It's Bush vs. America - and Bush wins

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Larry Derfner, THE JERUSALEM POST

Feb. 7, 2007

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What's going on in Washington now is unbelievable - Bush is getting away with it. He's escalating the war in Iraq. He's sending 21,500 more soldiers over there. Nobody's stopping him, nobody's going to, either - not the Democrats, not the new Republican realists and not American public opinion, where Bush is heading down to Nixon's Watergate level.

The war in Iraq is a four-year, runaway disaster, the American voters turned adamantly against it in the November elections, the vaunted James Baker-led panel recommended what most everybody wants - a careful withdrawal, or as careful a withdrawal as possible. In the face of all that, it was just assumed Bush would have to bow to reality.

No way. The exact opposite is happening. Not only is Bush not starting to get the troops out, he's not content to stand pat with the troops he's got there now. No, he's sending over more. The war in Iraq is one of the worst blunders in American history, and the man responsible is now digging America in deeper. And America is letting him do it.

You watch these clowns in Congress, these eunuchs who don't have the balls to even pass what a Bush ally laughed off as a "confetti resolution" - a symbolic statement that wouldn't force Bush to withdraw but would at least officially express Congress's opinion in favor of withdrawal. But they can't even agree on that - they're afraid the White House will accuse them of demoralizing the troops, of encouraging the enemy. It would be too politically risky.

Such a statement wouldn't have stopped Bush anyway. The only way Congress can prevent Bush from escalating the war is by refusing to pay the cost of sending the extra troops in. But only a few senators and congressmen are willing to take that step because then the White House would accuse Congress of leaving the troops to die, of taking away their guns and uniforms and everything.

It's bullshit, of course. The only thing that would be taken away is Bush's right to send over those 21,500 more soldiers. But it's not going to happen; the fear of White House propaganda has all but a few politicians paralyzed, and the White House knows it. The administration isn't even worried. "We are moving forward," Dick Cheney told CNN about Bush's decision to escalate. "Congress has control over the purse strings, they have the right, obviously, if they want, to cut off funding, but in terms of this effort, the president has made his decision." In America, the dogs bark but the caravan moves on. Right over the cliff.

MEANWHILE, the administration's argument for moving forward has cleverly changed. Bush and his mouthpieces have stopped braying about "victory," because nobody will buy that anymore, it'll only hold them up to ridicule.

No, America isn't fighting to win in Iraq now, because whatever victory might look like, it's nowhere on the horizon. Instead, America is fighting to avoid defeat, which is very easy to visualize. Defeat will come when America leaves Iraq with the country still exploding, with the killing still going on in all directions, with America still hated by everyone (except the Kurds), and with nothing but further atomization, slaughter and radicalism ahead.

That's defeat. And that, warns the pro-war camp, will leave the entire Middle East in danger of being pulled into the Iraqi conflict. Even worse, it will leave America disgraced and its enemies emboldened.

So, they argue, America has no choice but to fight on. The 21,500-plan is called a "surge" - a euphemism for "escalation" that lets people think this is just temporary, that the extra troops being sent into Iraq will be home soon.

The idea is that these new troops, being deployed in new ways, will make the difference in the war, that they will bring a turning point toward security on the Iraqi streets and national unity in the Iraqi government.

I'm not being too original when I say this is impossible. In the best case, the extra troops might make Baghdad somewhat less lethal; they might bring the daily nationwide body count down from 100 or so to 80, or 70. But security they're not going to bring. And this is in the best case. Another possibility is that they will make no difference at all. Still another is that they will make things worse.

But even if the new troops really make a dent in the murder rate, does anybody think that whatever security and stability gains might be made from the "surge" would remain in place after America's withdrawal? In other words, is there anything these additional soldiers can achieve that would change the consequences of an American pull-out, that would make those consequences any different from what they would be if those 21,500 soldiers were kept home?

Does anybody have a good idea for anything at all that the US can do in Iraq over the next two years, or five years, or 10 years, that would make the downside of an American withdrawal any less steep than it would be after the gradual withdrawal, beginning now, that most Americans want? I haven't heard such an idea, and I don't believe it exists. While optimists may come up with feasible plans for improving Iraqi conditions under America's occupation, no one can come up with a feasible plan for holding Iraq together after American troops are gone.

So by staving off the withdrawal, the Bush administration's escalation of the war is just delaying America's inevitable defeat. The only lasting difference the surge will make is to increase the number of American soldiers getting killed and maimed.

The majority of senators and congressmen, Democrats and Republicans both, now understand this. And since they understand, but lack the courage to use their power to force Bush to wind down this war, the American blood about to be spilled for nothing will be on their hands, too.

Going for Broke

January 29, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Endorsing the Baker report would have meant denouncing his entire foreign policy, so Bush is betting everything on the neocons’ surge.

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Nothing so clearly reveals the impoverished state of American political discourse as the ongoing debate over finding “a way forward” in Iraq. Broadly speaking, that debate pits a resurgent foreign-policy establishment, led by James Baker, against embattled neoconservatives, with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute their improbable champion. On the surface, Baker and Kagan represent irreconcilable views. Beneath the surface, they are engaged in a common enterprise: deflecting attention from the contradictions that beset U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Baker, the trusted Bush family factotum, resurfaced most recently as co-chair, along with former Congressman Lee Hamilton, of the Iraq Study Group. Almost without fail, media references to the Baker-Hamilton commission emphasize its bipartisan composition as if that alone were enough to win a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Yet to imagine that bipartisanship signifies wisdom or reflects a concern for the common good is to misunderstand the reality of present-day politics. The true purpose of bipartisanship is to protect the interests of the Washington Party, the conglomeration of politicians, hustlers, and bureaucrats who benefit from the concentration of wealth and power in the federal city. A “bipartisan” solution to any problem is one that produces marginal change while preserving or restoring the underlying status quo.

In this regard, the Baker-Hamilton report, issued as signs of impending failure in Iraq were becoming incontrovertible, was intended to do two things. Most obviously, it offered George W. Bush political cover to begin extricating the United States from Iraq. Yet that offer came at a price: by endorsing the ISG package of 79 recommendations—Baker pointedly warned against treating them as a “fruit salad”—the president would effectively repudiate his entire post-9/11 approach to foreign policy. To embrace the ISG’s findings meant renouncing unilateralism, engaging adversaries rather than castigating them as “evil,” and valuing stability over the promulgation of any Freedom Agenda. In effect, it meant steering the United States back toward the course that Secretary of State Baker had charted when working for Daddy Bush. After a lost weekend spent binging on the intoxicating liquor of Wilsonianism, the president would return to the path of sobriety.

Neoconservatives instantly grasped the nature of the threat: the issue at hand was not simply Iraq. Neocons have long loathed Baker as an unprincipled wheeler-dealer (and barely closeted anti-Semite). Now here was their nemesis leading the Old Guard in an assault on their most cherished convictions. If Bush took the bait—if he chose to cut his losses in Iraq—the effect would be to discredit their entire approach to foreign policy. Neoconservative hopes of “transforming” the Islamic world, banishing tyranny from the face of the earth, and securing permanent global dominion based on unquestioned military supremacy all would be dashed.

So neoconservatives launched a fierce—at times hysterical—counterattack. Among their several complaints, one in particular stood out: Baker and Hamilton based their conclusions on the assumption that victory in Iraq lay beyond reach. Neocon critics portrayed this as the ultimate heresy. Any admission of failure in Iraq was premature, they insisted. The war there had to be won, and it could be won.

Enter Frederick Kagan. A lesser light in the neoconservative constellation, Kagan had for months been flogging his own scheme for turning the tide in Iraq. From his perch at 17th and M Street, it all appeared quite simple: rather than looking for ways to turn the war over to the Iraqis, it was time for American commanders to get serious about winning. They needed to quash the insurgency and secure the population, thereby creating conditions for economic reconstruction and political “reconciliation.” Above all, winning meant sending more G.I.’s to Iraq and especially into Baghdad, which Kagan identified as the decisive battlefield.

Here was the neoconservative response to James Baker: the imperative of the moment was not to withdraw but to surge.

In a series of articles, op-eds, and interviews, Kagan argued his case with remarkable sangfroid. Writing in The Weekly Standard, he insisted that enlarging the U.S. troop commitment was “the only option likely to bring peace to Iraq.” It made no sense to consider any of the proposed alternatives: “All will fail.” Dismissing concerns of senior military officers that American forces were about tapped out, Kagan did his own arithmetic and found it “obvious that there are many more troops to send.” Kagan had equally little patience for complaints that units recently returned from the war zone needed time to refit before another tour. If it proved necessary to “send forces that are not as well trained as one would like,” then so be it, he wrote. Although the army chief of staff had recently gone on record worrying that his service might crack under the stress of repeated deployments, Kagan was having none of it: “The Army will not break with this proposal.” And if the Pentagon needed additional forces to sustain the surge, Kagan had a ready solution. In his AEI report “Choosing Victory,” he counseled President Bush to “issue a personal call for young Americans to volunteer to fight in the decisive conflict of this age.”

