The Adults take Charge
The Reality Based Community Strikes Back in Iraq
The professionals take charge. Bush is bringing in Ryan Crocker, a distinguished career foreign service officer, as the new US ambassador to Iraq. And Gen. David Petraeus will replace Gen. Casey as top ground commander in Iraq. Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing ambassador to Iraq, will go as ambassador to the United Nations, replacing the lying blowhard John Bolton.
I'm stricken with a case of the "what ifs" and "if onlys"! What if Gates had been at the Pentagon in 2003 and Petraeus had been in charge of the US military in Iraq and Crocker had been there instead of Paul Bremer? These are competent professionals who know what they are doing. Gates is clear-sighted enough to tell Congress that the US is not winning in Iraq, unlike his smooth-talking, arrogant and flighty predecessor. Petraeus is among the real experts on counter-insurgency, and did a fine job of making friends and mending fences when he was in charge of Mosul. Crocker has been ambassador to Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan, and knows the region intimately (as does Khalilzad). Bremer had been ambassador to . . . Holland. Despite all the talk of the resurgence of the Neoconservatives with their "surge" (actually ramped up occupation) plan, this team is the farthest from Neoconservative desires that you could possibly get.
I wish these seasoned professionals well. They know what they are getting into, and it is an index of their courage and dedication that they are willing to risk their lives in an effort that the American public has largely written off as a costly failure. If the US in Iraq can possibly have a soft landing, these are the individuals who can pull it off. It is a big if.
What they are up against comes through clearly in the reporting on the situation in Iraq on Thursday. Police found 47 bodies in the streets of Baghdad on Thursday. Guerrillas set off two car bombs in the al-Mansur district, killing 13 persons and injuring 22. The NYT gives a graphic eyewitness account of the gruesome aftermath.
Guerrillas killed a US soldier in Baghdad with small arms fire.
Sunni Arab guerrillas also launched a mortar attack on the Shiite Shu'la district of Baghdad, injuring 9 civilians. The NYT piece mentions several other such attacks, as does Reuters. Police found four bodies in Hilla, in the mixed Sunni and Shiite province of Babel (Hilla is largely Shiite).
The Associated Press has been vindicated in having reported on an incident of sectarian violence based on an interview with Jamil Hussein. The Iraqi government initially denied he existed, and the US military put pressure on AP to retract. Now it turns out he does exist but will be punished for speaking to the press!
Gee, it turns out AP is more reliable on Iraq than Michelle Malkin after all. Since she's so eager to intern people, maybe she can do penance by putting herself under house arrest for the rest of the war as a punishment for spreading war propaganda.
The diary of the last two months in the life of the director of the Iraqi National Library and Archives. It is harrowing.
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/05/2007 12:32:00 AM
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Not sure if everyone has seen these videos of the US military in Iraq or not, but they are pretty amazing: Hopefully our 'surge' will not include too many of these types...
http://minor-ripper.blogspot.com/2006/12/winning-hearts-and-minds-part-three.html
You write that, "Petraeus is among the real experts on counter-insurgency." Exactly what predictive or prescriptive insights can he, or has he, offered? Was he on the same side of the fence as the retiring Abizaid, who opposed a "large footprint"? Or will he be in shoulder to shoulder with the Keane-Kagan AEI surge plan, whose full edition is being rolled out today with endorsements from McCain and Lieberman.
It seems that some version of a surge, even if using another label, will be approved and implemented. Skeptics of either party on the Hill will vote yes, albeit with CYA reservations or, as in the case of H. Clinton, calls to wrap it into a larger initiative. They fear that any "no" vote will appear as inaction or lack of nerve. Since "stay the course" and "cut and run" will be anathema slogans by 2008, an 18-month surge strategy will seem like the safest bet.
Two bets:
1) The surge will never clear or secure any more than a few neighborhoods, and only temporarily. The clearing (cleansing) will be nearly impossible, since nearly any inhabitant is a potential insurgent or protector. The zones will revert to sectarian militia control as soon as the spreading ink-blot perimeter of limited US forces becomes too thin to stop infiltration. US casualties will rise and there will be multiple allegations of US crimes against civilians. However, it will produce a semblance of "progress" to satisfy near-term benchmarks, providing impunity to the congressional supporters.
