Words Don't Kill (II)

For the past six years the American media has seemed determined not to define George W. Bush or his Administration as outside the mainstream. They have essentially accepted the President's image of himself as a thoughtful and responsible leader. Bizarrely, that has led them to ignore, literally, several major stories that have been broken in allied lands, such as Britain and Israel. Today I have discovered the the embattled Paul Wolfowitz is receiving the same benefit of clergy.

Perhaps the most important such story has been in the news this week--the conversation in 2004, I believe, between President Bush and Tony Blair in which the President proposed bombing the central office of Al-Jazeera in Dubai. That came to light when two British officials leaked the account of the conversation. The American media refused to pick up the story at all, but in the past two weeks the two men have been sentenced to prison for violating Britain's Official Secrets Act. That amounts to indisputable confirmation of the story, since one can't be sentenced for leaking something that didn't exist in the first place.

A second less serious but equally revealing story broke this year in Israel, thanks to a journalist who had been very close to Ariel Sharon. He wrote that our President had once remarked to the Israeli Prime Minister that when the United States caught Osama Bin Laden, "I'll screw him in the ass." The real scandal here, of course, isn't the President's Texas swagger: it's the appalling, unbelievable failure, nearly six years after the fact, to have caught the man who killed 3000 Americans and who by all accounts has been living in a country that is supposed to be an American ally. But surely these presidential musings might have merited the attention of the New York Times or Washington Post? Evidently their editors did not think so.

Now today, everyone knows that Paul Wolfowitz is under attack. My wife and I had a good laugh this morning over the New York Times story, which described the White House's new proposal to have the bank clear Wolfowitz of wrongdoing so that he could resign honorably. When I mentioned this to my wife yesterday, she asked, "Haven't these guys ever watched Survivor?"--a reference to Dreamz's double-cross of Yao Man, which I had told her about (she doesn't watch the show, but I never miss it.) Sure enough, the Times today reports that the Europeans want someone to put the promise to resign in writing before they go through with such a deal. Nicholas Kristof also has a good article on the subject (which mentions, by the way, that the White House barred him from a recent conference on malaria because they don't like the things he writes.) But nowhere in any major American newspaper will one find the following story, gleaned from the World Bank's official report, which I just read in the British Guardian. (The Guardian and another British paper, the Independent, have broken a lot of important stories that the US press won't touch in the last few years. I quote:

"....angry comments attributed to Mr Wolfowitz came from damning testimony by Xavier Coll, head of human resources at the bank, who provided investigators with his notes of a meeting with Mr Wolfowitz last year. The notes directly contradict Mr Wolfowitz's assertions that the details of Ms Riza's treatment were properly shared with senior bank officials.

"In March last year, when a mention of Ms Riza's secondment outside the bank to avoid rules about partners was first published in the magazine US News & World Report, an angry Mr Wolfowitz accused Mr Coll of leaking the information.

"According to Mr Coll's notes: 'At the end of the conversation Mr Wolfowitz became increasingly agitated and said that he was 'tired of people ... attacking him' and 'you should get your friends to stop it'. Mr Wolfowitz said, 'If they fuck me or Shaha, I have enough on them to fuck them too'," naming several senior bank staff he felt were vulnerable."

Mr. Wolfowitz apparently fancies himself tougher than Vice President Cheney, who is content to tell political opponents to fuck themselves. But isn't the American public entitled to know from its own media that this is the kind of man that the White House is staking American honor on defending? The answer, in my opinion, is yes.

The Surge is Failing

The dispatch of 30,000 additional American forces to Iraq represented, in effect, the reversal of the decision reached by the Johnson Administration in March 1968, after the initial round of Tet attacks and the siege of Khe Sanh had led General Westmoreland to request another 206,000 troops, an increment that would have raised the total to about 750,000. Then Pentagon civilians convinced their new boss, Clark Clifford, that such an increase would not affect the strategic situation (partly because only a small fraction of it would consist of actual infantrymen.) The increase would in any case have required a large reserve call-up to reconstitute the strategic reserve. Meanwhile, the Army in Europe, filled with soldiers on 7- or 8-month tours, was already in a wretched state. The President eventually decided against the increase and partially halted the bombing of North Vietnam, and the slow de-escalation process had begun.

