No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.
The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.
I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.
Well, it's been a while since we last communicated. It's not easy getting tapes out from this basement in Tikrit, but I thought it was time we had a little chat. Heard your speech on Arab democracy on the BBC Arabic Service. I'll give you this, Bush, you and Blair do understand the stakes. It's your willpower I doubt.
You see, Bush, this really is "The Mother of All Battles." You may not have meant to, but you have triggered a huge civilizational war — the war within Islam. Who wins in Iraq will have a big impact on this war — which is now spreading to Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
By now you've realized that I was prepared for this war. I got rid of all my W.M.D., hid explosives and set up an underground network to fight you once you were in country. But God bless the Turkish Parliament. By not allowing you to use Turkey to invade from the north, my boys in the Sunni Triangle were spared. By the time you got here from the south, we just receded into the shadows. You occupied our Sunni towns, but never defeated them. Had you been able to sweep down from the north, my boys would have had to engage you, and you would have killed them wholesale by the hundreds. Now you have to kill them retail — one by one.
We're not fanatics. We're I.B.M. We have a business plan and we're executing it: We started by eliminating the U.N., the Red Cross and attacking oil pipelines. Then we moved against the countries that have sent troops or might — Italy, Jordan and Turkey. And now we're killing all Iraqis who collaborate with you — police, army, judges, technocrats. We know who everyone is and where they live. We're "a learning enemy." When you adapt to us, we re-adapt to you. Yes, we're secular Baathists, but we've made contact with Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria, and they drive our suicide vans. So many volunteers, so many good targets.
What we all believe is that if we can defeat you here, American cultural, political and economic influence in this part of the world will be finished for a long time.
So far, I feel pretty good. As isolated as I am in my bunker, I know that my view of this war — which is that you Americans have come here to put the Arabs down and steal our oil — still dominates Arab public opinion. I am bolstered by the fact that ill-qualified, intolerant Arab religious educators, spiritual leaders and "intellectuals" — who have long dominated our schools and mosques because tyrants like me found them useful — still feed this view to our youth. They think the only reason we are backward is because you put us down.
As long as the Arab street is locked in this view, I win. Because it means the people would rather have a cruel Arab leader like me or bin Laden — who momentarily lifts their pride by sticking a finger in your eye — than looking in the mirror and admitting that our society, religious leaders and culture have failed to prepare our people to succeed at modernity.
Changing all this is what this war of ideas is all about, and I am so pleased you are so bad at it. As long as you let one of your top generals and your pals on the Christian right spew hate against the Prophet Muhammad, you only strengthen the will of my young people against you. And your "moderate" Arab allies are good at the police tactics to repress our angry, humiliated youth, but they have no serious strategy to give them new jobs, new ideas and new beliefs.
Yes, Bush, you and Blair have kicked off something very big — a war of ideas with, and within, Islam. It's as big as the cold war. But to win, you have to mobilize your whole society, as you did in the cold war. You are talking about trying to change a whole civilization, whose backward, fanatical elements — when combined with modern technology — now threaten you.
Yet your Pentagon only talks about pulling troops out of Iraq, when you should be putting more in. What are you thinking? You should have brought every soldier you have in Europe and Japan right here. The whole game comes down to security. We are in a race to see who gets to the tipping point first. Iraqis will follow the strong horse. My bet is that I can generate enough insecurity among Iraqis to shun you, before you can induce them to carry out your program to build a democratic alternative to me.
I still think I can win, because I prepped my base for the Mother of All Battles, and you prepared yours for Mother Goose — a short war, with few troops, few funerals and no sacrifices for average Americans. Sorry pal, but that's no way to win The Big One.
What does the loss on Medicare say about the Democrats?
MSNBC discusses the difference between the discipline the Republicans are showing in both Houses and the lack of discipline demonstrated by the Democrats in the Senate. A key statement in the article is:
Longtime party strategist Harold Ickes was at a loss to see any upside to a Republican victory in an area Democrats have always owned. He said he was flabbergasted that key Democratic senators, led by John Breaux (La.) and Max Baucus (Mont.), went along with it.
Clearly the failure starts in the Senate with Tom Daschle, who needs to be replaced. In addition, if John Breaux and/or Max Baucus are running for reelection, the Democrats should select and fund someone to run against them. Clearly they should find no further Democratic support for their projects for as long as they remain in the Senate.
There also needs to be some mechanism for developing a Democratic position on issues other than just waiting to see who wins the Presidential nomination. Terry McAulife at the DNC perhaps could address this? Not unilaterally, of course.
MSNBC has an article showing another misstep by Paul Bremer that has delayed the Iraqi Constitution and the handover of sovereignty.
The key statement in the article is this: "We waited four months, thanks to Bremer," said one council member, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We could have organized this [transition] by now had we started when Sistani issued his fatwa. But the Americans were in denial.
People familiar with the lengthy discussions among U.S. officials about the fatwa said American political officers were too isolated to grasp the power of the edict right away, assuming that secular former exiles backed by the U.S. government would push Bremer's plan. Even when Sistani's clout became clear, they said Bremer remained reluctant to rework his transition plan right away. "He didn't want a Shiite cleric dictating the terms of Iraq's political future" one U.S. official with knowledge of the process said.
Once again the Bush administration is having problems because they think they know best and refuse to gather or respond to information that should change the way they intended to do things. Listening to the ideas of a few "Old Iraqi Hands" would have saved a lot of trouble for both Jay Garner and Paul Bremer - if they could have gotten Dick Cheney to permit it. posted by Richard at 4:57 PM
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Jay Garner Explains what went wrong in Iraq
If you wonder what went wrong in Iraq after the war was over, Jay Garner gave this interview to BBC.
Josh Marshall has an explanation why Garner did not have the best possible information on Iraq. His answer? Dick Cheney told him to get rid of the State Department man who had prepared the post-war plan and knew about what to expect in post-war Iraq.
This ties in well with Marshall's conclusion that when the Bush administration has royally screwed up, Vice President Cheney has been the central decision-maker in the decision. From what I have read, I concur. posted by Richard at 10:58 AM
We're schizophrenic about our two-party political system.
Sometimes, we Americans declaim the term in tones of reverence: The Two Party System (all rise) is practically synonymous with democracy itself.
Other times (some of us) utter the term like a curse word. Why must we always choose between two near-indistinguishable options? Why can't the Third-Party-of-the-Moment get a bug's chance at a square dance?
The American party animal
Well, the truth is, we don't have to have two parties. The constitution sets no limit. The constitution, in fact, says nothing at all about political parties, even though some of the founding fathers were notorious party animals.
We can have as many parties as we want--and we do. Shall we name names? Greens. Libertarians. Reform Party. Peace and Freedom. (big breath) American Party. Socialist Workers Party--well, the list goes on. They're all out there, they just don't win elections.
No one mandates it, yet virtually every significant political office in this country is held by either a Democrat or a Republican.
Is it because these two parties are just so incredibly wonderful that no one else could compare?
Or is this a plot by the rich and powerful to limit us to Tweedledum and Tweedlee, both of whom They control?
French sociologist Maurice Duverger says: "Neither."
Why settle for just two major parties?
Two parties--It's a law.
Way back in the 1950s, sociologist Maurice Duverger studied a variety of political systems and came up with a proposition now known as Duverger's Law. He claimed that an electoral system like ours inevitably drifts toward a two-party system, no matter how many parties come out the gate.
By "system like ours," he meant a system with these two properties:
1. Whoever gets the most votes wins.
2. Winner takes all.
Candidates in our system don't need to receive, say, 50 percent of the vote to win an election. They just need to beat the nearest runner-up. And when the voting's over, in our system, one candidate has the seat and all the others can go back to washing dishes.
Measured against real life, Duverger's Law holds up. Anomalies and deviations occur, of course. Former professional wrestler-turned Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura comes to mind. Neither a Democrat nor a Republican, Ventura was a member of the Reform Party and then the Independence Party. But "third-party" successes like Ventura's tend to be temporary. The two-party system keeps reemerging as if ordained by some law of nature.
Why?
Political scientists explain it by drawing a distinction between sincere voting and strategic voting.
Sincere voters cast their ballot for the party, person, or position they like best. That's the naïve base model of democracy. Strategic voters calculate what everybody else will do and apply their vote accordingly, where they think it will make the most difference. In every election, many voters--if not most--vote strategically.
Strategic voting
Let's say a race begins with four parties vying for power--Jocks, Preppies, Hipsters, and Geeks. Early polls show them getting, respectively, 35, 30, 20, and 15 percent of the vote.
The Geeks have little chance of winning, but at first they're planning to vote for their candidate anyway, hoping to spark a movement. They're not neutral on the other parties, however. Some Geeks actively dislike Jocks. If their candidate can't win, they'd at least like to keep the Jocks out of power. If their party had some chance, they'd vote their party line. But as their hopes wither, they feel increasing reluctance to waste their vote on The Loser (as they're now calling their favorite Geek). They decide to use their vote to keep the Jocks out. And who will they vote for? Well, voting for the Hipster would be almost as pointless as voting for the Geek. If they want to block the Jock, it only makes sense to vote for the Preppie.
The poll numbers now change. Geeks drop to 10 percent. Jocks and Preppies start running neck and neck. This, however, triggers movement among the Hipsters. Some of them think Jocks are sort of okay but they detest Preppies. When the Jocks were clear front-runners, they felt safe voting for their Hipster standard-bearer, because at worst they'd get a Jock. But with the Jocks in trouble, they're reconsidering. Maybe they'll vote for the Jock, just to block those awful Preppies.
The polls now show Jocks and Preppies getting a combined 80 percent of the vote. It's clear that one of these two candidates will win. Many who were planning to cast protest votes for Hipsters or Geeks wonder if their protest will even make a noise. If it won't, maybe they'd better use their vote to help determine who will actually win, Jocks or Preppies.
The power motive
Now, add another factor to this dynamic. A political party is not just a union of people devoted to the same principals. It's also a group of people organized to gain power. Between elections, each party has a strong incentive to absorb any absorbable minor parties on its fringes. It does this by opening its umbrella, becoming more inclusive--and more vague.
Neither party has a big incentive to stake out very definite positions, because any position that attracts some voters will alienate others. The safest course for each big party, then, is to become the least unattractive alternative to the other.
You see where this is going. By election time, there are only two major parties, pressed right up against each other on either side of a line. They will inevitably compete for voters who could go either way. And who are these wishy-washies? They're anyone situated somewhere between the major parties.
Whether you call them mugwumps, know-nothings, or independents, they inherently define the center. Since they will determine the outcome of the election, they become the line of scrimmage. And a line of scrimmage has only two sides.
The line of scrimmage itself can move, of course. The whole country can shift right or left; and it does. But the major political parties don't produce this shift. They reflect it. Wherever the line of scrimmage ends up, you'll find the two major parties nose to nose on either side of it.
Can a third party ever win?
Once two major parties are firmly established, can a third party ever crash the gate?
Well, no third party has succeeded since the Civil War, when our current two-party configuration really took shape. Ross Perot's Reform Party made big noise in 1992, but got only 19 percent of the vote, and that was considered good. Teddy Roosevelt came closer in 1912, when his Bull Moose Party actually pulled ahead of the Republicans. (Experts deny that the party's ridiculous name had anything to do with its ultimate loss.) But lose it did, to the Democrats, who then co-opted enough of its ideas to make it irrelevant. By 1916 the Bull Mooses had faded into the woods.