Only when it came to the dimensions of the surge did Kagan’s assurance slip. In early December 2006, he was insisting that 80,000 reinforcements were needed. As he refined his plan, that number shrunk. By year’s end he concluded that a mere 30,000 additional troops would suffice. Did this adjustment reflect Kagan’s perception that the task was becoming easier? Were conditions in Iraq somehow improving? Or was Kagan tacitly acknowledging that the Pentagon did not after all have “many more troops to send”? He offered no explanation.

What can we say of this proposal? Simply this: to imagine that 170,000 troops will accomplish what 140,000 troops failed to do in nearly four years or that marching a handful of additional combat brigades into the maw of Baghdad will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat qualifies as pure fantasy. Kagan’s “surge” is the first cousin to Kenneth Adelman’s more famous “cakewalk.” It is ideology dressed up as strategy. Marketed as the product of careful analysis, the surge should be seen for what it is: a naked gamble. Tacitly acknowledging the point, some proponents even refer to it as the “double down” option.

That in places like AEI and the editorial offices of The Weekly Standard Kagan himself has emerged as the man of the hour testifies to the depth of neoconservative desperation. Kagan’s insistence that his surge will do the trick postpones the neoconservative day of reckoning. Believe Kagan and you can avoid for at least a bit longer having to confront Iraq’s incontrovertible lessons: that preventive war doesn’t work, that American power has limits, that the world is not infinitely malleable, and that grasping for “benign global hegemony” is a self-defeating proposition.

Indeed, the very niggardliness of Kagan’s plan testifies to the core problem to which neoconservatives refuse to own up. Between their professed aspirations and the means at hand to pursue those aspirations there yawns a massive gap.

Consider this: at the equivalent moment in the Vietnam War—immediately following the 1968 Tet Offensive—those most obstinately in denial about the reality of that war concocted their own version of a surge strategy. At the urging of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Earle Wheeler, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the senior U.S. field commander, floated a request to deploy an additional 206,000 G.I.’s to South Vietnam. Whatever else might be said of Westmoreland’s proposal (which President Lyndon Johnson immediately rejected), it possessed a certain demented grandeur. Even with over a half-million U.S. troops already in Vietnam, throwing in a couple hundred thousand more qualified as a surge in just about anyone’s book. By comparison, Kagan’s proposal looks positively puny. It looks puny because it is.

“The United States faces a dire situation in Iraq,” Kagan loftily explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “because of a history of half-measures.” Now, he would have us believe, is the time to pull out all the stops. But Kagan’s so-called surge really amounts to yet another half-measure. Other than forfeiting the lives of more American soldiers and adding to the billions already wasted in Iraq, it will accomplish little. As for Kagan’s expectation that a presidential summons to the colors will produce a stampede of fresh recruits, anyone who buys that will also believe in the tooth fairy.

So if Kagan got it wrong, does it follow that Baker got it right? The short answer is no, except perhaps in a tactical sense.

Viewed as an immediate response to a crisis fast slipping out of control, the various prescriptions offered by the Iraq Study Group do possess considerable merit. Although the damage done to American interests by this misguided war cannot be undone, there exists an urgent need to contain that damage, to stanch our losses, and to prevent the entire Persian Gulf from plunging into chaos. Considered in this context, Baker’s call for a phased withdrawal of combat troops, his insistence on establishing milestones to spur improvements in the Iraqi government’s performance, and his proposed diplomatic initiative aimed at fostering regional support for stabilizing Iraq all make sense. Reinvigorating the so-called peace process, another Baker recommendation, also deserves consideration, not in the vain hope of producing peace, but to counter the (largely accurate) perception that the U.S. government has never really cared about the plight of the Palestinian people.

As a prescription for strategy, however, the Baker-Hamilton report flunks for the most fundamental of reasons: it neglects the little matter of how the United States got into this fix in the first place. As they went about their work, the one subject that members of the Iraq Study Group stubbornly avoided was the past.

This convenient amnesia allowed the ISG to overlook a record of bipartisan bungling and shortsightedness extending over a period of decades. Franklin D. Roosevelt got the ball rolling in 1945, promising protection to the House of Saud in exchange for preferred access to Saudi oil. Dwight D. Eisenhower made his own distinctive contribution, engineering a coup in Tehran and forging a fateful partnership with the Shah. John F. Kennedy chipped in with another CIA-assisted coup, this one bringing the Ba’ath Party to power in Baghdad. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon affirmed the Iranian connection and added another, establishing a costly “special relationship” with Israel. When revolutionaries tossed the Shah out on his ear, Jimmy Carter upped the ante: under the terms of the Carter Doctrine, the United States vowed henceforth to use any means necessary to secure its interests in the Gulf.

From this point, the pace of events quickened. U.S. commitments multiplied. Costs skyrocketed. American leverage waned. That U.S. policy yielded benefits for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and large multinational oil companies seemed clear enough. That it was serving the long-term interests of the American people was becoming far less clear.

Celebrated by neoconservatives as a man of vision and principle, Ronald Reagan manifested neither of these qualities when it came to the Middle East. In Lebanon, he flung away the lives of 241 U.S. troops to no purpose except perhaps to raise questions about American will. After establishing a tacit anti-Iranian alliance with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Reagan okayed a hare-brained scheme to funnel U.S. weapons to Tehran. Iran-Contra became Reagan’s trifecta: a policy that was simultaneously stupid, illegal, and an embarrassing failure. Meanwhile, just off-stage in the Petri dish of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, Reagan’s policies inadvertently served to cultivate the bacillus of Islamic radicalism.

Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, assisted by then Secretary of State James Baker, took the final plunge. With his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein outlived his usefulness to the United States. Operation Desert Storm, Bush’s attempt to remove the Iraqi dictator from the scene, came up short. Not for the last time an ostensibly historic victory over Iraq left in its wake a problematic legacy. Policing the Gulf now became a full-time job. To keep Saddam in his box and the mullahs at bay, Bush scattered a network of quasi-permanent military garrisons across the region. Bill Clinton inherited this mare’s nest and then proceeded to fritter away eight years bombing Iraq to little effect and absorbing terrorist attacks on American forces and installations.

This dispiriting narrative—from FDR’s encounter with Ibn Saud on the Great Bitter Lake to the near-sinking of the USS Cole at Aden 55 years later—left a peculiar imprint on members of the Washington Party. The blowback from ill-advised policies served to whet their appetite for more of the same.

By the time George W. Bush became president, Republicans and Democrats alike subscribed to a common set of dubious assumptions: that the Persian Gulf represents a vital strategic interest, permanent and inescapable; that Gulf nations are incapable of managing their own affairs; that the United States, therefore, has no alternative but to determine the fate of this region; that American power and prestige, guided by distinguished statesmen in the mold of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, will suffice to do just that; that peace and prosperity for all lie just around the corner, if only Americans will persist a bit longer.

Here lies the ultimate purpose of the Iraq Study Group: to shield these assumptions from critical scrutiny. Perpetuating the Great Game of the modern Middle East ensures that the flow of oil, arms, and contracts continues without interruption. As long as the Game goes on, it provides a rationale for the endless comings-and-goings of important personages engaged in “the search for peace.” Think tanks churn out policy papers by the score. Lobbying firms prosper. Guests on Sunday morning talk shows prattle on about the latest crisis. Recruited to serve on blue-ribbon commissions, high governmental officials from yesteryear relive their glory days. The Game is its own reward. For members of the Washington Party, its preservation qualifies as a categorical imperative.

When it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, neither the cavalier urgings of Frederick Kagan nor the confident reassurances of James Baker will provide the basis for defining a “way forward.” Despite superficial differences, their prescriptions point in the same direction: they will simply exacerbate our predicament. Further militarizing U.S. policy, always the first choice of neoconservatives, will only compound our dilemma; yet so too will deference to self-appointed Wise Men, who created that dilemma in the first place.

Neoconservatives like Kagan believe that the United States is called upon to remake the Middle East, bringing the light of freedom to a dark quarter of the world. Pseudo-realists like Baker believe that the United States can manipulate events in the Middle East, persuading others to do our bidding. Both views, rooted in the conviction that Providence has endowed America with a unique capacity to manage history, are pernicious.

The way forward requires abandoning that conviction in favor of a fundamentally different course. A sound Middle East strategy will restore American freedom of action by ending our dependence on Persian Gulf oil. It will husband our power by using American soldiers to defend America rather than searching abroad for dragons to destroy. A sound strategy will tend first to the cultivation of our own garden.

