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March 15, 2006IraqRumsfeld, today: "Iraqi security forces control the battle space currently for about 60 percent of Baghdad, including areas such as Haifa Street, Sadr City and the airport road." [emphasis added] In Sadr City, the Shia slum in northeast Baghdad, four men were found hanged, and three others had been tied to pylons and shot in the head, bearing “traitor” signs. But Iraqi Forces "control the battle space" in Sadr City. So sayeth Don "Stuff Happens" Rumsfeld. By the way, it's no secret that U.S. commanders in Iraq are under tremendous pressure to keep U.S. casualties down. Our force posture in country has become more and more conservative of late, and, yes, this has helped save coalition lives. But let's not kid ourselves about the result. Ralph Peters can drive around for an afternoon and report to the know-nothings at home that all is swell, but the reality is that we are too often relinquishing the battle space to militias, terrorists, neo-Baathists, and others. Yes, it's true, we've made some headway of late these past 12 or so months and gotten smarter about counter-insurgency in places like Tal Afar, or Samarra, or Ramadi (though the situation still ranges from tense to still perilous in these towns). And we've put insurgents under real pressure through most of Anbar province these past months too. But never with overwhelming force, the fundamental precept of the Powell Doctrine. Never convincingly enough to keep them from moving to another area of operations, resting, regrouping--the better to allow them to continue to mount a resilient insurgency. And, of course, there has been the rise in strength of Shi'a militias (not to mention Kurdish ones), albeit the gates of hell haven't opened yet as Sistani continues to call for restraint (god help us if he loses his patience, or succumbs to the pressure borne of the "Sistani is Sleeping" grafitti being spotted on Baghdad streets). But with a Secretary of Defense who thinks the Iraqi Army is currently handling Sadr City adequately, what can we do? Hope Abizaid and Zalmay Khalilzad persuade POTUS to bulk up back to 150,000 or so, and go and show the flag in places like Sadr City? Or continue to piss along bullshitting ourselves that the momentum is on our side, hoping that events move in our direction in the face of massive sectarian hatred, a determined insurgency, growing militia strength, the status of Kirkuk still so problematic, and so on. In good time, I will write my personal mea culpa in this tragic affair. I had greater faith in this Administration, and they have let us down time and again. But it's too easy to say it would all have been OK but for the dumbies who effed up the show. People who supported the war, and there were many of us (on both sides of the aisle, lest we forget), had to keep in mind the abilities of those charged with prosecuting it, and the resources that would be brought to bear. We knew the Powell Doctrine had been shunted aside in favor of utopic transformationalist nostrums, and we knew that some who were listened to in the leading counsels of power had memorably declared the effort would be a cakewalk. We should have smelled the danger signals better, and we deserve the scorn of those who were against this effort from the get-go, at least those who honestly believed we were doing the wrong thing rather than just opposing anything the horrible Bushies would bring to the plate. Also, it should be said, war is a tremendously complex endeavor, and while it's a cliche to state, it's very true that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. We can beat up on the war-planners, and their arrogance and reluctance to admit mistakes makes it feel good, but their jobs are never easy ones, and those of us brandishing laptops to castigate all and sundry do well to recall this now and again. Still, whatever you make of the lack of WMD, of the bungled first two years of the occupation, of Rumsfeld's immense hubris and ignorance, it's now all spilt milk. Now we have to move forward and salvage the situation. We need a new War Secretary, of course, but our President appears too bovinely stubborn to realize this. We also need to stay in country, and continue to view this as a generational committment. If we leave Iraq tomorrow, or scale back to well below 100,000, the country will explode. We will see savagery and mass killings on a horrific scale, and it is not clear that any of the parties will be able to decisively conquer the other in some tense , exhausted Mearsheimeresque entente post killing fields. It could go on for years, allowing for fecund conditions for international terror groups to take root, and all kinds of troublemaking by neighbors. Our democratization strategy will lie in tatters, with only a few die-hards at faux-think tanks in Washington delusionally playing pretend that all is well, but for those brutish Sunni Arabs (they have a "genius" for failure, Ralph Peters informs us) who couldn't appreciate the fruits of freedom we had bestowed upon them (the more civilized Persians will understand better, of course, so on to Teheran!). What is needed now is fresh leadership and renewed committment to this fight. Suzanne Nossel has recently written that the only thing worse than a civil war in Iraq is a civil war in Iraq with 130,000 plus US forces in country. I'm not so sure. I heard George Packer (author of the superb Assassin's Gate) last night here in NYC convincingly sketch out just how rapacious the deep hatred many Shi'a harbor for their heretofore Sunni oppressors. It will be ugly, very ugly, if the Americans go. The U.S., under Ambassador Khalilzad's leadership, at least acts to monitor the behavior of Ministries for varied cronyism and ethnic favoritism, acts to link funds disbursement to ensuring militias don't overly infiltrate Iraqi Army and (now increasingly) Police units, and other such carrot and stick juggling. And, most important, the US leads the efforts to put together a cohesive national government, the very polity the new Iraqi Army is meant to defend. This nascent government, if it can even be convincingly formed, will have to survive myriad crises in the coming months and years. True, there have been halfway successful constitutional referendum exercises albeit the deal-breaker issues often get punted for another day. There have also been decently run elections, all told, ones the insurgents were largely powerless to stop. But let's not kid ourselves. Any gains to date are eminently reversible, and huge American involvement will remain critical, especially by Ambassador Khalilzad's team on the ground. And, of course, his main currency is the 130,000 forces in theater, for if they leave, Zalmay, however talented a diplomat, will be revealed a shadow proconsul left ingloriously without clothes. So I'm sorry to be so very dreary, but I see no option but for the US to stay in country likely through the end of Bush's term and beyond at troop levels likely above 80,000 even in late '08/early '09. Otherwise we will have made a mockery of our policy objectives in that country and indeed the region. We will have betrayed our own ideals, the lives of our lost soldiers, and countless Iraqis as well. We will have failed, dismally. Can not the world's leading superpower do better? Comments
One would think it quite enough for Zalmay Khalilzad to be revealed as a shadow proconsul, but one without clothes as well? I would not go so far. As far as I can tell Khalilzad is about the best front line diplomat we have; the smart thing to do is to back him to the hilt as long as he sees some chance of holding a government together. That can't be for very much longer, however. Iraq is not what matters in this situation. The United States is. We cannot afford and should not attempt to make of Iraq a kind of super-Bosnia held together with a badly overstretched Army and billions of dollars borrowed from the Chinese central bank. This is a commitment that needs to be liquidated within a reasonable time frame, and it might be well to consider if American interests around the world would be best served if it were liquidated sooner by choice or a few months later under overwhelming domestic political pressure. Posted by: Zathras at March 15, 2006 07:46 AM | Permalink to this comment
Spot on analysis GD, I couldn't agree more. What I would add to what you said about what the result of a too early pull out would be the expansion of the conflict beyond Iraq's borders, and the big victory it would hand to Zarqawi & Co. We have a responsibility to do our best to make it work there, having gone in, and everyone being sick of it they all figure out how it is hopeless, but it better not be hopeless so better start figuring out how it can somehow work out. I believe this is your answer to the Posner article which I have been looking foward too. You did not disappoint. Posted by: Napablogger at March 15, 2006 08:04 AM | Permalink to this comment
Churchill once said democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. I share much of your despond, but I still think the choice we made -- pulling the trigger when we did -- was the least bad alternative available. Read Oliver Kamm's succinct recap of our reasoning in the Guardian (!) here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1730269,00.html If we want to learn anything from this sacrifice, I think it should include the costs of giving moral legitimacy to the UN and our "allies" that have done everything in their power, short of picking up arms, to bleed us in this effort. It should include a full accounting of the corruption and mendacity that scuttled "smart sanctions." And it should lead to a reappraisal of the costs and benefits of a neo-isolationism, which might not be taken off the table when discussing these issues with said "allies." Posted by: wks at March 15, 2006 02:00 PM | Permalink to this comment
Zathras is right. To criticize Rumsfeld for being out of touch, and then to blithely posit a generational committment (meaning, what, 100 billion a year for Iraq for the next ten years? Really?) is simply to continue the delusion. There have been bad civil wars in the Middle East -- from Yemen's to Northern Iraq's somehow forgotten fighting in the late eighties (the Kurd warlords stopped after 6-7,000 dead). The U.S. position, rightly, was to accept that there are limits on U.S. power. If you don't accept that limit, you will soon dissipate the power. Since the Bush administration failed in the fairly simple task of repressing Osama bin Laden (opting for the Clinton doctrine - put him in a new place and hope you can forget about him), there is a big American problem, but it is in Central Asia. The creeping radicalization of the Pakistan countryside, the not so underground connections between the ISI and the resurgent Taliban, and the renewal of Al Qaeda's ties with the Kashmiri terrorist groups that the Pakistani government supports are a big deal. The time is ticking away until Al qaeda gets its attack on Saudi Arabia right. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has unforgivably pissed away the American opportunity to pre-empt this. The opportunity costs in Iraq are just starting to kick in. Posted by: roger at March 15, 2006 02:16 PM | Permalink to this comment
I predict that Afghanistan will remain a US protectorate for the next 25 years. Western Europe remained a US protectorate for 45 years after the end of World War II. South Korea has been a US protectorate for 56 years and will continue to remain so for the forseeable future. Is there some natural law that Iraq should be any different? Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 02:20 PM | Permalink to this comment
Oh, and I forgot to mention Kosovo - the quagmire we never hear about. The moment foreign troops are withdrawn, the locals will slaughter each other. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 02:25 PM | Permalink to this comment