All indications suggested that the Pentagon was more than ready to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq last year, all the more so because the Army and Marines could not sustain the current pace. Donald Rumsfeld, we now know, had been trying to turn more of the job over to the Iraqis for quite some time. But instead, Rumsfeld was fired (ironically, in my opinion, because he refused to escalate our involvement further), and the President completely disregarded the Baker-Hamilton recommendations. He also relieved his commanders at CENTCOM and in Iraq, giving the latter command to the highly respected General David Petraeus, who had just helped draft a new manual on counterinsurgency and could hardly pass up the chance to try to put it into practice. Unfortunately, the first few months of the new strategy have been anything but a success.

The problems of counterinsurgency in Iraq and the American approach to it were the subject of a fine article by the brilliant if eccentric political scientist Edward Luttwak in Harper's. Luttwak said, in different words, what I have been saying here for two and a half years: that the political basis for the Iraq we are trying to create does not exist among the Arab population. The Sunni population either actively supports or fears the insurgents, and the Shi'ite population supports sectarian fundamentalism. It doesn't matter, as Luttwak points out, whether they are motivated by genuine allegiance or merely by fear; in either case they will not work for the objective of a non-sectarian, democratic Iraq. Nor is there the slightest evidence that any of the major factions within the government are really working towards such a goal; to one degree or another they sympathize with the goals of the Sunni insurgents on the one hand or the Shi'ite fundamentalists (still obviously very influential in the Al-Maliki government) on the other. The United States, as Luttwak points out, refuses to govern Iraq itself (he might have added that we have nowhere near the forces necessary to do so), and thus what authority there is is wielded by the insurgents or militias and Iraqis who are cooperating with them. Politically we are helpless.

The new strategy behind the surge consists in putting more American soldiers among the Iraqi population. As such it parallels what the Marines tried to do with Combined Action Platoons in the villages of Vietnam (as described in Bing West's excellent book, The Village), and what the American army also tried to do in some areas beginning in 1969. West showed how the Marines lived with the villagers, earned their trust, and kept the VC away from them by spending every night in ambush positions on the paths leading into it. Clearly, however, several problems make the success of such a strategy most unlikely in the neighborhoods of Baghdad.
First, the cultural gap between the Iraqi population and the Americans is considerably larger than that between the Americans and Vietnamese forty years ago--the reason why Americans and Vietnamese are now getting along so well. Second and more importantly, there were more Americans and fewer Vietnamese in that situation--20 Americans within a South Vietnamese village was a very larger number. Thirdly, we are now dealing in an urban environment of paved roads filled with motor vehicles--vehicles that can all too easily be turned into car bombs. Americans setting up ambushes on the streets of Baghdad would immediately suffer heavy casualties.

The Americans, recent press reports indicate, are doing the only thing they can: they are building fortified outposts in the neighborhoods to which they are assigned with the help of huge blocks of concrete. That, obviously, will separate them from the population and make it very difficult to build up any genuine trust. (This would be very hard anyway since so few Americans can speak any Arabic.) Those outposts will simply dare the insurgents to build bigger and better car bombs, or to attack them in new, ingenious, and not very labor-intensive ways. And indeed, because more Americans are out on the street, more Americans are dying. Our casualties hit a two-year high last month and this month isn't looking much better (six soldiers were probably killed today, although two of them, for the moment, are only missing.) In addition, the insurgents have been moving to new areas--most notably to Diyala province, where the US Commander has just asked for reinforcements. That will put President Bush on the spot, and today's Los Angeles Times actually speculates that Secretary Gates is encouraging commanders to make such requests to make it clear that what we are doing will not be enough.