A real course change will require a different compass, different navigational charts, and perhaps above all different helmsmen, admitting into the debate those who earn their livelihoods far from the imperial city on the Potomac. A foreign policy worthy of the name will reflect the concerns and aspirations of ordinary Americans. It’s that last prospect that Frederick Kagan and James Baker most fear.
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Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, is a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

Analysis: U.S. National Security Advisor's Lying Oped in Today's Washington Post

And in a most Orwellian way...

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Jan 29, 2006

Grasping at straws: *Now* they like the Iraq Study Group

By D.M. Silev, dmsilev@uchicago.edu

In this morning's Washington Post, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley writes an op/ed where he argues for the Surge!, and as part of his argument claims the support of the conclusions of the Iraq Study Group.

So, what did Hadley say? This:

As Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander of our forces in Iraq, explained in hearings before Congress last week, reinforcing U.S. troops is necessary for this new plan to succeed. Any plan that limits our ability to reinforce our troops in the field is a plan for failure -- and could hand Baghdad to terrorists and extremists before legitimate Iraqi forces are ready to take over the fight. That is an outcome the president simply could not accept.

The Baker-Hamilton report supports this conclusion. It said: "We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad . . . if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective." Our military commanders, and the president, have determined just that.

Which is awfully funny, because I seem to remember that the ISG report said something a tad different:

Mr Baker said "staying the course was no longer viable" and called "for a support group to reinforce security and national reconciliation within Iraq, neither of which Iraq can achieve on its own".

The report said the US could not achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it dealt with the Israeli-Arab conflict and regional instability, adding that talks should include Israel, Lebanon and Palestinian leaders who recognised Israel's right to exist.

To improve the political climate for its diplomatic efforts internationally and within Iraq, the study said Mr Bush should state publicly that the US does not seek to control Iraq's oil
[...]
The report's recommendation for a prompt start to withdrawal goes against Mr Bush's insistence that the US will stay in Iraq until the job is done.

So, in other words, Hadley is cherry-picking one or two sentences from the report, taking them way out of context (the context being "how best to get us the hell out of this mess ASAP"), and using them to support a diametrically opposite viewpoint ("we're staying until Hell freezes over or until Bush grows a functional brain, whichever comes first") (nb: my money is on the new NHL franchise, the Infernals)

Now, remember also that this is the report that Bush and his circle went out of their way to ignore, marginalize, and eventually shelve in favor of the Surge! augmentation escalation of the war. So, now that only 1 in 4 Americans think that Bush is doing a good job, they're looking for a lifeline, any lifeline, to get them out of the mess that they've created. And, for better or for worse, the Baker-Hamilton Commission had a fair amount of prestige associated with it, so the administration is now trying to associate themselves with that report, even while ignoring or actively opposing its substantive recommendations.

Washington’s political cleansing

by Sidney Blumenthal Jan 18 2007 - 8:35am

James A Baker, the consummate Republican political operator over the past thirty years, did not expect that President Bush would accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group he co-chaired simply on its merits. Baker's hidden political hand was unrevealed in the report's dire analysis or in its urgent suggestions for diplomacy or force redeployment.

Baker summoned as witnesses the joint chiefs-of-staff, the military commanders in Iraq past and present (including the recently named commander there, Lieutenant-General David Petraeus) and even British prime minister Tony Blair. But he understood that enlisting all of these formidable figures was insufficient. Baker privately negotiated with Bush, but he did not rest solely on his own powers of persuasion to convince the president, as the report put it, that the "situation is grave and deteriorating" and that his policies are "not working."

Ultimately, Baker's political strategy counted on the decisive intervention of one person in the president's closed inner circle - who sees him alone and could not be kept from him, and on whom he has become dependent for support and trusts implicitly - to deliver the bad news that continuing those policies would only deepen the disaster and explain that he had no way out except to change course.

Condi's quandary

After the debacle of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which secretary of state Condoleezza Rice called "the birth pangs of a new middle east", her former mentor, Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national-security advisor and still his public voice, published an article in the Washington Post on 30 July 2006 titled "Beyond Lebanon: This Is the Time for a U.S.-Led Comprehensive Settlement." In it he argued that the peace process the Bush administration had abandoned was essential in stabilising the whole region, not least Iraq, and in reducing the influence of Iran.

With the knowledge of the elder Bush and Baker, Scowcroft travelled to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, broaching his ideas to President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah. They told him they were fully supportive and prepared to step forward, but were sceptical that Rice or Bush would embrace Scowcroft's programme. Meanwhile, Scowcroft and Baker began reassembling the elder Bush's national-security team, using the Iraq Study Group as a mobilising tool. They saw this as a last chance to save the Bush presidency, which was indelibly tainting the father's legacy, and replace neo-conservatism with foreign-policy realism.

At the end of August 2006, Scowcroft briefed Rice, according to a national-security official close to Scowcroft. She seemed to concur with his views and asked him: "How are we going to present this to the president?" "Not we", replied Scowcroft. "You". She appeared taken aback, but he emphasised that she was the only one who could induce Bush to change his policies. Thus Rice became the linchpin for Scowcroft's and Baker's plans.

Rice now confronted the biggest quandary of her career. On one side were the authorities that had shaped her foreign-policy experience, not only Scowcroft and Baker but also, as she well knew, the looming shadow of Bush's father. On the other was the president, who had raised her into Baker's seventh-floor office in Foggy Bottom, whom she had flattered as the equal of Lincoln and Churchill, and whom, in a telling Freudian slip, she had referred to as "my husband" before a roomful of reporters and editors of the New York Times. Throughout the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and afterward Rice had been Bush's enabler. It was because Scowcroft understood her special relationship that he sought to win her over.

Rice's turn appeared to be reflected in a speech delivered at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 15 September by Philip Zelikow, her counsellor, closest aide and friend, who had served with her under Scowcroft on the elder Bush's National Security Council. Well publicised in advance, he asserted that "some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of things that we care about."

Immediately, Zelikow came under fierce criticism from vice-president Cheney's office and Rice publicly rebuked him, which provoked his abrupt resignation. In a 27 November letter to her, he wrote that he had "some truly riveting obligations to college bursars" for his children's tuition and instantly had to return to his professorship at the University of Virginia.

Nine days after Zelikow's resignation, on 6 December, the Iraq Study Group report was released. Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the report "a flaming turd", but his colourful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection. Still, Scowcroft and Baker, like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, waited for Rice.

Cheney's revenge

Just as they used the Iraq Study Group as their instrument, Cheney galvanised his neo-conservative allies inside and outside the administration to counter it. In order to have their own proposal they put Jack Keane, a former army vice chief-of-staff and longtime neocon fellow-traveller, in touch with Frederick Kagan, an analyst at the neocon American Enterprise Institute, who urged a massive "surge" of troops into Iraq.

Keane's presence lent a patina of military credibility. Encouraged by Cheney's office, Kagan and Keane and a team of neocons at the AEI whipped up a PowerPoint presentation, and on 11 December - five days after the ISG report's publication - they were ushered into Bush's presence.

The president had become enraged at the presumption of the Baker-Hamilton commission even before its members gave him their report. "Although the president was publicly polite", the Washington Post reported, "few of the key Baker-Hamilton recommendations appealed to the administration, which intensified its own deliberations over a new 'way forward' in Iraq.

How to look distinctive from the study group became a recurring theme. As described by participants in the administration review, some staff members on the National Security Council became enamoured with the idea of sending more troops to Iraq in part because it was not a key feature of Baker-Hamilton.

Donald Rumsfeld had been sacrificed as the secretary of defence, but his replacement, Robert Gates, a former director of the CIA and member of the ISG, turned from sceptic into team player. The joint chiefs-of-staff; General John Abizaid, head of central command; and General George Casey, commander in Iraq, all opposed the "surge" as no answer. Cheney and the neocons saw their opposition as the opening for purging and blaming them. The joint chiefs were ignored and sidelined, and Abizaid and Casey forced into retirement. Their dissent, leaked to the Washington Post for appearance in the paper on the day of Bush's "surge" speech, was an extraordinary gesture by the senior military leaders to distance themselves from impending failure.

Rice, who had fallen into radio silence, cancelling a scheduled speech on "transformational diplomacy", finally intervened. When the US military commanders in Iraq and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad protested against a rush by the Iraqi government to hang Saddam Hussein, Rice overrode their objections and gave the signal to Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to proceed.

Maliki's management and subsequent defence of the gruesome circus surrounding Saddam's execution disabused any illusion that he could act in the larger Iraqi national interest rather than as a political representative of Shi'a sectarianism. He is to his marrow a creature of the Dawa party (founded by a group of Shi'a leaders who included Muqtada al-Sadr's uncle) and his alliance with al-Sadr.

While the intent of the surge is to revitalise the Maliki government, that government cannot and does not wish to be reformed. The problem is not merely that Maliki is a weak political leader, or that his political coalition wouldn't permit it, or that his Iranian sponsors wouldn't allow repudiation - all of which are indisputably true. The irreducible reason is that Maliki exists only to achieve Shi'a control, and if he did not he would not exist. There is no other Maliki. Nor can Bush invent one.