Let me be sure I have this straight. You admit to the hubris of many in this administration, if not your own. You concede that our leadership is woefully incompetent. And yet your answer going forward, after we've avoided "crying over the spilled milk" is to stay the course. You recognize the need for Rumsfeld's retirement and also the fact that it will never happen. And your answer is to stay the course. Here's an idea. How about if we just ignore your advice going forward. Since you seem to agree it isn't worth the toilet paper it's written on and all. Sorry if this seems personal. But understand. It is you who has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of shattered young American lives, and untold numbers of shattered Iraqi lives. You jumped up and down, vigorously waving your pom poms, deriding anyone who had the temerity to mention that you really hadn't bothered to think any of this through. And yet, you have the nerve to suggest we hunker down, stay the course, trust the leadership you admit is feckless. I'll pass. While trying hard to resist the temptation to suggest you attempt an asexual act. Posted by: Davebo at March 15, 2006 03:24 PM | Permalink to this comment
"We should have smelled the danger signals better, and we deserve the scorn of those who were against this effort from the get-go, at least those who honestly believed we were doing the wrong thing rather than just opposing anything the horrible Bushies would bring to the plate." Thank you, thank you, thank you for that, Mr. Djerejian. I've yet to hear *any* war advocate acknowledge that many of us who opposed the Iraq disaster did so because we saw an epic strategic blunder in the making. I'm just glad that my biggest worry, that invasion would catalyze enough rage to launch an Islamist revolution in Pakistan, has so far proved wrong. Sadly, second major concern proved true all too quickly -- we've been in a situation with *zero* good options for the last two years, at least. It's for that reason that I simply cannot the question, "What do we do now?" There's no question that we now have a profound moral and economic obligation to Iraqis. On the other hand, it isn't at all clear to me that we can actually own up to that debt, that we have the talent and capacity to fix a horrible botch. And there's no question that we will never, ever allocate the resources that the situation really requires. But we love to talk tough and talk expansively, don't we? Like I said, no good options. It doesn't help that we still have to put up with idiots like wks: "If we want to learn anything from this sacrifice, I think it should include the costs of giving moral legitimacy to the UN and our 'allies' that have done everything in their power, short of picking up arms, to bleed us in this effort. It should include a full accounting of the corruption and mendacity that scuttled 'smart sanctions.'" Last I heard, American companies were happily trading with Saddam right up to the end, and that includes companies with which some of our more notorious war architects had lucrative affiliations. But that's an aside. If you wanna talk "costs", rather than fretting about how we "gave moral legitimacy" to the UN, you might ponder what advantage we gained by undercutting it, and other international arrangements. None of these are perfect institutions, granted. But they're what we've got to work with. It seems to me we stand to gain a lot more by strengthening and reforming them (genuine reforms, not the rhetorical gas spewed by a Jesse Helms or a John Bolton), instead of routinely using them as a politically convenient whipping boy.
Is there some natural law that Iraq should be any different? Kevin, I don't think it comes down to something like a "natural law" yet there are clearly major differences between the nature of our presence in Iraq and those other places you mentioned. Even the "quagmire" that is Kosovo. I'll give you a clue: please see the casualty rates for maintaining each "protectorate." See, also, costs in terms of economic outlays, military commitments, diplomatic costs, loss of favorable public perception, etc. If you can't tell the difference between Iraq and Western Europe, Kosovo, South Korea, etc. using the above criteria, let me know and I'll spell it out in greater detail. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 03:44 PM | Permalink to this comment
Pray do so, Mr. Martin. I am willing to bet that the 45-year occupation of Europe after World War II has cost more soldiers lives in training accidents and on-the-job deaths than the 2,000+ deaths in Iraq to date. And the economic outlays, military commitments, diplomatic costs of maintaining hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Europe... As far as the loss of favorable public perception, you should see the younger Korean generation's opinion of us for stationing the troops that prevent their enslavement by North Korea. If we had the defeatist mentality that we do today during World War II, we would all be speaking German or Japanese. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 04:05 PM | Permalink to this comment
I'm still not seeing any actual plan "to move forward and salvage the situation" and why it would be better than the current plan. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 04:08 PM | Permalink to this comment
As far as the loss of favorable public perception, you should see the younger Korean generation's opinion of us for stationing the troops that prevent their enslavement by North Korea. Yeah, and who can forget the years-long Korean Civil War, and the thousands of GI's shot by Seoul partisans. You war shills really need to get some historical analogies that are actually germane. I suppose you could start by maybe reading some history. Hint: It didn't all start with Munich or Pearl Harbor. Posted by: sglover at March 15, 2006 04:21 PM | Permalink to this comment
Ummm, sglover, the Korean War was actually a war between the North and the South of Korea... started by the crazy regime in the North. While there were not thousands of partisan or insurgent attacks on US troops, we did suffer 54,000 deaths - for what? A stalemate that has lasted for 53 years? The nature of warfare changed considerably in the 20th century, sglover. Perhaps lessons from the Charge of the Light Brigade would be more germane? Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 05:47 PM | Permalink to this comment
A pretty sorry state of affairs. Is there any reason to believe we'll get it right sometime in the future? Posted by: gwen at March 15, 2006 06:08 PM | Permalink to this comment
"I'm still not seeing any actual plan "to move forward and salvage the situation" and why it would be better than the current plan." Well, no. And you aren't going to see one, either. What can american citizens do when they aren't making their living doing military planning for the US military? Suppose I were to suggest a better plan. It might go something like, "We need to train our own troops to do JRG patrolling. But the iraqi troops have a different mix of skills and equipment, so we need to train them to do JRM patrols instead. Meanwhile we must revise our approach to collecting intelligence from civilians, we should follow the Boma Qua techniques which worked so well for the british in indonesia, the finns in lappland, and the chinese in tibet." Etc etc etc. Possibly you might look at the plan in detail and agree, "Yes, that's a better plan. We should do it that way." More likely somebody would come along and claim "I'm a lieutenant in the army and I work at Headquarters Iraq doing military planning, and I can tell you that we're basicly doing exactly what you say, with a bunch of refinements I can't talk about." Quite likely his name will be Sergeant Rock and his email address will be a@aa.com. But more likely than either of those, nobody will pay any attention whatsoever. And reasonably so. Since the US military will pay absolutely no attention but will continue to stay the course as long as they're ordered to, why shouldn't everybody else ignore alternative plans too? It's kind of like suggesting a better automobile to General Motors, or suggesting a better steel-making technology to US Steel. So calling for a better plan is completely bogus. It's only a red herring, a stinky distraction. As citizens, our choices are simple. We can support the Bush Administration in staying the course. Now, as Sergeant Rock at a@aa.com will tell you, they don't just keep doing the same thing over and over. They were doing the wrong thing up to about six months ago, but now they're doing something different and it's working, and we'll see the difference soon. And if the future is like the past, they're about to notice that this approach isn't working either and they're startingi to try something different, and in six months he'll tell us that now they're doing something different and it's working. So provided the problem doesn't change, sooner or later they'll try an approach that works -- provided there *is* some approach that works. Or instead of supporting Bush, we can urge Bush and the military to accept a draft. They haven't done this partly because they think the public wouldn't stand for it, so your job is to show them that the public is ready to do whatever the war needs. Of course there are other problems. The military doesn't want a bunch of unwilling recruits who're likely to start fragging officers. Iraqi soldiers with 8 weeks of training are potentially better than US draftees with 12 weeks training -- they know the language, they know the enemy, and they care about iraq. And they're a lot cheaper. But if you want to support the war more than simply going along with whatever the plan is this half-year, campaigning for a draft is pretty much all there is to do. A lottery is not good, we'd do better with a universal draft. Draft every 18-year-old male. It might be better to draft the girls too, but probably not. The official ata is classified, but the media estimated a couple of years ago that the pregnancy rate of women of reproductive age in the army was omewhere around 15% to 18% per year. If that was true of draftees too, it would cause a big social change to draft them all. Alternatively, if you don't think these bozos have it together, you can campaign for accepting defeat. A planned withdrawal is better than a rout. Hitler kept throwing troops in to Stalingrad, and the result was only a bigger loss. Maybe our choice isn't between a good plan and a better plan. Maybe our choice is between an extremely-expensive defeat and a less-expensive defeat. One consolation -- a defeat for us doesn't imply a win for al Qaeda. Not unlikely they'll get thrown out of iraq soon after we do. We don't really know the consequences of defeat. We thought if we lost vietnam then international communism would spread to thailand and malaysia and indonesia and so on, and it didn't happen. Communist vietnam invaded communist cambodia and communist china invaded communist vietnam. And we turned the tables on the russians, we helped turn afghanistan into their vietnam. We have already lost in iraq. The best outcome we can hope for now is a genuine iraqi democracy, installed by voters who want us gone. That's the best possible outcome, and it's a defeat. How much likelier is that only-moderate defeat if our army stays in, compared to us pulling out? Any estimates? My own estimate (based on media reports and iraqi blogs and listening to people back from iraq) is that if we keep our forces in iraq and spend ten billion dollars a month for the foreseeable future, iraq might get a functioning democratic government within 5 years, and they will tell us to get out, and I put the chance at 30%. And if we get out now, iraq might get a functioning democratic government within 2 years, and I put the chance at 40%.