Meanwhile, even the American-sponsored political leadership has had enough, and a majority of Iraqi legislators are preparing a call for an American withdrawal. That, I think, might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Polls have been showing for years that large majorities of Arab Iraqis want the Americans out, Our politicians have paid no attention so far, but vulnerable Republicans will find it harder and harder to defend the increasing deaths of American troops if no Iraqis want us there.

The Bush Administration now faces serious attacks on so many fronts that its last eighteen months seem more and more certain to resemble those of the Nixon Administration. It may actually reverse course in Iraq, but I see no sign that it will reverse its overall foreign policy. Just yesterday, Vice President Cheney, in a brave replay of his boss's most disastrous symbolic moment, stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and promised to use American naval power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, interfering with trade, or dominating the Middle East. Preventive war remains, in short, our policy. Should it occur, I honestly believe that Americans will certainly never be safe in the Middle East and will face new threats even in Europe for many years to come. The Congress should act to stop war on Iran. Events will eventually end the American war in Iraq.

The fourth great American crisis

In 1993, in their first book Generations, my friends Bill Strauss and Neil Howe identified three great crises in American national life--the revolutionary and constitutional era (approximately 1774-1794), the civil war era (1857-1868 or so, in my opinion, although longer in the South), and 1929-45. Identifying a periodicity of about 80 years, they anticipated the next crisis by about 2010. After 9/11 many of their readers assumed the crisis had come, but I think now that that was a mirage. But it is upon us now, albeit only in the realm of the mind and spirit. It is a truly Orwellian battle now: the battle for the right to say that two plus two equals four. And like all such battles, it is bringing out both the worst and the best among Americans.

Last night I finally watched Bill Moyers's special on the selling of the Iraq war, which was undersold, not surprisingly, by the mainstream media. It's watchable at pbs.org and no one should miss it. Moyars excoriates the virtually entire mainstream media, led by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the networks, for swallowing the Administration line on WMD hook, line and sinker. He reserves his praise for two brave reporters for Knight-Ridder, a newspaper chain which, significantly, does not have a paper in either Washington or New York, and whose reporters took the trouble to investigate open sources and run down leads and found little or no evidence that Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. He names the names of all the pundits--Safire, Kristol, Krauthammer, Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Richard Cohen, Jim Hoagland, and Peter Beinart of the New Republic--who embraced preventive war to disarm Saddam Hussein. Of them all, only Beinart has apologized, and the first five refused even to be interviewed by Moyers--as far as they are concerned they don't owe us any explanation. (For the record, I myself repeatedly attacked the preventive war doctrine on which the conflict was based in the months before the war on an internet list called H-Diplo. Anyone who is interested can go to its discussion log and search for my posts. I did not have the knowledge to argue that Iraq had no WMD, but I repeatedly attacked the preventive war doctrine as a violation of everything the US had always stood for and a disaster for the international community.) Moyers also spent some time on the media's failure to cover the inspectors' mission to Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. It turns out that while Colin Powell was complaining about certain mysterious Iraqi sites to the UN (with a smirking George Tenet sitting behind him), inspectors had already looked at those sites and found that they contained nothing of significance. President Bush's continuing insistence that Saddam refused to disarm--which ignores both his lack of weapons and his high degree of cooperation with the inspectors--is one of his most outrageous falsehoods. Moyers also showed how the few Democrats with long memories and courage to oppose the war from the start, like Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy, were virtually blacked out by the media, just as Wayne Morse was when he spoke against the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964. Moyers, who left the Johnson White House because of our last disastrous foreign intervention, is doing his bit regarding this one.

So is retired general Paul Eaton, whose recent letter to President Bush was posted on a veterans web site. I reproduce it here for non-commercial use only. In recent weeks, President Bush has been arguing that the Iraq war authorization must be passed because it's what the military leaders in Iraq say they need--which amounts to an abdication of his responsibility as commander and chief and political leader, since he is the one who is supposed to set the goals of American foreign and military policy and decide what is needed to meet them. Eaton nails that one most effectively.

May 1, 2007

Vote Vets

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

Today, in your veto message regarding the bipartisan legislation just passed on Operation Iraqi Freedom, you asserted that you so decided because you listen to your commanders on the ground.