Bush's surge, therefore, is a military plan that cannot produce its stated political outcome and will instead further unleash the forces he claims will be controlled. His offensive to subdue the Sunni insurgents, for example, is already accelerating the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad by the Shi'a militias, which, rather than being contained, are further empowered.

A Balkan forgetting

Bush's rhetoric about "democracy" underlines his studied error in ignoring the lessons of nation-building deeply ingrained in the experience of the US foreign service and US military in Bosnia and Kosovo. From the start, in the 2000 campaign, Bush disdained "nation-building" as Bill Clinton's project. During and after the Iraq invasion, his ideological preconceptions and hostility to the state department precluded him from adopting its successes.

In Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999), the US recognised the danger that an election in countries already sundered by conflict would threaten to hand power to one contending group and foment further violence. The US priority, rather, was to organise a broad range of international partners and institutions in creating a structure of stability that could be a basis for gradual democratic development.

By contrast, the elections Bush promoted in Iraq were political grandstanding in the name of "democracy" that incited the exclusion of Sunnis and aggravated civil warfare. Almost everything in place in Bosnia and Kosovo is absent in Iraq. The former are examples of US leadership, the latter a case study in amateurish blundering. Moreover, Bush has turned "democracy" into a synonym for failure.

The state department has been completely sidelined in the making of Bush's latest and last policy on Iraq. Its experience in the Balkans remains thoroughly ignored. And Rice does nothing to call it to Bush's attention, for that would require her to point out his shortcomings. The state department founders like a ghost ship. Rice meanders back and forth to and from the middle east, the shuttle without the diplomacy.

After twice rejecting the job of deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, was implored to accept it. In exchanging a cabinet post for a sub-cabinet one, a position of policymaking for an administrative post, Negroponte excited rumours that he would only have decided to make the switch if he believed that Rice would eventually leave and he would ascend to her job. But, once again, the logic of that Washington gossip is merely rational. Rice the irrelevancy remains Bush's indispensable devotee.
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About author Sidney Blumenthal is a former senior adviser to President Clinton. sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com

Sidney Blumenthal's blog |

The neo-cons’ route to disaster

By Gideon Rachman

Published: January 15 2007 20:56 | Last updated: January 15 2007 20:56

President George W. Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq demonstrates the remarkable durability of neo-conservative foreign policy. Just a couple of months ago, the neo-cons were being written off. The Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq was advertised as signalling the triumphant return of the “grown-ups” and the “reality-based community”. But the president chose to ignore Baker-Hamilton, reportedly dismissing the document as a “flaming turd”.

Instead he turned for succour and advice to his old neo-con allies. The “surge” idea was developed and promoted at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think-tank that has long served as neo-con central. The neo-cons, like President Bush, are getting another throw of the dice in Iraq.

Obituary writers are, however, already preparing the death notices for neo-conservatism. The neo-cons stand accused of many errors: imperialism, Leninism, Trotskyism (New York school), militarism. Some believe that the real problem is that so many of them are Jewish – this is an alarmingly popular theme, to judge by my e-mails. But the problem with the neo-cons is not that so many of them are Jews. The problem is that so many of them are journalists.

In making this point, I hope that I do not come across as some sort of self-hating journalist. The best opinion journalism has a clarity and readability that far surpasses most academic papers or diplomatic telegrams. But opinion journalism also has its characteristic vices. An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy.

The fingerprints of simplifying and exaggerating journalists are all over the Iraq debacle. Take a look at The Neocon Reader, which is edited and introduced by Irwin Stelzer, who writes a column for The Sunday Times. The book brings together essays by political figures, academics and journalists, but the last are the most numerous. Ten of the 22 contributors are columnists or editors.

The neo-cons that mattered most in shaping the “war on terror” served in the Pentagon and the White House. But the journalists are a vital part of a neo-con network that formulated and sold the ideas that took the US to war in Iraq and that is now pressing for confrontation with Iran. The links between journalists, think-tanks and decision-makers in the neo-con world are tight and there is plenty of movement from one area to the other. For example, David Frum, a former journalist, served as a White House speech-writer and helped coin the most famous over-simplification of the Bush era – the phrase “axis of evil”. He is now at the AEI.

Less than a year after the fall of Baghdad, it fell to Charles Krauthammer, a columnist for The Washington Post, to give a triumphal address on America’s role in the world to the annual dinner of the AEI. The elevated status of the Washington punditocracy was underlined by the fact that Mr Krauthammer was introduced by none other than Dick Cheney. In a previous era, it might have seemed more fitting for the journalist to serve as the warm-up act for the vice-president.

Mr Krauthammer’s speech was a masterpiece of simplification and exaggeration. He told the assembled grandees of Washington: “On December 26 1991, the Soviet Union died and something new was born, something utterly new – a unipolar world dominated by a single superpower unchecked by any rival and with decisive reach in every corner of the globe.” Mr Krauthammer made the familiar analogy between the war on terror and the heroic days of the second world war: “Establishing civilised, decent, non-belligerent, pro-western polities in Afghanistan and Iraq” would be as important as the US-led regime change in Japan and Germany in the 1940s. Then he proclaimed: “Yes, as in Germany and Japan, the undertaking is enormous, ambitious and arrogant. It may yet fail. But we cannot afford not to try. There is not a single, remotely plausible alternative strategy for attacking the monster behind 9/11.”

You can only admire the writing. The unexpected use of the word “arrogant” is arresting. The deployment of short and long sentences is mellifluous. But run that by me one more time. Was there really no “remotely plausible alternative strategy”?

You get the same combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship in Mr Stelzer’s introduction to The Neocon Reader, when he writes of the “formidable intellectual firepower behind neo-conservative foreign policy”, which “has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansionism”.

The comparison with Kennan is instructive but not in the way Mr Stelzer intends. The main difference is that Kennan had a profound knowledge of the part of the world he was writing about. When he wrote his “long telegram” on the sources of Soviet conduct in 1946, he had many years’ experience as a diplomat in Moscow. The mixed bag of journalists and policymakers in Mr Stelzer’s book are intelligent people. But there is not an Arabist among them.

Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers’ approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. Most academic specialists on the Middle East were adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq. But Bernard Lewis of Princeton University was in favour of toppling Saddam Hussein. So it was he who was routinely and reverentially cited by the neo-cons.

The same attitude to expertise has been applied in pressing for a new military “surge” into Iraq. Most of the top brass of the US military were sceptical about sending more troops to Iraq. But Jack Keane, a retired army general, believes in it. So it is Gen Keane who is quoted approvingly in a recent article by William Kristol, the editor of the neo-con bible, The Weekly Standard; as well as by editorials in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.

Unfortunately, the experience of recent years should caution against basing policy on the urgings of neo-conservative journalists, no matter how persuasively they write.

The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy. Does that conclusion strike you as simplified and exaggerated? Maybe so – but that’s journalism.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

The Future of Iraqi oil as proposed by the Iraqi Study Group

Jan 10, 2006

By Munir Chalabi
munir@chalabi.screaming.net

The US Democrats and the Republicans may disagree on many tactics and probably on part of the strategy for how to sustain the military occupation of Iraq, but when it comes to the strategy for the future of Iraqi oil they seem to be in agreement on every detail.

The Iraq Study Group (ISG) report represents a joint approach by both parties and its recommendations look to be very similar to the right-wing Republican's policies set by the State Department's "future for Iraq project" prior to the 2003 invasion.

Short-term strategy

The short-term objectives are as outlined in recommendation 62 which stated "to prepare a draft oil law that ... creates a fiscal and legal framework for investment" (meaning investments by international oil companies).

It goes further by calling on the US government to interfere in the writing of the draft of the Petroleum law to ensure that the new law should specially cover the huge oil reserves of the southern oil fields.

The ISG emphasizes the important of introducing a Petroleum law, as a milestone to be approved by the Iraqi Parliament no later than early 2007.

Furthermore the ISG admits that the occupying forces in Iraq are going to stay for a long time to come, to ensure the protection of the oil flow, when they recommended that "the US military should work with the Iraqi military and with private security forces [meaning the foreign mercenaries] to protect oil infrastructure and contractors."

Long-term strategy

The long-term objectives are outlined in recommendation 63. It highlights long-term US interests and shows that the reason for the war on Iraq was to sustain full control of the huge reserve of Iraqi oil. The proven reserve is over 115 billion barrels of oil and potentially another 215 billion barrels within the 400 unexplored structural anomalies.

The ISG emphasizes that US interests lie with the international oil companies and specifically the US companies, to ensure that they have complete control of Iraqi oil reserves (the second largest in the world). This policy has been highlighted in the report stating that "the United States should encourage investment in the Iraqi oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies."

So what model of oil contracts is the report calling for?

