George Packer's latest article on Iraq comes as close as anything I've seen from the "the Iraq War is terrible but we have a moral obligation to continue occupying the country indefinitely against the will of the Iraqi people" crowd to dealing with the basic problem that their proposed solutions are unlikely to work:
Toby Dodge admitted that anyone arguing against immediate withdrawal has to face the “killer question: Why should American troops continue to die when the chances for success are so low?” He offered his answer “with an honest recognition that it doesn’t sound very plausible.”
Now wait for the answer, and note that Dodge is right, it really doesn't sound plausible:
Dodge’s approach would bring the maximum pressure to bear on Iraqi politicians by persuading the region and the world—Iraq’s neighbors, the European Union, the United Nations—to come into the Green Zone, not as tools of American policy but as equal partners in an effort to force a political deal, not unlike the U.N.’s role in creating a government in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. This would imply an American confession of failure. Instead of pursuing more ambitious goals for democracy in the region, the U.S. would offer security guarantees to Iran and Syria in exchange for coöperation. “We then turn to the Iraqi government,” Dodge went on, “and say, ‘You’ve got to reform your government, make it more inclusive, less corrupt, more coherent, less sectarian.’ So the Iraqi government is reconstituted within a multilateral framework where the E.U., the U.N., and the U.S. are all singing from the same hymnbook.”
What I don't understand is why Packer and Dodge don't draw the obvious conclusion -- it's not a good idea to do something incredibly costly like staying in Iraq for many additional years on the basis of a not very plausible plan that's unlikely to succeed. Instead, we get this:
For Dodge, the only reason to give this long-shot strategy a chance is the awfulness of the alternative. “I wouldn’t bet the house on it succeeding,” he said. “But I would bet my hopes and fears for Iraq on it.”
A costly, likely to fail strategy, however, isn't an alternative to failure. Most likely, your likely to fail non-plausible strategy is just going to fail. And if Dodge wouldn't "bet the house" on his plan succeeding, then what are we supposed to say to the National Guardsman whose family is going to lose its house if he's injured in Iraq and can't work anymore? If Dodge won't "bet the house" on his plan, then why should our troops risk their lives for it? I couldn't possibly imagine looking someone heading off to war in the eye and giving him this account of why his service is vital and necessary.
Seven months after the American-led troop “surge” began, Baghdad has experienced modest security gains that have neither reversed the city’s underlying sectarian dynamic nor created a unified and trusted national government.
One thing to keep in mind about the "surge" is that the overall increase in the number of American soldiers wasn't especially large relative to either the pre-existing size of the deployment or to the size of Iraq. But along with the "surge" of additional American forces into the country, there was a "surge" of forces away from non-Baghdad portions of Iraq into the capital. It would be extraordinary if that policy didn't manage to produce "modest security gains" in Baghdad at the expense of problems elsewhere. The question is why one might think this kind of concentration of forces might be a good idea.
Roughly speaking, there are two possible ideas. One is that the security gains might be large enough to reach some kind of tipping point. You start with X troops in Baghdad. Then you "surge" up to X + Y troops. This surge produces a self-sustaining new situation, so now you surge down to fewer than X troops in Baghdad, allowing you to surge up elsewhere. That, though, hasn't happened. The "underlying sectarian dynamic" is the same.
Alternatively, one might think that the national capital is uniquely important to political events, and that a special focus on Baghdad security might create the environment for political reconciliation. That, though, hasn't happened either. The whole thing's failed. Now people would like us to believe that other "bottom up" trends compensate for the failure of the plan. But since this cuts directly against the logic of the policy we've been pursuing since January, there's no reason to think that anything we're doing is having a substantial positive impact on whatever decentralized processes in Iraq may or may not be evolving in a good situation. The scorecard can't just credit the US military presence for any good thing that happens anywhere in Iraq, while simultaneously arguing that without the military presence every bad thing about Iraq would be worse.
DoD photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen, U.S. Air Force
White House officials are suggesting that the general's views will carry great weight with Bush. "He is following through on his commitment to be guided by the people on the ground who know the most about what's going on," White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten said.
I might have thought it relevant at this point to note that Bush's deference to military expertise is a bit opportunistic. When, for example, the joint chiefs and Bush's previous set of commanders in Iraq didn't want a surge, he ditched them in favor of some different commanders.
One of the worst-appreciated points in the debate over national security policy is that the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies shouldn't be understood as counterterrorism measures that have, in some sense or another, "gone too far." Rather, we need to grasp that they've been wholly ineffective and, as best one can tell, merely made things worse. The fact that George Bush's invasion of Iraq has killed more Americans than Osama bin Laden's airplane hijacking is one illustration of the point. Another would be this map I've borrowed from the Center for American Progress team. The blue marks are pre-9/11 terrorist attacks, the yellow ones are between 9/11 and Iraq, and the red ones are post-Iraq attacks. Iraq and Afghanistan are just marked in red rather than trying to make pins for each attack in those unfortunately countries.
Some CAP text helps explain what you're seeing:
A study conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) since the Iraq invasion. When Iraq and Afghanistan, which together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities, were excluded, there was still a 35 percent per year increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks.
At this point, obviously, we can't fix the problem with a time machine, but it sure would be nice.
Kevin Drum notes that the American public expects General David Petraeus will lie under oath to congress "try to make things look better than they are" in Iraq rather than give sworn testimony that "will reflect the situation in Iraq." It's worth emphasizing in this regard how much the high regard in which Petraeus is held is a purely inside phenomenon. In particular, politicians and reporters alike who've spoken with Petraeus all seem to be very impressed with him. Consequently, other people like me who haven't ever spoken with him, picked up some of this sentiment through osmosis.
The reality, though, doesn't really seem to live up to the Legend of David Petraeus, and I'm not sure anything could. And the public is largely unfamiliar with the legend in the first place. So while Democrats should certainly be respectful when he testifies, there's no reason to be super-deferential. If some other Bush administration appointee showed up and said some stuff that didn't seem to be true, Democrats would give him shit about it and the public would expect them to. This situation, at the end of the day, isn't really any different.
UPDATE: Just to drive the point home, Ed Gillespie's set up a branch of the White House communications staff that's "hard wired" into Petraeus' shop. Which, again, is what you'd expect when a Bush appointee goes to congress for some high-profile testimony and illustrates the point that Petraeus should be treated accordingly.
First 'skins game of the season: excellent. CBS not broadcasting the game in HD for some reason: not at all excellent. I'm a little baffled by this decision. At this point in time, virtually all sporting events seem to be available in HD and nothing get better ratings than the NFL.
Scott Lemieux writes about Québec regulations against voting with a covered face, and efforts to secure an exemption for observant Muslim women. I agree with this bottom line:
Even if the Quebec government can do it, however, we need to ask whether it should. Absent a showing that facial covered was being used to a significant extent to commit voter fraud, I cannot agree that this regulation is remotely justifiable. The state should accommodate minority religions absent a good reason to do so.