A minor party that tries to jump to the majors faces one enormous Catch-22. In the long run, in order to get votes, a party must deliver. A party not in power cannot deliver. A party that has never held power can't point to any record of delivery. To win an election, therefore, a party must have won some elections already. A third party might go for a few cycles fueled purely by passion and principle--but eventually the troops get hungry. That's when the Catch-22 of party politics sets in.
Even if a third party movement did succeed, Duverger's Law predicts it would reconfigure, not eliminate, the two-party system. That's because a third party could succeed in only one of two ways. It could drain enough votes from one of the two parties to kill that one. We'd then be back to two parties. Or it could drain votes from both parties by offering a real alternative to their blandness. In that case, the two diminished older parties, driven together by their similarity, would consolidate against the upstart. They'd become one party. The former third party would become the second party--and there we are again.
To break out of our current two-party system, we would have to change the mechanisms of our electoral system. Alternative mechanisms do exist, of course. Opponents of the two-party system have been heard to mutter about the parliamentary system so common in Europe; about proportional voting; about fusion voting; and other schemes. But no scheme, system, or mechanism will stop people from voting strategically. So any changes we make may well move us out of a two-party system--but into what?
The voters will decide. And they're hard to predict, except in retrospect.
Richard Perle admitted that the US invasion of Iraq was illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
Frankly I find this a startling admission. posted by Richard at 9:25 PM
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Friday, November 14, 2003
When we cut-and-run from Iraq, who will be blamed?
Josh Marshal in talking points memo has quotes from Joe Biden and John McCain about what is happening in Iraq now.
Marshal points out that we can simply pull our troops out and let the place go to Hell the day we leave, or we can create a half-trained and underequipped Iraqi security force, turn it over to whatever group of Iraqis wants to try to govern, and pull our troops out by next Spring and hope it holds together until after November 2004 before it goes to Hell.
These two choices are determined by the date of the US Presidential election, not by circumstances on the ground in Iraq. They both have a real problem since they mean that we have been defeated, and Iraq will very likely become a greater threat to us later than it was under Saddam. The Bush White House will be quite satisfied if these problems occur after the November 2004 elections, and they hope they will still be in place to have to (mis)handle the new problems they will have created.
The alternative is for us to somehow to extend more Army troops, use Marines in the pacification role (not what they are trained for), use the rest of the Reserves, and try to expand the Army rapidly while they are doing that because those are all still short-term solutions. We are stuck in Iraq if there is any chance to succeed.
If we fail in Iraq, I doubt that Bush can be reelected. That, of course, depends on the failure being recognized before the election.
None of this considers what will happen to the Iraqis, because they have already recognized that they don't matter in this mess.
None of it is a decent resolution of the garbage situation the Bush administration has left us in, and none of it has a damned thing to do with 9/11 which was their excuse for doing this to us and Iraq.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
Although, the report was an internal CIA document it was widely circulated within the administration. Even more unusually, it carried an endorsement by Paul Bremer, the civilian head of the US-run occupation of Iraq - a possible sign that he was seeking to bypass his superiors in the Pentagon and send a message directly to President George Bush on how bad the situation has become.
The NYTimes article adds:
The C.I.A. and the White House refused even to confirm the existence of the report, which was first disclosed by The Philadelphia Inquirer. But government officials outside those agencies said its conclusions were among the darkest intelligence assessments distributed since the American-led invasion of Iraq in March.
"It says that this is an insurgency, and that it is gaining strength because Iraqis have no confidence that there is anyone on the horizon who is going to stick around in Iraq as a real alternative to the former regime," one American official said.
"It says that this is an insurgency, and that it is gaining strength because Iraqis have no confidence that there is anyone on the horizon who is going to stick around in Iraq as a real alternative to the former regime," one American official said.
A second American official said the grim conclusions were based in part on a classified opinion poll conducted by the State Department's intelligence branch, which found that a majority of Iraqis now regard American troops as occupiers rather than liberators. The concern has been reinforced, another official said, by an increasing consensus among intelligence analysts that appointed Iraqi leaders do not appear to be capable of carrying out the task of governing or working toward elections.
"The trend lines are in the wrong direction," a third government official said. "I haven't seen anything in any of the intelligence reports that offers a hard and fast recipe for how to turn things around."
I think that this next few weeks is going to involve a lot of major changes in our operations in Iraq, both military and political. It concerns me that many in the Bush administration want to use the Army combat forces against insurgents, something that is not likely to be successful, and that the pressures on Karl rove of the 2004 Presidential election will lead the Bush administration to attempt some counter-productive quick fixes and PR solutions.
Hopefully we have seen the end of the PR offensive from the White House stating that the media isn't reporting the "Good News out of Iraq." We as a nation are in a tough situation now. We need more effective action and honesty out of the White House, and a lot less self-serving "happy happy bullshit" from them. posted by Richard at 8:34 AM
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Problems in Iraq
I am a member of the "We broke it. We have to fix it." view on Iraq. First and foremost, we need to keep in mind that early exit means retreat or defeat.
We cannot leave until Iraq is a nation which is strong enough to sustain itself without outside support. We also need to leave an Iraq that is strong enough not to fall prey to a takeover by an organization like the Taliban or al Queda which would be a threat to it neighbors and to us. If Iraq does not also have some form of representative government before we leave, then we must consider our actions there to be at least a partial failure. Wesley Clark has offered one view of what should be done to achieve success in Iraq.
The Philadelphia Inquirer on Nov 13th printed a really pessimistic report based on a new, top-secret CIA assessment of our current position in Iraq.
A new, top-secret CIA report from Iraq warns that growing numbers of Iraqis are concluding the U.S.-led coalition can be defeated and are supporting the insurgents.
The report paints a bleak picture of the political and security situation in Iraq and cautions that the U.S.-led drive to rebuild the country as a democracy could collapse unless corrective actions are taken immediately.
The News story describes our current strategy as:
Accelerating a restoration of Iraqi self-rule, speeding security-force recruiting, and intensifying a U.S. counterinsurgency campaign form the crux of a new U.S. strategy to crush the insurgents, consolidate the support of ordinary Iraqis for democracy-building efforts, and reduce the U.S. military presence.
But it also points out:
The CIA analysis suggests U.S. policy in Iraq has reached a turning point, as the Bush administration moves to escalate the war against the guerrillas and accelerate the transfer of political power to Iraqis.
Both options are potentially risky.
An escalation of the military campaign could cause more civilian casualties and drive more Iraqis to the insurgents' side.
At the same time, the CIA assessment warns that none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country or even preside over drafting a constitution or holding an election.
NPR this morning reports that the US military is conducting large-scale efforts to attack likely insurgents as a result of the bombing of the Italian police station yesterday. Paul Bremer's sudden and surprising trip to Washington to talk to President Bush indicates that there may well be a major change in how the US will handle Iraqi governance.
The problem for the White House is that if things continue to go the way the CIA report indicates into next year, Bush's reelection chances will be damaged. A major concern for Americans and Iraqis right now is that Karl rove may decide that Bush's reelection depends on our early exit from Iraq, and he may believe that a major reduction of US troops in Iraq can be spun as success in the Iraq War.
The alternative is to decide if we are willing to pay the price that retreat or defeat will require.
Juan Cole has been reliable and knowledgeble about the events in Iraq. Here is what he has to say today. Juan cole.
US Rule in Iraq Collapsing?
US civil administrator Paul Bremer's sudden, rushed trip to Washington earlier this week signalled that the White House is considering a radical rethinking of Iraq policy. As Josh Marshall notes, Rumors are flying that he himself may resign or be fired.
He and his colleagues in Washington are also clearly thinking of abolishing the Interim Governing Council and resorting to an Afghanistan model. This step would require some sort of Iraqi selection process for a Karzai-like president, who could appoint a cabinet and establish a legitimate government while the new constitution is being written. Az-Zaman newspaper, which is close to IGC member Adnan Pachachi, describes the plan as a "purge of the Interim government."
Although the military situation is not ideal, the level of attacks on US troops is not a military challenge yet. I suspect that this frantic anxiety is mainly political, and is fueled in part by Karl Rove's realization that if Iraq is still in the headlines next summer, it will sink Bush's presidency. The US press is not interested very much in other governments, nor even in US troops serving in countries that have their own government. Note that attacks on US troops in Afghanistan seldom make the front page, even when there are casualties. This lack of press interest in Afghanistan was a by-product of creating the Karzai government.
Rove thus needs to move Iraq off the front page. By leaving Bremer in charge of the country, the Bush administration created a 51st state as far as the US press was concerned, and they covered it the same way they do New York. Moreover, this 51st state had a lot of newsworthy things going on in it, like daily attacks on US troops. Of course, the danger is that the US will fob rule of the country off on a failed state and the whole thing will blow up in the face of the Bush administration.
Which is not to deny that the dire security situation is also fuelling the panic. The Australian Broadcasting Company reported Wednesday, "The Coalition is facing attacks in various parts of the country. The Coalition headquarters in Baghdad has come under mortar fire at least five times in the past week. There've also been repeated ambushes in the volatile towns of Fallujah and Tikrit."
The Washington Post reported that guerrillas hit the US HQ in Baghdad with rockets or mortars yet again on Tuesday, sending "leaders of the U.S.-installed Iraqi government running to basement shelters." There were no injuries. "One source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said at least eight projectiles had landed in the area hit but only three exploded. At least one landed in a parking lot near the helicopter pad, and close to where U.S. contractor Bechtel Corp. is based."
Not only are CPA officials forced to the basement for their own safety, but the number of attacks on US troops has risen to an average of 30-35 per day. The numbers are actually increasing month by month, and a new CIA AARDWOLF or special field assessment says that growing numbers of Iraqis are joining the resistance and concluding that the US can be defeated.
The US has started bombing the increasingly organized guerrillas in the Sunni Arab triangle, admitting that it is still at war in Iraq. The bad news is that small guerrilla bands can't effectively be bombed, so it is mainly for show. It could also backfire against the US if they bomb innocent civilians.
There is more. Go read it. Cole has good sources and good instincts. He also keeps up with what is going on in Iraq quite well. posted by Richard at 10:22 AM
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Bush's Continued Failure as President
The Bush administration appears ready to announce a change in how Phase II
of the War in Iraq will be fought. Lt. General Sanchez carefully used the
term "War" in his recent address because things there are getting worse, not
better.
There is also concern that the Iraqi Councli will not meet the December 15th
deadline for preparing a new Constitution. While the Bush admininstration
want to blame this potential delay on the Iraqis, the Iraqi foreign minister
told this to the Financial Times:
The chief concern has been that the IGC will fail to meet a December 15
deadline for setting a schedule for writing a new constitution and holding
elections. Mr Powell this week raised for the first time the possibility of
putting in place a "basic law" in Iraq "before we get to a full
constitution".
However, Iraq's foreign minister on Tuesday blamed "geriatric ambassadors"
from the West and "American infighting" for many of the problems and
security failures bedevilling the US-led occupation.
Hoshyar Zebari defended the IGC and insisted the December 15 deadline would
be met. "I think this debate about the ruling council - that it is not doing
its work, that it is not taking decisions - this is unfair," Mr Zebari told
the FT.
"American infighting among themselves between different departments over
policy . . . has created many, many of the difficulties that we are going
through."