The report proposes that the US should provide Iraqi officials with contracting templates without naming the model of oil contracts.

But at the same time recommendation 63 states, "the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise...."

Looking at both proposals, together with all the other suggestions in the "Assessment of the Current Situation" part of the report provides an overwhelming indication that the report is calling for some kind of re-privatization of the Iraqi oil industries but from "the back-door" and is very likely directed towards the type of contracts known as "Production Sharing Agreements or PSA."

The information available on the best-kept secret -- the draft of the oil (hydrocarbon) law -- confirms that the new oil law will recommend that Iraq should implement PSAs and other types of contracts such as buyback and service contracts.

The PSA was introduced by the oil companies in the early 1960s to replace the out-of-date "concessionary" contracts (the early twentieth century model) to ensure that it reflects the interests of the oil companies, and maintains their profits at the same level as the concessionary model.

The PSA technically keeps the legal ownership of the oil reserves in the hands of the Iraqi state whilst actually giving full control to the oil companies.

In short, the PSA model will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in lost revenue whilst providing the oil companies with enormous profits.

For a comprehensive analyses of the PSA contracts see Platform study "Crude Designs: The rip-off Iraqi's oil wealth."

Conclusions:

1. The ISG recommendations are clearly calling for a back-door form of re-privatization of Iraqi oil wealth, which represents the interests of the US government and the international oil companies and not the Iraqi people.

2. The recommendations also call for long-term US military bases on Iraqi soil to protect US oil interests in Iraq.

3. The World Bank, the US administration and the IMF are also putting all manner of pressure on the Iraqi government to get a new hydrocarbon law through the Iraqi parliament in line with the ISG recommendations as soon as possible.

4. All indications are pointing to the fact that the draft of the new oil law is complying with many requirements of the ISG recommendations.

5. The major obstacle that seems to be delaying the presentation of the oil draft to the parliament is the disagreement between the Iraqi central government/ISG recommendations on one hand and the Kurdish regional government on the other hand with regard to the interpretation of article 111 of the Iraqi constitution.

6. Both the Iraqi Government and the ISG are calling for changes to article 111 to give more power to the federal government when it comes to taking strategic decisions on the future of the nation's oil wealth.

It is obvious in the mind of many analysts that the reasons behind the ISG's support for more power to the Iraqi central government on strategic decisions, is to give more legitimacy to any new contracts which could be signed between the federal government and the international oil companies, in case these are challenged in the future by a new Iraqi government in international court.

7. All indications are that the draft of the new oil law will recommend the re-instatement of the "Iraqi National Oil Company -- INOC" (which was dissolved by the Baathist government back in 1987), but with fewer powers than the old INOC.

8. It is in the interests of the Iraqi people not to rush into any new strategic oil law that will decide the future of the country's wealth within the lifetime of this parliament whilst Iraq is still under occupation and the Iraqi state is on its knees.

9. It will be in the Iraqi peoples' interest to have a temporary oil law which re-establishes INOC and gives it full decision-making powers.

Furthermore, it should permit only a short-tem contract between INOC and the international oil companies so as to provide technical help to develop the existing oil fields, which can produce up to 3.5 million barrels/day -- the same level of oil production as in 1979.

Stampeding the herd, Washington-style

Lyons: Stampeding the herd, Washington-style
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated Columnist
Sunday, December 31, 2006 - Updated: 12:27 AM EST


In the end, the most significant aspect of the Iraq Study Group may be that none of its esteemed members publicly doubted the wisdom of conquering Mesopotamia in the first place. President Petulant appears determined to ignore its recommendations for dealing with the "grave and deteriorating" crisis anyway. Why the hawks-only lineup? Because under the upside-down rules of Washington discourse, dissenting from this crackpot scheme indicated an unseemly lack of interest in career advancement, marking one as unsound. During a stampede, the safest place is the middle of the herd.

Maybe this will change after the Democratic-controlled Congress convenes. After all, recent polls have shown that roughly 12 percent of Americans support the White House's putative plans to "surge" (translation: escalate) by throwing another 20,000 to 30,000 troops into the Iraqi meat-grinder, although it's unclear whose side those soldiers will take in its civil war.

Shoot, you could get 12 percent to agree that Condi Rice is a space alien.

Change, however, won't come easy. Not only does the president retain the power of commander in chief, enabling him to confront Congress with a fait accompli -- French for "kiss my grits" -- before they're sworn in, but the Washington media elite follows the same inverted logic: nobody who grasped the folly of invading Iraq in 2002 can be trusted to run with the herd.

On his iconoclastic Web site The Daily Howler, Bob Somerby highlighted a characteristically lame discussion on MSNBC's "Chris Matthews Show." Andrea Mitchell, wife of former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, was guest host. Also featured were Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Joe Klein of Time, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times and Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic.

What a lineup! Newsweek fired Klein for lying about his authorship of "Primary Colors." Sullivan, a transplanted Brit, opined after 9/11 that the "decadent left ... may well mount what amounts to a fifth column" against fighting terrorists. He's now stridently antiwar. Bumiller's a White House correspondent who confessed being scared to ask the president a tough question "on prime time live television ... when the country is about to go to war." Tucker is disarmingly pretty. Here, she's the token progressive.

It's a perfectly representative group of DC pundits: trimmers and court jesters all.

So would Sen. Hillary Clinton's presumptive presidential candidacy be damaged by her pro-war vote? (Actually, President Bush vowed that attacking Iraq was a last resort, although nobody believed him.)

The panel agreed that Clinton might be able to finesse the issue. Then Tucker said something remarkable. "I also think that the peacenik wing of the Democratic Party may have learned a lesson from their failures in Connecticut, where Ned Lamont lost in the general election to Joe Lieberman," she said. "The simple fact of the matter is, every serious Democrat who was in the Senate at the time voted for the war."

Nobody contradicted her. The panel digressed to the titillating topic of Clinton's odd marriage, and whether she fits the "traditional model of what a woman should be."

Excuse me, but why do we need these people?

"Peaceniks?" Who's that? Almost nobody opposed going into Afghanistan after Osama bin Laden. It's the administration's failure to finish the job that's put the United States in danger of simultaneously losing two wars.

On Iraq, Somerby provides a fact check: "In the Senate vote of Oct. 11, 2002, 21 Democratic senators voted against the war resolution." (Also one Republican and an independent.) Among the nays was Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., who recently questioned the wisdom of a commission composed "entirely of people who did not have the judgment to oppose this Iraq war in the first place, and did not have the judgment to realize it was not a wise move in the fight against terrorism."

(Chairman James Baker privately warned Bush against it.)

Also voting against Iraq were Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.; Carl Levin, D-Mich.; Kent Conrad, D-N.D.; and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Failure in Connecticut? Because antiwar Democrats won Montana, Virginia and four other states, all will chair key Senate committees in 2007. Not serious people, Tucker thinks. Presumably along with the 126 Democratic congressmen (and six Republicans) who also voted against this bloody experiment in far-right utopianism.

Actually, it's unlikely Tucker really thinks that. Most often, the stances taken by TV pundits have more to do with establishing their own position within the herd than any outside reality. They can't be bothered to get even basic facts straight, even amid a disaster substantially caused by the news media's failure to apply appropriate professional skepticism to begin with.

"Because our modern elites are so constantly wrong," Somerby believes, "they must constantly disappear those who were right. Result? Inside a Washington hearing room, 10 well-known people who were wrong from the start tell the nation what to do next."

Far too often, alas, the news media are no exception.


Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is co-author of "The Hunting of the President." You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.

Could Bush Start Another War?

“If the king attacks Persia, he will destroy a great empire.” – Delphic Oracle

All the news is that despite growing antiwar sentiment among the public and the establishment, Bush has decided to reject the major recommendations of the Baker panel and continue to settle for nothing less than total “victory” in Iraq, that he has turned back to the dark heart of the War Party, the American Enterprise Institute, for a plan to win and that more troops and ships are headed to the region.

Everyone outside AEI seems to agree that the chances for his “victory” of a multiethnic, America-friendly, democratic Iraqi state have long since expired. The Baker panel avoided using the term at all. And as investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss explained to me last week, the US is backing the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) death squad leaders because they are the only ones (besides some of the Kurds in the autonomous North) who want – need – the US to stay. This is hardly the “road to victory” as it has been defined by the President.

But Bush can’t stop now. He figures his legacy as a disgrace to America and all mankind can be postponed or perhaps somehow even reversed if he could have just a little more time.

Time for what? Could it be that Bush truly intends to carry out the full neoconservative program in the Middle East, complete with more regime changes?

Could spreading his most spectacular failure to Iran and Syria make Iraq seem merely a “catastrophic success“? Are even Bush and Cheney stupid enough to think an air war against Iran will accomplish anything other than forcing their withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, pushing their rebellious populace back into the arms of the Mullahs, driving the price of oil over $200 a barrel and beginning a brand new war in Iraq against the Iran-friendly Shia whom the U.S. has spent hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars installing in power?

