The Nusra Front’s adoption of the new name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and claim that it has separated itself from Al Qaeda was designed to influence U.S. policy, not to make the group any more independent of Al Qaeda.
The objective of the maneuver was to head off U.S.-Russian military cooperation against the jihadist group, renamed last week, based at least in part on the hope that the U.S. bureaucratic and political elite, who are lining up against a new U.S.-Russian agreement, may block or reverse the Obama administration’s intention to target Al Qaeda’s franchise in Syria.
Libya under Muammar Qaddafi was subject to years of punishment and ostracism. As far as international sanctions were concerned, this did have a specific declared objective: involving the turning over of named suspects in the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988. Once Qaddafi surrendered the suspects, real negotiation ensued. It resulted in an agreement that ended (while opening up to international inspection) Libya's unconventional weapons programs and confirmed the Libyan regime's exit from international terrorism. Then, after an internal insurrection broke out in Libya, the idea took root—first in Western European capitals, although Washington would go along—that the situation should be exploited to intervene on behalf of the rebels and to help overthrow the regime. Regime change supplanted negotiation.Gareth Porter warns in Hillary Clinton and Her Hawks Consortium News 07/29/2016:
Policy toward Syria has been a mixed bag all along. There has been lots of punishment, but without some of the isolation to which other regimes have been subjected; the United States kept diplomatic relations with Syria even after placing it on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Once an internal revolt broke out in Syria, a situation similar to Libya arose, in that some outsiders (principally Gulf Arab states and Turkey) wanted to take advantage of the situation to topple the Assad regime. With Russian and Iranian help, and also for internal reasons, the regime has managed to hang on. But “Assad must go” became a slogan elsewhere, and many in the West took regime change to be an objective. There was negotiation leading to the surrender and disposal of Syrian chemical weapons, but some, including in the United States, did not like that approach. While there has been some backing away from the idea that Assad must go, others outside Syria say that still should be an objective. In short, there has been conflict and controversy, even within the United States let alone in any larger coalition, over just what the objective should be. [my emphasis]
As Hillary Clinton begins her final charge for the White House, her advisers are already recommending air strikes and other new military measures against the Assad regime in Syria.Escalating intervention in Syria, which is already underway under Obama, faces new complications after the recent failed coup attempt in Turkey, after which Turkey's government is looking to develop better relations to Russia.
The clear signals of Clinton’s readiness to go to war appears to be aimed at influencing the course of the war in Syria as well as U.S. policy over the remaining six months of the Obama administration.
"All signs point to Iran," Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement. He and other Israeli officials noted that the explosion came on the 18th anniversary of a bombing of an Argentine Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds, an attack for which Argentine prosecutors have blamed Iran.Gareth Porter posts a timely warning about the citations of the still-unsolved 1994 AMIA attack as evidence of Iranian capabilities and methods in foreign terrorist attacks: Why The Buenos Aires Bombing Is A False Indicator On Burgas LobeLog Foreign Policy 07/22/2012.
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| Gabriel Levinas |
The most likely result at this point is not an Afghan "transition," but rather an Afghan "muddle through." What is not clear is what, exactly, this "muddle" will look like and whether its outcome will be one that the United States can accept. What is clear is that this means the past strategy is dead, and we desperately need either to decide on a workable "transition" strategy for the future and then actually fund and implement it or develop an honest exit strategy that will do minimal damage to the Afghan people and our national interest.Our glorious generals are never likely to say that they've screwed the pooch in Afghanistan and that there's no point in pretending we have any better option than to pull out quickly and try to minimize any new messes we make in the process. And Cordesman likewise seems willing to believe that there is still some constructive outcome to be salvaged from the wreckage.
Building up a force of military and police of over 300,000 men has been the most expensive aspect of the U.S. aid program. The force goals and funding levels set in early 2011 are now clearly unaffordable, but there is no real plan for the future. At the same time, the United States and ISAF are rushing toward transfer to an Afghan force that is not ready and doing so at a pace of training and partnering that U.S. experience in Vietnam and Iraq indicates is far too quick. The NATO Training Mission for Afghanistan (NTM-A) has ceased any meaningful public reporting on what is happening, and the data that the United States and ISAF do provide on Afghan readiness is tied to past spending levels and has little to do with effectiveness and future capability.In other words: just like in Vietnam, the US built up an expensive force that can't be sustained without substantial outside help; plans aren't being met, and the Pentagon has apparently thrown up its hands about coming up with one beyond 2011; the Afghan forces aren't ready for the mission they are expected to do and have no reasonable prospect at this point of ever being ready; and, things are so screwed up the Pentagon is trying as hard as possible to keep the US public from finding out how bad.