Mr Zebari also criticised the quality of advice that Mr Bremer had received
on security issues, although he said co-operation had improved since the
early days after Baghdad fell in April.
The only operations in Iraq which have suceeded have been those which were
entirely the responsibility of the US military in which the civilian
"leadership" has interfered only minimally. Now that the Bush civilian
administration has screwed it up again, they are going to try to hand it off
to the military to fix their screwups. The problem of infighting between the
departments in the US federal government described by Zebari (above) is a
clear indication that George Bush is not able to do the required job as
President. This is simply more of the same warring that has gone on between
the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community (including the DIA and
CIA), and the State Department, and it has led to continued failures by the
Bush administration which they have tried to cover up with public relations
charm offensives and efforts to silence their critics.
Post-War Iraq countinues to prove George Bush's failure as President, and
the reshuffling that will occur very shortly with Bremer simply provides
more evidence of his utter failure as leader and President.
This is what Wesley Clark recently said bush did wrong, and what we have to do to succeed in Iraq:
Number one: How did we get into Iraq?
Mr. Bush made a series of strategic mistakes that have put us in danger and plunged us into Iraq. After September 11, all Americans understood that fighting terror was America's number one national security priority. All Americans understood it was crucial that we keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists.
Just as important - the world agreed with this approach. That is why we had international support for our war to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. But after the Taliban fell, instead of finishing off Al Qaeda, the very terrorists that continued to threaten us, the Administration began laying the ground work for a different war - a war in Iraq.
Our focus should have been on winning the war on terrorism - working with our allies to track down the terrorists themselves; to develop new initiatives in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to rip out the roots of radical terror, stop radical schools indoctrinating a new generation of terrorists day after day. That's how you win the war on terrorism.
Instead, the Bush Administration coined a new phrase - the axis of evil -- which essentially declared three dangerous nations enemies that we would deal with only by ultimatum. This phrase increased the threat it was designed to reduce - by encouraging these nations to speed up their programs to develop nuclear weapon to deter US action.
The Administration then offered the notion of pre-emption. American Presidents have always had the option of striking preemptively - it is inherent in the right of self-defense. And I would not hesitate to use that right if America was in imminent danger. But this policy was intended to be more -- much more. They made preemption the centerpiece of this Administration's national security strategy.
The Administration zeroed in on Iraq. But focusing on Iraq made no sense -- if the real goal was to protect the US either from weapons of mass destruction or terrorism. The hundred tons of loosely guarded nuclear bomb-making material and bioweapons in Russia presents a far more tempting target for terrorists. But this Administration has not made that a priority. The nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea were more advanced and more threatening than Iraq's, but for months they paid little attention. Their actions made no strategic sense; they downplayed the greater threats, and exaggerated the lesser one.
Finally, after training our forces on Iraq, the Administration essentially declared - we're going it alone. Instead of using diplomacy backed by force - as we did so effectively in the Balkans - this Administration's diplomacy was only a fig leaf. The United States was going to war no matter what. The Administration went to the UN with a "take it or leave it offer," which reflected a combination of indifference and disdain. It did not explore every diplomatic option; it did not do everything possible to bring allies with us.
The Administration compounded its error by failing to plan realistically for post-war Iraq. Instead of listening to the experts at the State Department and throughout the government, who predicted the danger of chaos and looting, the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his aides ignored their advice. Instead they relied on hope, hope that the Iraqi exiles would be accepted as legitimate, hope that the Iraqi police and military would provide security; hope that Iraqi oil revenues would finance reconstruction; and hope that we would be treated as liberators. How wrong they were - you can't build a plan on hope....
Meanwhile, the President rejected the advice of the uniformed military that we deploy enough troops not only to defeat Saddam's military but also to secure Iraq after Saddam's defeat.
As a result, we saw chaos, we lost the trust of the Iraqi people - and the enemy was emboldened.
When running for President, Mr. Bush assured voters he would have strong advisors in national security. But he didn't say what would happen if his advisors disagreed. Now we know. The advisors feud; the policy fractures, and our security suffers. In a Clark Administration, there won't be any question about whether the State Department drives policy, or the Pentagon drives policy, or the national security advisor drives policy. In a Clark Administration, the President will drive the policy.
Number two: What do we do now?
So how to we get out of the mess that the Bush Administration has created for America and Iraq?
First, we shouldn't give the President $87 billion until he has a plan that will work. President Bush keeps telling us we should stay the course. But what we really must do is change course.
Second, we must be honest with the American people. That's something that President Bush hasn't done. There is no silver bullet - no magic solution in Iraq. There is no easy way out.
Every American should understand: early exit means retreat or defeat. There can be neither. We need a success strategy -for it is only success that can honor the sacrifice of so many American men and women; it is only success that will allow Iraq to stand on its own; and it is only success that will allow our soldiers to come home.
What does success mean?
Success means that Iraq is strong enough to sustain itself without substantial outside forces, but not so strong as to threaten its neighbors.
Success means that representative government has taken root, so that it can be a model for the future in the Middle East.
Success means that Iraq doesn't become a breeding ground for Al Qaeda.
A new and realistic strategy for Iraq should be guided by the following principles. First, we must end the American monopoly on the occupation and reconstruction. Then we must develop the right force mix to fight and win a guerrilla war. Finally, we must give Iraqis a greater stake in our success.
1. End the American monopoly.
From the beginning, the Administration has insisted on exclusive control of the reconstruction and occupation of Iraq. This has cost us the support of other nations and made America a bigger target for terrorists. We must end this American monopoly.
Doing so will change the way this enterprise is viewed -- in Iraq, internationally, and here at home. The Coalition Provisional Authority, by which America controls Iraq today, should be replaced. But it is simply unrealistic to have the United Nations take over this daunting task - it's not able and it's not willing. Instead we must create a new international structure - the Iraqi Reconstruction and Democracy Council -- similar to the one we created in Bosnia with representatives from Europe, the United States, Iraq's neighbors, and other countries that will support our effort.
A high representative would be named to direct this mission, who would then bring in more resources and personnel from the rest of the world. It would have been easier to do this six months ago or four months ago, or two months ago. But even today, it is the only hope for gaining broader international support. Nations are more likely to share burdens if they are also sharing decisions. We would still have a leading role - but you can't be a leader if no one comes along - you're not a leader if you're all alone.
This new international effort should be launched immediately. The world is waiting for our leadership. They know success is critical for them, too. And we mustn't cast them aside any longer. They should have a seat at the table. But fixing the Administration's missteps won't be easy. It will require diplomacy at the highest levels. And I will call a summit of leaders from Europe, the United Nations, Japan, and the Arab World to launch this new international project.
We must also transform the military operation - turning it into a NATO enterprise. General Abizaid, commander of US forces in the Middle East, would remain in charge of the operation, but he would report to the NATO Council as well, as I did when I commanded NATO forces in Kosovo. Why - at this point - would NATO come? Again, it would have been easier if done earlier. But our friends and allies have a stake in a stable Iraq.
And our allies would be more willing to help us on Iraq if we are willing to work together on issues of concern to them, like climate change, the International Criminal Court, and a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. With a US commander, NATO involvement, and UN endorsement, I believe we can also get Muslim countries to step in, as we did in the Balkans. Their presence would prove that this is not an American occupation, but an international effort. Then more Iraqis will see that the people sabotaging their oil pipelines are sabotaging their children's future -- and they will help us stop them.
In these circumstances, it is reasonable to expect other countries to provide tens of thousands of new troops as well as additional personnel to help Iraqis conduct policing, police training, oversight, and border control.
Only by sharing responsibility for the management of this enterprise will we also be able to share the immense and growing burden we now face.
2. Force Mix
Along with NATO involvement, we will need a series of other military and security steps. No plan can be fashioned without substantial contribution from our military leaders on the ground. Their advice will be crucial. But let me tell you as Commander-in-Chief how I would approach this problem.
First off, we want to distribute our resources properly. This requires US forces to run an agile, intelligence-driven counter-insurgency campaign, while Iraqi forces and our allies perform other necessary tasks. When it comes to our force levels, it's possible that some may need to be added initially to create the right mix of capabilities. You cannot measure success by a reduction in forces, and you can't declare failure by an increase in forces. It's better to do the job right so we can succeed and then bring our troops home.
One mistake in Vietnam was trying to use conventional forces to fight an unconventional war. The more conventional forces we have in Iraq, the more logistics we need. The more unarmored humvees and trucks we have, the greater our vulnerability to roadside bombs. Most of our losses are being taken in routine patrolling and transit - not in active counter-insurgency efforts. The right mix of forces -- more special forces and other lighter units -- will reduce our "footprint," logistics tail and vulnerability, while increasing our ability to strike hard.
More intelligence resources: We have to do all we can to find out who's attacking our soldiers, and to produce the actionable intelligence that will enable us to strike accurately and hard. Success depends on good intelligence work and good rapport with the civilian population. Yet intelligence specialists and linguists are scarce.
We need to take the linguists and intelligence specialists now involved in the search for weapons of mass destruction and assign them to our military counter-insurgency efforts -- and we need to augment that with new technologies and more linguists drawn from loyal Arab Americans. We can ask international inspectors to take over the search for weapons They are ready, willing and able to perform this mission. That will make it possible to find the people who are killing our soldiers.
Iraqi Security forces: There is no more urgent priority than improving Iraqi security forces. We need a smart, patient two-tier plan - for police and the military.
We should start by calling the old Iraqi army to duty. We have to have thorough background checks, pay generous rates, and appeal to their sense of nationality. We need these security forces quickly so we can free up US soldiers to focus on our most urgent tasks of counter-insurgency - some Iraqis may go to police, some as guards for installations or borders, and some will be the nucleus for a new, still to be formed Iraqi army.
Better border protection: Today Iraq is a magnet for every jihadist in the Middle East who wants to take a free shot at an American soldier. We have to stop outside infiltration or intervention. Closing the borders will require real cooperation from the countries bordering Iraq. We should engage with the Syrians, the Iranians, and the Saudis, with clear carrots as well as sticks. We have other issues with each of these countries. But right now, closing those borders is most urgent. Unfortunately, this administration has made the region wary of working with us. We must convince them otherwise to show them that cooperation with us is in their interest and will help their region, not with more wars but with more progress.
In both Bosnia and Afghanistan, we recognized that you cannot put a country back together if its neighbors are committed to tearing it apart. In both those cases, we engaged all of the neighbors, no matter how objectionable we found their policies or regimes, in our effort to stabilize those societies. We have yet to initiate such a regional dialogue with Iraq's neighbors.
3. Give the Iraqis a rising stake in our success
Iraqis will be more likely to meet the security challenge if we give them a greater stake in our success. That means establishing a new sovereign government in Iraq right away. There has been a false debate between the French, who recommended turning all government functions over to Iraqis now - and the Bush Administration, which insists on waiting until a constitution is written and elections are held.
The French are wrong: we cannot transfer full authority to Iraqis before they are ready. But the administration is also wrong: we can give the Iraqis a much bigger sense of ownership over their country and move more quickly towards a government that answers to its people. Until Iraqis believe that they can control their future, they will huddle in fear and watch others attack - rather than stand with pride, expose the guerrillas and stop the violence.