2) By 2008, as the "secure" zones morph back into their present state, so much water, blood, and credibility will have gone under the bridge that candidates of both parties will, like Joe Lieberman, step out of reality and into a dream world. Having upped the ante with more money and lives, and having become deeply complicit in a quagmire, there will be calls to do a surge^2.
Bush will use his last days and office to seal his legacy with a bold military action that will dwarf Truman's July '45 decision.
Rove and others remember that Nixon won by a landside in '72 over an anti-war candidate. Nixon's 1970 escalations, bombings, and minings helped him at the polls. Most public misgivings were over inflation, school integration, and local issues. War protest withered as the draft system adopted a lottery approach that cut risks of selection to about 25% and US troop levels fell.
Three years later, in 1975, the US yawned at the fall of Vietnam because belief in the domino theory vanished, China was a quasi ally, and we had detente with Russia. There was no US lobby to demand a rescue of the S. Vietnam regime.
Iraq is different because of oil, Israel, and the boogey of "islamofascism." Iran's president gives rhetorical ammunition to the fear mongers. Even "realists" find it hard to discount the oil factor.
Regardless of whether Gates, Crocker, or Petraeus buy into the details of the surge plan or the Armageddon vision of Lieberman, all will be pulled along by group-think. Rice is certainly not one to challenge her boss. Negroponte learned that Cheney is the only one who really gets W's ear.
The surge^2 plan against Iran will have ostensibly limited military objectives: hit suspected nuclear facility sites, air defenses, and missile or artillery threatening the Straits of Hormuz. The prediction will be that Iran will not counter-attack and that Iranians will overthrow the mullahs, dance in the streets, and wave US flags. However, the outcome will quickly depart from the plan. Bush will have to decide whether to use tactical nukes or go down as a colossal fool. When it turns out that the tactical nukes are hardly more than glorified bunker busters and do not change a think the next step will be to launch the heavy stuff, fulfilling prophecy, Amen.
Perhaps the only way to avoid a war with Iran in 2008 is to avoid raising the stakes now. However, that would require absolute refutation of the surge strategy to be publicized over the next week. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a single military figure of stature, with the modest exception of Odom, with the guts to call it all nonsense.
I am amazed at how this administration has become so adept at rebranding.
They started with "death tax" and progressed to "Patriot Act",both very sucessful add campaines.Both great combinations of power words,right out of the focus groups.
Now we have "stay the course" and "cut and run",and finally "SURGE" .What a great power word,all kinds of mind games can be played with it. They may even make use of some of the old Surge detergent commercials"Cleansing east Baghdad". Maybe they can get George Bush in there as Mr Clean.
The press just eats this up .They never ask questions when someone puts a "brand" on some issue. Congeressmen regularly use the term "death tax" in place of Estate Tax when being interviewed and never get called on it.Reporters like easy lables.
Lets face it guys,this is done to sell something to Americans. Who do you think named this war?
The diary is interesting. Of course, it will be attacked because of errors in the chronology.
One thing I found interesting was the reference to the pension of the killed employee. Imagine that. Even in the midst of such anarchy, they still maintain the quaint tradition of pensions for employees.
That good news has to be worth at least two painted schools and a playground.
I think that the changes being made in Iraq, surging troops and replacing Abizaid and Casey, will turn out to be major mistakes that will cost many American and Iraqi lives. The changes in Washington seem more reasonable. It is definitely going to be helpful to the U.S. image not to have John Bolton at the U.N. any more.
While Gen. Petraes appeared from press reports to have accomplished more in Mosul, I think this article by a former Army Lt. serving in Mosul in 04-05 detailing the Army's disinterest in actually training the Iraqi army (and disdain for the Iraqis), provides a bit of a leavening insight into Gen. Petraeus, however.
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_03/article.html
The changes are more cosmetic than deep.
As Michael Dukakis said, "A fish rots from the head down," and W smells like road-abandoned lutefisk in July.
Too late to rearrange the deck chairs - the ship is mostly underwater already.
To a generation of Iraqi youth who have watched first the trade embargo that starved hundreds of thousands and now this awful occupation, America is now the great satan and the battle will be on no matter what we do.
This will get much, much worse before it gets any better.
(Mostly for Mr. Koch)
The President is getting a bit desperate, surely, to have some sort of "victory" in neo-Iraq, and he's past caring exactly what sort. To appoint Gen. Petraeus makes sense from that perspective, since this is the one Pentagon person I have ever heard of who came out of the quagmire looking rather good. He was good at training native troops, to be sure, and it is unlikely that that is the direction the Crawfordites will now "surge" in, but they're probably so eager to associate themselves with any success at all that they'll overlook a minor detail like that.