The United States and ISAF are talking about creating Afghan forces than can stand on their own after U.S. and ISAF troops leave by embedding advisers. This requires the equivalent of highly trained Special Forces with linguistic and cultural skills that are in very short supply. Such advisers become vulnerable and need protection from Afghan forces, and a willingness to take casualties in the face of inevitable clashes driven by culture and religion and the fact the insurgents see advisers as a key target.Translation: the training program ain't working. And after nearly 10 years of war in Afghanistan, US personnel who have to work closely with them on critical operations can't speak their languages (Pashto and Dari, mostly). Of course, that also means that disloyal Afghan troops could plot to kill Americans within earshot of American personnel and the Americans wouldn't know the difference.
Success requires massive funding indefinitely into the future. .... All of these cuts are taking place in spite of the fact that no one now has a stable funding plan for Afghan forces, and this critical aspect of transition planning is as unstable or missing as p[l]anning on the civil side.Translation: no way in blazes the Afghan force the US has trained can do what they were trained to do. And by the way, the touchy-feely parts of the program about kindly US troops painting girls' schools and handing out candy to the delighted Afghan children also blows.
The previous Afghan military plan had elements like an air force that were not scheduled to operate on their own until 2016 at the earliest. There is no clear plan now for the Afghan military.Translation: we trained them to rely indefinitely for US airpower. Just like in Vietnam.
The mix of Afghan regular police, local police, and security forces is totally unstable. Cutbacks in the Afghan regular police seem inevitable given their present cost, but it is unclear what will happen. Moreover, the present Afghan courts, jails, and legal system are far too small and insecure to support transition or to allow the police to function properly.Translation: morale sucks and people don't stick around that long. Oh, and the Afghan force we stood up is too dang expensive for Afghanistan. Plus, the Americans see it as an American war anyway, so why would we trust the Afghan government to do important stuff, like hold prisoners or try suspects in court?
The reality, however, is that the strategy developed under General Stanley McCrystal has been dying for a long time and for many more reasons than the growing distrust between U.S. and ISAF personnel and the Afghans. It was already clear in 2009 that the odds of success were no better than 50 percent. ...Translation: we couldn't beat the armed opposition; the Afghan government couldn't beat the armed opposition with massive US and other NATO help; Pakistan is far more worried about having Afghanistan as an ally of India (as Karzai's government is) than they are about NATO goals in the region; and nobody in the US or NATO countries want to keep this up, except the Pentagon and Christian Rightists who love war no matter what.
It was clear that there were four roughly equal threats to success, of which the Afghan Taliban, Haqqani, and Hekmatyar were only the first. The second was the corruption and incompetence of the Afghan government. The third was the role of Pakistan and its tolerance and support of insurgent sanctuaries. The fourth was the United States and its allies.
The new report ... leaves us where we've been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil—with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.He includes an important bit of information on the current management of the IAEA:
The shift in tone at the I.A.E.A. seems linked to a change at the top. The I.A.E.A.’s report had extra weight because the Agency has had a reputation for years as a reliable arbiter on Iran. Mohammed ElBaradei, who retired as the I.A.E.A.'s Director General two years ago, was viewed internationally, although not always in Washington, as an honest broker — a view that lead to the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei's replacement is Yukiya Amano of Japan. Late last year, a classified U.S. Embassy cable from Vienna, the site of the I.A.E.A. headquarters, described Amano as being "ready for prime time." According to the cable, which was obtained by WikiLeaks, in a meeting in September, 2009, with Glyn Davies, the American permanent representative to the I.A.E.A., said, "Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the group of developing countries], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program." The cable added that Amano's "willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy ... bodes well for our future relationship."Part of the mainstream US press dissing of Wikileaks was the claim that none of the information they are leaking is particularly important. Actually, there have been important leaks, including this one. It would be a shame if Wikileaks gets shut down, because they are doing investigative reporting that much of the Establishment press in the US is unwilling to do.