Leaving aside the bickering, Djerejian, I liked your comment. In good time, I will write my personal mea culpa in this tragic affair. I had greater faith in this Administration, and they have let us down time and again. But it's too easy to say it would all have been OK but for the dumbies who effed up the show. People who supported the war, and there were many of us (on both sides of the aisle, lest we forget), had to keep in mind the abilities of those charged with prosecuting it, and the resources that would be brought to bear. I personally opposed the war from the get go as I was sure that the current American Administration had no clue what kind of pandora's box it was opening. That being said, working on an equity fund that was placing real capital into the situation (oddly not one dollar ended up inside Iraq in the end), early on I had a strong expectation that fine, okay, they were going to fuck a few things up, but overall the money would be spent and something investible would emerge by 2004ish. After a few horrible months (which I documented in my sad little blog where I was fairly bouncing off the walls) we came to the realisation that the US occupation was completely staffed by utterly delusional party-political whankers who really believed the spin. For me, my turning point came when my Cambridge educated lawyer - who had told me he wanted Sadaam brought down (he's a Sunni mind you) - turned to me during one particularly delusional CPA-Iraq briefing and said, "You know, I am happy when I see them get killed on TV." Or words to that effect. The people who deserve scorn, I may add, taking your phrase: " As for Iraq, the country will go through a civil war. There is nothing that will stop that. Maybe US presence dampens, maybe not. One should now start by admitting the obvious and working from there. "Avoiding" a civil war is already delusion.
Greg, an interesting and challenging piece. A couple quick reactions: 1. This is a paraphrase on Posen: All factions in Iraq are well-provisioned with defensive weapons and poorly provisioned with offensive ones (artillery, air power). No faction in Iraq has sophisticated logistical capability. Could any of them, absent substantial outside help, really make much progress on territorial conquest or mass slaughter? 2. This is NOT a "You admit you were wrong before so shut up" item, though if you squint it could be taken that way. It's a sincere inquiry. How do you think that the reasoning process that leads you to conclude the US must and *can usefully* stay in Iraq is free of the defects you find, in retrospect, in the reasoning process that led you to believe the US needed to go into Iraq in the first place? I know where *I* think the "hawks of good will" went wrong, but I don't want to assume you'd agree. 3. Well I thought I had a third one when I started, but maybe I don't. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 15, 2006 07:29 PM | Permalink to this comment
3. Oh I DID have a third one! Do you think that the unhappy US experience in Iraq these last couple of years might itself tend to deter other outside powers from, what's the word, meddling? IOW, might it make others think twice about tearing off a piece of Iraq for themselves? Posted by: Jim Henley at March 15, 2006 07:31 PM | Permalink to this comment
"If you wanna talk "costs", rather than fretting about how we "gave moral legitimacy" to the UN, you might ponder what advantage we gained by undercutting it, and other international arrangements. None of these are perfect institutions, granted. But they're what we've got to work with" Didn't Rummy say you go to war with the army you've got? Meet your evil twin. I still believe in the ideals of the UN, and the ideals of Wilson and FDR, it's founders. I still think there comes a time when participating in a sham insults their memory more than it honors it, and that time has come. I do not see how we would undercut it by demanding transparency in it's accounts, by telling France and Russia to quit treating their votes like they were judging ice skating at the Olympics, even to insist that France's veto be turned over to the EU. [France's veto was an affectation when it was first granted in the 1940's, let alone today.] I personally would not shed any tears if we pulled out and tried to start with a coalition of democracies, but if we are not willing to go that far I'd at least say clean the Augean Stables or we're taking our 22% of the budget and going home. Posted by: wks at March 15, 2006 07:41 PM | Permalink to this comment
Ummm, sglover, the Korean War was actually a war between the North and the South of Korea... started by the crazy regime in the North Yeah, I'm well aware of that. I was trying to highlight the stupidity of your Iraq-Korean occupation analogy. I guess it went over your head. Why am I not surprised? Posted by: sglover at March 15, 2006 07:46 PM | Permalink to this comment
Also to Mr. Glover P.S. What American companies were violating sanctions up until the end? I think this is another DemocraticUnderground factoid like "we armed Saddam to the hilt" or "we gave him chemical weapons." I think those that accuse the Bush Regime of misinformation on 9/11 ties and such should try to be more circumspect in their charges. Posted by: wks at March 15, 2006 07:49 PM | Permalink to this comment
Pray do so, Mr. Martin. I am willing to bet that the 45-year occupation of Europe after World War II has cost more soldiers lives in training accidents and on-the-job deaths than the 2,000+ deaths in Iraq to date. And the economic outlays, military commitments, diplomatic costs of maintaining hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Europe... Kevin, thank you for illustrating exactly why the apples and oranges in your analogy are not good comparisons. First, the casualties: Let me get this straight, I should compare the deaths from 45 (45!) years of military presence in Europe to almost three years (3!) in Iraq and then....what exactly? Are you seriously suggesting that 45 years of occupying Iraq would even remotely approach the European tally? Really? Do you not recognize that the nature of our presence in each place was vastly different? Accidental deaths vs. insurgent caused fatalities? On a per-soldier in theater basis? Economics: See, above re: 45 years vs. 3 years. Yes, at the current burn rate in Iraq, we are outpacing spending in many other crucial national security efforts - even historically speaking. Iraq, mind you, is but one country in the Middle East. Western Europe is vastly larger, with many countries. So the spending should be proportional to the security interests and geographical space protected. And the money spent was in opposition to the USSR and countering their capacity. In other words, for the size and scope of the operations, Europe was a far, far better bang for the buck - and less costly overall when looked at in proper proportion. As far as the loss of favorable public perception, you should see the younger Korean generation's opinion of us for stationing the troops that prevent their enslavement by North Korea. Yes. I am aware. My many Korean friends enjoy poking me in the eye on this. But the angst and anti-American riffs of South Korean youth is really negligible in size and scope when compared to the damage Iraq is doing to our image/favorability in the entire Muslim world, Europe, South America and elsewhere. Whereas the former is a regional, localized and relatively innocuous phenomenon, the latter has very serious implications with respect to our efforts to combat the spread, efficacy and support for radical Islamist terrorism. Further, we are making life more difficult for ostensible allies like Musharraf in Pakistan, ie. Not to mention the lack of cooperation fostered on a host of other vital international issues not terrorism-related. Occupying Korea did not alienate the world. In fact, the war effort was done through the UN. Putting a military footprint in Western Europe at the behest of the Western Europeans did not alienate Western Europeans or turn them against us (with exceptions on the fringes). Occupying Iraq, on the other hand, has very real diplomatic costs. Again, I think you have shown how different the two are by your attempt to draw an analogy. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 07:57 PM | Permalink to this comment
sglover, I notice you avoided any substantive discussion here... while charges of "stupidity" and "war shills" may be satisfying to you, they don't actually make you any more useful than a whiner. Come up with some substantive suggestion about how to make the situation better. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 07:58 PM | Permalink to this comment
sglover, I notice you avoided any substantive discussion here... while charges of "stupidity" and "war shills" may be satisfying to you, they don't actually make you any more useful than a whiner. Come up with some substantive suggestion about how to make the situation better. I am also interested in which American companies violated sanctions to the end of the Saddam regime. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 07:59 PM | Permalink to this comment
So calling for a better plan is completely bogus. It's only a red herring, a stinky distraction. No, it is a serious question that deserves a serious answer. If you are calling the Administration (of which I am no great supporter) criminally incompetent, that implies that there was some other plan that would have worked, and will now work better than what the Administration is currently doing. I am seriously interested in what this plan is, not to score rhetorical points, but just to see what options exist in Iraq. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 08:03 PM | Permalink to this comment
wks, There were American companies and individuals implicated, and there are ongoing investigations to ascertain the roles played by others not yet named. From the CFR: What other investigations into Oil-for-Food are there? They include: -Five ongoing congressional investigations examining the role of U.S. companies and individuals and the program more generally. The Senate Government Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has already issued a dozen subpoenas for individuals affiliated with the program, according to news reports. -Four House panels are also conducting inquiries: the International Relations Committee—which has already made three trips to the region and issued a subpoena to Paris-based bank BNP Paribas—the Energy and Commerce Committee, the Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, and the Appropriations subcommittee on commerce. -An ongoing U.S. Treasury Department investigation into which U.S. trade laws may have been violated. -An ongoing federal criminal investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. -Oil-for-food-related investigations underway in Iraq, Britain, and Switzerland, according to The Wall Street Journal. -An April 2004 report by Congress’s nonpartisan investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, now called the Government Accountability Office. From the reports/investigative findings available at the time, it is clear that US companies/individuals were involved, though not nearly to the extent as companies/individuals from other nations (notably France and Russia). Again, from the CFR: Who received the vouchers? The Duelfer report contains a list of more than 1,300 oil vouchers that Saddam Hussein gave to more than a hundred corporations, foreign officials, individuals, and political parties around the world. This information came from lists found at Iraq’s state oil company and interviews with captured regime officials. -Thirty percent of the oil vouchers were issued to beneficiaries in Russia, including individual officials in the president’s office, the Russian -Foreign Ministry, the Russian Communist Party, members of the Russian parliament, and the oil firms Lukoil, Gazprom, Zarubezhneft, Sibneft, Rosneft, and Tatneft. -Fifteen percent of the beneficiaries were French, including a former -Entities in Switzerland , Malaysia , and Syriaeach received 6 percent. -U.S. companies and individuals received between 2 percent and 3 percent of the total vouchers—some 111 million barrels out of a total of 4.1 billion. These companies were not named in the report, because of U.S. privacy laws, but were later leaked to the press.
-Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian Liberal Democratic Party leader, and companies associated with his party were allocated 53 million barrels. -Alexander Voloshin, chief of staff under former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, was allocated 3.9 million barrels of oil from May to December 2002. -Oscar S. Wyatt Jr., a prominent Texas energy investor with a long history of dealings in Iraq, received vouchers for 29.7 million barrels, according to press reports. -Benon Sevan, the UN chief of the Oil-for-Food Program, received an allocation of 13 million barrels. -Charles Pasqua, a businessman and former French interior minister, received an allocation of 11 million barrels. -Megawati Sukarnoputri, the former Indonesian president, was allocated 6 million barrels. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 08:12 PM | Permalink to this comment
1. This is a paraphrase on Posen: All factions in Iraq are well-provisioned with defensive weapons and poorly provisioned with offensive ones (artillery, air power). No faction in Iraq has sophisticated logistical capability. Could any of them, absent substantial outside help, really make much progress on territorial conquest or mass slaughter?They might be able to do so in the absence of coalition forces. I suspect that well disciplined forces like the Kurdish Peshmerga would be able to make the most headway, although the Peshmerga would likely stop after overrunning the territories that they claim. The Shiites have the strength of numbers. An option for us is to gradually withdraw to bases outside the key population centers, so that we are out of the way of daily public life, while close enough to intervene between the factions if necessary. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 08:16 PM | Permalink to this comment
I am also interested in which American companies violated sanctions to the end of the Saddam regime. Well, you have some high profile companies. The most commonly mentioned of course was Halliburton's Cayman Islands subsidiary. But also Bayoil of Texas was also indicted for sanctions violations. Note that a senate investigation found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together. Posted by: Davebo at March 15, 2006 08:23 PM | Permalink to this comment
Iraq, mind you, is but one country in the Middle East. Western Europe is vastly larger, with many countries. So the spending should be proportional to the security interests and geographical space protected. And the money spent was in opposition to the USSR and countering their capacity. Eric, I doubt that there is a "proper proportion" that is objectively definable in these contexts. I can argue, that in the Western European theater, that the US has spent "disproportionately" more on the defense of the UK, which is after all a well defended island, than on the rest of the continent. Iraq occupies a strategic position in the heart of the Middle East, a historically troublesome area. "Proper proportion" all depends on your perspective. If you think that Iraq was worth, you will tend to support the expenditure on it. If you don't, you won't. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 08:29 PM | Permalink to this comment
But the angst and anti-American riffs of South Korean youth is really negligible in size and scope when compared to the damage Iraq is doing to our image/favorability in the entire Muslim world, Europe, South America and elsewhere. Whereas the former is a regional, localized and relatively innocuous phenomenon, the latter has very serious implications with respect to our efforts to combat the spread, efficacy and support for radical Islamist terrorism. Further, we are making life more difficult for ostensible allies like Musharraf in Pakistan, ie. Public opinion in the Middle East is a beast that is hard to pin down or do well with for anyone. A lot of it is also based upon displays of "raw strength" - i.e. it is better to be feared than loved, etc. Middle Easterners routinely bomb, murder and slaughter each other - much more than they kill foreigners. We just get the bad press. Also note that the Pashtun in Pakistan were sheltering Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban well before Iraq came along, in the aftermath of 9/11 which every sensible person on this earth should have condemned unreservedly. The invasion of Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban that followed likely made some people angry at the US - and also fearful of the strength and reach of the US. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 08:37 PM | Permalink to this comment
Kevin, I get your point, but 45 years vs. nearly 3 years is not a suitable comparison, regardless. Deaths per year would be more appropriate. And even then, deaths per year as a function of the number of troops in theater. In terms of money, again, 45 years vs. 3 years. Expenditures per year would be more appropriate. And even then, as a percentage of total foreign policy/defense expenditures. As for diplomacy, see above. Bottom line is this: the Iraq occupation is more costly than our presence in Europe, South Korea or Kosovo on a number of levels - both relative and real. You can argue that the higher costs are worth it, but pointing to those past occupations/military commitments and saying that since we did something notionally similar then, why can't we do Iraq for the next 4-5 decades elides too much crucial information about the nature of each engagement and why they are so different. What was it McCaffery warned about again? Something about a meltdown? If Iraq calmed down almost completely in the next 6-12 months, and our soldiers were no longer targeted. And we could draw down our troop levels by a substantial chunk, and we stopped heaping billions a day into the furnace, then you could argue that we should and could do a Middle Eastern version of South Korea or Kosovo or a mini-Western Europe. But without that, the analogy breaks down in too many fundamental ways. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 08:54 PM | Permalink to this comment
They might be able to do so in the absence of coalition forces. I suspect that well disciplined forces like the Kurdish Peshmerga would be able to make the most headway, although the Peshmerga would likely stop after overrunning the territories that they claim. But Kevin, my question is about logistics. Cargo capacity, fuel, food, traffic management, command, control and communications. All the unglamorous stuff covered in the old saw about amateurs versus generals. We know from recent congressional testimony that not one Iraqi Army battalion (these guys become the Shiite forces in a civil war, except for the ones that become Kurdish forces) can operate independently of US logistical support. If that's the state of the regular Army, which has the advantage of official status, open (if corrupt) provisioning, US tutelage in training, how much less capable of actually moving and concentrating force must be the unofficial armed forces in-country. Consider that in the mid-1990s, when Barzani's Kurds wanted to kick Talabani's Kurds around they invited Saddam in to do it for him. He was the one with logistics worthy of the name and adequate heavy-weapons power (helicopters and artillery). No Iraqi armed force, including the Army, has significant armor or heavy weapons. None of them have airpower. Absent US cooperation none of them can mount an effective offensive because they lack "find, fix and flank" capacity. Or so it at least seems. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 15, 2006 08:58 PM | Permalink to this comment
lack "find, fix and flank" capacity Meaning, above, say, platoon level. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 15, 2006 09:00 PM | Permalink to this comment
Public opinion in the Middle East is a beast that is hard to pin down or do well with for anyone. A lot of it is also based upon displays of "raw strength" - i.e. it is better to be feared than loved, etc. Middle Easterners routinely bomb, murder and slaughter each other - much more than they kill foreigners. We just get the bad press. Also note that the Pashtun in Pakistan were sheltering Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban well before Iraq came along, in the aftermath of 9/11 which every sensible person on this earth should have condemned unreservedly. The invasion of Afghanistan and the defeat of the Taliban that followed likely made some people angry at the US - and also fearful of the strength and reach of the US. Look, nothing is black and white. And certainly, we weren't popular in the Muslim world pre-Iraq. And some people respond to displays of strength. But on the whole, Iraq has been a net negative for us. The actual metric might be hard to pin down, but not the underlying dynamic. The dynamic has been recorded in comparative opinion polls, and reams of similar data. "Raw strength" hasn't exactly been that effective if the underlying dynamic is toxic enough. See, ie, Israel. Do you really think that people looking to martyr themselves will be deterred because they fear we might...kill them? Better yet, they might not join Salafist cults because they see that we would be willing to invade Iraq? Sorry, I don't really see it. Regarding Pakistan: what I'm saying is that the more poisonous we become, the harder it is for Pervez to cooperate. Not that he's an angel, or 100% commited to the cause, or that Iraq is the only thing standing in his way. Still, Iraq has been a net negative on this front. And yes, the Afghan campaign made some people angry, but on the whole it was not as radicalizing a force as Iraq - within the Muslim world and within Europe/rest of the world. along these lines, the cost-benefit analysis was considerably different.