We should help the Iraqis move immediately to establish their own government, a government to replace the existing council. Because that council was chosen by Americans, it is not seen as legitimate in the eyes of too many Iraqis. But right now, there are 50 city and regional councils in Iraq - elected by the Iraqi people. Just as the State Legislatures used to elect members to our Senate in our own country, these councils should select new members of an interim government drawing from the existing governing council.
This new government would represent Iraq internationally - and control oil revenues, funds, and any frozen assets through a transparent, internationally audited process. The transfer of government functions to this new government should be ongoing, week by week, as soon as it is ready.
This interim government would then launch a new process to write a Constitution. Such a constitution would be an Iraqi document -- not written by Americans or people appointed by Americans - and would set the terms for free and fair elections.
Finally, we should open the West to Iraq with exchange programs in multiple fields so that Iraqis who have been isolated for years can see the rest of the world -- what we are doing with our economy, schooling, health care, local media, how we run our government and take community action. Then they can return to their country to help guide the growth of the new Iraq.
If I am elected President, I pledge to you that my highest priority will be this: not only to protect America from the threat of Al Qaeda, but to transform the strategy that is failing in Iraq to one that will succeed.
I would draw on my 34-year military career, my experience as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, the lessons of diplomacy I learned in that job, the personal relationships with foreign leaders I developed, my role in bringing peace to Bosnia, my understanding of guerrilla war, and my efforts commanding the victorious war and winning the peace in Kosovo. Drawing on this experience, I will work to promote a stable democracy in Iraq, to recruit other countries to share the burden, to protect our troops, draw them down, and eventually to bring them home - to leave Iraq, but not abandon it.
Number three: How do we make sure this does not happen again?
If I am elected President, I pledge to you that America will never, under my leadership, choose to isolate itself without allies, in a "long, hard slog" that drains our money, strains our military, and squanders our moral authority. We will act with others if we possibly can and alone only if we absolutely must.
A Clark foreign policy would never let it happen - because I would not give away our alliances any more than I would give away the 101st Airborne.
Despite our overwhelming military might, our economic strength and the power of our democracy, we cannot win these battles alone. We can't pursue Arab-Israeli peace, maintain stability in the Middle East, support reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, deal with the challenges of North Korea, track down Osama bin Laden, fight the global war against terrorism, face the problem of Iran, and return to prosperity in this country, unless we have allies to help us.
We have choices. We can ignore the threats. We can confront them alone. Or we can get people who share our interests to share our challenges. That is how America led the world for the last half century. And when we led, others followed -- not because we compelled them, but because we convinced them.
General Eisenhower once said leadership is "persuading the other fellow to want to do what you want him to do." America needs a President who can lead.
As President, I will restore what's been lost. I will rebuild our alliances. And I will strengthen them, so that when America has to act we can call on the military, financial, and moral resources of others.
I will propose a new Atlantic Charter to reinvigorate our security partnership with Europe - a Charter that will define the threats we face in common, create the basis for concerted action from our allies to meet them, and offer the promise to act together as a first choice - not a last. The United States will always reserve the right to act alone in our own defense if we must. No nation will ever have veto power over our security. But we have seen that it is foolish to act alone as a first resort, to determine alone the threat, to decide alone on a response, and then to say to the world, "you're with us or against us." Our first choice should be to act with the power and authority of many nations. This model could be applied to our friends and allies in Asia as well.
I also propose creating an agency that will bring the same skill to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and ethnic conflict that we have brought to the challenge of warfare. We should be using our great capacities to prevent conflicts early so we don't need to use force later. That means drawing on the skills that now exist across the federal government.
This new agency should have a budget for real research and development, real planning, and the ability to draw on the US national civilian reserves which I proposed last month. This agency will give us a power to engage that we don't have right now. Because we don't need a new strategy of preemptive force as much as we need a new capability for preemptive engagement.
It serves our interests to make sure that Afghanistan is never again a haven for Al Qaeda; to make sure the fallen states of Africa don't become breeding grounds for terrorists; to make sure the scourge of AIDS doesn't reverse political and economic gains in the developing world. America should be the best in the world in addressing and reversing the causes of human misery, and we should be known and admired for it.
For much of our history, America has been the most admired nation in the world. People around the globe admired America's strength - because they saw it was on their side. That reputation took decades to build - but only a few years for George Bush to bring down. We must recover what's been lost.
As my record makes clear, I am not opposed to confronting a dictator, setting an ultimatum, and acting with force if the ultimatum's not met. We did it twice. We fought with Milosevic and persuaded our allies to join us. And I wrestled with some of the pentagon brass along the way to get it done. If we have to confront danger again, we will. And we will win.
But we must be a country that listens, and leads again. A country that is respected, not resented. Not for its military might or material wealth, but for its values and vision; for the greatness of its goals, and for the generosity of its spirit. Respected more than feared, by nations rich and poor, Christian, Jews, and Muslim. A country governed by people with ideals, not radical ideologies. A nation where citizens speak their minds, demand more of their leaders, and serve their country. It's what I call a New American Patriotism.
This New American Patriotism recognizes the simple truth that we can't be safe at home unless we're secure abroad. We can't solve our domestic challenges - the economy, health care, and education -- unless we succeed in Iraq and extinguish terrorism around the world.
We need leadership to succeed - and when this campaign is over, I believe the American people will make me that leader.
While we have troops in Iraq, most of our news comes from Iraq. Saudi Arabia hasn't been a major focus except that it has been a source of funds for fundamentalist militants.
The recent bombing of a mostly Arab housing compound during Ramadan highlights the dilemma the Saudi Royal family is in. This from the Christian Science monitor:
The Saudi government has always had to walk a fine line in combatting Al Qaeda and other militants who claim to act from religious motives. "The government is based on Islamic legitimacy, and to crack down, you really need to make arrests of popular preachers," says Joshua Teitelbaum, an Israeli expert on Saudi affairs. "But if you start arresting these people you may find that you have less Islamic legitimacy, because you're arresting Islamic preachers. Those have always been the horns of the government's dilemma."
The problem the Saudi Royal Family has is that the preachers are painting them as not extreme enough as Islamicists to be the custodians of the most sacred of the Islamic sites. The US presence in Saudi Arabia is a continuing problem, and the US preemptive invasion of Iraq has created more problems.
Mr. Awaji, who is initiating an effort to mediate between the government and the militants, says the situation in Iraq is influencing events in Saudi Arabia. "The news coming from Iraq" - especially the reports of rising US casualties, "is encouraging militants to go ahead with jihad everywhere," he says, using the Arabic word meaning "holy struggle."
"They believe Iraq is a new Afghanistan for them," he adds.
Whatever the result in Saudi Arabia, it will not be greater democracy. A government under such threats will have to crack down on freedoms in the populace. The question is how effective such crack-downs can be.
This is about as good an analysis of the coming election as I have seen anywhere.
50-50 America Is Spewing Venom
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2003
Wasn’t 9/11 supposed to bring the country together? In his latest Against the Grain commentary, CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer says it’s not working out that way -- big time.
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The presidential election is one year away.
That means the campaign is three-quarters of the way finished, since modern campaigns begin the day after Election Day. The 2004 election, in fact, is a short one because of the Battle of Florida, which delayed the neo-traditional start time by a few weeks.
Two questions seem to be dominating the ponderings of ponderers of the political zeitgeist: Is President Bush vulnerable? What is this election all about? My answers are pretty straightforward: Yes and mistrust (of both sides).
I have detected three camps of campaign existentialists thus far in the cycle. Depending on your sect, the campaign is primarily about the economy, foreign policy or a culture war.
There’s nothing tricky about the first two. Elections are almost always about the economy. The basic take this year is that if the economy is bad, or if the economy is perceived as bad, incumbent Bush loses. Republicans hope this recession came early enough in Bush’s term for a rebound that he will get some credit for; they were delighted by the impressive GDP figures that came out last week. Democrats hope a discernible recovery takes awhile. What’s unique about this election is – nothing.
The foreign policy camp is smaller. “Next year, for the first time in three decades,” wrote James Mann in The Washington Post, “foreign policy will be the dominant issue of a presidential election.” I think in the months after 9/11 most voters would have agreed with that and now most voters would not. That itself is a remarkable indication of how fast our political worldviews change. After 9/11, it seemed the landscape of issues Americans cared about was changed forever. Now it doesn’t.
I belong to a sub-set of the culture war commentariat.
The main culture war theorists see this election as a clash between two alien populations: “conservatives” who may be unsympathetic to abortion rights, government activism, homosexual rights, environmentalism, gun control and supportive of religious conservatism, the death penalty, tax-cutting, military might; “liberals” who may be hostile to the Bush doctrine, anti-intellectualism, the death penalty, deficits, religious conservatism and sympathetic to abortion rights, gun control, homosexual rights, expanded entitlement programs, environmentalism, and multilateralism.
I have come to believe that this demarcation of opposing camps is too issue-oriented and substantive. The schism is reflected in the issues, but it’s more about values, aesthetics and lifestyle. It’s gut level. It’s not a culture war; it’s a feud, a frat war, the jocks vs. the chess club.
It’s Clinton-haters and Bush-haters. The driving impulse is mistrust; each side profoundly mistrusts, and dislikes, the other – not the policies, but the very essence. It’s personal.
This grudge match is painfully and shamefully evident in the best-seller lists, talk-radio and talk TV – the ceaseless, full volume, and, to my mind, skin-crawling argument between polemicists who call their worthy opponents are liars, idiots and traitors.
But politicians fight the fight as much as pundits, politicians on both sides. Columnist David Brooks refers to this as the “presidency wars.” “The fundamental argument in the presidency wars is not that the president is wrong, or is driven by a misguided ideology. That's so 1980's,” Brooks wrote. “The fundamental argument now is that he is illegitimate. He is so ruthless, dishonest and corrupt, he undermines the very rules of civilized society. Many conservatives believed this about Clinton.” And many liberals now think it of Bush.
I see this war in my e-mail in-box every day. If I write a column – or even a paragraph in a nice column - critical of President Bush, scores of irate e-epistles instantly appear loaded with bathroom insults, charges of liberal bias and even, bless their old-fashioned hearts, accusations that I am a Communist. When I write something positive about the administration – even a nice paragraph in a mean piece – I am called a tool of corporate media, an administration pimp and, again, various bathroom names.
I believe the politically engaged in this country are profoundly polarized. (Ironically, I also believe this is happening at a time when the substantive differences between the parties are as narrow as they have been in decades.) I had thought, and many still think, that 9/11 diminished the schism that grew bloody during the Florida recount, that it unified the country. I no longer believe that. I think a toxic mistrust and deep disrespect of the “other side” will mark this election.
So, yes, Bush is vulnerable to repeating the fate of his father. And the eventual Democrat nominee is vulnerable to repeating the fate of Bob Dole and Walter Mondale.
Bush has many advantages: he’s the incumbent, he’s better funded than any candidate in history, the sum of his overall public approval is greater than the approval for his positions, as was true of Ronald Reagan. The third year of a president’s first term is always a low point so Bush’s frailty is probably exaggerated now.
But my sense is that the feuding families of mistrustful voters are roughly equal in size. The election of 2000 is compelling evidence of that. A senior Bush campaign official told some CBS News reporters recently that the country is “closely divided” and this election “will look more like ’00.”
Regardless of how the economy, the terror threat and the Iraqi situation are seen next fall, probably independent of the big, unknown stories that are bound to break before then (and there will be some), I would be most surprised if this isn’t a very close election. There is too much mistrust and bad blood for any candidate to catch a wave. The existentialists call it alienation.