The lesson supposedly learned by the U.S. establishment media from the Iraq debacle was the danger of relying on anonymous government sources to disseminate unverified fear-mongering accusations. Rather obviously, no such lesson has been learned, as this continues to be the primary reporting method for accusing the Supreme Hitlers of the Moment — Iran — of anything and everything the U.S. Government can dream up.Gareth Porter adds some information relative to the report in Former Weapons Inspector: Iran Does Not Have Nuclear Weapons Test Chamber Alternet 11/20/2011. Gareth also links to this interview with nuclear engineer Robert Kelley of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), who has been an IAEA inspector by The Real News Network, Former IAEA Inspector: Misleading Iran report proves nothing 11/14/2011:
President Barack Obama has given his approval to a Pentagon plan to station U.S. combat troops in Iraq beyond 2011, provided that Iraqi Premier Nouri al-Maliki officially requests it, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources.The Pentagon doesn't seem to want to leave anyplace they're had a serious ground war. Why the Obama Administration went along with the idea for Iraq is a different question. With the Afghanistan War and now the Libya War on his hands, wouldn't it make plain sense for him to shut down the combat role in Iraq as agreed? As Porter reports, this may have been part of his thinking, or at least his justification behind the scenes to Iraq officials:
But both U.S. and Iraqi officials acknowledge that Maliki may now be reluctant to make the official request. Maliki faces severe political constraints at home, and his government is being forced by recent moves by Saudi Arabia to move even closer to Iran.
And it is no longer taken for granted by U.S. or Iraqi officials that Maliki can survive the rising tide of opposition through the summer.
Several days after Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, the key U.S. strategic ally in the Middle East for 30 years, was forced by the pro-democracy movement to resign in early February, Iraqi officials were informed that Obama was now more convinced than before that he could not afford to be tagged with having "lost" Iraq, the intelligence official told IPS.But Porter explains various reasons, not least of them the opposition of Muqtada al-Sadr, that Maliki's government may not agree. And he writes:
If the Iraqi premier does not ask for U.S. troops to remain after the expiration of the November 2008 U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement, it will be a major blow to the assertion made over the past three years portraying Maliki as an ally of the United States who wants U.S. help in keeping Iraq out of the Iranian sphere of influence.Iran has been a de facto ally of the United States since we invaded in 2003. Iran wanted a stable, Shi'a-led government in Baghdad. And the US realized it was something they had to accept.
The reality is much less favourable to the rosy view of U.S. influence in Iraq. Press accounts have revealed that key events in that period - including the selection of Maliki as prime minister in 2006, the 2007 ceasefires in Basrah and Baghdad, and the renewed political alliance between Maliki and Sadr in 2010 - were all brokered by Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. [my emphasis]
But the Saudi dispatch of combat troops to Bahrain last month to repress the pro-democracy movement that represented the Shi'a majority in that country may have made a move toward the United States difficult, if not impossible for Maliki.Now, this is from an anonymous Iraqi intelligence official, so it can't be regarded as definitive evidence. But Gareth Porter has a good record on his reporting and research on the Iraq War.
That aggressive Saudi action against the Shi'a of Bahrain has made it clearer that Saudi Arabia must be regarded as Iraq's primary enemy, according to the Iraqi intelligence official.
But it is only part of a larger problem of Iraqi conflict with Saudi Arabia. Iraqi intelligence has indications that the original al Qaeda in Iraq network is in the process of leaving the country for Libya, but that another organisation now operating under the name of al Qaeda in Iraq is actually a Saudi-supported Baathist paramilitary group run from Jordan by a former high-ranking general under Saddam Hussein. [my emphasis]
Coalition forces in Afghanistan have beaten the insurgency in an important stronghold of Taliban fighters, though pockets of resistance remain, a U.S. commander said Monday in an interview with USA TODAY.Gareth Porter, Deferring to Petraeus, NIE Failed to Register Taliban Growth Inter Press Service 02/14/2011:
"This is really the heart of the insurgency," Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Mills said of Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. "I believe they have been beaten."
Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.Soon we'll have ten full years of success after success after success in Afghanistan. And still no sight of the war's end. And major media still treat announcements from official Pentagon sources as being credible.
That unusual decision was in deference to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan, who did not want any official estimate of the insurgency's strength that would contradict his claims of success by Special Operations Forces in reducing the capabilities of the Taliban in 2010.
In late 2009, the intelligence community adopted an estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 full-time insurgents, as reported by McClatchy newspapers in November and confirmed in a press briefing by Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), on Dec. 3, 2009.
But in 2010, the Taliban and their allies increased the total number of attacks to 34,000, compared with 22,000 in 2009, according to official ISAF data – a whopping 54 percent rise.