Could Bush, whose approval ratings remain in the 30s, initiate an aggressive war without authorization from Congress? Could he claim that the authorization for the war in Iraq was all the authority he needed?

Scott Ritter and Seymour Hersh seem to think so. On December 14th Democracy Now! replayed the audio of their October 16, 2006 appearance at the Ethical Culture Society.

They emphasize the role of the communist cult Mujahideen-e-Khalq – once Saddam’s loyal terrorists, now “ours” – in the early stages of war against Iran and the then-recent – and now recent again – news of U.S. Navy ships, including minesweepers, being sent to the Persian Gulf region. Ritter also explained that the American people have already accepted Bush’s false premise that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that the U.S. must not allow it to be successful.

But, as Hersh reported in the New Yorker’s November issue, the CIA’s new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran says that they have no evidence at all of a secret weapons program. Indeed, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has had full access to Iran’s nuclear program, has reported all along that there is “no indication” that Iran has diverted nuclear technology to any other purpose beyond their declared and monitored electricity program, a program which they have an “inalienable right” to under the NPT.

According to Ritter and Hersh, the Israelis don’t have any more evidence than the U.S. does, and it does not matter. In the eyes of right-wing Likudnik crazies like Benjamin Netanyahu and his ex-communist, Israel-First, neocon buddies in the U.S., any nuclear technology in the hands of the Iranians is tantamount to a ready capacity to “wipe Israel off the map.” The fact that the ability to enrich uranium to the grade required to generate electricity (around 3.6% U-235) does not equal the ability to enrich it to weapons grade (well over 90% U-235) – especially in the presence of IAEA inspectors and video equipment – is irrelevant to them.

It has been reported, first by Philip Giraldi, then by Hersh, Larisa Alexandrovna and Col. Sam Gardiner (ret.), that Bush has considered using real nukes on Iran’s pretend ones. While it seems inconceivable, Iran’s Natanz facility is buried deep underground, and we know how concerned Bush is with getting things right the first time.

It seems the only way he can imagine to take one last shot at greatness is to compound his mistake by 1,000 times.

Perhaps the question is whether Israel will start a war in Syria as a back door to the expansion of America’s war to Iran, or will the U.S. simply fake another Gulf of Tonkin provocation in the Indian Ocean and hit Syria second?

Even if Iran did have nuclear weapons, it would still be none of America’s business. They do not have the rocket technology to deliver them here, nor would they be likely to share their prize with terrorists. Nuclear bombs all come with a “return address.” And let’s not forget that back in 2003, they offered to give the US everything.

Israel has at least 400 nuclear bombs, a fully capable conventional military and can protect itself just fine. They don’t need the U.S. for their defense, but for aggression against threats that do not really exist.

Even Robert Gates, our new secretary of “defense” admitted to Congress that the only reason Iran would want a nuke is that they are surrounded by powers with nukes.

Robert Parry reports that Bush, Blair and Olmert are already planning for more war in the new year. The Iranians seem to have waited too long to get their act together. If they had withdrawn from the NPT and started harvesting plutonium the way North Korea did, instead of throwing their books wide open to the UN and trying to go along, they’d have a nuclear deterrent by now.

Posted by Scott Comments (1)

The little town that symbolises the suffering of the Middle East

Leading article

Bethlehem tells us something revealing. There is an exodus of the people responsible for what little prosperity there was

Published: 23 December 2006

In one of the unfailing ironies of the place religious believers call the Holy Land, its most famous emblem of peace - the little town of Bethlehem - is once again a symbol of its troubles. Its economy is in crisis. Concerns over security are keeping many tourists away. Israel's security wall has cut the town off from much of its agricultural hinterland. Unemployment stands at 65 per cent. The West's financial boycott against the Palestinian Authority has meant no salaries have been paid at the municipality for four months.

It is a complex business. The wall reflects legitimate Israeli security concerns; half the suicide bombers in 2004 are said to have come from Bethlehem. And, although Israel ceased its military activity in the Gaza Strip a month ago, Palestinian militants continue to launch rockets against Israel from there. On the other side, the recent escalation of internecine strife between the Palestinian factions has added to the tensions which have been building since voters ousted the corrupt Fatah leadership and replaced it with the more militant Hamas. Yesterday fierce gun battles raged between the two groups; some predicted all-out civil war.

But Bethlehem tells us something revealing. The Archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster, who arrived there on a Christmas pilgrimage earlier this week, have expressed concern - not just at the barrier which is "strangling" the place, but also at the flight of Christians from the town. Christians constituted more than 85 per cent of the population in 1948; today they make up just 12 per cent. This matters because it is the Christians who own most of the town's hotels, restaurants and shops. Throughout the West Bank and Gaza there is an exodus of the middle classes responsible for what little prosperity there was.

Prosperity for Palestinians holds the key to peace. A meeting is urgently needed between President Abbas and the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. They have a lot to discuss. High on the agenda must be the rocket attacks on Israel and the Israeli incursions into the Palestinian territories. They must also make progress on the release of Palestinian prisoners, in which they would be assisted by Hamas freeing the Israeli soldier they captured last June. To do so would be an important signal from Hamas that it intends to continue to move along the path of political realism it adopted by contesting the elections in the first place. But their guiding strategy must be to give the Palestinians the prospect of prosperity. Mr Olmert needs to look beyond short-term security considerations and ease those Israeli restrictions that are hampering the organic growth of the Palestinian economy. A new horizon of prosperity, even more than symbolic political gestures, is essential to dispelling the sense of despair that grips so many Palestinian youths.

Shifts are needed internationally too. The recent Baker-Hamilton plan called for movement in US policy on the Israeli/Palestinian problem. President Bush needs to heed that. And the European Union, which has salved its conscience in the past by giving more aid to charities working with Palestinians, needs to get off the fence and apply some political pressure to Israel.

In the midst of it all, the innocents - terrified children, disabled people, women cut off from hospitals by security checkpoints - continue to suffer. Two of the three charities for which we are raising money in our Christmas appeal this year work with such people. Supporting them is the only gesture of solidarity open to most of us. We exhort our readers to be generous in their giving. In the end, though, personal hopes must be allied to politics. If there is anything good in the present flux it is that it offers a chance to find new ways forward.

Rhetoric of confrontation

Leader
Friday December 22, 2006
The Guardian

Tony Blair waited until the final stop of his Middle East trip to deliver his big message about the state of the region. After visits to Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories he declared in Dubai that Iran was at the heart of a "monumental struggle" between the forces of moderation and the forces of extremism. In the preceding days the prime minister had seen for himself the issues and conflicts he was drawing on for evidence of this dramatic claim: Turkey's troubled relationship with the EU; the barriers to democracy in Egypt; the deadly impasse between Israelis and Palestinians - including the danger of a Palestinian civil war; and of course the disaster in Iraq three years after he recklessly followed George Bush into a war that replaced Saddam Hussein's dictatorship with mayhem that has crippled the country, made it a magnet for jihadists and fuelled anti-western sentiment across the Muslim world.

Many of the prime minister's critics think he has done quite enough damage in the Middle East already, should now concentrate on limiting that, and have the humility to stop making sweeping pronouncements that might do even more. His thesis subsumes too many discrete issues under one roof, portraying a clash not of civilisations but of ideologies. This sounds dangerously like a substitute for the global confrontation of cold war days in which every international problem could be neatly explained by reference to a Manichean struggle of right against wrong, freedom versus tyranny, west versus east. Dubai represented a return to Mr Bush's "axis of evil" approach but this time with only one named member state - Iran.

Few analysts would disagree that the Islamic republic has been the main beneficiary of the war in Iraq, its influence and confidence boosted by the victory of its Shia allies. It is certainly promoting its interests in Iraq. It is doing the same by backing the Shia Hizbullah in Lebanon and (the Sunni) Hamas in Palestine. Its pursuit of nuclear energy - widely seen as a cover for acquiring nuclear weapons - threatens non-proliferation efforts, challenges Israel's hegemony and is preoccupying the UN security council in a search for sanctions. President Ahmadinejad's rhetoric about Israel is inflammatory; his hosting of the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran is not clowning.

The problem with blaming Iran for all the ills of the Middle East is the same problem as blaming the Soviet Union and its satellites for every cold war conflict. Moscow supported the ANC in its struggle against apartheid. PLO men were trained by East Germany's Stasi. Cuba backed left-wing guerrilla groups in Latin America. But just as those conflicts existed independently of external involvement so do those in which Iran is involved in the Middle East today. The Palestine issue is so hard to resolve because it has been left to fester for too long, not because Hamas leaders are welcome in Tehran. Hizbullah reflects changing internal Lebanese political realities as well as hostility to Israel.