Dick Meyer, the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, is based in Washington. For many years, he was a political and investigative producer for The CBS News Evening News With Dan Rather.
CBS posted by Richard at 3:37 PM
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Monday, November 03, 2003
Cheney's hawks 'hijacking policy'
This article from the Sidney Morning Herald is really scary.
A former Pentagon officer turned whistleblower says a group of hawks in the Bush Administration, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, is running a shadow foreign policy, contravening Washington's official line.
"What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra [a Reagan administration national security scandal] look like amateur hour. . . it's worse than Iran-Contra, worse than what happened in Vietnam," said Karen Kwiatkowski, a former air force lieutenant-colonel.
"[President] George Bush isn't in control . . . the country's been hijacked," she said, describing how "key [governmental] areas of neoconservative concern were politically staffed".
Ms Kwiatkowski, who retired this year after 20 years service, was a Middle East specialist in the office of the Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, headed by Douglas Feith.
She described "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress", adding that "in order to take that first step - Iraq - lies had to be told to Congress to bring them on board".
Ms Kwiatkowski said the pursuit of national security decisions often bypassed "civil service and active-duty military professionals", and was handled instead by political appointees who shared common ideological ties.
There was speculation earlier this year that such an ideologue group had emerged, and that it was behind the US attack on an Iraqi convoy in Syria in June.
The New York Times quoted Patrick Lang, a former senior Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) official, as saying that many in the Government believed the incursion was an effort by ideologues to disrupt co-operation between the US and Syria.
Ms Kwiatkowski said there was an extra-governmental network operating outside normal structures and practices, "a network of political appointees in key positions who felt they needed to take some action, to make things happen in a foreign affairs, national security way". She said Pentagon personnel and the DIA were pressured to favourably alter assessments and reports.
In a separate interview, Chalmers Johnson, an authority on US policy, said that the Administration's neo-conservatives had in effect seized power from Mr Bush. Dr Johnson said the neo-conservatives had pursued an agenda outlined in the controversial 1992 Defence Planning Guidance. That document, drawn up at the direction of Mr Cheney when he was defence secretary, said the world's only superpower should not be cautious about asserting its power.
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/29/1067233251576.html
Paul Krugman has this to say about the administration's record on job creation.
Stimulating the economy in the short run is supposed to be easy, as long as you don't worry about how much debt you run up in the process. As William Gale of the Brookings Institution puts it, "Almost any tax cut or spending increase would succeed in boosting a sluggish economy if the Federal Reserve Board follows an accommodative monetary policy. . . . The key question is, therefore, not whether the proposals provide any short-term stimulus, but whether they are the most effective way to provide stimulus." Mr. Gale doesn't think the Bush tax cuts meet that criterion, and neither do I.
To put it more bluntly: it would be quite a trick to run the biggest budget deficit in the history of the planet, and still end a presidential term with fewer jobs than when you started. And despite yesterday's good news, that's a trick President Bush still seems likely to pull off. posted by Richard at 2:13 AM
Since the tragedy of 9-11 which understandably shook and outraged everyone in this country, we have increasingly embraced at the highest official level what I think fairly can be called a paranoiac view of the world. Summarized in a phrase repeatedly used at the highest level, "he who is not with us is against us." I say repeatedly because actually some months ago I did a computer check to see how often it's been used at the very highest level in public statements.
The count then quite literally was ninety-nine. So it's a phrase which obviously reflects a deeply felt perception. I strongly suspect the person who uses that phrase doesn't know its historical or intellectual origins. It is a phrase popularized by Lenin (Applause) when he attacked the social democrats on the grounds that they were anti-Bolshevik and therefore he who is not with us is against us and can be handled accordingly.
Further on Mr. Brzezinski makes a point which I think dovetails with and helps to explain the Intelligence problems which I have been documenting.
The second condition, troubling condition, which contributes in my view to the crisis of credibility and to the state of isolation in which the United States finds itself today is due in part because that skewed view of the world is intensified by a fear that periodically verges on panic that is in itself blind. By this I mean the absence of a clearly, sharply defined perception of what is transpiring abroad regarding particularly such critically important security issues as the existence or the spread or the availability or the readiness in alien hands of weapons of mass destruction.
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States. That failure was contributed to and was compensated for by extremist demagogy which emphasizes the worst case scenarios which stimulates fear, which induces a very simple dichotomic view of world reality.
Let me hare off into my own thoughts here.
I have long believed that Conservatives build their policies around a reaction to fear. As individuals they are afraid of what they do not understand. One thing they do not understand is the world outside the United States. Not only is it strange and incomprehensible [all those people speaking other languages and praying to strange Gods.] it is very dangerous. 9/11 was graphic proof of how that strange outside world can reach out and destroy people and things which are American, familiar, and otherwise safe.
A second major threat to many conservatives is people who work to change our American society itself. The familiar is comfortable, and any effort to change the familiar threatens that comfort and increases that fear.
One way of dealing with those threats is to try to understand them. The major institution we have in society for studying and attempting to understand the things we do not is Universities and schools. A lot of people spend great effort to understand the world outside the US and the changes that are occurring in society, and gain a measure of comfort in their mastery of those things. Another institution which is more accessible to everyone is the Press generally.
But Universities themselves are special places, open to only a select few. Many people do not feel accepted in such environments, and find them as puzzling and as threatening as the world outside the US with its strange languages and cultures. In addition to that, many changes in society can be directly attributed to people in universities. For many outsiders, Universities are more likely to be viewed as sources of threat than of comfort.
Two other social ways of dealing with the frightening threats are to try to control them by force (military and law enforcement) or to find an environment with a clear, concise and unambiguous set of guidelines.
The first would lead to heavy investment (both financial and emotional) in an extremely strong military or in clear unambiguous demands for rigid law enforcement, and the second can lead to search for a social institution that bases itself on clear, unchanging and universal guidelines. Fundamentalist religion is often found as such a social institution.
It is difficult to find comfort in complex, nuanced ideas. When a person is afraid, he doesn't think well. So he is likely to search for clear and specific alternatives.
Enter the demagogue. The demagogue specializes in offering clear, black and white alternatives that do not require that a person make nuanced judgments.
Today in America we have an institutional source of such demogoguery in the right wing press and the related set of conservative institutes such as the American Heritage Society and the American Enterprise Institute. Much of it is based on the financing provided by Richard Mellon Scaife and by Rupert Murdoch. The conservatives in the Republican Party have built on this by creating a centrally controlled method of determining the current message to publish and an extremely disciplined method of keeping everyone on the same message. The result is a clear, black-and-white well-financed and unnuanced message from the media and from the politicians that is hard to get away from. It is especially attractive to people who want certainty in their lives and are afraid when they don't have it.
Part of the message is what to fear. That includes outsiders, foreigners, intellectuals and university professors, anti-Americans, and anyone who contradicts the message or policy they are currently pushing. All of these are threats that the population they are preaching to, which makes it more imperative that those people accept their message as The Answer to such threats.
Part of the message is who Not to listen to. This is the source of political attacks on individuals who hold different views such as those performed by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. David Brock's book is an excellent description of how this right-wing propaganda machine works. A lesson that conservatives learn from this is that anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy with a contrary agenda. This is why the people in the Bush administration have been "Stovepiping" raw Intelligence data to the decision makers and ignoring the analysis by the CIA, DIA, and State Department as described by Seymour Hersh's recent New Yorker article.
Another clear part of the message is to distrust the Press. They label it the "Liberal-biased" Press. The effect of this label is that a Conservative can discount any information the Press offers that disagrees with the Conservative message because it comes from a source with an agenda to attack conservatives. Any disagreement with the Conservative message proves the bias of the Press.
It's not that there isn't a lot of things out there to threaten people. 9/11 proves that. The problem is when our government takes a paranoid attitude and attempts to simply destroy every threat by force. America has a superb military, but a military force is primarily useful against the military force of another nation. It is a lot less useful against terrorist organizations which are not nation-based.
Since we don't have a large powerful anti-terrorist force, the problem of 9/11 had to be converted by Conservatives to one that could be attacked by out military. The attack on Afghanistan to get the al Queda did that, so the Bush administration then attacked Iraq. Saddam was a festering problem that could be reframed as an attack by our strong military on "terrorism".
It was also a very paranoid move. It makes very little sense to outsiders and non-Americans and in fact is very likely to create more dangers from terrorism than it could possibly solve. It is the violent reaction of a group of people who refuse to try to understand what threats really exist and how to deal with them because that is not a clear, black-and-white action that builds on the clear strengths of America.
I think is also comes from a recognition by Conservatives that America is probably past its peak as the dominate nation on Earth.
In short, I really think that Brzezinski is on to something fundamental in America today when he describes the actions of the Bush administration as paranoid.
More on the administrations war on our own Intelligence agencies
Sidney blumenthal in the guardian has more on how the bush People ignored the Intelligence reports from the CIA, etc. and depended on ideology for guidance, creating the mess in post-war Iraq.
In advance of the war, Bush (to be precise, Dick Cheney, the de facto prime minister to the distant monarch) viewed the CIA, the state department and other intelligence agencies not simply as uncooperative, but even disloyal, as their analysts continued to sift through information to determine what exactly might be true. For them, this process is at the essence of their professionalism and mission. Yet the strict insistence on the empirical was a threat to the ideological, facts an imminent danger to the doctrine. So those facts had to be suppressed, and those creating contrary evidence had to be marginalised, intimidated or have their reputations tarnished.
In the streets of Baghdad today, Americans do not feel welcome. United States military personnel in the city are hunkered down behind acres of fencing and razor wire inside what was once Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace. When L. Paul Bremer III, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, leaves the compound, he is always surrounded by bodyguards, carbines at the ready, and G.I.'s on patrol in the city's streets never let their hands stray far from the triggers of their machine guns or M-16 rifles. The official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that things in Baghdad and throughout Iraq are improving. But an average of 35 attacks are mounted each day on American forces inside Iraq by armed resisters of one kind or another, whom American commanders concede are operating with greater and greater sophistication. In the back streets of Sadr City, the impoverished Baghdad suburb where almost two million Shiites live -- and where Bush administration officials and Iraqi exiles once imagined American troops would be welcomed with sweets and flowers -- the mood, when I visited in September, was angry and resentful. In October, the 24-member American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council warned of a deteriorating security situation.
Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in Iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
I have made two trips to Iraq since the end of the war and interviewed dozens of sources in Iraq and in the United States who were involved in the planning and execution of the war and its aftermath. It is becoming painfully clear that the American plan (if it can even be dignified with the name) for dealing with postwar Iraq was flawed in its conception and ineptly carried out. At the very least, the bulk of the evidence suggests that what was probably bound to be a difficult aftermath to the war was made far more difficult by blinkered vision and overoptimistic assumptions on the part of the war's greatest partisans within the Bush administration. The lack of security and order on the ground in Iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar Iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Despite administration claims, it is simply not true that no one could have predicted the chaos that ensued after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In fact, many officials in the United States, both military and civilian, as well as many Iraqi exiles, predicted quite accurately the perilous state of things that exists in Iraq today. There was ample warning, both on the basis of the specifics of Iraq and the precedent of other postwar deployments -- in Panama, Kosovo and elsewhere -- that the situation in postwar Iraq was going to be difficult and might become unmanageable. What went wrong was not that no one could know or that no one spoke out. What went wrong is that the voices of Iraq experts, of the State Department almost in its entirety and, indeed, of important segments of the uniformed military were ignored. As much as the invasion of Iraq and the rout of Saddam Hussein and his army was a triumph of planning and implementation, the mess that is postwar Iraq is a failure of planning and implementation.