[W]hat should really be taken away from the US military's experience over the past ten years is not that the United States understands how to fight and win population-centric counterinsurgencies but that counterinsurgencies are as violent and inconclusive as any other conflicts, and that the United States should avoid such wars at all costs.... writes Michael Cohen. (Tossing the Afghan COIN The Nation 12/16/2010)
If one ghost hovering over the discussion of Afghanistan was that of Vietnam, where an earlier Democratic president had come to grief by escalating a war in Asia, another ghost was that of the "surge" in Iraq, which had been opposed by the key officials presiding over the Afghan review, including the president himself, the vice president, and Secretary of State Clinton. Of course, the surge in Iraq had succeeded for a number of reasons, including the Sunni Awakening, but Obama had never publicly conceded that he had been wrong about it. At a meeting late in the review process, Obama said, "I'm not saying it'd be the exact same plan as Iraq, but I am looking for something that is a surge to create the conditions for a transition." [my emphasis]Bergen writes about the early months of the Obama Administration and its Afghanistan War policy:
... the tension between the military officers who wanted a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan for as long as it was going to take—in effect, well past the presidential election of 2012, and at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars — while the president and much of his political team (at least initially) took the position that they wanted something far more modest. This tension was compounded by the fact that the new president had never served in the military and was a vocal opponent of both the Iraq war and the surge, while the Pentagon had gotten pretty much whatever it had wanted from Bush in the latter years of the Iraq war. [my emphasis]Nir Rosen in a recent interview with Glenn Greenwald (Transcript: Nir Rosen Salon 12/13/2010) gives a more real-world view of The Surge than Bergen's comic-book version:
It is really, really important for Americans to understand what happened in Iraq during the surge. ... There is the notion that the surge was a success in Iraq. Petraeus and the surge was a success in Iraq, so Petraeus and the surge will be a success in Afghanistan. Now, the surge, strictly speaking, was just an increase in troops by 30,000 people, which began in 2007.Rosen has more to say about The Surge and US policies in both Iraq and Afghanistan in that interview. But that's the key thing about The Surge: the US forces allied with Sunni militias against "Al Qa'ida in Iraq", a mostly Iraqi group with little if any meaningful operation connection to Bin Laden's organization. And this was made possible by the Shi'a militias' bloody victory in the Iraqi civil war, largely supported by US forces.
But the surge has come to mean a lot more than that, and it now signifies a period from late 2006 until 2008 in which a complex synergy of primarily Iraqi dynamics interacting with some changes in what the Americans are doing ended up reducing violence from the terrible terrible levels of 2006-2007, to the just really, really bad levels of today. Even calling what you have in Iraq today a success is deeply offensive because violence in Iraq today is still worse than it is in Afghanistan; people are being blown up and assassinated every day. The government is brutal and ugly and torturous and corrupt.
But violence did go down. It went down primarily not because of the American surge, primarily you had a civil war and the Shias won. It wasn't so much that the Americans defeated the Sunni Arab insurgency, it was that Shia militias brutalized the Sunni population. Shias were the majority, so they had that numerical superiority, and they had the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army working for them too, those were acting for the first three years basically as Shia death squads, and they had the American military on their side. So they brutalized the Sunni population until Sunni militiamen began to realize by summer 2006 that they had lost. [,y emphasis]
So once the Iraqi civil war had sufficiently devastated its population, the Americans came in there, kind of froze the gains of the civil war with these massive walls, in a way that reminded me of the way that the Dayton accords froze the Serbian gains in the Bosnian civil war.He means literal walls, in the case of Baghdad:
Iraq was also much easier [than Afghanistan]in the sense that the battle was an urban one for the most part, and you could build these immense walls around different neighborhoods. It was very oppressive, it was like Palestine; it disrupted the social fabric, it made life hell, but it allowed you to control the people and control who went in and who went out of neighborhoods. You could conduct a census and determine who belonged. You could prevent arms and bombs from going in a neighborhood because you controlled the only entry and exit point to it. You could prevent militias from going into a neighborhood. [my emphasis]Gareth Porter characterized The Surge back in 2008 as follows (The Surge and American Military Triumphalism Huffington Post 01/04/2008):
In 2003 U.S. military forces destroyed the Sunni regime of Saddam Hussein and installed a Shiite regime in its stead. The Sunnis predictably launched a military resistance, and the U.S. military began its own war against Sunni insurgents. The presence of a U.S . military occupation force in an Islamic country with some of Islam's holiest sites predictably incited much greater popular support among Sunnis, both within Iraq and in neighboring Sunni countries, for jihadi extremists aligned with al Qaeda.In a more recent assessment, Leaked Report, New Iraqi Alignment Reveal U.S. War Failure Inter Press Service 10/25/2010, he writes about information from Wikileaks published in the New York Times, that shed new light on dealings between the Shi'a Prime Minister al-Maliki and Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr. The short version is, they teamed up to thwart US efforts to crush the Mahdi Army and maneuver the Cheney-Bush Administration into a withdrawal agreement:
Thus al Qaeda, which had practically no support in Iraq in 2003, quickly became a major force in 2003 and 2004. By 2005, however, the tensions between al Qaeda and the predominantly Baathist nationalist Sunni insurgents had reached the point of open warfare. That warfare had become even more violent during 2006. The main non-al Qaeda Sunni resistance groups tried to negotiate a peace agreement with the United States in 2005-2006, but Bush refused.