In good time, I will write my personal mea culpa in this tragic affair. I had greater faith in this Administration, and they have let us down time and again. But it's too easy to say it would all have been OK but for the dumbies who effed up the show. People who supported the war, and there were many of us (on both sides of the aisle, lest we forget), had to keep in mind the abilities of those charged with prosecuting it, and the resources that would be brought to bear. We knew the Powell Doctrine had been shunted aside in favor of utopic transformationalist nostrums, and we knew that some who were listened to in the leading counsels of power had memorably declared the effort would be a cakewalk. We should have smelled the danger signals better, and we deserve the scorn of those who were against this effort from the get-go, at least those who honestly believed we were doing the wrong thing rather than just opposing anything the horrible Bushies would bring to the plate. Greg, that is as much as a personal mea culpa as we need, imho. My only problem with it is that those of us who opposed the war because of the horrible Bushies did so because we understood not just the abilities, but the characters "of those charged with prosecuting it." The best analogy I can come up with is that of finding a huge leak in your roof (i.e. 9-11) that needs to be dealt with immediately. The only contractor that can do the job right away is Bush and Co. --- you can tell straight off that that are shady, but you let them do the job anyway --- and they do manage to stop the worst of the leak without actually sealing your roof properly (overthrowing the Taliban without capturing bin Laden). If this contractor tried to sell you on a complete remodelling of your kitchen (invading Iraq), you'd be insane to hire him to do it -- especially when he was telling you that you had major structural problems that required immediate attention (WMDs) that, upon closer examination, did not exist. Sure, the kitchen could use a complete remodelling --- but one was not absolutely necessary -- most importantly, under no circumstances would you ever consider allowing Bush and Co to do the remodelling, because you knew they were not merely incompetent, but dishonest. The same goes for the invasion of Iraq. The contractor that tried to sell you the job sucked, and regardless of whether the job should be done eventually, that contractors was not the guy to hire. (BTW, doesn't calling Bush "bovinely stupid" put you in the "Bush Hater" camp?) Posted by: p.lukasiak at March 15, 2006 09:05 PM | Permalink to this comment
My apologies for the confusing use of italics above. I think I forgot to italicize two paragraphs of kevin's comment. My mea culpa, Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 09:14 PM | Permalink to this comment
But on the whole, Iraq has been a net negative for us. The actual metric might be hard to pin down, but not the underlying dynamic. The dynamic has been recorded in comparative opinion polls, and reams of similar data.I will concede that this is likely true. However, my primary concern is that our foreign policy not become dependent on the fickle nature of the Arab street. There is no way for us to do anything (including nothing) and not offend some faction or the other in the Middle East. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 09:28 PM | Permalink to this comment
So calling for a better plan is completely bogus. It's only a red herring, a stinky distraction. No, it is a serious question that deserves a serious answer. If you are calling the Administration (of which I am no great supporter) criminally incompetent, that implies that there was some other plan that would have worked, and will now work better than what the Administration is currently doing. Well, KevinP, you're wrong. It's a red herring, of no use whatsoever except to score rhetorical points. See if this story makes it clear. You're a stockholder in a company that has recently gotten an extremely stupid CEO. The new CEO has done everything he could to suck liquidity out of the company, and used the money to play at the casino. He originally claimed that he had a gambling strategy that would pay off far better than the company's regular ROI. But it hasn't been working, and the company's losses so far are over a quarter trillion dollars, and possibly as high as two trillion when various of the liquidity schemes finish playing out. You suggest that perhaps it's time for a proxy fight since the current CEO has repeatedly proclaimed that he intends to keep following his gambling strategy until it pays off. But a fellow stockholder issues the following challenge, "It's no good to criticise the CEO's gambling strategy unless you have a better gambling strategy. Until you can present a better plan to win at the casino, shut up." This administration was criminally incompetent in starting this war. We have been losing for something like 30 months now. I have no suggestion how to win. Every plan to win I've seen so far has looked ludicrous. Utter wishful thinking. We might perhaps have come up with a winning plan as late as October 2003. The chance has passed. Pulling out would work better than what the Administration is doing. We would lose the chance to control iraq, the iraqis would do whatever-the-hell they want, just as all the nations we aren't currently occupying do. So it wouldn't *feel* as good. It feels comforting to think that our army is in there stopping bad people from doing bad things. Ten billion dollars a month of comfort. It costs more than it's worth, more than we can afford -- unless you're a politician who's up for re-election.
Absolutely. But neither should our foreign policy ignore this. It should be one factor amongst many to be considered when entering numbers into the great foreign policy Calculatron 3000. In real life terms: it should not have de-railed our Afghan campaign, nor alone derailed our Iraq campaign. But it sure makes the notion of spreading democracy through invasion a bit tricky when one factors in all that resentment stuff that happens in the wake of an invasion. Not exactly an ideal setting for us to urge others to abandon their comfort zone and embark on radical new societal transformations. Nor does it help others in the region pursuing similar goals. They find themselves instantly tainted with our poisonous image - and the concept of democracy itself becomes more unsavory. War supporter Fareed Zakaria said it best: Bush does not seem aware that the intense hostility toward him in every country in the world (save Israel) has made it very difficult for the United States to be the agent of freedom. In every Arab country that I have been to in the last two years, the liberals, reformers and businessmen say, "Please don't support us. American support today is the kiss of death." Just something to consider. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 09:36 PM | Permalink to this comment
Eric Martin, I readily concede 2 or 3% of the vouchers ended up with crooks like Oscar Wyatt. I will further concede that our blind eye to smuggling thru Turkey and Jordan of Iraqi oil hurt our credibility tremendously. My point remains that if the rest of the industrialized world had demonstrated the same level of ethics as the US and Britain, smart sanctions would have made this war unnecessary. Why do sanctions work against a South Africa, or, hypothetically, a Chile under Pinochet, but not against the Pol Pot of our generation? That's a question UN defenders and reformers should be asking. Posted by: wks at March 15, 2006 09:41 PM | Permalink to this comment
Since most of us are not being called to sacrifice our own lives for this war, here is the question I ask of hawks I meet: how much additional income tax are you willing to pay each year to "stay the course" in Iraq? Posted by: Mike at March 15, 2006 10:06 PM | Permalink to this comment
Jim Henley wrote: Do you think that the unhappy US experience in Iraq these last couple of years might itself tend to deter other outside powers from, what's the word, meddling? Yes, definitely. The russian fiasco in afghanistan kept other outside powers from meddling for a very long time.
Eric, I'd give up arguing with KevinP. His initial examples were either extremenly foolish, or extremely dishonest. Either way... Greg: Last I heard, Tal Afar has been swept three (?) times, the last time with a triumphant proclamation that they wouldn't get away this time - but they did. Greg: "Also, it should be said, war is a tremendously complex endeavor, and while it's a cliche to state, it's very true that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. We can beat up on the war-planners, and their arrogance and reluctance to admit mistakes makes it feel good, but their jobs are never easy ones, and those of us brandishing laptops to castigate all and sundry do well to recall this now and again." Now, this is just 100% wrong. The people criticizing the dreams of the administration include Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General 'hundreds of thousands of troops for years' Shinseki, the RAND Corporation, and the plans drawn up at the State Dept in 2002. The administration failed not because they couldn't know ahead of time, but because they refused to know ahead of time.