Happy days.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Khalilzad a career neoconman as well? He may not be as much of an out and out loud-spoken idiot as Bolton, but what exactly has he achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why was Karzai weeping while delivering a speech this week if K-zad was such a terrific fix-er-upper? Why is Iraq falling apart now if K-zad was great at building bridges with Iran and Syria?
And what good does it do to replace generals when the overall policy (strategery) in Iraq remains the same? To impose US hegemony, and disrupt any Iranian or Syrian attempt to work in Iraq?
The pre-requisite to working for the Bushiites is that one has to be a bound-and-gagged servile peon who obeys his master's voice... The real problem in Iraq is that we have a group of megalomaniacal blowhards in the White House who believe they are changing the world for the better by destroying it. And the very top of this heap of bushit is the village idiot being egged on by religious nuts who believe that the apocalypse is a good thing and must be brought to bear on mankind ASAP...
And, by the way, these loudmouths like to talk so much about how the world changed after 9/11, and how their critics live in the pre-9/11 world - Well, guess what? Neoconservatism is a pre 9/11 way of thinking... It is a policy thought up in the manic-high of the times when the Soviet Union collapsed and America had no real enemies...
To insist that Neoconservatism can be applied in the post-9/11 world is to deny the basic fact that there is now a large, growing mass movement against US hegemony in South America and the Middle East... To use pre-9/11 methods in trying to stamp it out is only going to make matters worse...
Bush is trying to use more water to put out an oil fire. He claims to be born-again, but in reality he acts as if he was born yesterday - the man has no knowledge of history save for his vague remembrances of the glorious nationalistic goo that passes for history classes in elementary schools. And the rest of the White House keeps him comfy in this cocoon of consonance, allowing no dissent to be voiced in King George’s presence.
In a democracy, people get the president they deserve and they get the wars they deserve, but at this point I am wondering if the American people really deserve this kind of bushit.
Looking at US politics right now, the surge is not a foregone conclusion. It might actually be stopped.
Let's define what a soft landing means. A soft landing to where.
The United States is not willing to tolerate an Iraq that is united but hostile to the US, allied with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and that kicks the US troops out. If that was not the case, the US could probably get a soft landing there.
There is nowhere for the US to land, soft or not, that has an Iraq that is united but not hostile to the US and that allows US to keep a military presence. If you want that, there is no such thing as a soft landing. There is no such thing as a landing. That is a goal that will never, ever be reached. The US trying to reach that will continue in its current state of a permanent crash.
In Vietnam, the US accepted that the North would unify the country as Communist and hostile to the US and when it expressed that acceptance to the Chinese, the US was able to leave - in defeat.
The US has not accepted that you cannot sanction, bomb, invade and occupy a country to make it non-hostile. The colonial era is over.
The US might even try to sanction, then bomb then invade then occupy Iran in the future. It won't work. The colonial era is over. The resulting Iranian government might be less religious than the current one, it might be more religious - but it will be at least as hostile, no, certainly more hostile, to the US and US interests, than the government in Iran today.
This is a lesson the US should well have learned from Vietnam. It looks like there is a chance the US will never learn the lesson until its reign as an imperial power is over.
But you can make a hostile country somewhat less hostile, by encouraging trade and entering a dialogue on the issues of disagreement. If the US wants a friendly Iraq, it should get out now, let the Sunnis either negotiate or lose to the Shiites (I'm sure they'll choose the first, as long as they know the US will not be there), and then let the Kurds be forced to go along with whatever the Sunnis and Shiites arrive at (which means no US bases in Kurdistan). Then give the resulting nation most favored nation trading status, then give the country ten years to thaw its relations with the US, while at the time taking steps to convince the Arabs that US foreign policy is not an extension of Zionism.
The US would be well advised to take similar steps towards North Korea, Cuba and Iran. But the US is in its imperial splendor today. You cannot stop it from making stupid mistakes that hurt itself, and hurt its victims much more. Oh well.
Juan, Sorry I can't join in your reveries. Pleasant thoughts about the Disaster in Iraq are so hard to come by,the temptation to Friedmanesque flight is considerable.