By 2007, however, the Bush administration had changed sides in Iraq. It was more concerned with Shiite forces they associated with Iran than with the Sunni resistance. The United States finally began allowing them to police their own cities - something the Sunnis themselves had been proposing since 2005 but which Bush had refused to approve. The nationalist Sunnis have shown they were perfectly capable of taking care of al Qaeda themselves if the United States would only stop attacking them and get out of the way, which is what they had been saying all along.
Iran prevailed on Sadr to agree to a unilateral ceasefire in September 2007 and to end fighting in Basra and Sadr City in late March and early May 2008. The latter two agreements prevented U.S. troops from carrying out major offensives in both cases.Yet in the mythology of Afghanistan War hawks like Peter Bergen, The Surge in Iraq of 2007-8 was a brilliant triumph of American arms and strategy.
The quid pro quo for Sadr's agreement to those ceasefires appears to have been the promise of a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Maliki's renewal of the alliance with Sadr on the way to forming a new Shi'a government has brought strong protest from the Barack Obama administration. U.S. Ambassador James Jeffries has repeatedly said in recent weeks that Sadr's inclusion in an Iraqi government is unacceptable to Washington.
But that protest has only underlined the fact that the United States is the odd man out in the Shi'a-dominated politics of Iraq.
Obama cannot afford to make his calculations about Iraq solely with an eye to domestic American politics. He extended his original proposal of a 16-month withdrawal of active combat brigades to 18 months so as to leave more troops in place to help with the next Iraqi parliamentary elections, scheduled for December 2009. It is ... the case that Iraqi elections can still only go forward if the country is locked down and vehicular traffic forbidden, preventing car-bombings and coordinated guerrilla strikes. It might be possible for the Iraqi military to provide security for national elections in 2013 should the country's future ruler or rulers deign to hold them, but the Iraqi military cannot hope to do so this year.Just to be clear, I would have preferred a rapid drawdown on something like a one-year schedule. The presence of American troops is in itself a major risk of the fighting escalating.
Iraq's military also continues to need logistical support from U.S. forces. ...All of this reflects the fact that Cheney and Bush intended for Iraq to be a permanent US military base.
Although Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has had military successes during the past year, in the southern port of Basra and in Sadr City (east Baghdad), against the Mahdi Army militia, these campaigns depended heavily on U.S. close air support. Iraq lacks an air force and it will take years to create one. One caveat about Obama's pledge to remove troops by the end of 2011 is that he cannot possibly be including the U.S. Air Force, which is almost certainly in for a longer mission, but can operate from bases outside Iraq. Without a navy, moreover, Iraq cannot prevent petroleum smuggling via the Persian Gulf, which drains billions from government coffers annually and strengthens militias against the state, and this sort of patrol will fall to the U.S. Navy for some time to come.
It would be wrong to overlook these simple words: "And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011." Though the word "troops" referred to the Army and the Marines, not to the Air Force and Navy, what Obama said on Friday was a firm pledge to leave. And by binding himself to a security agreement formally passed by the Iraqi parliament, Obama was eschewing unilateralism and the patronizing hubris that marked Bush's discourse on Iraq. The Iraqi and Arab press understood this point immediately, and led their accounts of Obama's speech with that sentence abour [sic] removing troops. Obama was not signaling any diffidence about ending the Iraq War before the end of his [first] term. He was attempting to provide for an orderly withdrawal that will ensure that U.S. troops are not drawn back in by a subsequent security collapse. [my emphasis]For other views on Obama's withdrawal plan, see also:
When there was a choice [in 2008] between supporting Barack Obama and attending rallies organized by various Maoists, Trotskyists and neo-anarchists opposed to Obama and electoral politics, the grassroots peace movement headed for the precincts by the thousands. What appeared to Ricks to be a failed antiwar rally in Washington was only evidence that the movement was moving on, becoming a voting force in and around the Obama campaign.Unlike the Pod Pundits, who see Obama's withdrawal plan as a sign of his standing up against "the left", Hayden - who is generally considered a figure of "the left" - writes, "The greater danger from Iraq for Obama may lie at home politically if Republicans and the generals, echoed by the mainstream media, protest Obama's withdrawal plan as naïve or worse."