What American companies were violating sanctions up until the end? I think this is another DemocraticUnderground factoid like "we armed Saddam to the hilt" or "we gave him chemical weapons." I think those that accuse the Bush Regime of misinformation on 9/11 ties and such should try to be more circumspect in their charges. I should have been more clear. I wasn't thinking of Oil-for-Food sanctions violations so much as I was Dick Cheney doing commerce with Iraq not long before he began agitating for its invasion. Here's what a New Yorker article says: The Dresser merger also raised ethical questions. The United States had concluded that Iraq, Libya, and Iran supported terrorism and had imposed strict sanctions on them. Yet during Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton the company did business in all three countries. In the case of Iraq, Halliburton legally evaded U.S. sanctions by conducting its oil-service business through foreign subsidiaries that had once been owned by Dresser. With Iran and Libya, Halliburton used its own subsidiaries. The use of foreign subsidiaries may have helped the company to avoid paying U.S. taxes. In some ways, the Libya and Iran transactions were consistent with Cheney’s views. He had long opposed economic sanctions as a political tool, even against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During the 2000 campaign, however, Cheney said he viewed Iraq differently. “I had a firm policy that we wouldn’t do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal,” he told ABC News. But, under Cheney’s watch, two foreign subsidiaries of Dresser sold millions of dollars’ worth of oil services and parts to Saddam’s regime. The transactions were not illegal, but they were politically suspect. The deals occurred under the United Nations Oil-for-Food program, at a time when Saddam Hussein chose which companies his government would work with. Corruption was rampant. It may be that it was simply Halliburton’s expertise that attracted Saddam’s regime, but a United Nations diplomat with the Oil-for-Food program has doubts. “Most American companies were blacklisted,” he said. “It’s rather surprising to find Halliburton doing business with Saddam. It would have been very much a senior-level decision, made by the regime at the top.” Cheney has said that he personally directed the company to stop doing business with Saddam. Halliburton’s presence in Iraq ended in February, 2000. Sorry for the long blockquotes. Judge for yourself the veracity of the source and the nature of the offense. My main complaint is that this is pretty outrageous moral hypocrisy. But, after all, it's Cheney. Posted by: sglover at March 15, 2006 10:29 PM | Permalink to this comment
wks, My point remains that if the rest of the industrialized world had demonstrated the same level of ethics as the US and Britain, smart sanctions would have made this war unnecessary....Why do sanctions work against a South Africa, or, hypothetically, a Chile under Pinochet, but not against the Pol Pot of our generation? That's a question UN defenders and reformers should be asking. Depends on what you mean by "work." The inspections/sanctions did not work in the sense that Saddam was able to undermine them in order to improperly enrich his coffers. But the inspections/sanctions worked extremely well in terms of preventing Saddam from acquiring/developing WMD - especially nuclear weapons which dwarf all other WMD to the extent that they render the term imprecise. In the sense of WMD-prevention/containment, they were a great success story. Improving them all around was necessary though - and it wouldn't have been easy. Yet I believe that we would have had an easier time achieving that end than, say, success in the current imbroglio. We could have probably used our saber rattling, bluster and other 9/11-imbued moral high ground to tighten the ship so to speak. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 10:32 PM | Permalink to this comment
Yes, definitely. The russian fiasco in afghanistan kept other outside powers from meddling for a very long time. Heh. I salute you, sir! Of course, we were powerfully motivated to intervene militarily in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis and to a lesser extent the Iranians played around there pre-September 2001, but not in force. And our own military intervention in Afghanistan has been much more circumscribed in extent and ambition than the Soviet one. Turning to Iraq, it's hard to see the Syrians or Iranians being motivated to bring to bear enough force to make up for their potential clients' own military shortcomings. It's almost as hard to see the Turks doing it, though man they do hate those Kurds, so I suppose it's possible. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 15, 2006 10:38 PM | Permalink to this comment
Jim Henley asked, No faction in Iraq has sophisticated logistical capability. Could any of them, absent substantial outside help, really make much progress on territorial conquest or mass slaughter? Not conquest. But in mixed areas they could do ethnic cleansing. Low-intensity warfare. Small-unit infantry operations drain people even when they don't get wounded. But it isn't so bad when you're making little raids against civilians. They don't know where you'll pop up, they mostly aren't ready, you can slaughter a few people and leave. Do it enough and the civilians decide they can't stay there and they move someplace more congenial, and you've won some territory. Say there's no logistics to speak of. A place where your people are the 2:1 majority, you can get twice the troops to attack half as many civilians. You get 4 times the intensity of attacks. You'll probably win. So without armor, artillery, air support, or much logistics they might establish somewhat where the internal borders will be. They probably can't push the borders far that way, but they can narrow them. Posted by: J Thomas at March 15, 2006 10:39 PM | Permalink to this comment
Eric, I'd give up arguing with KevinP. His initial examples were either extremenly foolish, or extremely dishonest. Either way...This is a good way to construct a bubble around yourself and win elections... your opponent has no argument, no valid perspective, he is not just wrong, he is foolish and dishonest... In a democracy, you have to do the hard work of persuading people to your point of view. Insult and dismissal are self-satisfying, but don't persuade anyone. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 10:41 PM | Permalink to this comment
Mr. D: 1. The elections that Iraq has held over the past 14 months have only been possible -- that is, only uninterrupted by insurgents -- because the US military imposed an unsustainable security lockdown for the few days necessary. You can't point to the elections as any kind of evidence of progress along the road to lessened dependence on US force. 2. I guess you can call it spilt milk, but they're still pouring more, and, as you can see above, plenty of people are still true believers. 3. I think if you spend any time at all reflecting on what the best case scenario really is here -- Anbar is sort of a Waziristan, where the Islamists have a haven for attacking enemies outside Iraq -- you'd have a hard time calling anything at all victory. I say it's the best case scenario, because eventually, the factions are going to reach an armed truce of some kind. There will NEVER be Sunni Arab army units deployed in Kurdistan to 'protect' Kurds from either outsiders or internal enemies, or the 'protect' Basra from infiltration by Iranian 'agents.' When they do, each will harbor radicals who pose no threat to the home team, but are a threat to outside enemies. That is, Kurdistan won't roust out everyone Turkey wants extradited, and the Shi'a will protect Hezbollah people from Lebanon, if/when it come to it. the national government will be, by design, too weak to prevent this sort of thing. (Unless a Sunni strongman emerges from the army). This means that no actual progress will have been made in the US struggle against violent Islamism. 4. I don't understand any basis for not blaming the President, and Sec. Rice, for each and every bad decision. They were in a position to direct Rumsfeld (Rice as NSA was certainly in a real position to work this, and the President's position was obvious) and you cannot show any decision made by DOD at any point that they did not agree with. They are absolutely fully responsible, and until you recognize this, your analysis of the problem is really less than half done. 'Heck of a job, Rummy' just is not the story. 5. Sure you go to war with the army you've got. Unless you don't have enough army to win. Then you build a different one before you go to war. In early 2003, Canada suggested that inspections be extended, and war delayed, in hopes that better proof of real violations would have brought more countries on the UNSC into the war. The US rejected this suggestion, saying we had all we needed. And held to the point, even after Turkey turned away the 4ID because we didn't have UN sanction. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld all gambled, betting that it would be easy, and that they would find sufficient evidence after the fact to prove that they'd been right, and everyone else over cautious. They lost. And still want to pretend otherwise. 6. There was a real chance to get out from under this losing bet in 2004. New US leadership could've admitted the past mistakes, and sought real help. They'd have gotten help that the current regime is too arrogant to seek properly. Instead, we, as a society, chose to stick with our losing strategy. Rather than admit we've got a problem. There is zero chance that the president will change course on this. Instead, he'll . . . 7. pursue, again, a war drums strategy. Look for major escalation in the fall of 2006 wrt Iran. All of the governance by the Bush team is driven by domestic electoral politics. The reality they will try to create in the fall will again be fear that voting Dem will result in defeat. They'll do it because (a) it's what they know how to do and (b) it will work. Posted by: CharleyCarp at March 15, 2006 10:43 PM | Permalink to this comment
Jim Henley: My sense of it is that logistics gives you a relative advantage, particularly w.r.t. the enemy that does not possess the same logisitical support. Imagine for a moment that every coalition soldier in Iraq vanished with her equipment. The playing ground would be fundamentally different and the players would adjust accordingly. The people with better organization, motivation and leadership (and small arms supplies) would tend to prevail. Posted by: Kevin P. at March 15, 2006 10:48 PM | Permalink to this comment
But what about the cost of the US staying in Iraq with 100,000 plus troops? Can this country, with record deficits, keep our troops there? Who wil finance this? If it continues to be China, how much power will they have over us? Posted by: Steve at March 15, 2006 10:57 PM | Permalink to this comment
Eric, When John Dillinger was public enemy number one, he once broke out of jail by carving a bar of soap in the shape of a gun and pushing it in the back of a prison guard. His reputation and aggression did the work for him, not the fact that his gun was a fake. Following your logic Dillinger did not commit a crime, since it was the fault of the stupid guard that believed he had a gun.