Given the generally fraught subject of the relationship of the major western democracies to the Islamic world and to their internal Muslim minorities, it's worth pointing out that this is a fairly perverse measure. Nobody who feels a serious religious obligation not to uncover her face is going to be shaken from that conviction by being barred from voting. Instead, a regulation of this sort is just going to be experienced as the disenfranchisement of a group of observant Muslim women. What one wants to do, however, is encourage minority groups to participate in mainstream practices and institutions -- voting being high on the list -- even if that means the practices may need to be slightly modified in order to accommodate such participation.
Peter Beinart points out that Norman Podhoretz and Michael Ledeen are both crazy people. It's too bad, though, that he doesn't really say anything about the implications of the fact that Podhoretz's decision to splash onto the scene with a series of demented writings about "Islamofascism" coincides so closely with Republican front runner Rudy Giuliani's decision to embrace him very publicly. It seems to me that something's gone badly wrong with a country where a major political figure sees associating himself with this kind of lunacy as a smart political move.
Since it worked, of course, Joe Gibbs is going to wind up not taking criticism for his odd decision to kick the early field goal instead of continuing to run the football, but I still don't like the decision. Not only does it seem wrong on the merits to me, but it seems strange to start off your season with a vote of no confidence in your running backs.
Amber Clark, 28, an Army veteran who moved here from California about two months ago and who described herself as an active Mormon, said she thought polygamists should be left alone, so long as no one was under age or coerced into marriage.
“I’m liberal in that respect,” Ms. Clark said. “If it’s legal in some states for people of the same sex to get married, why is it not legal to marry more than one wife?”
As it happens, I agree, but I know many gay rights groups seem very concerned about the need to deny the existence of any slippage. And, in fact, I think it would be pretty easy to draw a logical or legal distinction if you felt it necessary, since a difference between "one" and "more than one" can be drawn in a principled way in a whole variety of contexts. To me, though, the main issue here is that polygamist communities in practice seem to be sustained through dubious practices that are wrong (and often illegal) on their own terms. That, however, is different from saying that a genuinely consensual plural marriage is something we need to prohibit.
If you read anything about the later phases of European imperialism, one is struck by the way in which the need for, for example, perpetual British control over India or large swathes of Africa is always justified as being for the good of the subjugated people. And, of course, the perpetual control isn't described as perpetual. It just needs to last a bit longer. Then a bit longer. You know, Friedman Units and all that. Somehow the actual desires of the people being controlled don't seem to figure much into the calculations.
I thought of that as I read this bit of dialogue from the McClatchey stringers' blog:
"Why, Mum? Why can't I go to this shop?"
"Because it's in the green zone baby, and you're Iraqi."
That was brought to my attention by the deeply unserious Jim Henley who fails to recognize that this is serving an important higher moral purpose.
See also this striking bit of state-of-the-art COIN doctrine in action.
Via Atrios, a reader actually got The Washington Post's Shailagh Murray to offer a definition of "precipitous withdrawal," perhaps the Beltway's most pernicious meaningless term. She came up with:
Precipitous in this case would be more quickly than military leaders believe is sensible, based on their mission and the situation on the ground. Believe it or not, a lot of Democrats are concerned about withdrawing too many troops too quickly. You can be against the war, but also against mucking it up.
Obviously, though, "military leaders" disagree. The Joint Chiefs didn't like the surge plan when Bush floated it. And this big multi-byline Washington Post feature on the surge leads with General Petraeus fighting with Admiral Fallon, his commanding officer, over surge-related issues. Part of the Petraeus/Fallon debate involved the CENTCOM CINC wanting more troops to be available for contingencies outside of Iraq. Part of the Joint Chiefs' objection to the surge was its massively deleterious impact on long-term military preparedness.
Which is to say that military leaders disagree in part because people are just bound to disagree. But they disagree in part because they have different perspectives and different priorities. Ultimately, it's the job of political leaders -- of the president and the congress -- to make these kind of decisions about priorities. It's up to them to set national policy, to decide where the nation's interests lie, and to ultimately decide what to do. Politicians should, obviously, listen to what officers have to say, but the fact that some particular commander wants to have more resources dedicated to his particular mission doesn't have a great deal of probative value.
At the behest of a David Brooks column from last week, I finally got around to reading Stuart Butler's proposals for health care reform. If you think (as I do) that the current system of health care finance in the United States is unjust, economically inefficient, and in need of major structural change, then this is not the proposal for you. However, unlike a lot of recent health care proposals from the right -- the Health Savings Account gambit and that sort of thing -- this plan isn't aimed at making things worse than they already are.
In that sense, it's really something progressives ought to worry about. While totally inadequate to the scale of our health care problems, Butler's proposal to create state-sponsored "insurance exchanges" able to take advantage of the tax benefits currently afforded to employer-based plans would provide real help to some people, doesn't threaten anyone's interests in a really obvious way, and could provide an appealing way for employers to wriggle out of responsibility for administering health care plans without needing to endorse anything devilishly socialistic.
In that sense, it's a very politically plausible proposal. If I were a conservative looking to block an ambitious progressive health care plan, but afraid of being unable to beat something with nothing, I'd be running to embrace what Butler's selling here.
It's what the surge is achieving, according to the surge's architects and supporters. But what is it? What does it mean? The Center for American Progress' Brian Katulis asks some good questions about this strategy, and so does Ilan Goldenberg from the National Security Network.
Leila Fadel from McClatchy's Baghdad bureau provides yet another independent press account calling into question the administration's claims of improved security thanks to the surge in Iraq. Fadel notes that when the surge was announced, Bush "said that Iraqi and American troops would improve security while the Iraqi government improved services." He promised that "Responsibility for security in most of Iraq would be turned over to Iraqi security forces by November." And, of course, he forecast political reconcilation.
As Fadel reports, "With less than a week to go before the White House delivers a congressionally mandated report on that plan, none of this has happened."
On the flipside we have the news that the reason no outside journalists have been able to scrutinize, evaluate, or verify the administration's claims of security gains is that both the numbers and the methodology used to generate them are classified. I think we need to put our credence in the idea that the White House has some super-convincing data in support of its policies that it's got hidden away and can't release at around zero. If Bush had solid numbers, we'd be seeing them. Heck, we'd see non-solid numbers if Bush thought he might be able to bamboozle people into believing some screwy ones.
From Kenneth Pollack and Carlos Pascual, Salvaging the Possible: Policy Options in Iraq -- "In contrast to the 150,000 troops that will be in Iraq, there are only about 7,500 Foreign Service Officers posted everywhere in the world." It's not directly relevant to the Iraq issue, which is too pressing and acute to wait for big picture changes, but this imbalance between the military and non-military aspects of the American foreign policy apparatus is really absurd.