That turned out to be the right strategy for the peace movement when John McCain was defeated in November, but many continued to wonder--with good reason--whether Obama was promising nothing more than partial peace under a new form of military occupation. Now it is clear that somewhere along the way Obama became persuaded that it made little sense to leave 50,000 troops in Iraq when the Pentagon couldn't win with 150,000, the American economy was collapsing and his hands were full in Afghanistan and Pakistan. [my emphasis]
Obama's claim that the U.S. combat mission will end in August 2010 raises the question whether he will call a halt to combat patrols by U.S. personnel embedded with Iraqi units. The sweeping concession made to CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus and Iraq commander Gen. Odierno on the residual force suggests that he will not demand the end of such operations by U.S. troops.Former Sen. George McGovern favors a faster withdrawal, as reported in McGovern: Troops Should Come Home This Year Keloland.com 02/27/09:
The freedom granted to Odierno and Petraeus on the residual force overshadows his concession to the generals and Gates in accepting the recommendation for 19-month timetable for withdrawing combat brigades.
"I give the President credit for setting a date certain, that's something the previous administration would not do," McGovern said.Tags:
But McGovern says waiting 18 months to pull thousands of troops out of Iraq isn't something this country can afford.
"I think we ought to recognize this is a mistake and then cut our losses. I don't mean just race for the border. I mean we should be out of there by September this year not September next year," McGovern said.
And the former Senator doesn't think 50 thousand troops should be left behind to train the Iraqi forces.
"We can't control events in the troubled Middle East. Everybody that's tried to do that has ended up with blood on their hands, blood on the receiving country's hands, and without a clear cut victory," McGovern said.
President Bush and his aides emphasize that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki deserves both credit and blame for acting on his own and precipitously sending a division-size force of Iraqi soldiers and police to Basra last month to attack Shiite militiamen. Maliki miscalculated, but he showed himself to be decisive and independent, goes the official version.Porter also suggests that Al Maliki's Iraq government could have planned the Basra offensive with the idea that Iran would negotiate a peace that the United States would feel required to respect. Wheels within wheels. But he notes that what is developing looks like a major military conflict between the US forces and Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM (Mahdi Army) is developing.
But the weight of the unacknowledged continuing American occupation broke through as soon as Maliki's offensive faltered. The prime minister's own chief of security, Salim Qassim, was shot dead by a sniper as he stepped out of Basra Palace to use his cellphone on March 28. Maliki, nearby, was in physical danger as the fighting raged, according to intelligence reports.
The CIA flashed word to Washington that the offensive - and Maliki's government - was about to collapse. That was when U.S. units were ordered into action to save Iraq's sovereign but defenseless prime minister, according to U.S. and Iraqi sources. (my emphasis)
The nomination of Gen. David Petraeus to be the new head of the Central Command not only ensures that he will be available to defend the George W. Bush administration's policies toward Iran and Iraq at least through the end of Bush's term and possibly even beyond.Here are two recent takes from Patrick Cockburn on the Iraqi situation:
It also gives Vice President Dick Cheney greater freedom of action to exploit the option of an air attack against Iran during the administration's final months. ...
Cheney aggressively solicited political support from Turkish leaders for a U.S. strike against Iranian nuclear facilities during his visit to Turkey last month, according to a source familiar with Cheney's meeting in Ankara.
Cheney was "very aggressive" in asking Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, as well as Turkey's chief of general staff Gen. Yasar Bukyukanit to get "on board" with such an attack, according to the source, who has access to reports from the Cheney visit. ...
After the meeting between Cheney and King Abdullah on the same trip, Saudi sources let it be known to the media that Abdullah had told Cheney that his government opposed any U.S. military strike against Iran. That suggested that Cheney had brought up the military option in Ryadh as well.
One of Cheney's main objectives on the trip appears to have been to get the message to Iran that the option of a strike against its nuclear facilities is still very much alive.
The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and the militias but between rich and poor. Maliki’s main supporters - his own Dawa party has a small base - are the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and its Badr militia. ISCI draws its support primarily from the established Shia clergy, the merchants and the Shia middle class. But ever since ISCI was founded in Iran in 1982 at an early stage in the Iraq-Iran war the party has always lacked popular backing. It won an unsavory reputation for interrogating and torturing Iraqi prisoners: this did not stop it becoming a firm ally of the US occupation after the fall of Saddam Hussein.He also address the role of Iran and the state of The Surge's "success" in the context of the Shi'a vs. Shi'a civil war:
The new conflict has another aspect: it is also a proxy struggle between the US and Iran. This has been going on ever since the American invasion. But, for all Washington’s attempts to prove otherwise, the Sunni insurgency was primarily supported by the Sunni Arab states to the west of Iraq. The Sadrists have traditionally been highly suspicious of the Iranians. From the beginning, Muqtada was the only Shia leader who has always opposed the US occupation. His militiamen fought two furious battles with US Marines for the Shia holy city of Najaf in April and August 2004. They suffered heavy casualties, but survived; and Muqtada became politically stronger. In public he said he was shifting from military to political resistance. But, in confronting the US, he is forced to look to Iranian political and military support. 'The Iranians cannot afford to see Muqtada eliminated or seriously weakened,' says Ghassan Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist. In Iran's battle with the US for influence over the Iraqi Shia, Muqtada plays too important a role for Iran to see him crushed.Iran's role in Iraq is real. In the larger strategic picture, that has been the main result of the Iraq War: to strenthen Iran's influence in the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular.