It isn't a matter of resume - Casey, Abizaid, Kalilzad,Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz et al even Bremmer are all highly skilled, competent, and experienced professionals. Af
The problem isn't one of deficiency in skill,competence or experience. Rumsfeld wasn't the problem, and Gates isn't the solution. The problem is one of courage and a Co-Presidency which doesn't make policy as much as it fixes it.
The Decider decides and the rest either rage their way out of job or apply their considerable skills in his service at whose pleasure they served.
Kahlilzad was exceptionally well qualified. So too were Abizaid and Casey. General staff officers are neither dumb nor for the most part are they timid save in combat up the chain of command.
Gates has a fine resume as do Adm Fallon and Ambaassdor designate Cooke. Petraeus is a master at self promotion (COIN Rediscovered and Forward Together but two examples) and I am sure a competent general/ Certainly Bolton won't be missed but the point is that nothing will change.
Bush's much ballyhooed deference to his generals is much like Hitler might have boasted and as credible. My way or the highway.
The Necons have become political liabilities in the admisistration who have become expendable because Bush has learned well. He is the Uberneocon.
For policy advice, the second string is more than adequate. Kagan, Pletka, Kristol, Keane, all that the Deider needs to play this one out. Forget Rice. Forget Gates. Forget Baker. Forget Scowcroft. Forget the rest of the Gnerals, there are always more of them waiting the next star.
Is this all there is?
*REPORTER: The president is expected to give his speech on a new way forward in Iraq next week. CBS’s David Martin has learned military commanders told the President they could execute a ‘troop surge’ of 9,000 soldiers and Marines into Iraq, with another 10,000 on alert in Kuwait and the U.S. Two army brigades — about 7,500 troops — would go into Baghdad in an effort to control the violence, clearing neighborhoods and staying long enough for reconstruction projects to take effect. 1,500 Marines would go to the western province of al-Anbar, heartland of the Sunni insurgency."
7500 for Baghdad? Does anyone believe that will even get the militias' and insurgents' attention?
And what of the claims that we would logically attack the insurgency first and then argue that the militias now had no excuse for not disarming? According to Peter Cockburn, the insurgents are mostly in the towns surrounding the city, preparing to cut off its roads at the proper time. It now seems that we're attacking the Mahdi Army first. But it has perhaps 60,000 followers.
Is there any rational explanation for this at all?
One sometimes gets the impression that Surge landing craft will dissembark thousands of social workers, city planners, and carpenters. But that's not what heavily armed US brigades consist of. The thing they can do best in Bagdad is establish martial law, round up and jail more suspicious nobodies, and shoot to kill when threatened.
Is the Iraqi government asking for this kind of operation? Is Iraq's "sovereignty" to be put on hold during the operation? And haven't we bought and paid for several hundred billion dollars worth of the same product with no results to show?
I'd just like to add my little poetic bit to dumping all over the latest Orwellian misnomer designed and focus-group tested by Frank Luntz in his "word lab" specifically aimed at the "lizard" lurking in all neo-colonialists everywhere. I call it: "Escalating Sacrifice."
http://themisfortuneteller.blogspot.com/2007/01/escalating-sacrifice.html
And as for General Petraeus -- apropos of his many dubious "successes" training all those Iraqi "security" forces -- I've got just the title for his next book about all the "counter insurgency" lessons he learned not countering any insurgencies in Iraq any better than we countered them in Vietnam: namely, "It takes destroying a village (Fallujah) in order to save it."
According to Lt. Col. Paul Hughes, a the ISG Military Expert and hero of the invasion it'd take 130,000 US combat troops to take, hold and clear Baghdad alone. That's based on the 1 to 50 soldier/civilian ratio. The entire country would require 500,000 based on that ratio. That may be lowballing it. I think 1 to 30 is more like what's in Kosovo.
But that number is based on a permissive environment. It might actually have worked in March 2003. To succeed now in the face of overwhelming hostility it'd take a lot more soldiers and money than we have. To disarm militias, clear the country of munition caches, secure the borders and rebuild the infrastructure while employing let's say 8 million breadwinners it'd probably take 1.5 million US troops and $50 billion a year in reconstruction money for several years. You want overwhelming force so the occupation army can be everywhere making resistance not only futile but crazy. At the height of the Vietnam War we had half a million troops in South Vietnam, a nation of 15 million vs. 25 million for Iraq. We all know how that panned out.