To return to the report referenced below on "Salvaging the Possible" in Iraq, I have sharply mixed feelings. Pollack and Pascual do a lot of analyzing of this and that, but there baseline conclusion is this:
The more time passes and as violence escalates, the harder it will be to achieve a political settlement. The United States must cooperate with regional players,
the UN and other international partners in order to create leverage over Iraqis who might rein in the militias and reach a political compromise. The chances for success are low, but this is one of the few options that has not been tried, despite the imperative suggested by international experience with civil wars. And failing to try essentially amounts to accepting civil war in Iraq.
The report goes into more detail about what they're proposing, but it's similar to Toby Dodge's implausible scenario. And reading Pollack & Pascual write about it, on some level I agree with them. As they say, probably if we made a big push for a UN-sponsored diplomatic settlement of Iraq's internal conflicts and related regional ones, etc., etc., our push would fail. On the other hand, if such a push succeeded, that would be very good. And the costs of trying for such a settlement and then failing would be low.
At the end of the day, though, the whole premise of a discussion like this is that Bush might read a Brookings Institution report and agree to a radical change in direction. That, of course, isn't going to happen. At the present day, the set of options that might plausibly occur between today and January 2009 are:
Bush gets his way.
Enough Republicans get freaked out that congress is able to force Bush to start withdrawing troops.
Under the circumstances, the political impact of things like this Pollack/Pascual report seem to me to be mostly pernicious. It mostly serves to obscure the real issues and choices in play. It lets people continue with the delusion that they're floating off on some worthy path between Bush and Bush's opponents. This nicely serves various people's sense of vanity and desire to avoid undue association with dirty fucking hippies, but it's every bit as detached from realities on the ground in America as Bush's policies are from realities in Iraq. Either the Bush steamroller is going to plow forward for 18 more months, or else congress is going to muster the votes to shut it down.
That said, in gossipy terms it's interesting that Pollack and O'Hanlon have responded so differently to the criticisms of their "War We Just Might Win" op-ed. O'Hanlon's basically double-down as a hawk, whereas Pollack's gone back to the relatively sensible views of his Things Fall Apart era.
I feel like it's safe to say that now that Michael O'Hanlon is following up last week's Washington Times op-ed with a column for National Review Online and an appearance on Laura Ingraham's radio show that he's cast himself out of the broad left-of-center community in favor of becoming a conservative movement propagandist whose salary just happens to be paid by Brookings.
This, however, makes the Michael O'Hanlon Primary all the more pressing. The word on the street in 2004 was that O'Hanlon was in line for some kind of job in a John Kerry administration. This time around, in a Fox News appearance O'Hanlon expressed his support for Hillary Clinton. Does Clinton return the admiration?
Polling Iraqis: "Although the percentage of Anbar residents who have a favorable view of local security has increased to 38 percent from zero in March, 62 percent still rate security negatively overall."
So, okay, I'll concede that this counts as progress. Unfortunately, on aspects of the situation that weren't already at the lowest-possible level, we're not doing as well: "Meanwhile, the level of satisfaction in other quality-of-life categories -- including the availability of jobs, supply of clean water and freedom of movement -- has decreased since March."
I'm watching Ike Skelton's opening statement at the "surge" hearings, and it's not very interesting. Conversely, Dave Weigel has a report that starts with the promising observation that elsewhere in Washington, "Newt Gingrich just wrapped a speech on 'an alternative history of the war since 9/11,' the product of 'immersion' (his word) in the history of Lincoln's and FDR's war-time decision-making."
Apparently, this really happened.
Newt's main take seems to be that Bush erred in the post-9/11 environment by failing to start enough wars ("Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would have been dealt with as a regional conflict") and seize enough authority to issue extra-legal regulations.
I can't believe Duncan Hunter really just said we shouldn't question General Petraeus' credibility because, in fact, he stands in the same tradition as General MacArthur.
During his opening statement, Rep. Ike Skelton referenced a poll just released today showing that Iraqis don't believe the surge is working. It seems that Skelton, like me, made the mistake of reading The Washington Post's summary of the poll, rather than the BBC writeup which highlights the much more striking fact that "nearly 60% see attacks on US-led forces as justified."
This is something we've seen several times in polls of Iraqi opinion, but it never seems to penetrate. It seems to me that even 10-25 percent of the population actively approving of attacks on American troops might make our mission there impossible. But when an actual majority support killing our soldiers, then how, exactly, are the soldiers supposed to help Iraq's population? It just doesn't make sense, on any level, to think that a giant military deployment can play a constructive role under these circumstances.
Ambassador Crocker made a reference to reconstruction teams making funds available for projects in "post-kinetic environments." In case you don't get that reference, a "post-kinetic environment" is, for example, a neighborhood that's been leveled by American military action.
It's come to my attention recently that some iPhone owners still don't know how to install third-party software on their phones. That is, perhaps, reasonable since the earliest methods developed were quite complicated and not necessarily appropriate for the faint of heart. These days, though, it's very simple. Basically, you need to download the Installer.app beta from Nullriver Software's website and follow the instructions for installing it on your phone. With that done, the Installer's icon will appear on your phone's Springboard, and it will allow you to install (and, as necessary, update) the other programs that are available.
The software offerings thus far are a little limited and not all of the programs work very well. But progress is being made rapidly. There are a couple of neat games, the Apollo IM program is a very usable AIM client (and one hopes it'll soon be expanded to other services), and there are also a bunch of useful utilities. In particular, you'll probably want things like MobileFinder and SummerBoard to help you access your new software as you add programs.
Check out this briefing slide from General Petraeus' presentation:
Basically, the idea is that about nine months from now, we'll be back to the number of troops we had in Iraq about nine months ago. After that, more stuff is supposed to change . . . maybe . . . sometime . . . if all goes well . . . maybe . . . at some point.
General Petraeus is making the point that, contrary to some press reports (including commentary on this blog), the US Army isn't "arming" any Sunni insurgents in al-Anbar province or elsewhere. If he says so, I'll take him at his word. Still, we are giving them money. And since you can use money to buy weapons -- especially if the US military is smiling on your efforts to do so -- I'm not sure I really see the difference here. Moreover, Petraeus and Crocker are both bragging about Anbar Sunnis joining the local police force and presumably we are arming the local police force and given that Shiite militias in Shiite areas find it easy to infiltrate the local police there, it seems like the new, Sunnified Iraqi local police in Sunni areas are just going to be Sunni insurgent groups, but this time with uniforms.
Rep. Christopher Smith (R-NJ) was just saying that it's unrealistic to expect Iraq to move swiftly to militia disarmament. After all, look at Northern Ireland where the IRA has just only very recently agreed to lay down arms.
This all seems reasonable to be, except that Smith seems to think this is a data point in favor of his side. It proves, you see, that the GAO scorecard is silly. And maybe so. But peering just a half an inch beneath the analogy is the idea that civil war in Iraq might continue for thirty or forty years before it would be reasonable to expect our policy to start showing results.
I first heard rumor of this "General Betray Us" ad plan Friday night and it sounded dumb. And when I saw it this kornng it looked dumb. But not nearly as dumb as the House Republicans look endlessly harping on it at the hearing. This war is serious stuff -- literally a matter of life and death -- and here they are screwing around like children.