Confrontation, and even war, with Iran is politically easier to sell in the US than support for the continuing war inside Iraq. The Democratic Party may want to withdraw troops from Iraq but its leaders try to outdo each other in condemning Iran. General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, has been blaming Iran as the hidden hand behind the latest fighting in Baghdad and Basra. He [did] the same when he appeared before Congress on April 8 to give evidence about why, over the last few months, Iraq has become more and not less violent. He had a lot of explaining to do. With US television showing armed men in the streets, burned-out vehicles and smoke rising over Baghdad and Basra, his claims about the success of the 'surge' looked much less convincing than they did at the end of last year.Petraeus says that the number of American soldiers in Iraq should not be reduced below the level they were at before the surge started - which makes his claims of military success look dubious. The 3.2 million Iraqis, one in nine of the population, who fled to Syria, Jordan and elsewhere in Iraq, have not been coming home because they think it is too dangerous for them to do so; they are right. (my emphasis)
Again, there is a heavy layer of fog over the outcome. It is important to note, however, that the Sadrists [Muqtada's forces] did not win any previous clashes with MNF-I, have not won significant clashes in this round of fighting, seem to have lost in Basra, and have not had any overt Iranian encouragement and support. Iraqi forces—for all their very real and all too obvious weaknesses—are now much stronger and are slowly becoming more effective.Since Muqtada's goal for his JAM militia was to survive and not be disarmed, and since after Iran brokered a cease-fire deal JAM survived and was not disarmed, this is an odd comment. Compare that conclusion to the description in the latter Patrick Cockburn article. It's possible that Cordesman was talking in purely conventional military terms, i.e., Muqtada didn't capture large numbers of government troops and make them surrender, but otherwise it doesn't make much sense.
As the Iraqi army began to fail the Americans moved quickly to prop it up. Air controllers to marshal air strikes were sent to Iraqi army units. A team of senior American advisers was sent to Basra. This may explain why Muqtada agreed to a ceasefire. The Mehdi Army had already shown it could fight off the Iraqi army and police, but the Americans might be a different matter. Even so, the short war between Muqtada and the government was revealing as to who really holds power in Iraq. A delegation of Shia leaders went to Iran. They talked to Muqtada in the holy city of Qom, and to General Qassem Sulaymani, the head of the Quds Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who oversees Iranian involvement in Iraq. He has long been an American bête noir and last year US special forces tried to kidnap him during an official visit to the Kurdish president. Maliki seems to have been told of the agreement only after it was reached, but its terms were that the Mehdi Army would not give up its arms, the government offensive would stop and militia members would no longer be arrested without warrants. The Americans, who normally react furiously to any sign of Iranian interference in Iraq, said nothing about the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were negotiating peace terms between the government and its enemies.Tags: anthony cordesman, gareth porter, iraq war, patrick cockburn
The Americans said nothing because the abortive attack on Basra was, for them, a nightmare. The claim that the surge was the first step in restoring peace to Iraq was exposed as a myth. American military casualties might be down -- but some two thousand Iraqis were killed in March. American politicians ran for cover. While I was in Baghdad in March, Senator John McCain visited, at the same time as Vice-President Dick Cheney. Both expressed confidence that security was improving. McCain happily told CNN that Muqtada’s 'influence has been on the wane for a long time'. Three weeks later, McCain was denying he had ever said such a thing; what he had said, he insisted, was that ‘he was still a major player and his influence is going to have to be reduced and gradually eliminated.’ Given that Muqtada is the most powerful Shia leader, and that his militiamen had just shown they could defeat the Iraqi army, this would mean that McCain, if elected president, would fight a war with Iraq’s 17 million Shia. (my emphasis)
The interest of Bush administration in keeping the proxy war line alive has nothing to do with Iraqi realities ... As a strategic weapon for justifying the administration's policies toward both Iraq and Iran, the theme of Iranian interference through "Special Groups" is bound to be a central thread in the testimony by both Petreaus Congressional testimony [sic] next week.The Shi'a parties to which Iran has the closest relationship are the government parties in Iraq. While Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (JAM) takes a friendly posture toward Iran - Muqtada himself is reported to be studying in the Iranian city of Qom - JAM has not been as close to Iran historically. Porter writes:
The Madhi Army has received training in both Lebanon and in Iran and has undoubtedly used financial assistance from Iran to procure weapons. But Sadr revealed in his al-Jazeera interview that he had told Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on a trip to Iran that he did not agree with the "political and military interests" that Tehran had pursued in Iraq. That was an apparent reference to Iran's pronounced tilt toward Sadr's Shiite rivals who remain in power with joint U.S.-Iranian support.Tags: gareth porter, iraq war, iran
Ironically, when Iranian President Mahmound Ahmadinejad visited Iraq in early March, both [Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri] al-Maliki and Supreme Council chief Abdul Aziaz al-Hakim publicly dissociated themselves from the U.S. "proxy war" line, insisting that Iran was restraining Sadr rather than egging him on.