If you put Ralph Peters, Greg Djerejian (of the Kissenger school of foreign policy), some NY Times, Francis Fukuyama, a dash of Christopher Hitchens and the Beep (for gas / flatulence) you may come up with your own perspective on Iraq. Rumor has it Greg has it in for Rummy because at a major / minor Wahington event Rummy commented that Greg's nosehairs some vichyssoise on them. Rummy basher. Posted by: Peter at March 15, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink to this comment
WKS, I'd be interested to hear why it was necessary to invade Iraq before the capture of Usama bin Laden. Much less before countries like Mexico were willing to vote for the thing on the UNSC and Turkey to permit invasion from the north. The situation in February/March 2003 was not static. A show of good faith -- rather than of fixing the rationale around the policy -- could well have made a real difference. (And, of course, there was nothing really to lose from delaying the 6 or 8 weeks suggested by Canada). I think we should have declared victory and gone home, and that we've had several opportunities to have done it. the longer we stay, the more it will appear that our departure is because we're worn out and driven out -- exactly the wrong message we want to be sending. (I'm afraid that the recent mosque attack might have been the death knell for get-out-and-declare-victory though). The transformation goal was also a chimera. We've created the conditions for a weak, de-centralized, and Iran-friendly Iraq. Efforts to make it into something else are like shouting at the tide. BTW, those of you who do not think there's a civil war on ought to take a look at the combatant death toll in the month after Ft. Sumter was shelled. Or the six months after. Posted by: CharleyCarp at March 15, 2006 11:46 PM | Permalink to this comment
Well wks, there was the fact that inspectors were on the ground in 2002/2003 poking around, so that is one way that an "inspection regime [could] prove that he did not" have WMD. Saddam needed to be intimidated into opening up his country. But we're good at intimidating. After the first Gulf War he was told he was not allowed to intimidate his neighbors. Can you argue with a straight face that any option other than his forcible removal from power could have enforced that sanction? Look, there's no way to insure that Saddam wouldn't have sought to intimidate some of his neighbors. Althoug, in retrospect, there is probably one neighbor (an animosity for which we share in common with our erstwhile mini-proxy Saddam) that we wouldn't mind shaking up a little ourselves (Iran, ahem). But at the end of the day, is that a sufficient casus belli? Does it make war so inevitable and necessary? I think not. We would have lived with his regional saber rattling. It would have been an unfortunate but tolerable grievance - kept contained by the no fly zones. We have put up with more murderous, despicable and odious regimes than Saddam's Baath in the past, and we will likely do so in the future. Some we even actively support. Actually, the current situation in Darfur - which is spreading to Chad with a mind-boggling death toll mounting across the Sudan border - is one such recent example. What are we doing there? Does Sudan's strategic importance cause us to adjust our moral compass? It isn't pretty, but we can't afford to - and don't have the means to - take out any and all leaders that defy the UN or intimidate their neighbors. Another example: why aren't we invading North Korea? If you can answer that question, you might also answer the one you posed to me about Iraq. The reasoned outcome of strategic calculations of risks and rewards, costs and benefits and potential ramifications. That is not to say that leaving Kim Jong Il or Saddam in power doesn't have it's very significant and serious drawbacks (both in a cold Realism sense and an idealistic human rights sense), but that doesn't mean we can always make the situation better through the redemptive power of military intervention. Doesn't always work that way. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 15, 2006 11:51 PM | Permalink to this comment
J Thomas wrote Not conquest. But in mixed areas they could do ethnic cleansing. etc Agree completely. I'd add two things from which you might or might not demur: 1. This is what is already happening. Arabs are fleeing Kirkuk, Sunnis are skedaddling from Basra and mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad are unmixing, all under the threat or actuality of violence. 2. Iraqi civilians are, as we know so well, really well armed. No one sect or ethnicity has the weapons advantage that, say, Hutus held over Tutsis in 1990s Rwanda. Kevin P wrote My sense of it is that logistics gives you a relative advantage, particularly w.r.t. the enemy that does not possess the same logisitical support. A minimum logistical capacity lets an armed force operate at all. The bigger and more powerful the force, the higher the threshold that counts as "minimum." You can only mount an offensive if you can move force to the target you're trying to conquer. Right now, no force in Iraq can move *much* force on its own. You can only *destroy* a target if you can keep it from retreating before you can kill it. And before all of this you have to find it. A target, btw, could be military or civilian. It could be people or a place. To slaughter 5,000 Kurds at Halabja Saddam's forces had the advantage of terrain (a natural "bowl") and massive superiority of force. They were able to cut off the exit routes with conventional artillery bombardment. Geography and artillery served the "Fix" function. Then came an all-day chemical bombardment (artillery again), serving the "flank" function. Take away artillery, heavy munitions (explosive and chemical) and the ability to get them where you want them and the massacre at Halabja doesn't happen. The residents may get chased out, and maybe eventually the Baath regime resettles the town with Arabs. But they don't die. The alternative Halabja scenario is not peaceful multiculturalism, but it's not the slaughter that actually took place. And fears of carnage - bodies, massacres - are what seem to haunt Greg and other's who regret starting the war but can't see a way to leave it. My tentative conclusion is that the US could forestall *mass slaughter* by simply refusing to provide the assistance any faction would need to mount offensive operations against any other faction. That includes elint, sigint and satellite recon data, transportation, communications and artillery/air support. Instead, the current official line, per Rumsfeld in Congress the other day, is that if it comes to a big ol' civil war rather than a lil' one, we'll "support the government," which is to say, the UIA. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 16, 2006 12:02 AM | Permalink to this comment
David wrote Genghis Khan killed millions of people without artillery, tanks, or aircraft. David, if you'd like to participate in the good-faith discussion around these issues, you don't even have to ask, just make a good-faith post. Posted by: Jim Henley at March 16, 2006 12:05 AM | Permalink to this comment
Ah, to rehash recent history. Look, if I had been in charge I would have preferred we take up the Canadian suggestion mentioned somewhere above. I agree we had more to gain than to lose once our troops were in place, maybe we could have impressed some of our feckless friends to reluctantly support us. What I don't know is how the Sultan of Qatar or the other actors would have reacted if we backed down once more, after a 20 year history of leaving our friends to twist in the wind. I think it's very likely that Bush had promised the locals that this time we really, really meant it, and refusing to pull the trigger would have had other consequenses.
Eric, What regimes worse than Saddam's do we support, now or even in the past? The man killed over a million people in several wars, murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, and promised to eventually turn Tel Aviv into another Auschwitz. He saw himself as the reincarnation of the previous hero of Trikrit, Saladin, and wanted to go down in history by remaking the world. The man could not be trusted with WMD, or the resources to aquire them. Posted by: wks at March 16, 2006 12:27 AM | Permalink to this comment
In a democracy, you have to do the hard work of persuading people to your point of view. Insult and dismissal are self-satisfying, but don't persuade anyone. Kevin, there are people who're so far from the consensus that they can be safely ignored. It isn't an insult to claim that some particular person is in that position, but it might be incorrect. So for example, people who believe that the Bush Administration committed 9/11 on purpose. There's no credible evidence. The FBI agents who were prevented from investigating the al Qaeda agents who did it are not evidence even that they knew 9/11 was coming, that could have been a favor to the saudi government or to the bin Ladin family or something. Similarly with all the evidence they present. Similarly for the theory that the israelis were involved. The story about the israeli agents who were videotaping the WTC before the first tower was hit, who got reported and arrested by city police -- it might not even have happened. City police records are easy enough to fake, it could have been just another piece of disinformation like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A reasonable study shows no definitive proof, and people who say it's definitely true are being unreasonable. But more than that, the big majority of the public simply doesn't believe it. They don't believe that americans would be willing to do something like that. So they will ignore anybody who makes the claim. We aren't at the point yet that pro-war advocates get tuned out just because they're pro-war. People still listen to them, hoping they'll say something that sounds hopeful. But there isn't anything hopeful for them to say, they can only talk about how bad it will be if we lose. So people turn away again, disappointed. Maybe your claims aren't worth refuting except in the process of making some other point. But it hasn't reached the point people will treat you like a 9/11 theorist. They want to listen and hope you have something worthwhile they can pay attention to. I would like it a whole lot better if you did. I think Bush sees there's nothing he can win in iraq, and yet it would cost him to lose. So I figure he's going to dole out just enough resources to iraq that he can plausibly deny that we've lost yet. And unless we have some dramatic defeat, we'll be stuck there mostly passive except for airstrikes, for the next 3 years. I'd be grateful for a more hopeful view of it that I could halfway believe.