Respectfully, as your former commander on the ground, your administration did not listen to our best advice. In fact, a number of my fellow Generals were forced out of their jobs, because they did not tell you what you wanted to hear -- most notably General Eric Shinseki, whose foresight regarding troop levels was advice you rejected, at our troops' peril.

The legislation you vetoed today represented a course of action that is long overdue. This war can no longer be won by the military alone. We must bring to bear the entire array of national power - military, diplomatic and economic. The situation demands a surge in diplomacy, and pressure on the Iraqi government to fix its internal affairs. Further, the Army and Marine Corps are on the verge of breaking - or have been broken already - by the length and intensity of this war. This tempo is not sustainable - and you have failed to grow the ground forces to meet national security needs. We must begin the process of bringing troops home, and repairing and growing our military, if we are ever to have a combat-ready force for the long war on terror ahead of us.

The bill you rejected today sets benchmarks for success that the Iraqis would have to meet, and puts us on a course to redeploy our troops. It stresses the need for sending troops into battle only when they are rested, trained and equipped. In my view, and in the view of many others in the military that I know, that is the best course of action for our security.

As someone who served this nation for decades, I have the utmost respect for the office you hold. However, as a man of conscience, I could not sit idly by as you told the American people today that your veto was based on the recommendations of military men. Your administration ignored the advice of our military's finest minds before, and I see no evidence that you are listening to them now.

I urge you to reconsider your position, and work with Congress to pass a bill that achieves the goals laid out above.

Respectfully,

Major General Paul D. Eaton, USA, Retired

The Administration's debasement of the debate over Iraq is making it impossible even to focus on what the war is about. It claims that we are fighting Al Queda, as if Al Queda would rule Iraq if we left. Yet every responsible observer has argued from the beginning that foreign fighters make up a tiny fraction of the problem in Iraq, and academics like Mark Lynch
and Juan Cole have recently been reporting that Al Queda has fallen afoul of the Sunni tribes in Anbar province and is losing ground. We are in fact fighting both of the major political forces in Arab Iraq, the Sunni insurgency and the militant Shi'ite militias, especially that of Moqtar Al Sadr. Today's Washington Post reports that a major portion of our casualties last month--the highest since January 2005--took place thanks to ieds in Shi'ite neighborhoods of Baghdad which the surge is now entering. Meanwhile, story after story confirms that the Maliki government is in the Shi'ites' pocket and is doing nothing (as General Petraeus, to his credit, admitted) to bring about reconciliation. Generals who moved too aggressively against Shi'ites have been removed from the Iraqi army and the legislation the US has demanded for months is going nowhere. All of Arab Iraq is radicalized, and today's New York Times describes how the process is spreading into neighboring Jordan, where young men dream of becoming Jihadis themselves.

Faced with all this, the Democratic Party is apparently disinclined to roll over and play dead in the wake of the President's veto, but few if any elected Democrats are willing to state the obvious: that Iraq is going to be ruled by a mix of hostile Islamic extremist movements, and that the entire world of militant Islam will rejoice, loudly and publicly, when we are sooner or later forced to leave. Actually the second development may have a silver lining. Having re-established their right to rule themselves--something they thought they had won fifty years ago--the Arabs may be ready for more realistic dealings with us, if we are with them. But the experience will be painful, and the United States will have to abandon the irresponsible fantasy of transforming the Middle East according to our own wishes (a fantasy that was articulated, actually, all the way back in 1980 by none other than Richard Nixon, or his ghostwriters, in a polemic called The Real War.) Like Charles De Gaulle in 1959-62 over Algeria, some American leader must declare that attempts to rule distant lands by force now weaken, rather than strengthen, great nations. But that man or woman has not emerged.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are moving from one fantasy land to another. In last night's candidates' debate, Mitt Romney said that withdrawal from Iraq would undercut the kind of "strength" that the Republican idol Ronald Reagan had personified--forgetting that Reagan pulled out of Lebanon after we suffered casualties around 1/20 of what we have suffered in Iraq. Resolute American leadership, Rudy Giuliani argued, could face down Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "He has to look at an American president, and he has to see Ronald Reagan." Alas, Ronald Reagan to the Iranians is the man they helped into office by refusing to release our hostages, and who then allowed them to blackmail him into supplying them with spare parts for their weapons by kidnapping a few Americans in Lebanon. (Some one should ask Giuliani about this.) John McCain echoed the canard that Al Queda has won in Iraq if we have lost. I do not see at this point how any Republican can win next year, but I have not yet seen the Democrat who is willing to face reality and get us back on course either.