Meanwhile the basic point of the MoveOn ad -- that it doesn't make sense for the public or the congress to make policy on the basis of secret data that's at odds with publicly available assssments as well as work by the GAO, CIA, and DIA -- is eminently sensible. Petraeus' slides are just random pictures with no sourcing, it's ridiculous.
Ed Kilgore makes a good point here -- it's really not clear why the details of General Petraeus' presentation on the military state of play in Iraq matter at all. The question of the surge, and of the military presence more generally, is whether or not the presence is creating a situation where the presence will no longer be needed in order to avoid the Potentially Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal. As long as we have a situation where the day after we leave, the Catastrophic Consequences of Withdrawal will come to pass, then we may as well just leave tomorrow.
Obviously, though, the aspect of the situation in Iraq that makes the CCW frightening isn't the quantity of last week's car bombs, but rather the political conflict that led to the car-bombings. If violence declines simply because American troops are patrolling the country, then the troops need to patrol forever. If, by contrast, the decline in violence leads toward a resolution of the political conflict then it's a different story.
So the question of the surge is fundamentally outside of Petraeus' domain. And as hard as Ambassador Crocker tried to dodge the point (by for example, trying to relabel the total absence of central government control over the vast majority of the country as an experiment in federalism) the answer here is clearly no. We could, of course, just give it some more time. And then more time. And then yet more time. But by the same token, if we leave and some Catastrophic Consequences break out and then we give that more time, things will eventually calm down.
All of which is to say that there's no such thing as "military progress" that we can tally up next to absence of political progress and say, "eh, the glass is half full." The military exists to try to help accomplish political ends. If the military isn't succeeding in achieving those political ends, then it's not making progress, and our troops ought to be sent somewhere where they can do something useful.
The anniversary post is always the hardest one to write. This year, I think I won't do it. It's hard for me to contemplate, and one wants to do writing worthy of the magnitude of the thing and I'm not sure I can.
Watching yesterday's incredibly boring hearing for hours, then doing something else, then turning back the still-on hearing and watching it continue for more hours I was gripped by the sense that the Democratic leadership had really messed up. It would have been much better, I felt, to make Petraeus and Crocker feel the sting of either Senate Armed Services or Senate Foreign Relations, both of whose Democratic caucuses contain both stars and key role players who could have really gone to war.
From the vantage of the morning after, though, leading with the House -- and in particularly, with the mind-numbing combo-hearing format -- may have been a stroke of genius. The was was incredibly unpopular on the morning of September 10, 2007 so the Republicans needed not just a solid performance, but some kind of show-stopping one from Crocker and Petraeus to turn things around. A dull hearing guaranteed that the game would end in a draw, and a draw is a political win for the Democrats. The Senate Foreign Relations hearing that's about to stop should feature more interesting moments -- what will Hagel say? how will Obama do? etc. -- but it's a second day story.
The "surge" itself was hail mary strategy, and it didn't work. Then we had the surge of dog and pony shows, but that didn't bring anyone other than Michael O'Hanlon over to Bush's side. Now the surge of testimony has begun, and it looks to be, in essence, another dud. Something the administration's dead-ender supporters can feel good about, but that's not going to change the public's accurate perception that if ever there were a time when this policy could have been saved, it came and went years ago.
We know that Barack Obama has a shady history with liquid coal interests, and now I learn from Dave Roberts that John Edwards' views on new coal power plants aren't nearly as sound as they appeared at first glance.
Laura Rozen notes that purveyor of fake interviews Alex Debat seems to have been a source for several of our most inflammatory recent news stories, including this ABC News piece about covert ops against Iran.
One element of the data that seems unambiguous is that you have many further attacks against American troops happening in Anbar province. This is related, clearly, to new partnerships between American forces and non-AQI insurgent groups in Anbar. Still, that leaves an open question as to the precise source of the reduction in violence. My sense is that surge-lovers would like us to believe that most of the pre-Awakening Anbar attacks were mounted by AQI and that the recent reduction in Iraq is a result of US-insurgent cooperation against AQI succeeding.
An alternative interpretation, however, is that AQI was always responsible for only a minority of attacks and that the reduction has happened because, in essence, we've started paying insurgent groups to stop attacking us. Now, either way, it's good news that fewer American soldiers are being attacked, but, obviously, we could also stop insurgent attacks by just not being in Iraq at all.
It's always good to see bloggish notions getting wider dispersion through newspaper columnists not named "Paul Krugman." Take, for example, today's Eugene Robinson column:
The next six months in Iraq are crucial -- and always will be. That noise you heard yesterday on Capitol Hill was the can being kicked further down the road leading to January 2009, when George W. Bush gets to hand off his Iraq fiasco to somebody else.
It's clear by now that playing for time is the real White House strategy for Iraq. Everything else is tactical maneuver and rhetorical legerdemain -- nothing up my sleeve -- with which the administration is buying time, roughly in six-month increments.
Increasingly, I think Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot politically. More and more people have figured out what's happening. As I write in a new piece for The Guardian:
Soon enough, though, it'll be time for another election, and polls have shown for some time now that the American public has no appetite for an indefinite military commitment to Iraq and that, however they may struggle to hide it, is exactly what Republicans are promising as will be perfectly evident if Bush gets his way and more than 100,000 American soldiers are still in Mesopotamia when voters go to the polls in 14 months.
That's great, if you work at the DCCC or the DSCC. For the country, though, it's really not so good and it would be much, much, better to implement better policies rather than just waste the next 18 months.
At any rate, now I'm watching John Kerry, and I'm thinking someone should ask General Petraeus how you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake.
Here's another one of the slides from the Crocker/Petraeus presentation. At first glance, it appears to show impressive progress starting in March 2007. Look more closely at the bars, though, and you'll see that the top segment of each bar is an essentially meaningless category -- "unit forming." The real meat is in those tiny green bars representing Iraqi units capable of operating independently of US forces. Here, we saw considerable progress between March 2006 and November 2006, followed by a steady decline running through June 2007, and now things have ticked up again a bit so that we're essentially back to where we were a year ago.
Not only is there no progress here, but the absolute numbers in question are tiny so even if things were to pick up, we'd still be years and years and years away from this policy succeeding.
Crocker is right that Iraqi leaders' intentions and how much actual power they wield is more important than whether they have accomplished a specific set of benchmarks--or whether withdrawal will do more harm than good. But his cautious optimism didn't even seem to convince himself. Even when he was describing areas like provincial reconstruction in which he'd had "pretty good luck," Crocker sounded depressed. I think he's well on his way to becoming another tragic figure of this war: well-intentioned, capable, but brought to his knees by the mistakes of others and the sheer immensity of the task he was given. Success is "achievable"? You wouldn't know it from Crocker's manner at the hearing today--a subdued, this-is-all-hypothetical-anyway spirit, like a doctor whose careful and long-ranging diagnoses are for naught because the patient in front of him is already gone.
