For more than 230 years, Americans have assumed that because we have had a happy experience with democracy, so will the rest of the world. But the American military has had a radically contrary experience in Iraq. And Iraq may be but prologue for what our troops may encounter in the tribal areas of Pakistan.Robert Kaplan, "It's the Tribes, Stupid!", The Atlantic, November 2007
Iraq has had three elections that have led to chaos. Bringing society out of that chaos has meant a recourse not to laws or a constitution, but to blood ties. The Anbar Awakening has been a rebuff not only to the extremism of al-Qaeda, but to democracy itself. Restoring peace in Anbar has been accomplished by a lot of money changing hands, to the benefit of unelected but well-respected tribal sheikhs, paid off with cash and projects by our soldiers and marines. Progress in Iraq means erecting not a parliamentary system, but a balance of fear among tribes and sectarian groups.
...Iraq hawks argued that, in a post-9/11 world, we needed to take out rogue regimes lest they give nuclear or biological weapons to al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups. But each time the United States tries to do so and fails to restore order, it incurs a high -- albeit unseen -- opportunity cost in the future. Falling short makes it harder to take out, threaten or pressure a dangerous regime next time around.Foreign governments, of course, drew the obvious lesson from our debacle -- and from our choice of target. The United States invaded hapless Iraq, not nuclear-armed North Korea. To the real rogues, the fall of Baghdad was proof positive that it's more important than ever to acquire nuclear weapons -- and if the last superpower is bogged down in Iraq while its foes slink toward getting the bomb, so much the better. Iran, among others, has taken this lesson to heart. The ironic legacy of the war to end all proliferation will be more proliferation.
The bottom line is clear, Mr. President: The more you worried about the unchecked spread of doomsday weapons, the stronger you thought the case was for war in the first place. But precisely because you had a point about the need to stop nuclear proliferation, you must now realize that the costs of a failed war are far higher than you've acknowledged.
Ironically, it's probably the doves who should lower their mental estimate of the war's long-haul cost: By fighting a botched war today, the United States has lowered the chance that it will fight another preventive war in the near future. The American public simply does not have the stomach for fighting a costly, potentially futile war every few years...
What Does Iraq Cost? Even More Than You Think (Washington Post, November 18, 2007)
Six Years Later: Bin Laden Still Free, U.S. Mired in Iraq (Radley Balko, September 12, 2o07, FoxNews.com)We have created in Iraq the exact type of scenario Bin Laden was hoping (but failed) to lure us into in Afghanistan—an unwinnable war where we're isolated from the world, our troops are walking targets for guerilla terrorists, and our only options are bad (pull out and hope for minimal carnage) and worse (stay in, where our troops will continue to die, and where there's no prospect for stability in the near future).
A loosely-connected, (relatively) poorly funded, backward-thinking organization like Al-Qaeda could never inflict significant harm on the United States, at least not in a straightforward war. Their best hope is to scare us into rash, ill-considered actions like overextending our military, alienating our allies, and doing away with the open society and civil liberties that define who we are.
Six years have passed since Sept. 11. That's enough time and distance for us to take a couple of steps back, look at that horrible day with some perspective, and reevaluate if the course we've charted is the correct one. We should bear in mind that Al-Qaeda could never defeat us on its own. It can only frighten and trap us into defeating ourselves.
Ahmed, who has a Shiite father and a Sunni mother, considers himself a secular Shiite, and, in his view, the religious militias want to force people like him out of Baghdad. “Americans are the safe house for the whole situation in Iraq,” he said. “Once they say they are going to withdraw, the whole country will become a hell.” He went on, “I imagine that no Sunnis will be in Baghdad at all. Baghdad will be only for the Shiite man with the long beard and black imama—the turban. The Americans are representing the taboos, just like ‘Lord of the Flies.’ I imagine the Shiites will be just like that if the Americans have to withdraw. Who can fight will fight, who must leave will leave.” He added, “Those who are weak, who are trying to avoid the savagery, those who are at the edge of being eaten by the Shiite specifically—that will be the end point, that will be their doomsday. The plan, as we hear it, is to make Baghdad empty of Sunnis.”Planning for Defeat: How should we withdraw from Iraq? (The New Yorker, September 17, 2007)
This week, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador in Baghdad, and General David Petraeus, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, will give their assessment of the surge to Congress—an event that, in Washington, has taken on the aura of a make-or-break moment for the Administration’s policy. But their testimony is likely to be unremarkable. Administration officials, military officers, and members of Congress described their expectations of it in strikingly similar terms, and a few said that they could write it in advance: military progress, a political stalemate among Iraqis, more time needed.