Mr Blair's thesis also ignored the fact that the nervous Sunni kingdoms and republics he wants to form "an alliance of moderation" are hardly beacons of moderation themselves. Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi ideology did much to nurture jihadist thinking. Egyptian democracy would not have produced a fanatic like al-Qaida's Ayman al-Zawahiri. The prime minister's speech was disconcerting too because it so closely echoed Mr Bush's bellicosity and went against the idea in James Baker's Iraq Study Group report of reaching out to talk to Iran (and Syria). It dropped the sensible notion of using carrots and sticks at a time when there is some evidence that pragmatists may be gaining ground against the extremists in Tehran. If the US and Britain understood in the frozen depths of the cold war that they had to talk to their Soviet enemy, surely Iran is too a serious a player in today's Middle East to be addressed solely through the rhetoric of confrontation?

Farewell, Dense Prince: MAUREEN DOWD

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
The New York Times

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Farewell, Dense Prince
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 16, 2006

The defense czar who rivals Robert McNamara for deadly incompetence has been on a victory lap in Baghdad, Mosul and Washington.

--MORE--

Money quote:

"James Baker ran after W. with a butterfly net for a while, but it is now clear that the inmates are still running the asylum."

REPOSTED

Bush makes a “Clean Break” with the Baker Plan

Dec 16, 2006

By Mike Whitney

“Pressure from the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.” (“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt)


Poor Ehud Olmert.

A couple of weeks ago every thing was hunky-dory. The Palestinian death-toll had just topped 400, 1,000 or so homes had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers, the main power station in Gaza had been knocked-out, the blockade of food and medicine was still going strong, and the IDF was gearing up for another rampage through the occupied territories.

In Lebanon, Pierre Gemeyal had just been assassinated; making it easier for the US and Israel to continue hectoring Syria at the UN. And, in Iraq, the American army was busy transforming the once-vibrant Iraqi society into an ungovernable slaughterhouse headed for decades of anarchy.

All in all, things were looking pretty rosy for Olmert.

The neocon master-plan, “A Clean Break: a New Strategy for Securing the Realm”, appeared to be lurching forward according to plan and it was beginning to look like the whole Middle East would be converted into a balkanized hodge-podge of warring factions, armed militias and Islamic extremists killing each other well into the next millennia.

Only one country would prevail in this tempestuous stew of battling factions and broken states; Israel, the soon-to-be dominant power in the entire region, a 21st century Middle East Kingdom. (presumably that is what is meant by securing the “Realm”)

But Olmert’s plans appear to have hit a few well placed speed-bumps; sending the neocon bandwagon rumbling towards the cliff. The first setback was the Baker-Hamilton report which grabbed headlines across the country and restarted the national debate about the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. Baker aptly summarized the Iraqi fiasco as a “grave and deteriorating” crisis in which military victory is no longer possible. The report galvanized the public and sent Bush’s approval ratings through the floor. According to a new CBS News Survey only 4% of the American public now thinks that “the US should keep fighting as it is now” while 75% “disapprove” of Bush’s handling of the war. A mere 21% of the public still supports Bush’s handling of the war.

As for Olmert, the prospect of an American troop withdrawal signals the end of his regional ambitions. There’s no way the Israeli PM can “secure the realm” without the aid of his “proxy army” continuing the fight in the West. That may explain why the neocons have launched a major “media blitz” in the US to discredit the report and disparage its author, Baker, as an anti-Semite.

Baker, an anti Semite?

Perhaps he can join that other great “human rights abuser”, Jimmie Carter?!?

The armchair warriors at the Weekly Standard, The National Review, The New York Post and the Wall Street Journal are leading the charge; each taking shots at Baker while promoting the same worn “stay the course” strategy.

An article in the Washington Post 12-10-06 “Hawks Bolster Skeptical President” provides a list of pro-Israel hawks who have lined up against Baker. Among the more familiar names are William Kristol, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and Michael Rubin; the same lineup that will forever be identified with the catastrophe in Iraq. It’s revealing that the Washington Post still provides an open forum for neocon views even though, as we said, less than 4% of the American people still support a “stay the course” strategy. Apparently, that doesn’t affect the editorial policy at the Washington Post where the war-mongering incitement of neoconservative fantasists still gets unlimited coverage.

This tells a great deal about the state of media in America today and whose interests are really served.

It is also interesting to see that a signatory of the Project for the New American Century was a member of the 5-man panel advising Bush on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. After 4 years of unmitigated failure, Bush is still getting counsel from the same coterie of right-wing radicals who pushed for war in the first place. It’s extraordinary. As Middle East expert Juan Cole said, to have a member of PNAC on the advisory-panel “contradicts the basic principle that when someone gets you into a mess, you stop following their advice.”

Not Bush. Bush seems to believe that the chimera of “global empire” is still within his reach.

The media blitz has had no effect on public opinion. In fact, the public is more fed up with the war than ever. All it’s done is draw attention to the handful of extremists whose views are at odds with 96% of the American people.

The Baker report has torpedoed Olmert’s plans to reinvade Gaza and forced him to reconsider talks with the Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas. It’s all for show, of course, but it does illustrate how quickly things can change.

Two weeks ago, Dick Cheney rushed over to Saudi Arabia to try to calm-down King Abdullah who was fuming over the mass-slaughter of Sunnis in Iraq. Abdullah naturally wanted to know why “Iranian-backed, US-trained” Shiite militias were purging Baghdad of its Sunni population. (Wouldn’t you love to know how Cheney wriggled out of that one?) Cheney’s response is unknown, but we do know that he contacted Olmert and asked him to stop the killing in Gaza and extend the olive branch to Mahmoud Abbas. Astonishingly, Abbas complied with this charade and allowed himself to be photographed “hand-in-hand and smiling” with Olmert just two weeks after 18 members of the same Palestinian family were butchered by Israeli tank-rounds in Beit Hanoun. Abbas’ craven behavior speaks for itself. As for Olmert, the escalating violence in Iraq has put a temporary halt to his plans to reinvade Gaza.

Score one for James Baker.

Olmert’s plans for Lebanon have apparently hit a block-wall, too. The largest demonstrations in the country’s history took place last Sunday after 7 days of nonstop protest in the city center. Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah mobilized an estimated 2 million Lebanese who took to the streets to call for American-stooge, Prime Minister Siniora, to step down. Siniora lost all credibility during the Israeli onslaught when he refused to defend his country by taking any action to repel the Israeli invasion or to deploy the 80,000 troops in the Lebanese army to the south where they were needed. His negligence caused the deaths of 1,300 civilians who were killed while trying to escape Israeli bombardment.

A recent poll showed that 51% of the people believe that the Siniora government “lacks legitimacy” and “73% support the forming of a unity government”. These numbers confirm that Siniora no longer has any base of popular support and that the US-Israeli war has made Hezbollah the most powerful player in Lebanon’s political system.

Hezbollah poses no threat to Israel. What Olmert fears is an independent Arab regime to its north which may develop a credible deterrent to Israeli belligerence. (Israel has invaded Lebanon 4 times) Nasrallah is a fierce nationalist and not a puppet of Iran as Olmert claims. He has no plans for establishing an Islamic Theocracy in Lebanon although it’s an effective device for demonizing him as a fanatic and a terrorist. What he really wants is sufficient military power to convince Israel that future incursions will come at great cost to the IDF. No country in the region needs to improve its national defense and “power of deterrents” more than Lebanon. Siniora has no intention of providing that type of leadership. He should be removed.

Olmert’s plans for Lebanon were articulated in “A Clean Break”. He wants to divert “Syria’s attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize control of Lebanon”, thus, creating a de facto “Israeli protectorate” to their North. The 34-day war sabotaged this plan and further strengthened Israel’s main rival, Hezbollah. The Shiite star continues to rise in Lebanon just as it is in Iraq.

This is not the result that Olmert (or Bush) had in mind.

Baker: “Negotiations with Iran and Syria and a New Madrid”?

The Iraq Study Group made two key recommendations which are pivotal to regional peace. Both have sent tremors through the Olmert regime. First, Baker wants Bush to convene a regional conference with Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to address the deteriorating security situation and the steady escalation of violence. Bush is resisting this effort believing he can cobble together a miraculous “victory” at the eleventh hour. This, of course, will not happen and Bush will soon be compelled to make concessions whether he wants to or not.

The last thing Olmert wants is to see Bush negotiating with Iran which might forestall a preemptive attack on its nuclear and military facilities. If the US enters discussions with Iran, then Iran will naturally demand security guarantees that will lead to a "non-aggression" pact. This would prevent Bush from initiating hostilities “at the time of his own choosing”. This explains why the neocons are so adamantly opposed to dialogue with Syria and Iran. They don't want Bush to be bound by treaty obligations.

Second, the Baker report states unequivocally:

“The United States will not achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the US deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.” (We must make a) “renewed and sustained commitment to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts.”