1. Getting In Too Deep With Chalabi
In the minds of the top officials of the Department of Defense during the run-up to the war, Iraq by the end of this year would have enough oil flowing to help pay for the country's reconstruction, a constitution nearly written and set for ratification and, perhaps most important, a popular new leader who shared America's vision not only for Iraq's future but also for the Middle East's.
Ahmad Chalabi may on the face of it seem an odd figure to count on to unify and lead a fractious postwar nation that had endured decades of tyrannical rule. His background is in mathematics and banking, he is a secular Shiite Muslim and he had not been in Baghdad since the late 1950's. But in the early 90's he became close to Richard Perle, who was an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, and in 1992, in the wake of the first gulf war, he founded the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella organization of Iraqi opposition groups in exile.
In the mid-90's, Chalabi attended conferences on a post-Hussein Iraq organized by Perle and sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. There he met a group of neoconservative and conservative intellectuals who had served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who later formed the core group that would persuade President George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq. As a number of Iraqi exiles have since related, Wolfowitz, then the dean of the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was particularly appalled and shamed by the first Bush administration's failure to help the Kurds and the southern Shiites in the aftermath of the first gulf war. Encouraged by President Bush to ''take matters into their own hands,'' these groups had risen against Saddam Hussein, only to be crushed by his forces while America did nothing. Wolfowitz and his colleagues believed that removing Saddam Hussein would have been the right way to end the first gulf war, and during their years out of power they lobbied the Clinton administration both publicly and privately to make the overthrow of Saddam Hussein a priority.
In the mid-90's Chalabi fell out of favor with the C.I.A. and the State Department, which questioned his popular support in Iraq and accused him of misappropriating American government funds earmarked for armed resistance by Iraqi exile groups against Saddam Hussein. He remained close with Perle and Wolfowitz, however, as well as with other neoconservative figures in Washington, including Douglas Feith, a former aide to Perle, and regularly appeared with them on panels at conservative policy institutes like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Chalabi lobbied senators and congressmen to support action against Saddam Hussein, and a coalition of neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, sent a letter to President Clinton calling for a tougher Iraq policy. Together they succeeded in persuading the Republican-controlled Congress in 1998 to pass the Iraq Liberation Act, signed into law by President Clinton, a piece of legislation that made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States.
After George W. Bush assumed the presidency, Chalabi's Washington allies were appointed to senior positions in the defense establishment. Wolfowitz became deputy defense secretary, Feith under secretary of defense for policy and Perle head of the Defense Policy Board. Chalabi and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon were united by a shared vision of a radically reshaped Middle East and a belief that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the essential first step in the realization of that vision. The Iraq Chalabi envisioned -- one that would make peace with Israel, have adversarial relations with Iran and become a democratic model for (or, seen another way, a threat to) Saudi Arabia -- coincided neatly with the plan of the administration neoconservatives, who saw post-Hussein Iraq as a launching pad for what they described as the democratization of the Middle East. (Wolfowitz, Perle and Chalabi all refused or did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.)
Bush had come into office strenuously opposing ''nation building,'' and in the early months of his presidency the neoconservatives' interventionist view was by no means dominant. But the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the movement new energy. Within days of the attacks, Wolfowitz was spearheading efforts to put on the table a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Initially these efforts seemed to go nowhere. There was the war in Afghanistan to fight first, and many senior officers within the military feared that a war in Iraq would stretch American military capabilities beyond their limit at a time when the threat of war loomed on the Korean Peninsula. But the war in Afghanistan was a quick success, and in early 2002 a vigorous lobbying effort by the neoconservatives, both in public and inside the White House, succeeded in moving the idea of Hussein's overthrow to the center of the administration's foreign policy agenda.
Planning began not only for the war itself but also for its aftermath, and various government departments and agencies initiated projects and study groups to consider the questions of postwar Iraq. As Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would put it later, planning ''began well before there was a decision to go to war. It was extensive.''
Chief among these agencies was the so-called Office of Special Plans, set up after Sept. 11, 2001, reporting to Douglas Feith in the Pentagon. It was given such a vague name, by Feith's own admission, because the administration did not want to have it widely known that there was a special unit in the Pentagon doing its own assessments of intelligence on Iraq. ''We didn't think it was wise to create a brand-new office and label it an office of Iraq policy,'' Feith told the BBC in July.
The office's main purpose was to evaluate the threat of Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capabilities; its mission reflected the Department of Defense's dissatisfaction with the C.I.A.'s conservative estimates of Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi provided the Office of Special Plans with information from defectors ostensibly from Saddam Hussein's weapons programs -- defectors who claimed to be able to establish that the Iraqi dictator was actively developing weapons of mass destruction.
Through such efforts, Chalabi grew even closer to those planning the war and what would follow. To the war planners, the Iraqi National Congress became not simply an Iraqi exile group of which Chalabi was a leader, but a kind of government-in-waiting with Chalabi at its head. The Pentagon's plan for postwar Iraq seems to have hinged, until the war itself, on the idea that Chalabi could be dropped into Baghdad and, once there, effect a smooth transition to a new administration.
At the insistence of the civilian administrators in the Pentagon, Chalabi and 500 of his fighters in the Free Iraqi Forces were flown to Nasiriya in southern Iraq in April, in the first weeks of the war. At the time, American military officials were continuing to stress the importance of Chalabi and the Free Iraqi Forces. Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described them as the ''core of the new Iraqi Army.'' But to the surprise and disappointment of American military leaders on the ground, Chalabi failed to make much of an impression on the people he tried to mobilize.
Timothy Carney, a former American ambassador to Sudan and Haiti who served in the reconstruction team in Iraq just after the war, says that there was, in the Pentagon, ''a complete lack of grasp of Chalabi's lack of appeal for ordinary Iraqis.'' In the end, Chalabi sat out the war in the Iraqi desert and was taken to Baghdad only after the city had fallen and the Americans had moved in.
Many Iraqis outside the Iraqi National Congress felt marginalized by the Pentagon's devotion to Chalabi. According to Isam Al Khafaji, a moderate Iraqi academic who worked with the State Department on prewar planning and later with the American reconstruction office in Baghdad, ''What I had originally envisioned -- working with allies in a democratic fashion'' -- soon turned into ''collaborating with occupying forces,'' not what he and other Iraqi exiles had had in mind at all.
Carney agrees. ''There was so much reliance on Chalabi in those early days,'' he says.
2. Shutting Out State
In the spring of 2002, as support for a war to oust Saddam Hussein took root within the Bush administration, the State Department began to gather information and draw up its own set of plans for postwar Iraq under the leadership of Thomas Warrick, a longtime State Department official who was then special adviser to the department's Office of Northern Gulf Affairs. This effort involved a great number of Iraqi exiles from across the political spectrum, from monarchists to communists and including the Iraqi National Congress.
Warrick's Future of Iraq Project, as it was called, was an effort to consider almost every question likely to confront a post-Hussein Iraq: the rebuilding of infrastructure, the shape Iraqi democracy might take, the carrying out of transitional justice and the spurring of economic development. Warrick called on the talents of many of the best Middle Eastern specialists at State and at the C.I.A. He divided his team into working groups, each of which took on one aspect of the reconstruction.
David L. Phillips, an American conflict-prevention specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and a former adviser to the State Department, served on the project's ''democratic principles'' group. In his view of the project, ''Iraqis did a lot of important work together looking at the future.'' But however useful the work itself was, Phillips says, the very process of holding the discussions was even more valuable. ''It involved Iraqis coming together, in many cases for the first time, to discuss and try to forge a common vision of Iraq's future,'' Phillips says.
There were a number of key policy disagreements between State and Defense. The first was over Chalabi. While the Pentagon said that a ''government in exile'' should be established, presumably led by Chalabi, to be quickly installed in Baghdad following the war, other Iraqis, including the elder statesman of the exile leaders, Adnan Pachaci, insisted that any government installed by United States fiat would be illegitimate in the eyes of the Iraqi people. And the State Department, still concerned that Chalabi had siphoned off money meant for the Iraqi resistance and that he lacked public support, opposed the idea of a shadow government. The State Department managed to win this particular battle, and no government in exile was set up.
There was also a broader disagreement about whether and how quickly Iraq could become a full-fledged democracy. The State Department itself was of two minds on this question. One prewar State Department report, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists, asserted that ''liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve'' in Iraq and that ''electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.'' The C.I.A. agreed with this assessment; in March 2003, the agency issued a report that was widely reported to conclude that prospects for democracy in a post-Hussein Iraq were bleak. In contrast, the neoconservatives within the Bush administration, above all within the Department of Defense, consistently asserted that the C.I.A. and the State Department were wrong and that there was no reason to suppose that Iraq could not become a full-fledged democracy, and relatively quickly and smoothly.
But Thomas Warrick, who has refused to be interviewed since the end of the war, was, according to participants in the project, steadfastly committed to Iraqi democracy. Feisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-American lawyer who also served on the project's democratic principles group, credits Warrick with making the Future of Iraq Project a genuinely democratic and inclusive venture. Warrick, he says, ''was fanatically devoted to the idea that no one should be allowed to dominate the Future of Iraq Project and that all voices should be heard -- including moderate Islamist voices. It was a remarkable accomplishment.''
In fact, Istrabadi rejects the view that the State Department was a holdout against Iraqi democracy. ''From Colin Powell on down,'' he says, ''I've spent hundreds of hours with State Department people, and I've never heard one say democracy was not viable in Iraq. Not one.''
Although Istrabadi is an admirer of Wolfowitz, he says that the rivalry between State and Defense was so intense that the Future of Iraq Project became anathema to the Pentagon simply because it was a State Department project. ''At the Defense Department,'' he recalls, ''we were seen as part of 'them.''' Istrabadi was so disturbed by the fight between Defense and State that on June 1, 2002, he says, he took the matter up personally with Douglas Feith. ''I sat with Feith,'' he recalls, ''and said, 'You've got to decide what your policy is.'''
The Future of Iraq Project did draw up detailed reports, which were eventually released to Congress last month and made available to reporters for The New York Times. The 13 volumes, according to The Times, warned that ''the period immediately after regime change might offer . . . criminals the opportunity to engage in acts of killing, plunder and looting.''
But the Defense Department, which came to oversee postwar planning, would pay little heed to the work of the Future of Iraq Project. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired Army officer who was later given the job of leading the reconstruction of Iraq, says he was instructed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to ignore the Future of Iraq Project.
Garner has said that he asked for Warrick to be added to his staff and that he was turned down by his superiors. Judith Yaphe, a former C.I.A. analyst and a leading expert on Iraqi history, says that Warrick was ''blacklisted'' by the Pentagon. ''He did not support their vision,'' she told me.
And what was this vision?
Yaphe's answer is unhesitant: ''Ahmad Chalabi.'' But it went further than that: ''The Pentagon didn't want to touch anything connected to the Department of State.''