The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the “Mission Accomplished” declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.
On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”Challenging The Generals (Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007)
[...]General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”
Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”
The testimony reveals the CIA run by a man who cannot think straight, advising the national security adviser, who went on to make false allegations, and the vice president, who made more false allegations, and the president, who took ill-considered action.Torture on 60 Minutes, William F. Buckley, May 2, 2007
The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war.The Waning of the GOP (William F. Buckley, Jr. writing in National Review, April 28, 2007)
For the second time in a generation, the United States faces the prospect of defeat at the hands of an insurgency. In April 1975, the U.S. fled the Republic of Vietnam, abandoning our allies to their fate at the hands of North Vietnamese communists. In 2007, Iraq's grave and deteriorating condition offers diminishing hope for an American victory and portends risk of an even wider and more destructive regional war.These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy. The argument that follows consists of three elements. First, generals have a responsibility to society to provide policymakers with a correct estimate of strategic probabilities. Second, America's generals in Vietnam and Iraq failed to perform this responsibility. Third, remedying the crisis in American generalship requires the intervention of Congress.
Here's the link. Go read it:
As we enter year five of the Iraq war, President Bush is demanding a second surge—not of soldiers, but of spending. Congress has been glad to oblige, seeing his $93.4 billion "emergency" request and adding an extra $21 billion, with subsidies for such military necessities as America's citrus farms ($100 million), fisheries ($60 million), and new congressional office space ($16 million).Blood and Treasure (Reason Magazine, March 22, 2007)
Two years ago Bush promised this war would "support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond." Obviously, he has been true to his word. Once, to be a war profiteer, you had to be involved, however peripherally, in war-making: building weapons, supplying troops, or at the very least making money off some supposed reconstruction project. Now you can rake in the war profits from the shade of your orange grove. What better example could there be of democratization, of replacing the rule of elites with an open, more participatory system? Talk about sharing our wealth: Every Man a Halliburton!
The war that has unhinged so many has curiously revitalized Buckley, not as the administration's most eloquent defender but as perhaps its most forceful in-house critic. Untethered to the Bush team--the only insider he knew was Donald Rumsfeld, whom Buckley suggested should consider resigning following the Abu Ghraib scandal--he is also detached from its outer ring of ideologues and flacks. He is, instead, a party of one, who thinks and writes with newfound freedom. While others, left and right, have staked out positions and then fortified them, week after week, Buckley has been thinking his way through events as they have unfolded, looking for new angles of approach, new ways of understanding, drawing on his matchless knowledge of modern conservatism and on his 50-year immersion in the American political scene. It is one of those late-period efflorescences that major figures sometimes enjoy--and, in Buckley's case, it is marked by an unexpected austerity. Like Wallace Stevens's snow man, he has developed a "mind of winter" and, as he scans the bleak vista of the Iraq disaster, "beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And it has been instructive to observe.Athwart History: How William F. Buckley Turned Against The War - And His Own Movement (The New Republic, 3/15/07)
Missing in Baghdad: My Father (Wall Street Journal, February 17, 2007; subscription required)About 5 o'clock on a mid-December morning, I was awakened by a call from my brother in Iraq. "Dad is missing," he said. He was upset and some of his anger spilled out at me: "You should be here," he shouted. "You don't seem to care."
My father had left home in Baghdad that morning to go to the auto-repair shop across town where he works. Fifteen minutes after he left, car bombs exploded on his route to work and he hasn't been seen since.
His disappearance set off a desperate search by my family through the netherworld of war-torn Baghdad. It also put me in the agonizing position of trying to help my family with the violent dislocations of civil war -- over the phone, from thousands of miles away. I'm the oldest son and have been studying and working in New York for more than two years. Since my father vanished, my three grown siblings and my mother have looked to me as the head of the family.
Every time I hear about a bomb going off, I brace myself for the worst possible news. Last February, my entire family went missing for two weeks, without a word. When my cellphone rings and an Iraqi number shows up on the display, I say a silent prayer before answering.
...I have come to the conclusion that the situation could not be any worse and that the American presence in Iraq is causing as much conflict as it is preventing. Therefore, I think we should disengage as rapidly as possible. Adding additional troops, as Bush plans to do, simply means throwing good money after bad.Good Reasons to Leave Iraq (Bruce Bartlett, New York Times Blogs, Jan 17, 2007)Perhaps if Bush still had any credibility, I would be willing to give him the benefit of a doubt, as I did four years ago. But since then, we have learned how incredibly poor the prewar intelligence was, how Bush essentially bullied intelligence analysts into giving him the reports he wanted, and how he undertook the war with insufficient forces and without giving any thought to postwar planning or an exit strategy.