Preserving western civilization

There is much to discuss this week, including the leaks from George Tenet's book and General Petraeus's anything-but-optimistic statements about Iraq, but in the relatively short time I have available this morning (I'm traveling) I would like to use my broadest available brush. The story of the last four or five centuries has been the story of the spread of western European civilization, but I am becoming more and more convinced that we can save that civilization as we have known it only by assuming a more defensive posture towards the world. By "western civilization" I mean, more than anything else, a secular, rationalistic civilization, based on impartial principles and legal systems, which affirms (even if it does not always respect) the dignity of individual human beings regardless of their beliefs.

To be sure, that kind of civilization has never been as secure as we would have liked to believe. Seemingly unchallengeable 100 years ago, it promptly gave the world two disastrous global wars, but righted itself in the second half of the twentieth century. "Civilized peoples," Clausewitz wrote almost two hundred years ago, are ruled by reason, and barbarians by passion, but those, we can now see, were ideal types, and we need no reminding today of the role that passions play in our own politics, dominated as they are by the crassest appeals to feelings about patriotism, religion, and sex. Still, we inherited from the eighteenth century principles and ideals that have served us well in trying to make a fairer and better world. Our own Founding Fathers realized that slavery, for instance, stood in complete contradiction to their principles, but 80 years later slavery was in fact abolished. One hundred years after that, black Americans actually received full civil rights.

Meanwhile, Europe extended its rule over most of the globe, but Europe never ruled a large part of the Muslim world, and after 1945 direct imperialist rule retreated. Still, we believed in the second half of the twentieth century that the rest of the world would follow the western path, and even Communist nations were following an essentially western, rationalist ideology. Now all that, it seems to me, has been exposed as in illusion.

One critical sign of this comes this morning from Turkey, where Parliament is in crisis over the election of a new President. The leading candidate comes from the Islamic Party, which is the governing party today, but which has been held in check by Turkey's secular traditions and by the Turkish Army. Thanks to its founder Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has of course been a uniquely modern Muslim nation for 85 years now--a nation with full rights for women, in which everyone must contract civil marriages. The scholar Bernard Lewis, who gave the Bush Administration key advice before the Iraq War, argued in effect that this was proof that the Muslim world could modernize. But Turkey's exception has had no real imitators, and Ataturk's achievements are severely threatened. It seems less and less likely that Turkey will join the EU now, signalling a halt to the advance of western civilization for some time to come.

Another related sign of trouble is the crisis over American missile defense bases in Europe, which has led Russia to denounce the Conventional Forces Treaty, one of the great achievements of the post-cold war era, and which is also dividing the US from the rest of NATO. Here, as in Iraq, American irrationalism is to blame. The deployment of missile defense in Czechoslovakia and Poland is irrational from several perspectives--the threat which it claims to meet does not yet exist, the denunciation of the ABM treaty was a huge step backward for arms control, and our missile defense system has never been shown to work. But missile defense has been a conservative Republican shibboleth since Ronald Reagan proposed it in 1983, and Rumsfeld, Cheney and President Bush were all determined to get it in place regardless of the consequences. They have made it very clear how little they care for the solidarity of the western industrialized world, the great achievement of their parents' generation, and the one which can save us from a renewal of the intra-industrial conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, their whole foreign policy has defied rationality from the beginning. The invasion of Iraq exemplified the principle that President Bush so loves to denounce: "If it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame some one else." It is no accident that the Administration had to intimidate or ignore the national security bureaucracy to fight the war it wanted--bureaucracy is based upon rationality, and thus the State, CIA and even much of the military understood that the costs of this war would almost surely outweigh the benefits. Even now the President remains convinced that the world has to conform to his wishes. Today's Times also includes a report of a White House meeting in January (it would have been nice to hear about it then) in which the President claimed to have told Prime Minister Maliki, "this [the surge] has to work or you're out"--a remarkable statement, one might think, to make to the leader of a foreign government. When a legislator asked why the President was so sure that this new tactic would work, he replied, "Because it has to." But now, General Petraeus has both admitted that Maliki cannot make the political deals we believe to be necessary and made it clear that we can expect no dramatic results by next fall. What we can expect, to judge from this month, is an increase in American casualties, as American forces set up outposts in hostile neighborhoods without having been able to create any real pro-American political base.