Gary Kamiya may be using "us" a bit broadly. But his comment on Establishment thinking - what liberal bloggers have taken lately to calling "the Village" - is uncomfortably accurate (Iraq taught us nothing Salon 11/06/07):The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. ...I wouldn't go so far as he does in criticizing Clinton's position on the Iran issue. A couple of recent Huffington Post articles with differing points of view help put the Democrats' position in context, A Reality Check on Iran Policy and U.S. Campaign Politics 11/04/07 by Joe Wilson and Coercive Diplomacy and War: The Vietnam Precedent by Gareth Porter 11/01/07.
The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America's political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.
The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. (my emphasis)
On to Iran, my pretties! Mephisto in the Air (1828) by Eugène DelacroixWith the triumph of the democratization movement in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire, Islam constitutes the most pervasive and powerful transnational force in the world, with one billion adherents spread out across the globe. Muslims are a majority in some 56 countries ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia, and they exist in growing and significant numbers in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Europe. For a Western world long accustomed to a global vision and foreign policy predicated upon superpower rivalry for global influence if not dominance - a U.S.-Soviet conflict often portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, capitalism and communism - it has been all too tempting to identify another global ideological menace to fill the "threat vacuum" created by the demise of communism. (my emphasis)Islam became a convenient enemy for many, though it took the 9/11 attacks for it to become credible to enough people so that those interested in threat inflation could use it as the central justification for an American military establishment that spends half or more of the military spending of the entire world.
I can envision a scenario in which, sometime next year, the intelligence community is against a war, telling the White House it doesn't know enough; the military is against it, saying that they're bogged down in Iraq; the State Department is against it, saying that there won't be any allies for a war with Iran; and the political people tell the White House that Congress won't support it - and still, the president and the vice president decide to go to war anyway.Still, I would hate to see a sense of inevitability arise around this. Because expanding the Iraq War to Iran is a bad, bad idea.
In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.Now whether or not you think, as Joan Walsh put it, that the MoveOn.org ad "was marred ... by the right-baiting play on Petraeus as "Betray us", calling him "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" strikes me as even less reverential.
Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.
The policy context of Fallon's extraordinarily abrasive treatment of his subordinate was Petraeus's agreement in February to serve as front man for the George W. Bush administration's effort to sell its policy of increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq to Congress. ...I also found this encouraging:
Fallon was strongly opposed to Petraeus's role as pitch man for the surge policy in Iraq adopted by Bush in December as putting his own interests ahead of a sound military posture in the Middle East and Southwest Asia - the area for which Fallon's CENTCOM is responsible.
The CENTCOM commander believed the United States should be withdrawing troops from Iraq urgently, largely because he saw greater dangers elsewhere in the region. "He is very focused on Pakistan," said a source familiar with Fallon's thinking, "and trying to maintain a difficult status quo with Iran."
One of Fallon's first moves upon taking command of CENTCOM was to order his subordinates to avoid the term "long war" - a phrase Bush and Secretary of Defence Robert M. Gates had used to describe the fight against terrorism.I always thought that "the Long War" was a kind of Orwellian propaganda name.
Fallon was signaling his unhappiness with the policy of U.S. occupation of Iraq for an indeterminate period. Military sources explained that Fallon was concerned that the concept of a long war would alienate Middle East publics by suggesting that U.S. troops would remain in the region indefinitely.
Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.Wow!
He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy. (my emphasis)
"I've been selling Petraeus to anybody who would listen," said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who terms the Bush troop increase the "Petraeus Doctrine" and fetched senators off the floor to meet the general in McConnell's office. "He's the General Grant of the surge. He's our last best chance as a military commander to bring about a change on the ground." ...Porter describes this arrangement in particular as "a highly unusual political role for an officer who had not yet taken command of a war".
Graham said he grabbed Petraeus last week and had him wait in McConnell's office while he ushered in senators to see the general.