At this point, it is obvious even to Bush that the status quo is untenable, and he has put the last of his chips on the table to try to salvage something he can call a victory. But there still is no realistic plan for achieving it — or even a definition of victory in the context of Iraq. Consequently, I don’t see how this troop surge can possibly succeed. All it will do is put off the inevitable pullout by another year or more, which means that hundreds more of our fighting men and women will die in vain.
Apparently many of the EFPs ["explosively formed projectiles," or shaped-charge explosives - bc] are being factory-made in Iran, and shipped to Iraq. During 2005, I asked many American and Iraqi commanders if they were capturing Iranians. They were capturing foreigners, surely, but what about Iranians? Not a single commander, Iraqi or American, told me that his people were catching Iranians. Times have changed. Today, American commanders talk about capturing Iranians. Not rumored Iranians, but real ones; some of whom are believed to be involved in importing EFP technology into Iraq. To be sure, EFPs are deadly, but from a broader military perspective, they are merely a nuisance.
[...]This does not look like a big or intense war to people at home. It doesn’t look like that because we have so few troops actually in combat. But for those who are truly fighting, this is a brutal death match where every mistake can get them killed, or make worldwide headlines. Yet when the enemy drills out eyes or tortures people with acid, it never resonates.
There is an explanation for why when some of these young soldiers and Marines go home and people are trying to talk with them they might be caught silently staring out a window. Many people back home seem to think they have an idea what is happening here, but most do not. And nobody is here to tell the story of our people in this war.
...The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.How could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.
The Shameful Hanging of Saddam Hussein (Slate, January 2, 2007)
The taunts Mr. Hussein endured from Shiite guards as he stood with the noose around his neck have made headlines around the world, and stirred angry protests among his fellow Iraqi Sunnis. But the story of how American commanders and diplomats fought to halt the execution until midnight on Friday, only six hours before Mr. Hussein was hanged, is only now coming into focus, as Iraqi and American officials, in the glare of international outrage over the hanging, compete with their versions of what happened.
Smashing.“Might I suggest, sir, a regional conference?”
“Dash it, Jeeves, we’re at war. You can’t go conferencing with bullets flying all over the place.”
“Indeed, sir. And yet if we were to invite, say, Iran and Syria and some of the other affected countries to sit down for what is, I believe, referred to as ‘networking,’ it might take some of the pressure off yourself?”
“You mean the sort of how-d’ye-do where everyone sits at one of those huge U-shaped tables and makes endless orations all day?”
“That would be the general notion, yes, sir.”
“Now, steady on, Jeeves. You know I hate those things. You sit there with an earphone, listening to interpreters jibber-jabber about how it’s all your fault. I’d rather take my chances playing Blinky with Cobra Woman and Cactus Butt.”
“You wouldn’t actually have to attend personally, sir. Indeed, I could represent you, if that would be agreeable.”
“I say, would you, Jeeves?”
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.This is, of course, the kind of risk you run when you publicly post tens of thousands of documents in a language (Arabic) that the vast majority of your knowledge managers do not speak or read.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”
Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.
U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer (New York Times, November 3, 2006)
Censoring Iraq: Michael Yon, The Weekly Standard, October 30, 2006In a counterinsurgency, the media battlespace is critical. When it comes to mustering public opinion, rallying support, and forcing opponents to shift tactics and timetables to better suit the home team, our terrorist enemies are destroying us. Al Qaeda's media arm is called al Sahab: the cloud. It feels more like a hurricane. While our enemies have "journalists" crawling all over battlefields to chronicle their successes and our failures, we have an "embed" media system that is so ineptly managed that earlier this fall there were only 9 reporters embedded with 150,000 American troops in Iraq. There were about 770 during the initial invasion.
Many blame the media for the estrangement, but part of the blame rests squarely on the chip-laden shoulders of key military officers and on the often clueless Combined Press Information Center in Baghdad, which doesn't manage the media so much as manhandle them. Most military public affairs officers are professionals dedicated to their jobs, but it takes only a few well-placed incompetents to cripple our ability to match and trump al Sahab. By enabling incompetence, the Pentagon has allowed the problem to fester to the point of censorship.
