Cobban and Cole
Check out Helena Cobban's "Just World News" for an account of our program together on Sunday in Ann Arbor on Iraq, and her comments on Trudy Rubin and Jim Webb on Iraq.
As for her critique of my present lack of policy prescriptions for Iraq, I'm just being realistic. It is increasingly silly to dream up ten point plans to resolve the Iraq crisis. It would be nice to see a multilateral approach, but we should not fool ourselves that the Bangladeshis can succeed in al-Anbar where the Marines couldn't. It would be nice to see Maliki's reconciliation program broadened to include neo-Baathist guerrillas and Salafis, as it must if it is to succeed. But that isn't going to happen because Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Kurds would veto it, as would the US Congress. I actually think that offering glib solutions like "Complete US withdrawal in 3 months" is the cop-out, because they seem to offer hope but are no more substantial than a desert mirage and about as likely to quench any existential thirst.
It is better just to admit to people when there are not good options, and be honest with them about the various likely scenarios that would ensue from what realistic options there are. That is what I try to do. It is not a cop-out.
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/19/2006 12:25:00 AM
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While it is true that a ready solution is wishful thinking, there are certainly steps that can help.
Congress can ban the "enduring bases" in Iraq.
Out of the 200 or so countries in the world, the USA is the least appropriate to train the Iraqi Army due to its imperial designs and also appalling record. Other countries can easily take over the entire training enterprise.
The thousands of US Likudist in Iraq must leave. The reconstruction execuse is over, and Iraq can pick advisers from anywhere else.
The bizarre largest embassy in the world project must be ditched. Iraq, and the ME in general are not some Frankenstein lab for the retarded American president.
The Oil majors are paying Iraqis with influence in Baghdad "lobbying fees". That is called bribery in plain language and is against US laws. That must be investigated by the FBI.
All the Iraq "plans" are muddled blends of the polar choices: CAR (cut and run) and STC (stay the course). Each requires various conditions that cancel any supposed distinctions. For instance, the most strident advocate of CAR would probably halt a US retreat if, at the outset, hell broke loose. On the other hand, if progress remains ellusive, even the most any zeal for STC is likely to flag by 2009. Both sides gamble on the appearance of some sort of order and stability.
Most stubbornly assert that the US can leverage some sort of "better" outcome through some blend of military tactics (Krepinevich), public employment (Eric Davis), or election magic (Diamond). Even Pape sees US persistence in the name of oil and regional security.
Only two real dissenters appear: Odom and Polk. Both argue that anti-US insurgents and militia will inherit Iraq, despite whatever the US thinks it will leave behind. They don't seem fazed by the specters and boogeymen that others conjure to dissuade any serious discussion of this prospect.
But what if they are absolutely right? And what proof is there that the US cannot have a functional relationship with an anti-US autocracy? Khaddafi is basically the same old boy, yet look how he has been allowed back into the community of nations. Putin is authoritarian and anti-US, as is Chávez, yet this does not impede orderly trade in oil and gas.
Failure to recognize and accept the most likely outcome makes everyone, more or less, passenger on the same bandwagon. They may not like the conductor, but want to hear the same victory march.
So much military history is useless because it rests on memoirs of victors or superficial accounts of victory threaded together to prescribe some formula for success. Too little deals with the muddles outcomes of stalemates, draws, or defeats. It is certainly much harder to prove any thesis on stalemates, and there is no rewarding publishing career on the theme. Of all the plethora of popular US literature on Vietnam, little has anything to do with the Vietnamese.
A serious history of the US in Iraq, if it ever gets written, will probably discard most of the reconstruction conundrums and lost causes and give the Odom / Polk forecasts an air of inevitability. It will amaze serious people that anyone believed in use of force to turn a factious Muslim oilocracy into a pro-Israel, free market democracy.
Meanwhile, the popular mind will remained affixed with a link of Iraq to 9/11, uniform worship, and an obscure attribution of failure to liberal traitors. People who dissent from this cult will be tarred the same way as Kerry or McGovern.
Watch: more and more will quietly gravitate to the recognition of failure, yet camouflage this in all sorts of patriotic and mystical lingo. They know that Odom and Polk (and belatedly WFB, Fukuyama, and G. Will) are right, but know that US polical culture and popular psyche will need some vast protective myth. The Cause was holy, but undone by [fill in the blank].
Prof Cole - I agree with your acceptance of a "non-plan" as the only reasonable position at this juncture. All plans involve dependencies, events or actions that need to take place to ensure the feasibility or success of other events / actions. Who could reasonably state that one step along a plan is going to succeed in Iraq at this point? Or that it is the only reasonable path to pursue?
Ms Cobban's position that the UN is the best-positioned to facilitate US withdrawl and re-create peace in Iraq is disingenuous or unrealistic. The task is supremely challenging: enable the withdrawal of an occupying power during combat while guiding in-country sectarian forces toward re-entry (or new entry) into formal governing processes and establishment of a dynamic peace. The UN has never accomplished anything nearly so complex or so dangerous, nor has it ever been agile in negotiating multi-stakeholder political minefields.