None of the senior American officials involved in the Future of Iraq Project were taken on board by the Pentagon's planners. And this loss was considerable. ''The Office of Special Plans discarded all of the Future of Iraq Project's planning,'' David Phillips says. ''I don't know why.''
To say all this is not to claim that the Future of Iraq Project alone would have prevented the postwar situation from deteriorating as it did. Robert Perito, a former State Department official who is one of the world's leading experts on postconflict police work, says of the Future of Iraq Project: ''It was a good idea. It brought the exiles together, a lot of smart people, and its reports were very impressive. But the project never got to the point where things were in place that could be implemented.''
Nonetheless, Istrabadi points out that ''we in the Future of Iraq Project predicted widespread looting. You didn't have to have a degree from a Boston university to figure that one out. Look at what happened in L.A. after the police failed to act quickly after the Rodney King verdict. It was entirely predictable that in the absence of any authority in Baghdad that you'd have chaos and lawlessness.''
According to one participant, Iraqi exiles on the project specifically warned of the dangers of policing postwar Iraq: ''Adnan Pachaci's first question to U.S. officials was, How would they maintain law and order after the war was over? They told him not to worry, that things would get back to normal very soon.''
3. Too Little Planning, Too Late
The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was established in the Defense Department, under General Garner's supervision, on Jan. 20, 2003, just eight weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Because the Pentagon had insisted on essentially throwing out the work and the personnel of the Future of Iraq Project, Garner and his planners had to start more or less from scratch. Timothy Carney, who served in ORHA under Garner, explains that ORHA lacked critical personnel once it arrived in Baghdad. ''There were scarcely any Arabists in ORHA in the beginning'' at a senior level, Carney says. ''Some of us had served in the Arab world, but we were not experts, or fluent Arabic speakers.'' According to Carney, Defense officials ''said that Arabists weren't welcome because they didn't think Iraq could be democratic.''
Because of the battle between Defense and State, ORHA, which Douglas Feith called the ''U.S. government nerve center'' for postwar planning, lacked not only information and personnel but also time. ORHA had only two months to figure out what to plan for, plan for it and find the people to implement it. A senior Defense official later admitted that in late January ''we only had three or four people''; in mid-February, the office conducted a two-day ''rehearsal'' of the postwar period at the National Defense University in Washington. Judith Yaphe says that ''even the Messiah couldn't have organized a program in that short a time.''
Although ORHA simply didn't have the time, resources or expertise in early 2003 to formulate a coherent postwar plan, Feith and others in the Defense Department were telling a different story to Congress. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Feb. 11, shortly before the beginning of the war, Feith reassured the assembled senators that ORHA was ''staffed by officials detailed from departments and agencies throughout the government.'' Given the freeze-out of the State Department officials from the Future of Iraq Project, this description hardly encompassed the reality of what was actually taking place bureaucratically.
Much of the postwar planning that did get done before the invasion focused on humanitarian efforts -- Garner's area of expertise. Through the U.S. Agency for International Development, Washington was planning for a possible humanitarian emergency akin to the one that occurred after the first gulf war, when hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled their homes in northern Iraq and needed both emergency relief and protection from Saddam Hussein. This operation, led by Garner, had succeeded brilliantly. American planners in 2003 imagined (and planned for) a similar emergency taking place. There were plans drawn up for housing and feeding Iraqi refugees. But there was little thought given to other contingencies -- like widespread looting.
Garner told me that while he had expected Iraqis to loot the symbols of the old regime, like Hussein's palaces, he had been utterly unprepared for the systematic looting and destruction of practically every public building in Baghdad. In fairness to Garner, many of the Iraqis I spoke with during my trips were also caught by surprise. One mullah in Sadr City observed to me caustically that he had never seen such wickedness. ''People can be weak,'' he said. ''I knew this before, of course, but I did not know how weak. But while I do not say it is the Americans' fault, I simply cannot understand how your soldiers could have stood by and watched. Maybe they are weak, too. Or maybe they are wicked.''
One reason for the looting in Baghdad was that there were so many intact buildings to loot. In contrast to their strategy in the first gulf war, American war planners had been careful not to attack Iraqi infrastructure. This was partly because of their understanding of the laws of war and partly because of their desire to get Iraq back up and running as quickly and smoothly as possible. They seem to have imagined that once Hussein fell, things would go back to normal fairly quickly. But on the ground, the looting and the violence went on and on, and for the most part American forces largely did nothing.
Or rather, they did only one thing -- station troops to protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry. This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry -- not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry -- probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil. ''It is not that they could not protect everything, as they say,'' a leader in the Hawza, the Shiite religious authority, told me. ''It's that they protected nothing else. The Oil Ministry is not off by itself. It's surrounded by other ministries, all of which the Americans allowed to be looted. So what else do you want us to think except that you want our oil?''
As Istrabadi, the Iraqi-American lawyer from the Future of Iraq Project, says, ''When the Oil Ministry is the only thing you protect, what do you expect people to think?'' And, he adds: ''It can't be that U.S. troops didn't know where the National Museum was. All you have to do is follow the signs -- they're in English! -- to Museum Square.''
For its part, the Hawza could do little to protect the 17 out of 23 Iraqi ministries that were gutted by looters, or the National Library, or the National Museum (though sheiks repeatedly called on looters to return the stolen artifacts). But it was the Hawza, and not American forces, that protected many of Baghdad's hospitals from looters -- which Hawza leaders never fail to point out when asked whether they would concede that the United States is now doing a great deal of good in Iraq. The memory of this looting is like a bone in Iraq's collective throat and has given rise to conspiracy theories about American motives and actions.
''The U.S. thinks of Iraq as a big cake,'' one young Iraqi journalist told me. ''By letting people loot -- and don't tell me they couldn't have stopped the looters if they'd wanted to; look at the war! -- they were arranging to get more profits for Mr. Cheney, for Bechtel, for all American corporations.''
4. The Troops: Too Few, Too Constricted
On Feb. 25, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, warned Congress that postwar Iraq would require a commitment of ''several hundred thousand'' U.S. troops. Shinseki's estimate was dismissed out of hand by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other civilian officials at the Pentagon, where war plans called for a smaller, more agile force than had been used in the first gulf war. Wolfowitz, for example, told Congress on Feb. 27 that Shinseki's number was ''wildly off the mark,'' adding, ''It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security force and his army.'' Shinseki retired soon afterward.
But Shinseki wasn't the only official who thought there were going to be insufficient troops on the ground to police Iraq in the aftermath of the war. The lack of adequate personnel in the military's plan, especially the military police needed for postconflict work, was pointed out by both senior members of the uniformed military and by seasoned peacekeeping officials in the United Nations secretariat.
Former Ambassador Carney, recalling his first days in Iraq with ORHA, puts it this way, with surprising bitterness: The U.S. military ''simply did not understand or give enough priority to the transition from their military mission to our political military mission.''
The Department of Defense did not lack for military and civilian officials -- men and women who supported the war -- counseling in private that policing a country militarily would not be easy. As Robert Perito recalls: ''The military was warned there would be looting. There has been major looting in every important postconflict situation of the past decade. The looting in Panama City in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion did more damage to the Panamanian economy than the war itself. And there was vast looting and disorder in Kosovo. We know this.''
Securing Iraq militarily after victory on the battlefield was, in the Pentagon's parlance, Phase IV of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Phases I through III were the various stages of the invasion itself; Phase IV involved so-called stability and support operations -- in other words, the postwar. The military itself, six months into the occupation, is willing to acknowledge -- at least to itself -- that it did not plan sufficiently for Phase IV. In its secret report ''Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategic Lessons Learned,'' a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Times in August, the Department of Defense concedes that ''late formation of Department of Defense [Phase IV] organizations limited time available for the development of detailed plans and pre-deployment coordination.''
The planning stages of the invasion itself were marked by detailed preparations and frequent rehearsals. Lt. Col. Scott Rutter is a highly decorated U.S. battalion commander whose unit, the Second Battalion, Seventh Infantry of the Third Infantry Division, helped take the Baghdad airport. He says that individual units rehearsed their own roles and the contingencies they might face over and over again. By contrast, the lack of postwar planning made the difficulties the United States faced almost inevitable. ''We knew what the tactical end state was supposed to be at the end of the war, but we were never told what the end state, the goal was, for the postwar,'' Rutter said. (Rutter was on active duty when I spoke to him, but he is scheduled to retire this month.)
Rutter's unit controlled a section of Baghdad in the immediate postwar period, and he was forced to make decisions on his own on everything from how to deal with looters to whether to distribute food. When I asked him in Baghdad in September whether he had rehearsed this or, indeed, whether he received any instructions from up the chain of command, he simply smiled and shook his head.
Rutter's view is confirmed by the ''After Action'' report of the Third Infantry Division, a document that is available on an Army Web site but that has received little attention. Running 293 pages and marked ''official use only,'' it is a comprehensive evaluation of the division's performance during the war in Iraq, covering every aspect of operations, from the initial invasion to the postwar period. The tone of the report is mostly self-congratulatory. ''Operating considerably beyond existing doctrine,'' it begins, ''the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) proved that a lethal, flexible and disciplined mechanized force could conduct continuous offensive operations over extended distances for 21 days.''
If the report contains one pre-eminent lesson, it is that extensive training is what made the division's success possible. ''The roots of the division's successful attack to Baghdad,'' the authors of the report write, ''are found on the training fields of Fort Stewart'' -- the Third Infantry Division's Georgia base. ''A direct correlation can be drawn between the division's training cycle prior to crossing the line of departure and the division's successful attack into Iraq.''
But as the report makes clear, no such intensive training was undertaken for postwar operations. As the report's authors note: ''Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase IV. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase IV in the absence of guidance.''
The report concludes that ''division planners should have drafted detailed plans on Phase IV operations that would have allowed it'' -- the Third Infantry Division -- ''to operate independently outside of guidance from higher headquarters. Critical requirements should have been identified prior to'' the beginning of the war, the report states. The division also should have had ''a plan to execute'' a stability-and-support operation ''for at least 30 days.''
The report says that such an operation should have included ''protecting infrastructure, historic sites, administrative buildings, cultural sites, financial institutions, judicial/legal sites and religious sites.'' It notes, with hindsight, that ''protecting these sites must be planned for early in the planning process.'' But as the report makes clear, no such planning took place.
Without a plan, without meticulous rehearsal and without orders or, at the very least, guidance from higher up the chain of command, the military is all but paralyzed. And in those crucial first postwar days in Baghdad, American forces (and not only those in the Third Infantry Division) behaved that way, as all around them Baghdad was ransacked and most of the categories of infrastructure named in the report were destroyed or seriously damaged.
Some military analysts go beyond the lack of Phase IV planning and more generally blame the Bush administration's insistence, upon coming into office, that it would no longer commit American armed forces to nation-building missions -- a position symbolized by the decision, now being reconsidered, to close the Peacekeeping Institute at the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn. According to Maj. Gen. William Nash, now retired from the Army, who commanded U.S. forces in northern Bosnia after the signing of the Dayton peace accords: ''This is a democratic army. If the national command authority tells it that it doesn't have to worry about something anymore'' -- he was talking about peacekeeping -- ''it stops worrying about it.''
It is hardly a secret that within the Army, peacekeeping duty is not the road to career advancement. Civil-affairs officers are not the Army's ''high-fliers,'' Rutter notes.