I agree with Eve that Crocker didn't -- and doesn't -- appear to me to believe his own testimony on this score. I suppose, though, that I have a less sympathetic take. Rather than a tragic figure, I see yet another figure who's been corrupted by association with this venture. Either way, I've been a bit surprised by the nature of Crocker's testimony. His career suggests that he's a serious professional with good judgment -- "The memo bluntly predicted that toppling Hussein could unleash long-repressed sectarian and ethnic tensions, that the Sunni minority would not easily relinquish power, and that powerful neighbors such as Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia would try to move in to influence events. It also cautioned that the United States would have to start from scratch building a political and economic system because Iraq's infrastructure was in tatters" -- not the sort of man likely to let ephemera obscure the big picture.
And, as Eve says, something about his demeanor suggests he knows he's putting up a snow job. I heard him earlier today describe the "legislative reconciliation" issues he's been downplaying as "fundamental questions" about the nature of the Iraqi state. He knows perfectly well that those questions are the ones that matter. The fundamental ones. And that no progress has been made toward answering them.
Last week, John Edwards proposed the creation of a new multilateral organization he would call CITO, the Counterterrorism and Intelligence Treaty Organization:
Every nation has an interest in shutting down terrorism. CITO will create connections between a wide range of nations on terrorism and intelligence, including countries on all continents, including Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. New connections between previously separate nations will be forged, creating new possibilities.
CITO will allow members to voluntarily share financial, police, customs and immigration intelligence. Together, nations will be able to track the way terrorists travel, communicate, recruit, train, and finance their operations. And they will be able to take action, through international teams of intelligence and national security professionals who will launch targeted missions to root out and shut down terrorist cells.
The new organization will also create a historic new coalition. Those nations who join will, by working together, show the world the power of cooperation. Those nations who join will also be required to commit to tough criteria about the steps they will take to root out extremists, particularly those who cross borders. Those nations who refuse to join will be called out before the world.
I think this is a very good idea. As Edwards says, "it's important to note that CITO is not a panacea, nor will it be perfect." Indeed, as he doesn't say, it's even possible something like this would be a huge flop. But it's also a pretty promising idea. And best of all, I like the basis of the thinking behind it, namely the idea that the rise of transnational terrorism can and should be a locus for increased levels of international cooperation. Here, for example, we see a proposal for a new multilateral organization that it would be perfectly reasonable for Russia and China to enthusiastically join (unlike a Concert of Democracies) and where countries like Japan, Germany, India, and Brazil would have a chance to step up and take a leading role in the world stage in a way that would also be a constructive one.
This is a much more appealing vision of America's relationship with the world than you tend to see nowadays -- one's that's optimistic and looking for opportunities, rather than one seeking conflict and sowing fear.
The latest issue of National Journal contains this intriguing poll in its front of the book. It seems that 84 percent of American CEOs say the economy is either "good" or "excellent." Meanwhile, just 37 percent of the American public agrees.
Kevin Drum says I'm wrong about who wins the testimony battle. In fact, though, we're talking about two different battles. I'm saying the GOP needed a big win in PR terms to prevent the war's unpopularity from dragging them even further down in 2008. Kevin's saying the Democrats needed a big win in order to end the war. Nobody got a big win, so the war will continue, and the Republicans will be dragged down by the war's unpopularity.
In terms of actually ending the war, I think all prospect of doing so before 2009 was more-or-less signed away when Democrats decided to accept Bush's framing of the "fund the troops" question and grant Bush an un-amended supplemental appropriation after he vetoed the amended one. Challenging that framing would have been politically challenging, but possibly doable. Having done what they did, though, it'd be extremely difficult to turn around, and there's no sign of any inclination to do so anyway.
I trust that by now everyone's already read Kevin Drum's two mini-essays on the rise of the chaos hawks who warn "that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East will go up in flames."
The only thing I would add is that it's worth looking at this phenomenon, at least in part, through the perspective that to many people the real risk may be that if we leave Iraq the entire Middle East might not go up in flames. We've shifted back and forth from the Shah to Saddam to "dual containment" to regime change to stay the course to "surge" over the decades all on the premise that American domination of the Persian Gulf is vitally necessary in order to prevent something terrible from happening.
What if we get chased out and things turn out to be non-catastrophic? What if bloodshed is limited to Iraq and maybe some areas around the Kurdistan-Turkey border that nobody cares about? What if oil keeps flowing? What if it turns out that, a Shiite-dominated government isn't interested in the kind of pan-Arabist ideology that could make Iraq a threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? What if it also turns out that it's not really feasible for a Persian regime in Teheran to control Iraq? And what if Taliban-style governance and global holy war turn out to be really unpopular?
What, in short, if things turn out to be basically okay for America and for Americans? Well, that'd be good, it seems to me. But it would also call into question a lot of habits of mind, past policies, spending commitments, career paths, sacred cows, delusions of grandeur, etc. That, I think, is why relatively few people in Washington seem interested in entertaining optimistic scenarios about the regional context even though an optimistic scenario seems more likely to me than do frequently discussed worst-case scenarios. The truth of the matter, though, is that there hasn't been a moment when the United States didn't try to micromanage events in the Gulf since, well, since the British Empire was doing it instead. There isn't, however, much in the way of evidence that this kind of policy is actually necessary. It does, however, seem to have succeeded in producing one of the most politically screwed up places on the planet.
Media Matters has a report into ideological balance among syndicated columnists which shows that "whether examining only the top columnists or the entire group, large papers or small, the data presented in this report make clear that conservative syndicated columnists enjoy a clear advantage over their progressive counterparts."
I would be fascinated to see a newspaper editor explain why he thinks this is. One possible answer, of course, is that readers love rightwingers. Maybe you gain a ton of subscribers, at the margin, by carrying Charles Krauthammer or John Podhoretz in your newspaper. Maybe that's what the editors of newspapers think. Maybe they even have some market research to back that conclusion up. Alternatively -- and in my view more plausibly -- maybe opinion columns have little measurable economic value (does anyone really believe Washington Post circulation would change in either direction if they sacked Krauthammer and hired Rosa Brooks away from the LA Times?) and basically exist to put forward ideas that newspaper owners find congenial.
What Kevin said about press coverage of Bush's plans "to order troop cuts only because of the success achieved on the ground in Iraq." Obviously, this is BS. We're returning to pre-surge troop levels next year because the surge was a surge -- something temporary -- because the military lacks the logistical capacity to further prolong it.
But if the policy is simply to continue the surge for as long as possible in hopes of a stroke of good luck on the political end, and then to end the surge when the operational strain requires it whether or not that luck has actually emerged, then what's the point of even having this whole argument about "progress"? Bush's position is actually one of studied indifference to conditions on the ground and the logic of the policy, namely that more US troops equals more security and security is the precondition for reconciliation, is that the surge should continue if there's progress (because it's working) or if there's no progress (because more security is needed). Either way, the surge is both a self-sustaining and self-limited policy intervention.
