rebranding, observing that the point of changing the name to ISCI wasn’t just to “de-revolutionize” the brand but specifically to re-Iranianize the party’s image. Of course, the same Iran-backed leadership who spent the Saddam years in exile in Teheran is still running the party. And, yes, this is the horse we’ve backed in Iraq and for some reason it’s considered very important that this particular gang of goons beat Muqtada al-Sadr’s rival goon squad.