Fortunately, Baker recognizes the centrality of the issue and is pushing to create a suitable framework for negotiations. That doesn’t mean he will succeed. Olmert stated plainly before the US Congress that (he believes) that Israel has a right “to all the land”, which is the traditional Zionist position. His belief is grounded in a rigid ideology that doesn’t accept the authority of the international community or the rights of the people who have clear title to the land. On top of that, as Uri Avnery said:

“No president will quarrel with the government of Israel if he wants to be re-elected, or-- like Bush now—to end his term in office with dignity and pass the presidency to another member of his party. Any senator or congressman, who takes a stand that the Israeli embassy doesn’t like, is committing Harakiri, Washington-style.

The fate of the peace plans of successive Secretaries of State confirms, on the face of it, the thesis of the two professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that caused a great stir earlier this year. According to them, whenever there is a clash in Washington between the national interests of the US and the national interests of Israel, it is Israel’s interests which win.” (Uri Avnery, “Baker’s Cake”)

But the power of the Jewish Lobby is about to be challenged. There is simply no other way forward. As the United States predicament in Iraq becomes more tenuous, Israel will come under increasing pressure to make concessions for peace. We can expect to hear agonized squeals from the usual suspects, but that will only further identify the dwindling number of neocons who cling to the suicidal policy which most Americans have already abandoned.

Presently, Bush still believes he can affect the war’s outcome, but he’s mistaken. Events on the ground will quickly overtake him and he’ll be forced to change directions. It’s simply out of his hands. In truth, the Baker-Hamilton report is just a pragmatic way of organizing defeat while creating a military-backup to safeguard the oil-fields. By discarding the cover of Baker’s recommendations, Bush is simply inviting a bigger and more embarrassing Vietnam-type exit.

In a matter of weeks the political landscape in the Middle East has changed completely. The US grip is conspicuously loosening in Iraq while the shadow of arch-rival Iran now extends across the entire region. Washington’s pro-Israel hawks will try to stem the tide by pushing for more troops and greater commitment, but they will only attract more attention to their Israeli-centric policies. They are now so isolated from the mainstream that they run the risk of a severe backlash to themselves and their cause.

Olmert’s regional ambitions are quickly unraveling, too. The cracks and fissures in the “Grand Plan” are visible everywhere. Israel’s outpost in the Kurdish north of Iraq will be insufficient to defend against the rising power of the Shiite-dominated regime; just as the US-Israel’s machinations in Lebanon will amount to nothing.

The whole scheme for a “New Middle East” controlled by overlords operating out of Washington and Tel Aviv is in a state of collapse.

As Americans begin to grasp the magnitude of the defeat in Iraq, the “special relationship” will come under increasing scrutiny putting greater strain on the US-Israel friendship. Many are likely to agree with Mearsheimer and Walt that, “pressure from the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in 2003, but it was critical.”

Indeed.

An article in today’s New York Times proves this point quite persuasively. It says, “The Bush administration is working to form a coalition of Sunni Arab nations and a moderate Shiite government in Iraq, along with the US and Europe, to stand against ‘Iran, Syria and the terrorists,’ another senior administration official said Tuesday.” (Helene Cooper, NY Times)

“Stand against Iran, Syria and the terrorists”?

This isn’t the Baker plan, or the Congress’ plan, or the plan the American people demanded in the midterm elections. Those have all been brushed aside or tossed on the scrap-heap. This is the neocon plan; “A Clean Break”; articulated almost word for word from the original document.

Bush hasn’t changed a thing! He is still carrying out an agenda that runs contrary to the will of the American people as well as his father’s most trusted advisors. He’s following a strategy that was clearly intended to establish Israeli regional hegemony.

How can anyone argue otherwise?

The question of loyalty is bound to loom large in any future discussion of why the United States invaded Iraq. Were the neocons really acting in America’s best interests by pushing us towards war or were they secretly serving some other cause?

The finger-pointing has already begun and it’s bound to intensify as time goes by. There’s no telling who may end up being pegged as the scapegoat for the “greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history”, but the list of suspects is gradually narrowing.

Options after the Deconstruction of Iraq

December 18, 2006

by Rodrigue Tremblay

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

George W. Bush, September 12, 2002

"Intelligence leaves no doubt that Iraq continues to possess and conceal lethal weapons."

George W. Bush, March 18, 2003

"For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

"But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.."

George W. Bush, May 30, 2003

Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices. Wars are also waged by warlike gambling leaders who bet their citizens' houses to fulfill their megalomaniac dreams of grandeur —And the illegal military invasion of Iraq was a gigantic gamble from the start. What's more, it is a war that was planned and executed on the basis of fabricated lies. It was a war based on false pretenses and on false perceptions of the Muslim Middle East. For example, it is not true that Middle Eastern Muslims hate the West "because they hate our way of life, our freedom, and our democracy." Polls indicate that such ideas are simply based on ignorant prejudices. This wicked war will be judged by history as one of the most blatant abuses of power by any American administration ever.

In the process, the Bush-Cheney team, through a combination of design and blunder, has inflamed the entire Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan, to Palestine and Lebanon, and soon, to Iran, and possibly Syria, Saudi Arabia and even Turkey. In Iraq, nearly four years after the March 20, 2003 invasion of the country, the mess and the destruction are complete, leaving behind a genuine humanitarian catastrophe and a political near-debacle.

United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, for one, has concluded that the “average Iraqi’s life” is worse now than it was under Saddam Hussein and that the situation in Iraq is now "much worse" than a civil war. Even some republican senators now say openly that Bush's war in Iraq may be 'criminal'. Only President George W. Bush and his Rasputin-like vice president, it seems, continue to think that their wrecking-crew Middle East policy makes any sense. Even departing Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejects bluntly their stubborn "stay-the-course" and “must-complete-the-mission” policy.

However, departing Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld amazingly listed 20 tactical options for U.S. policy in Iraq, but no strategic option. It seems that among G. W. Bush's sorcerer's apprentices, there are a few tacticians, but no strategist. This may understandable in a government of ideologues. For the Bush-Cheney administration, ideology is a strategy in itself, and it is this neoconservative dogma that cannot ever be questioned or modified without loosing face. Even if all the rosy neocon assumptions about Iraq and the Middle East have turned out to be wrong and wrong-headed, George W. Bush has bet his entire presidency on the foolish enterprise and would need a credible face-saving solution to extirpate himself from the mess he himself created. As an immature person and as the bully-in-chief, as he has recently been labeled by economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times, G. W. Bush cannot face the failure of his adventure in Iraq and will remain in a state of denial as long as he is allowed to do so by Congress.

And now, the 10-member Baker-Hamilton bipartisan commission has made it unanimous and officially concluded that Bush's Iraq policies have failed. But, amazingly, the Commission watered downed its recommendations for fear that Bush would reject them out of hand. As a consequence, its 79-some recommendations deal more with tactical changes than fundamental strategic realignments. For one, the Commission refrained from calling for a timetable for a real withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq or even for a real troops reduction. In this sense, the Baker-Hamilton commission did not produce the face-saving plan of withdrawal from Iraq that the current U. S. President and American politicians from both sides of the isle could have leaned on to extirpate themselves from the blunder they made in the fall of 2002. Secondly, the report did not establish how the Iraq adventure is a costly distraction from the real threat of Islamist al Qaeda-type terrorism, which is in resurgence in Afghanistan and in Pakistan.

But all is not completely bleak, even if you are a Neocon who has been "mugged by reality." Indeed, obliterating Iraq from the map, as a country opposed to Israel, and taking control of its oil reserves, were the core objectives behind the pro-Israel neocon policy of invading that country; they were well camouflaged under the terms "liberation" and "democracy". It's not sure, therefore, that the mess that the Bush-Cheney administration has created in Iraq was solely the result of abysmal ignorance and incompetence.

When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003, he did not only topple the Saddam Hussein regime, one of George W. Bush's juvenile fantasies, but he made sure that the entire infrastructure of the country was also destroyed: the army was dismembered, security services were abolished, and, the ruling Sunni-dominated Baath Party was dissolved and its members purged from any administrative positions. An enormous political vacuum resulted, opening the gates to a bloody civil war between the Sunnis in the center, the Chiites in the south and the Kurds in the north.

In this sense, the debacle in Iraq was a planned failure. The final chapter of this drama would be the official break-up of the country into pieces along religious and/or ethnic lines, to the great satisfaction of two countries, i.e. Iran and Israel, the only two countries bound to profit directly from the fragmentation of Iraq.

This is probably what we are going to witness in the coming months. But, just as President Richard Nixon promised to get Americans out of Vietnam in 1968, and only succeeded in doing in 1973, after 20,000 more young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died there, President George W. Bush will try to temporize and save face, as thousands more Americans and Iraqis die. —It is a terrible shame.

Rodrigue Tremblay lives in Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com

Also visit his blog site at www.thenewamericanempire.com/blog.

Author's Website: www.thenewamericanempire.com