I'm not quite sure why there's nothing about this on Swampland, but it seems that during his testimony yesterday, Ryan Crocker gave an "I do not recall saying that" when confronted with a quotation from a Time story in which Crocker told Joe Klein "The fall of the Maliki government, when it happens, might be a good thing."
Klein says in response: "He said it. I've got it in my notes. He never denied it or asked for a correction after it appeared in print and was featured on Meet the Press. He may not remember it, but he said it."
Robin Hanson has a fondness for bold, outlandish claims so I think his argument that half of all medical spending is waste seems overstated. Nevertheless, the general shape of his point is something I certainly agree with -- an awful lot of medical spending is wasteful, and spending money on medical care isn't a particularly effective way of improving the health of the population. I'm taken with this opening metaphor:
Car inspections and repairs take a small fraction of our total spending on cars, gas, roads, and parking. But imagine that we were so terrified of accidents due to faulty cars that we spent most of our automotive budget having our cars inspected and adjusted every week by Ph.D. car experts. Obsessed by the fear of not finding a defect that might cause an accident, imagine we made sure inspections were heavily regulated and subsidized by government. To feed this obsession, imagine we skimped on spending to make safer roads, cars, and driving patterns, and our constant disassembling and reassembling of cars introduced nearly as many defects as it eliminated.
The crux of the matter, is that while there certainly are specific areas of medicine where you see a lot of efficacy (Hanson names "immunization, infant care, and emergency care") there are also a lot of areas where you don't see it. Moreover, while the current American policy environment is stingy about health care in some regards, Medicare is a very generous program and the tax treatment of employer-sponsored health care is, de facto, a giant and totally untargeted subsidy for the consumption of medical care. Obviously, though, health care policy has a "health" dimension but also a social justice dimension so even though a libertarian like Hanson and a liberal like myself can agree about this basic point this still leads in various directions.
Be that as it may, I think Hanson's observation that "humans long ago evolved a tendency to use medicine to 'show that we care,' rather than just to get healthy" partially explains why things like the UK's National Health Service generate so much bang for the buck. In effect, a highly centralized state run health care system is able to put a cap on how much demonstrative caring can be done through the health care system. Nobody's going to say to his or her spouse, "well, sure we could afford the procedure, but it doesn't really stand up to cost-benefit analysis compared to spending the money on organic produce for the kids" but if bureaucrats stand in your way well, then, that's hardly your fault.
It looks to me like the much-anticipated moment when the Republican primary electorate discovers that Rudy Giuliani doesn't hate gay people and doesn't hate immigrants and they hate people who don't hate gay people or immigrants (indeed, he may even be soft on gay immigrants) has arrived. I think just about everyone who watched Fred Thompson's belated entry into the presidential campaign concluded that it was a bit clumsy and poorly handled. But despite the very flawed nature of the announcement, he's sprung into a statistical tie with Rudy Giuliani in the latest CNN poll: "The former New York mayor garners 28 percent nationally among registered Republicans, while Thompson is one point behind at 27 percent -- well within the poll's 5 percentage point margin of error."
Given that Giuliani's also running behind Mitt Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire, his campaign seems to me to be in big trouble. And that's very good news for the country, since in this instance the Republican who's probably the most electable one is also the one who scares me the most. Meanwhile, though people keep warning me about Fred Thompson's formidable political skills, I haven't really seen a ton of evidence for them yet.
All-in-all I continue to find it surprising that the press seems more interested in the Democratic primary (and I've heard conservatives complain about this, so I'm not making a partisan complaint), which seems frozen in a locked pattern, than in the much more fluid and objectively interesting GOP race. Normally, I find horse race coverage basically dull, but I think one has to admit that a race where two candidates are neck-in-neck in national polls while a third candidate leads in cash and the early primary states makes for a decent horse race. Meanwhile, McCain's still lurking in the background, hoping that re-inventing himself as Crazy Uncle Surge will somehow save him.
I have elaborate and somewhat evidence-free theories of generational turnover in the press and so forth that renders me predisposed to agree with this theory of media out-of-touchness from Jim Henley:
Also, demographics mean that media operations will always lag the popular mood. The people with the jobs in newsrooms now are the Alex P. Keaton generation. Careerism means that now is their day. But it’s not Alex P. Keaton’s country any more. During Alex P. Keaton’s time, in fact, the Lou Grant Generation ran America’s papers. It wasn’t Lou Grant’s America by then either.
Kevin Drum tries to throw some water on the "Middle East in Flames" theory holding that American withdrawal from Iraq will lead not only to a short-term intensification of fighting in Iraq, but also to some kind of broader regional conflagration. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, as usual sensible but several clicks to my right, also make this point briefly in Democracy: "Talk that Iraq’s troubles will trigger a regional war is overblown; none of the half-dozen civil wars the Middle East has witnessed over the past half-century led to a regional conflagration."
Also worth mentioning in this context is the basic point that the Iranian and Syrian militaries just aren't able to conduct meaningful offensive military operations. The Saudi, Kuwait, and Jordanian militaries are even worse. The IDF has plenty of Arabs to fight closer to home. What you're looking at, realistically, is that our allies in Kurdistan might provide safe harbor to PKK guerillas, thus prompting our allies in Turkey to mount some cross-border military strikes against the PKK or possibly retaliatory ones against other Kurdish targets. This is a real problem, but it's obviously not a problem that's mitigated by having the US Army try to act as the Baghdad Police Department or sending US Marines to wander around the desert hunting a possibly mythical terrorist organization.
The real issue is that between the gloom-and-doom right and the modern-day decent left both emphasizing how departure will lead to bloodshed in Iraq, we've had very little recognition of the fact that how much bloodshed we're talking about is very much an open question and that we need to be thinking about how to minimize it. It's very implausible that you'd have all these countries invading Iraq. It is, however, totally plausible that Iran and Saudi Arabia, possibly with Turkey, Israel, and God-knows who else getting into the mix, might do exactly what the United States (and to a lesser extent, Iran) is already doing right now and giving the combatants weapons and money. Bigger inflows of money and weapons means a larger, deadlier civil war and we should try to stop that through diplomacy, contact groups, etc.
How effective that could be, I really couldn't say, but part of the package would have to be that we stop arming and funding the different factions. Does anyone think that the Iraq Air Force we're building is going to be anything other than a lethal participant in the post-withdrawal war? Intensified civil conflict is a real worry, but our mission in Iraq right now isn't helping that problem, it's making it worse.
One of the more bizarre aspects of America's bizarre constitution is that I am represented in congress by zero United States Senators and one non-voting member of the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, even though residents of the District of Columbia have less say over congress than do other American citizens, congress actually has more authority over the colony where we live. Even weirder, essentially everyone agrees that the reason we Districters don't have congressional representation is just that too many black people live here so Republicans wouldn't be competitive. This is not, if you think about, a very compelling justification for denying us equal political rights.