To suggest that involving the UN is the only pathway to US withdrawl is fantastic. To suggest that formation of a UN peacekeeping force and a transition-to-democracy team should begin now is realistic. (Yes, OK, Iraq's already a democracy; perhaps a democracy-repair team...) But until we know the make-up of those teams, their mandates, and their resource levels we won't know anything about even their potential effectiveness.
Keep up the good work.
RATIO OF TROOPS TO OPPOSITION WORSENS DAILY
The number of Iraqis in opposition to our troops and their armament and their relative organization have all increased vis a vis our troops. What we could have accomplished with 140,000 troops and, god forbid, a plan in place is long gone. We've given the opposition time to organize and arm which leads to the conclusion that our troops are more in harms way for each passing day.
With luck the Democrats can secure enough Congressional control in November to pry the hitherto inept GOP leadership away from sole planning authority. This should free up the military to more freely disclose what needs to be done operationally and what results are most likely.
"Doing nothing" does constitute a default "option" in the absence of doing anything else, but so what? Who would wish to claim the proud paternity of just another euphemism for helplessly acquiescing in a steadily disintegrating status quo? Doing the same thing over and over again while expecting future, magically different results has a name -- not "realism," but "fanaticism." Calling oneself a "realist" for offering no plausible alternative to a perfectly plausible withdrawal of American forces from Iraq does not make one "realistic" but rather "fatalistic."
Juan Cole does not engage Helena Cobban's basic point that America has "no damn business" in Iraq. Juan Cole obviously and paternalistically thinks differently and has on many occasions frankly endorsed the continued violation of Iraqi "sovereign" airspace by American (and other foreign) air forces for the express purpose of bombing Iraqi military formations at or above the company level. Obviously, although he does not say this openly, Professor Cole has no confidence in the Shiites and Kurds to defeat (or negotiate a peaceful settlement with) any reconstituted Sunni national army. So the good professor just conveniently assumes and supposes that America will go on indefinitely serving as the Kurdish-Shiite Air National Guard even after we stop stupidly serving as their mercenary militia -- and all at the helpless American taxpayer's expense.
This unwarranted, unauthorized, illegal, and ruinous use of America's military assets against one, both, or all sides of the ongoing Iraqi civil war simply cannot continue. It can't continue because, as Hezbollah demonstrated in Lebanon (and like the Vietnamese demonstrated in Vietnam) the forces fighting the foreign military occupation can easily get more -- and ever more lethal -- weapons to use against American armor, aircraft, and infantry. Worst of all from the American point of view, whoever wants to emerge with any sort of political credibility at the end of the civil war will most assuredly have earned that credibility by killing the most Americans. What fame and renown Nasrallah earned in Lebanon against the Israelis will seem as nothing compared to what Moqtadr "Just call me Saladin" Al-Sadr can earn by unceremoniously booting America out of Iraq. As Zbigniew Brezinski said recently, the people who keep begging us to stay will probably leave with us when we go -- in a panicked helicopter evacuation off the Badhdad Green Zone Castle rooftop, probably.
As a former Israeli general and Prime Minister told Seymour Hersch years ago, America now "can only choose the size of its humiliation." Thanks, Ehud. Like Donkey told Shrek: "Only a true friend would be that cruelly honest." The longer we stall, the uglier and more expensive the exit.
As with the Nixon-Kissinger Fig Leaf Contingent in which I served, the Cheney-Bush Buy Time Brigade only fights and dies in Iraq so that those disinterested and uninvolved Americans who profit from this obscene warfare welfare can go on milking the make-work militarism for all its worth. Now as then, "We are the unwilling, led by the unqualified, to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful." The time has long since passed for this shit to stop. The "realistic fanatics" can say what they want, but I agree with Helena Cobban that America has "no damn business in Iraq" and, from this Vietnam Veteran's point of view, we Americans would do much better putting our own Vice President, President, and Secretary of War in a cage and on trial than worrying about what, if anything, the Iraqi people want to do with Saddam Hussein. We don't have any damn business involving ourselves in that question, either.
Cognitorex: Yes, putting "the adults" back in charge of the Congress is probably the single most important beneficial action we can undertake. (Not that it's a plan that would be adopted by the Bush administration.) But legislators have only a slow and attenuated connection to military decision-making.
Sure, a democrat-controlled House Armed Services Committee can invite scores of generals, colonels even, to present observations & ideas, but sorting through those ideas as a committee would still leave us a pitifully long way from actionable strategy much less directives from the Pentagon. Which leads to Plan B, I suppose, which needs to wait till 2008...
To return to Prof Cole's argument, sort of, it's not that either of the above steps would look bad as part of a 10-pt plan. But they're way contingent on events (only tangentially related to Iraq) and they need to take place alongside 100s of other parallel and perhaps even contradictory measures. Same with giving the whole game over to the UN...
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