Seeing as the realistic resources needed to accomplish the goal aren't available it makes no sense to throw more lives and treasure away.
The only silver lining I see in this mess is letting the boy king have one last shot at fixing his mess. Pass the supplemental with the caveat that this is his last chance. Come June the jig's up, negotiate a base agreement with the Iraqi government in Kurdistan and if they don't go along with the Kurds themselves. Base some of our troops in Kuwait. Send some to
Afghanistan for a real effort to clear, hold and REBUILD before they hate us more than they hate the Taliban and bring the rest home.
The US Army is degrading into a non functioning force. A surge will cripple it even more but the final refutation of the neocon strategy of US military hegemony over the rest of the world will be worth another $100 billion and the lives it'll cost. It may be the only way.
Never getting bogged down in a hostile occupation propping up a puppet government was supposed to be our booby prize, the lesson learned for all those dead in Vietnam. Apparently the Cheneys of the world just didn't get it. So let them hang themeselves. Give them another 6 months to thoroughly discredit themselves in the eyes of the American people. And then never again. I want these fools out of our government and shunned by serious people forever.
Life will go on. Iraq will eventually
pacify itself for better or worse. Arabs will still oil. And we can go back to forming a more perfect union.
Khalilzad's exit strategy
Recent news on the coming Khalilzad's resignation from the post of the US Ambassador to Iraq are really too good to be true, I will believe this only when he will actually leave. This will mark a real, not rhetorical change of the course in Iraq and the ME
Khalilzad personifies what Rice calls "transformational diplomacy", which in simple terms means using the State Department as a thin cover for the DoD. Live illustration of Murphy's law, Khalilzad has lots of experience in leading doomed political projects based on pseudo-theoretical charlatanry. It was Khalilzad who presided over both Afghan and Iraqi disasters!
Neocon Khalilzad is pretty much at the wheel of the foreign news coverage in the US/UK media. Apparently, his personal influence on both publicism and reporting is huge. Those who monitor the US/UK news coverage of situation in Afghanistan, could not miss the drastic change in its tone when Khalilzad was reassigned from Kabul to Baghdad.
Pretty much as soon as Khalilzad left Afghanistan, the brand National Review / The Weekly Standard magical optimism was gone, and the ugly truth about the Afghan drug empire and the revival of radical Islamism finally started reaching the US/UK MSM. Now same effect can be expected in the Iraqi news coverage, and the results are going to be nothing short of ugly.
Unfortunately, coming foreign policy changes are not going to be really different from awakening from one bad dream to another. For example, Gen. David Petraeus is known to be among the authors of the recent Counterinsurgency Manual, a true work of political SciFi, which is heavily based on the typically neoconservative assumption that "liberated" local population is happy to provide humint on the guerilla activities!
So, yes, there will be lots of changes, but one can be sure that they are going to be essentially incremental, nothing to do with actual withdrawal from Iraq.
juan, I would like to see you revisit your optimism here. A number of the other commenters made good points.
What is your response this: doesn't the appointment of Fallon give us the final proof we need that an attack on Iran is a certainty?
Gates has been routinely criticized for his efforts in politicizing intelligence back when he worked for Casey and when he was CIA director. His first nomination to run CIA was scuttled because of this. Given the contribution that the politicized CIA makes to the Iraq disaster, I don't think Gates is someone to feel good about.
As for the others, I agree with the comment above that the people running the show matter, and we should not take this as evidence that they have changed. After all, they got Colin Powell to be their puppy. It is interesting that Casey got kicked upstairs as a reward for retracting his criticism of the Surge.
Does anyone remember that it only been a few months since the last surge? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Together_Forward.
Training Iraqis to handle their own security is not such a bad idea, if you can do it. It might have worked in 2003. At this point, however, American troops have turn most of Iraq against them. I read a survey once in which Iraqis were asked who they fear violence from and who they have gone out of their way to avoid. U.S. troops led the list. Further, at this point, most U.S. troops have seen friends killed or severely injured in Iraq, and that is going to influence them to behave in quite unfriendly ways toward Iraqis.
Given the job shuffling ahead of the escalation, a better name for the new policy would be "Purge and Surge". Makes one consider the roots of the word "insurgent."
Juan- I'd like to second the motion that you revisit and expand upon your opinion here. It doesn't appear that this surge idea is going to be resisted by anyone who could try to stop it.
Thanks
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