At any rate, Orrin G. Hatch, Joe Lieberman, Tom Davis and Eleanor Holmes Norton say we deserve a vote and they're right, damnit.
Ann Friedman declares that the video for Ciara's "Like a Boy" contains "the most successful execution of a move I'll call 'subversive crotchgrab in menswear' that I've seen in popular music since Madonna's 'Express Yourself' video."
Unfortunately for Ciara, though, a healthy share of the responsibility for the behavior she deplores seems to have deeper structural roots in the high rate of incarceration and low life expectancy of African-American men combined with the persistence of substantial social pressures against inter-racial dating. Note that "nationwide the Census Bureau calculates that among single non-Hispanic whites in their 20's, there are 120 men for every 100 women. The comparable figures are 153 Hispanic men, 132 Asian men and 92 black men for every 100 single women in their 20's of the same race or ethnicity." Insofar as people date intra-racially, that means African-Americans are facing a very different climate from whites, Asians, or Latinos.
Will Marshall July 23, 2005: "Democrats should also bring a sense of proportion to the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay."
Will Marshall September 2007: "We should start by putting our own house in order. That means unequivocally banning torture, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and junking the 'Cheney Doctrine,' which holds that U.S. presidents can make up their own rules for detaining, interrogating, and trying terrorist suspects without regard to domestic or international law."
Note that back two years ago when Marshall thought liberals were making too big a deal out of what he now thinks should be the next administration's top priority, he suggested that the reason liberals thought this was such a big deal was that they were unpatriotically busy "ignoring" the crimes of the insurgency in Iraq in a way that betrayed "an anti-American bias."
David Cutler strikes back with an observation that's a necessary complement to Robin Hanson's post about how much medicine is wasteful, namely that the waste-factor moves in both directions.
Much of the money that people spend on medical treatment isn't especially useful, but policies (cost-sharing, etc.) aimed at inducing people to cut back on their consumption of health care don't specifically induce them to cut back on their consumption of the wasteful parts. Thus, it's not as if the uninsured or the underinsured are skimping on wasteful treatments and still getting the necessary stuff, while those of us who are better positioned are just getting waste. Instead, the uninsured get little health care and much of the health care they do get is wasteful. People under financial pressure to reduce health care expenditures tend to cut out useful things just as much as the useless ones.
Back in the day, as you'll recall, the reason we couldn't leave
Iraq was that if we did, the (Sunni) insurgents would overthrow the
(Shiite) government. These days, though, the reason we can't leave Iraq
is that (government-backed) Shiite militias will kill Sunni civilians. Does anyone recall when this switch happened? Any guess as to how long before our new wonderful Anbar policy causes the worry to switch back?
Think about it. Since 1998, we've witnessed the first presidential impeachment since the 1860s, the first presidential election to go into "overtime" since the 1870s; the first attack on the continental United States since 1812; the first major preemptive "war of choice" in U.S. history; and the first televised destruction of an American city. I don't mean to equate any of these non-9/11 occurances with what we witnessed that day, but it has been an extraordinary span of time.
If you want to truly understand why Democrats (especially those whose entire formative political experience has been the last decade) are so often "angry," remember the behavior of the leadership of the Republican Party in all of the non-9/11 events I've mentioned. And then remember what the president and vice president have done to destroy the national unity and worldwide symphathy this country enjoyed just after 9/11, typically viewing domestic unity and global approval with ill-disguised contempt.
I only hope that Ed can appreciate that part of the reason there's a lot of anger also directed at a somewhat nebulous "Democratic establishment" is precisely a perception that at just these moments of conservative perfidy to which he points, the response mounted by said establishment was notably ineffectual.
Via Amanda and Tom Lee, I see that we've got an Iron Man film in the works. I'm pretty psyched. Besides the reasons Tom notes, it's worth keeping in mind that from the beginning Iron Man has always been the most national security policy oriented of superheroes.
His initial origin story related to the Vietnam War, it was eventually updated for the Gulf War, and the film preview makes it look like they've updated things yet again for the 21st century's military conflicts. Under the circumstances, I firmly expect to be able to get some additional blog posts out of this film in the future. Still, at this point Ultimates is really the comic book movie that I want to see.
Negotiations for a law to specify how oil revenue will be shared in Iraq are once again breaking down, once again casting the failure of the surge into stark relief. Bush meanwhile, has decided that his plan to end the surge when it's logistically impossible to continue it is a moderate "way to bring America together."
At the same time, Barack Obama's latest, most detailed scheme for withdrawing troops from Iraq isn't perfect in my view, but does meet all of the whining objections from the dwindling liberal hawk caucus that anti-war people are ignoring the humanitarian aspects to the situation. Obama's plan won't magically eliminate the now-inevitable continuation of the massive suffering that's been taking place for years now in Iraq, but it is the most thoughtful program out there for how to mitigate it.
Of course, since the political purpose of raising these humanitarian issues is just to try to build political support for an open-ended military deployment whose relationship to humanitarian goals is very hazy, the existence of an actual plan of humanitarian action isn't going to actually shelter Obama from these criticisms.
Today falls exactly nine months before Russia Day, and as one of Putin's policies to encourage more breeding in his country, he's offered SUVs, refrigerators, and monetary rewards to anyone who gives birth on June 12. So the mayor of Ulyanovsk, a region in central Russia, has given workers there the afternoon off to make with the baby making. Everyone who gives birth is a winner in the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia's Independence Day" contest, but the grand prize winner -- judged on qualities like "respectability" and "commendable parenting" -- gets to take home a UAZ-Patriot, a Russian-made SUV.
I wonder what the natalists of the blogosphere have to say about that. The only Russian cars I've been in were GAZ-Volgas and they were pretty impressively unimpressive (Communism doesn't work, kids). Maybe the UAZ-Patriot would surprise me, though.
This has been anticipated, but it looks like former Governor Mark Warner is officially unoffocially in the race (official announcement later today) to succeed John Warner as Senator from Virginia. For reasons that are slightly mysterious to me, governor Warner is ridiculously popular in Virginia for someone who was governor for four years a couple of years ago (even my cousin in second grade remembers him fondly), so this has just gone and become a very likely Democratic pickup which, in turn, makes it overwhelmingly likely that Democrats maintain their Senate majority.
UPDATE: Commenters are warning that semi-moderate Rep. Tom Davis would be a formidable opponent, but Rasmussen's polls say otherwise:
In a match-up of former Virginia Governors, a Rasmussen Reports telephone survey finds Warner leading Jim Gilmore by twenty percentage points, 54% to 34%. Warner also starts the season with a comfortable lead over Virginia Congressman Tom Davis. The Rasmussen Reports poll shows Warner attracting 57% of the vote while Davis earns 30%.
I should note that, like Matt Stoller, I'm not really a Mark Warner fan. I am, however, strongly inclined to take what I can get in terms of Democratic pickups in southern states.