Greg, I'm impressed with your honesty and integrity, and your willingness to accept and listen to facts on the ground. Instapundit is full of nothing but misleading and snide links about how the civil war is all a media concoction. It makes me sick, listening to them blithely dismiss the thousands of Iraqis dying as we speak. I'm also,after what seems like an eternity of absence, quite gratified to see a complex discussion on relatively free of insults. wks: Saddamn Hussein was a very bad man. Yes. I don't accept that he was a unique case, though, in any way. He was a merciless scumbag with zero regard for human life and we had no business conducting any kind of relationship with him. We have seem plenty of these. Even supported them. I don't agree with that, and it has cost us, and there's no reason to do it, but neither do we, as said, have to be personally responsible for bombing out every meglomaniac scumbucket. Not just because it costs us money and troops, but because we leave places worse than we found them. To make the case that saddamn was unique, you'd have to declare him worse than syria, which has launched just as many aggressive wars post world-war II, supported more terrorism, and killed its own citizens just as ruthlessly. You'd also have to declare him more dangerous than Stalin, who invaded maybe 12 nations and killed more than fifty million people. We survived Stalin just fine. We'd survive Saddamn just fine. Quite frankly, there is no nation on earth that can attain the power to threaten us as long as we maintained the pre-eminent economy and army in the world, not to mention a nuclear arsenal, and as long as we respond with overwhelming force when we are attacked. Stateless terrorists are an exception, but it's rarely neccesary given our abilities, to invade countries to get them. There was never any urgency, at any time. Chemical and biological weapons are held by dozens of countries and don't even pose a serious military threat in any form. Nuclear weapons are dangerous in theory but have never been used since the second country obtained them. Invading countries in this century is a bad idea for the nation who's doing it, almost regardless of who's doing it. Especially if you're not capturing some form of strategic resource. Wars weaken all parties relative to those who are not in them. Having said that, this war was bad for us strategically, and bad for Iraq on a human scale, but the governance in the middle east will yet benefit as a whole. Even after 9/11, there were other ways to get that result, equally drastic but with lower cost, like a total end of support to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Posted by: glasnost at March 16, 2006 02:00 AM | Permalink to this comment
Greg, I forgot the part of your argument I don't agree with, and in fact consider unserious, a blind assumption. Who says Iraq will get worse if we leave? Who says the Sunnis won't be more willing to compromise, since their prime goal is our removal and the alternative to compromise after we leave is a civil war they cannot win? Who says the Shiites won't be more willing to compromise, now that the costs of suppressing Sunnis rises immensely when we leave? The sunnis are not helpless. All the Shiites have are numbers. There will be fragmentation and some variant of ethnic migration (cleansing, in some form), but that's already happened and happening. It can't be stopped now without truly, truly massive numbers of troops, at least three times what we have, and a total wipeout of the indigent government and a restart from scratch. Having said that, I acknowledge that things COULD get worse if we leave. But I think it depends a lot on how we do it. We could use the carrot of our departure and the stick of our presence to negotiate a real consensus among Iraqi leaders. It's the only real leverage we have left. We should use it to angle for the best kind of exit possible. Before it's too late. There, there's my answer to all the right-wing thugs who tell leftists, "so what's your better idea?"
This is a brilliantly clear exposition of the future from one who couldn't even see the mendacity and incompetence of the Bush Administration. At least part of it is true, this administration will scale back to well below 100,000 before much longer. If we leave Iraq tomorrow, or scale back to well below 100,000, the country will explode. We will see savagery and mass killings on a horrific scale, and it is not clear that any of the parties will be able to decisively conquer the other in some tense , exhausted Mearsheimeresque entente post killing fields. It could go on for years, allowing for fecund conditions for international terror groups to take root, and all kinds of troublemaking by neighbors. Our democratization strategy will lie in tatters, with only a few die-hards at faux-think tanks in Washington delusionally playing pretend that all is well, but for those brutish Sunni Arabs (they have a "genius" for failure, Ralph Peters informs us) who couldn't appreciate the fruits of freedom we had bestowed upon them (the more civilized Persians will understand better, of course, so on to Teheran!). This is a good idea, but who ya gonna call? McCain? What is needed now is fresh leadership and renewed committment to this fight. Posted by: Bunker at March 16, 2006 02:13 AM | Permalink to this comment
Nothing's going to change for the better while Bush is in office. Bush doesn't have the slightest clue what to do. He relies on his advisors. His advisors are the same ones who got us where we are in Iraq. Bush won't change advisors, either because Bush doesn't make those decisions (Cheney does), or he's too stubborn, or it would be like admitting error. The only way the war leadership will change is if the advisors recognize their shortcomings and resign - and that's about as likely as my winning the Powerball Lotto. So we have 3 more years of the status quo. Only the status quo isn't static. The militias are getting more confident, and their attacks more bloody. The lockdown averted an immediate obivous civil war, but shows no signs of halting a slow-growing civil war. The insurgency was slow-growing, too. Remember? How long after Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished!" photo op in May 2003 did it even dawn on the Bush Admin, and its pro-war supporters, that the insurgency was growing? How long was Cheney still saying the insurgency was in its "last throes"? How long did you, and other pro-war commentators, keep saying the same thing? Considering how long it took, and how wrong you all were, how can you possibly say the civil war "hasn't really started yet"? What epiphany, what incontrovertible action, are you looking for? Are you waiting until the Iraq "national unity government" gives up and never seats itself? Are you waiting for deconfederation to be formalized by closed borders and pitched battles along those borders? Do you understand that waiting for any of that is as futile as waiting for some formal spokesman to issue a press statement announcing the official start of an insurgency? Iraq's civil war is part of its insurgency. It's a natural outgrowth of the insurgency. There will be no hard and fast line signaling the end of the insurgency and the start of the civil war. They're the same damn thing. So think about where we'll be in 3 years. We'll have a President and an Administration that keeps thinking all it has to do is keep giving hopeful speeches, and keep accusing opponents of "aiding and abetting the enemy." The Iraqi Insurgency will have blended seamlessly into a civil war and we'll look backwards wondering how that happened, how we missed the danger signs, when the fact is we simply refused to see what was already happening. We might even have an insurgency in Iran, if Bush decides to attack that country (I can't judge how likely that is, but I do know that nothing short of a mutiny by the military will stop Bush if he decides he wants to attack Iran). The casualty count for Iraqis will be dozens or hundreds per day. Families, towns, entire cities will be riven as people are forced to choose which side they're on; and those who make the wrong choice will be killed. Families, towns, entire cities worth of people will be on the move as people flee strongholds of one ethnic or sectarian group to relative safety in areas controlled by their own ethnic or sectarian group. US forces will either be caught in any one of dozens of "middles," and taking fire from all sides - or they'll have retreated to their bases, the Green Zone, and the occasional few city blocks they ephemerally control. Nothing Bush does will stop that from happening. He has no idea, and his advisors have no ideas. Every choice they've made - beginning with the decision to invade in the first place - has been wrong. Every choice they've made has led to disaster. They really did cry havoc, they really did set loose the dogs of war, and they really did unleash a whirlwind that they have no control over, that they have no idea whatsoever how to control. What choices do you see for the President who takes over in January 2009? Posted by: CaseyL at March 16, 2006 03:20 AM | Permalink to this comment
I think it's very likely that Bush had promised the locals that this time we really, really meant it, and refusing to pull the trigger would have had other consequenses. The thing about this theory is, the locals didn't want us to do it. Mubarak was strongly, and vocally against. One of our strongest allies, Turkey, balked at giving us a land route from the north. Jordan was against. Syria against. Saudi Arabia against. Iran was probably pretty mirthful though. Israel too. Don't recall Kuwait's stance, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were pleased. Not sure who we promised what to, but most of those neighbors weren't exactly thrilled at the prospect. Less so now probably. Not that their opinions should have determined our actions necessarily. But the claim that Bush staked his cred on this matter with the locals just doesn't seem all that plausible As to the swimmingly effective inspections going on under Mr. Blix and friends; remember we were hunting for something that could be hidden in a closet (or, at best, a garage) in a country the size of California. Look, if we were really looking for a mass of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that could fit inside of one closet, in the aggregate, then we didn't really have anything to fear in the first place. The big issue was nukes. They are grandpappy of all WMD, as I said above, to the extent that they make all other WMD look like junior versions. And any real nuke capacity requires enormous facilities that span very large areas. Posted by: Eric Martin at March 16, 2006 03:40 AM | Permalink to this comment
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