Nash, understandably proud of his service as commander of U.S. forces in postconflict Bosnia, is chagrined by the way American forces behaved in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. ''I know they expected to be greeted with flowers and candy,'' he says, ''or at least the civilians in the Pentagon had assured them they would be. But we know from experience that this kind of welcome lasts only a few days at most. You are welcomed with roses -- for one day. Then you have to prove yourself, and keep on proving yourself, every succeeding day of the mission. There are no excuses, and few second chances. That was why, when we went into Bosnia, we went in hard. The only way to keep control of the situation, even if people are initially glad to see you, is to take charge immediately and never let go of control. Instead, in postwar Iraq, we just stood around and responded to events, rather than shaping them.''
5. Neglecting ORHA
In his Congressional testimony before the war, Douglas Feith described General Garner's mission as head of ORHA as ''integrating the work of the three substantive operations'' necessary in postwar Iraq. These were humanitarian relief, reconstruction and civil administration. Garner, Feith said, would ensure that the fledgling ORHA could ''plug in smoothly'' to the military's command structure on the ground in Iraq. But far from plugging in smoothly to Central Command, ORHA's people found themselves at odds with the military virtually from the start.
Timothy Carney has given the best and most damning account of this dialogue of the deaf between ORHA officials and the U.S. military on the ground in Iraq. ''I should have had an inkling of the trouble ahead for our reconstruction team in Iraq,'' he wrote in a searing op-ed article in The Washington Post in late June, ''from the hassle we had just trying to get there. About 20 of us from the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance showed up at a military airport in Kuwait on April 24 for a flight to Baghdad. But some general's plane had broken down, so he had taken ours.''
Carney stressed the low priority the military put on ORHA's efforts. ''Few in the military understood the urgency of our mission,'' he wrote, ''yet we relied on the military for support. For example, the military commander set rules for transportation: we initially needed a lead military car, followed by the car with civilians and a military vehicle bringing up the rear. But there weren't enough vehicles. One day we had 31 scheduled missions and only nine convoys, so 22 missions were scrubbed.''
More substantively, he added that ''no lessons seem to have taken hold from the recent nation-building efforts in Bosnia or Kosovo, so we in ORHA felt as though we were reinventing the wheel.'' And doing so under virtually impossible constraints. Carney quoted an internal ORHA memorandum arguing that the organization ''is not being treated seriously enough by the command given what we are supposed to do.''
The lack of respect for the civilian officials in ORHA was a source of astonishment to Lieutenant Colonel Rutter. ''I was amazed by what I saw,'' he says. ''There would be a meeting called by Ambassador Bodine'' -- the official on Garner's staff responsible for Baghdad -- ''and none of the senior officers would show up. I remember thinking, This isn't right, and also thinking that if it had been a commander who had called the meeting, they would have shown up all right.''
Carney attributes some of the blame for ORHA's impotence to the fact that it set up shop in Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, where ''nobody knew where anyone was, and, worse, almost no one really knew what was going on outside the palace. Some of us managed to talk to Iraqis, but not many, since the military didn't want you to go out for security reasons unless accompanied by M.P.'s.''
Kevin Henry of CARE, a humanitarian organization active in Iraq, says that he still has similar concerns. ''One of my biggest worries,'' he says, ''is the isolation of the palace.''
Garner disputes these complaints. He is adamant that he managed to talk with many Iraqis and strongly disagrees with claims that officials in the palace were out of touch.
Still, ORHA under Pentagon control was compelled to adhere rigidly to military force-protection rules that were anything but appropriate to the work the civilians at ORHA were trying to do. Larry Hollingworth, a former British colonel and relief specialist who has worked in Sarajevo and Chechnya and who briefly served with ORHA right after Baghdad fell, says that ''at the U.S. military's insistence, we traveled out from our fortified headquarters in Saddam's old Republican Palace in armored vehicles, wearing helmets and flak jackets, trying to convince Iraqis that peace was at hand, and that they were safe. It was ridiculous.''
And Judith Yaphe adds, ''In some ways, we're even more isolated than the British were when they took over Iraq'' after World War I.
Kevin Henry has described the Bush administration as peculiarly susceptible to a kind of ''liberation theology in which they couldn't get beyond their own rhetoric and see things in Iraq as they really were.''
As the spring wore on, administration officials continued to insist publicly that nothing was going seriously wrong in Iraq. But the pressure to do something became too strong to resist. Claiming that it had been a change that had been foreseen all along (though it had not been publicly announced and was news to Garner's staff), President Bush replaced Garner in May with L. Paul Bremer. Glossing over the fact that Bremer had no experience in postwar reconstruction or nation-building, the Pentagon presented Bremer as a good administrator -- something, or so Defense Department officials implied on background, Garner was not.
Bremer's first major act was not auspicious. Garner had resisted the kind of complete de-Baathification of Iraqi society that Ahmad Chalabi and some of his allies in Washington had favored. In particular, he had resisted calls to completely disband the Iraqi Army. Instead, he had tried only to fire Baathists and senior military officers against whom real charges of complicity in the regime's crimes could be demonstrated and to use most members of the Iraqi Army as labor battalions for reconstruction projects.
Bremer, however, took the opposite approach. On May 15, he announced the complete disbanding of the Iraqi Army, some 400,000 strong, and the lustration of 50,000 members of the Baath Party. As one U.S. official remarked to me privately, ''That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.''
The decision -- which many sources say was made not by Bremer but in the White House -- was disastrous. In a country like Iraq, where the average family size is 6, firing 450,000 people amounts to leaving 2,700,000 people without incomes; in other words, more than 10 percent of Iraq's 23 million people. The order produced such bad feeling on the streets of Baghdad that salaries are being reinstated for all soldiers. It is a slow and complicated process, however, and there have been demonstrations by fired military officers in Iraq over the course of the summer and into the fall.
6. Ignoring the Shiites
It should have been clear from the start that the success or failure of the American project in postwar Iraq depended not just on the temporary acquiescence of Iraq's Shiite majority but also on its support -- or at least its tacit acceptance of a prolonged American presence. Before the war, the Pentagon's planners apparently believed that this would not be a great problem. The Shiite tradition in Iraq, they argued, was nowhere near as radical as it was in neighboring Iran. The planners also seem to have assumed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Shiites would welcome American forces as liberators -- an assumption based on the fact of the Shiite uprisings in southern Iraq in 1991, in the aftermath of the first gulf war. American officials do not seem to have taken seriously enough the possibility that the Shiites might welcome their liberation from Saddam Hussein but still view the Americans as unwelcome occupiers who would need to be persuaded, and if necessary compelled, to leave Iraq as soon as possible.
Again, an overestimation of the role of Ahmad Chalabi may help account for this miscalculation. Chalabi is a Shiite, and based on that fact, the Pentagon's planners initially believed that he would enjoy considerable support from Iraq's Shiite majority. But it rapidly became clear to American commanders on the ground in postwar Iraq that the aristocratic, secular Chalabi enjoyed no huge natural constituency in the country, least of all among the observant Shiite poor.
The Americans gravely underestimated the implications of the intense religious feelings that Iraqi Shiites were suddenly free to manifest after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Making religious freedom possible for the Shiites was one of the great accomplishments of the war, as administration officials rightly claim. But the Shiites soon demonstrated that they were interested in political as well as religious autonomy. And although the Americans provided the latter, their continued presence in Iraq was seen as an obstacle to the former -- especially as the occupation dragged on and Secretary Rumsfeld warned of a ''long, hard slog ahead.''
After the war, American planners thought they might be able to engage with one of the most moderate of the important Shiite ayatollahs, Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim. He was rhetorically anti-American and yet was willing (and urged his followers) to establish a detente with the occupiers. Had he lived, he might have helped the Americans assuage Shiite fears and resentments. But Hakim was assassinated during Friday prayers in the holy city of Najaf on Aug. 29, along with more than 80 of his followers. At this point, it is not clear who the current American candidate is, although there are reports that American planners now believe they can work with and through Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Meanwhile, in the streets the anger of ordinary Shiites grows hotter. Every reporter who has been in Iraq has encountered it, even if administration officials think they know better. As Robert Perito argues, ''One of the things that has saved the U.S. effort is that the Shiites have decided to cooperate with us, however conditionally.'' But, he adds, ''if the Shiites decide that they can't continue to support us, then our position will become untenable.''
Although they are, for the most part, not yet ready to rebel, the Shiites' willingness to tolerate the American occupation authorities is growing dangerously thin. ''We're happy the Americans got rid of Saddam Hussein,'' a young member of the Hawza in Sadr City told me. ''But we do not approve of replacing 'the tyrant of the age''' -- as he referred to Hussein -- ''with the Americans. We will wait a little longer, but we will fight if things don't change soon.''
Or as his sheik told me later that afternoon at the nearby mosque, so far they ''have no orders'' from their religious superiors to fight the Americans. Still, he warned, ''we have been very nice to them. But the U.S. is not reciprocating.'' Last month, in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the first firefights between American forces and Shiite militants took place, suggesting that time may be running out even more quickly than anyone imagined.
The Next Steps
In Iraq today, there is a steadily increasing disconnect between what the architects of the occupation think they are accomplishing and how Iraqis on the street evaluate postwar progress. And as the security situation fails to improve, these perceptions continue to darken.
The Bush administration fiercely denies that this ''alarmist'' view accurately reflects Iraqi reality. It insists that the positive account it has been putting forward is the real truth and that the largely downbeat account in much of the press is both inaccurate and unduly despairing. The corner has been turned, administration officials repeat.
Whether the United States is eventually successful in Iraq (and saying the mission ''has to succeed,'' as so many people do in Washington, is not a policy but an expression of faith), even supporters of the current approach of the Coalition Provisional Authority concede that the United States is playing catch-up in Iraq. This is largely, though obviously not entirely, because of the lack of postwar planning during the run-up to the war and the mistakes of the first 60 days after the fall of Saddam Hussein. And the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that what happened in the immediate aftermath of what the administration calls Operation Iraqi Freedom was a self-inflicted wound, a morass of our own making.
Call it liberation or occupation, a dominating American presence in Iraq was probably destined to be more difficult, and more costly in money and in blood, than administration officials claimed in the months leading up to the war. But it need not have been this difficult. Had the military been as meticulous in planning its strategy and tactics for the postwar as it was in planning its actions on the battlefield, the looting of Baghdad, with all its disastrous material and institutional and psychological consequences, might have been stopped before it got out of control. Had the collective knowledge embedded in the Future of Iraq Project been seized upon, rather than repudiated by, the Pentagon after it gained effective control of the war and postwar planning a few months before the war began, a genuine collaboration between the American authorities and Iraqis, both within the country and from the exiles, might have evolved. And had the lessons of nation-building -- its practice but also its inevitability in the wars of the 21st century -- been embraced by the Bush administration, rather than dismissed out of hand, then the opportunities that did exist in postwar Iraq would not have been squandered as, in fact, they were.
The real lesson of the postwar mess is that while occupying and reconstructing Iraq was bound to be difficult, the fact that it may be turning into a quagmire is not a result of fate, but rather (as quagmires usually are) a result of poor planning and wishful thinking. Both have been in evidence to a troubling degree in American policy almost from the moment the decision was made to overthrow Saddam Hussein's bestial dictatorship.
David Rieff is the author, most recently, of ''A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.'' His last article for the magazine was about the United Nations sanctions imposed on Iraq.