It feels a little absurd to me to need to be parsing speeches this closely to figure out where candidates actually stand on the most pressing issue of the day, but I think Obama's Iraq speech yesterday contained a small-but-significant shift in his stance on residual forces:
We will need to retain some forces in Iraq and the region. We'll continue to strike at al Qaeda in Iraq. We'll protect our forces as they leave, and we will continue to protect U.S. diplomats and facilities. If--but only if--Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian, we should continue to train and equip those forces. But we will set our own direction and our own pace, and our direction must be out of Iraq. The future of our military, our foreign policy, and our national purpose cannot be hostage to the inaction of the Iraqi government.
The key shift here being that the training mission should continue "if -- but only if -- Iraq makes political progress and their security forces are not sectarian." In other words, in the real world, the training and equipping mission will not continue but if a miraculous pony happens to emerge then that's a different story. This is correct and General Petraeus' testimony and the renewed evidence on the centrality of political progress is as good a time as any for Democrats to follow the Center for American Progress' lead and reject unconditional training of Iraqi forces. This is different from my best understanding of what Hillary Clinton's proposing.
Meanwhile, this idea about the need to keep American forces in Iraq to fight AQI seems misguided to me, but I don't think it's nearly as significant as the training issue since it's the difference between a limited involvement in a specific mission in Iraq and a deep entanglement with all of that country's political problems.
Brian Beutler ponders the spectacle of General David Petraeus admitting he doesn't know if the war in Iraq makes Americans safer:
I almost sympathize with him. But in the end this only brings to light the giant expanse between how George Bush casts Petraeus and what Petraeus can accomplish (or even claim his role to be) without showing his hand. Bush says "winning" in Iraq is critical to American safety. He also says he's handed over responsibility for success there to General Petraeus, who we all must trust because he's just so honorable. Tall order. But that setup leaves Petraeus in an uncomfortable position, especially when faced with members of the Senate: He can't claim to be everything the president says he is, but neither can he suggest that his mission is anything but completely essential for American security. He must either sacrifice his mission-minded reputation as a soldier and toe the Bush line, or call into question the value of the mission itself. On Tuesday, I think we saw a man desperately trying to have it both ways and failing badly.
It's worth saying that Petraeus' answer was, in many ways, the only appropriate one to give. A soldier's job is to execute a policy. If you call him on the floor, you can expect him to defend his execution of the policy. Bush, however, wants Petraeus to defend the policy. This, however, isn't Petraeus' job. He's the top general in Iraq. He's not, however, in command of our civilian presence there. Nor is he in charge of diplomacy with Iraq's neighbors or with major allies (Israel, Egypt, etc.) elsewhere in the region. He's not in overall command of American military forces in the Middle East. He's in the Pentagon taking a big picture look at the American military. Nor is he fighting al-Qaeda around the world.
None of those things are his job. But they are all incredibly important pieces to put together when you want to ask whether or not our policy in Iraq is, all things considered, serving the national interest. That question, however, is a question for George W. Bush; a political question for politicians to debate without hiding behind generals or claiming their opponents are slandering the troops.
Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, head honcho of the Anbar Salvation Council, was killed earlier today by insurgents. Meanwhile, Jim Henley wonders:
I read a lot about how Sunni tribal leaders and insurgents have “turned against AQI,” and how we’re paying them to - er, supporting them with financing and logistics in their fight against AQI. But actual reporting on what they’re doing to fight AQI is scarce. Aside from pocketing our money and manning some checkpoints, what are they doing?
A good question. And given the dodgy state of American intelligence in that area, how do we even know what they're doing?
Since there is no Israel lobby, and if there is one it's not influential at all, then obviously these attacks on Zbigniew Brzezinski couldn't possibly be politically damaging, and therefore Barack Obama must be distancing himself from Brzezinski's views on the matter for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the political clout of this non-existent lobby. Obviously, anyone who says otherwise is an anti-semite.
I've been remiss in not doing any blogging about the revelation that Bill Belichick's defensive schemes seem to involve cheating. To me, the potentially excellent shadenfreude value here is diminished by the fact that the main alternative to the Patriots is the . . . also loathsome Indianapolis Colts. All of which is to say that Ross is right about dynasties. One, especially if they're not too dominant, can be good for a league by giving everyone someone to hate. But a dynastic rivalry soon enough just becomes tedious for everyone not from the two cities involved.
Photo by Flickr user Silas216 used under a Creative Commons license
I think this is the sound of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell lying to congress. Meanwhile, here's General David Petraeus responding to the news that Abdul Sattar Abu Risha has been killed:
"This is a tragic loss," Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, said of Abu Risha's death. "It's a terrible loss for Anbar province and all of Iraq. It shows how significant his importance was and it shows al-Qaeda in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy."
The only problem is that Petraeus doesn't have any evidence that Abu Risha was killed by al-Qaeda in Iraq. After all, lots of people had reason to want to kill him. Here's Time from June 1:
Sheikh Sattar, whose tribe is notorious for highway banditry, is also building a personal militia, loyal not to the Iraqi government but only to him. Other tribes — even those who want no truck with terrorists — complain they are being forced to kowtow to him. Those who refuse risk being branded as friends of al-Qaeda and tossed in jail, or worse. In Baghdad, government delight at the Anbar Front's impact on al-Qaeda is tempered by concern that the Marines have unwittingly turned Sheikh Sattar into a warlord who will turn the province into his personal fiefdom.
He could have been killed by one of Anbar's other Sunni groups. He could have been killed by people working for Maliki's government. People die all the time in Iraq, and there are only a tiny number of AQI personnel. This is a classic example of the Myth of al-Qaeda in Iraq in action -- it's convenient to blame this on AQI so that's what's happening even though there's no evidence.
I was hoping to come up with some fascinating commentary to make on Robert Kaplan's take on the "surge" report that's now up on the Atlantic website, but I don't really have an incredibly novel rejoinder to assertions like "It may be no accident that the progress we have seen is at the bottom, since that might be the only place where such progress can even begin to take hold."
To reiterate, though, I believe that the essentially problem in Iraq is disagreement about the basic nature of the Iraqi state. In particular, disagreement between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs about who should control Iraq, and disagreement between Kurds and Arabs about how much control Iraq should have over Kurdistan and how big Kurdistan should be. "Political reconciliation" is the name for the hypothetical process by which critical masses of all three groups might come together to reach an agreement about these key issues. Various figures, including Ryan Crocker, David Petraeus, David Brooks, and now Robert Kaplan are pushing the idea that the "Anbar Awakening" represents a form of "bottom-up reconciliation" that serves as an alternative to reconciliation understood as a agreement between major factional leaders.
The problem here is that the Awakening isn't just bottom-up rather than top-down, but actually on a different subject. Sunni Arabs agreeing to stop fighting American soldiers as a precursor to overthrowing the Shiite-led government and, instead, to accept money and possibly weapons from American soldiers as a precursor to overthrowing the Shiite-led government isn't a close substitute for Sunnis and Shiites reaching an agreement about the nature of the government. Nor is it a tentative first step toward such an agreement. Nor is it progress toward such an agreement.