It is true that military power helped spread western ideas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but I do not believe that this is possible any longer. Armed forces have shrunk drastically in relation to world population--a good thing, in my opinion--and cannot occupy foreign lands for decades or centuries. We shall have to drop the insane idea that the best way to fight terrorism is to conquer and transform large parts of the Muslim world. The whole Administration approach to the war on terror contradicts one of Clausewitz's fundamental principles of strategy--that defense is strategically stronger than offense, partly because the defensive power is far more likely to secure the sympathy and help of third parties. Rationalism, meanwhile, is under attack in the United States as well. We must restore more of it at home before we try to spread it abroad, even if only by example.

Readers will have seen, I think, how discouraged I have been in recent years by the eclipse of so many of the achievements of our parents' and grandparents' generation. Like any good westerner, I grew up believing that progress was continuous and inevitable, and that is a painful illusion to let go. Yet the reality may be in a way more inspiring. We are still fighting the battles that Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and FDR fought before us, because, human nature being what it is, every victory is only provisional. That is why the "end of history" was so illusory. We are once again facing the same conflicts between reason and emotion, secularism and religion, greed and ambition on the one hand the impulse towards a more just equality on the other. We are once again compelled to play for great stakes, and our ancestors have left us all the tools we need to do battle. We can certainly do better than this.

Whither Maliki?

Today's post will be speculative, but two data points over the last few days lead me to suggest that Prime Minister Maliki's government is about to fall.

The second item, appearing today in USA Today, quotes numerous Iraqi politicians to the effect that Maliki has failed to pass any critical legislation or carry out national reconciliation and that he therefore has to go. It also quotes Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman at the National Security Council, that the Bush Administration has confidence" in Maliki--just as it does, of course, in Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz.

But the first item was in a way more interesting, coming as it did in Dana Perino's press briefing yesterday, when she made a remarkable statement about conditions in Iraq:
"We all want the Iraqis to move faster, to do more and to do it faster, in terms of their political reconciliations. But they're just not ready to do it yet."

I find it hard to believe that Perino made that statement off the cuff. It is a most unusual admission that things are not developing as we had hoped. To be sure, the surge--like the decision to bomb North Vietnam and deploy Marines in February-March 1965--has always been based on the need to change the behavior of our client government. (When the Johnson Administration adopted the war plan in early December 1964, bombing and deployments were supposed to await improvements in the South Vietnamese government, but by January Administration officials were concluding that only bombing would give the South Vietnamese the necessary encouragement to make these improvements. The same rationale was used for the surge.) Robert Gates, meanwhile, made various threatening statements towards the Iraqi government in Baghdad, and may be returning with a recommendation for a change of leadership. Time will tell.

In all the talk about the maneuvering in Washington over Iraq appropriations, I have yet to see the most obvious Democratic alternative proposed. After a veto, fund the war for another year from today, but announce that Congress simply won't fund the war at anything like the current level after that. News stories still constantly ignore that Congress, as well as the President, must act affirmatively to continue the war. The default option in the absence of agreement between the two branches is no war, not war. I believe that in the end Congress will be driven to this.