Sanctions can lead to war

It's true as a general matter that economic sanctions can bring pressure on a country without leading to war. It's also true that our general political culture regards sanctions are a relatively harmless war of pressuring a country that isn't doing what we Americans want. And we don't generally view sanctions as a step toward war. But sometimes they can be.

I'm still bumfuddled by the Senate vote yesterday about sanctions on Russia and Iran. It was hard from the early news reports to tell what they actually about. That's among the few news reports that people were able to find even with the Google machine.

Oh, and there's this:

Two days after Tillerson says US seeks regime change in Iran, Trump reveals he's investigated for obstruction of justice. Who'll fall first?

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) June 16, 2017

What.The.****?

ThinkProgress generally reflects the corporate Democratic perspective. but they also often do good reporting. Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani reports for them in Tillerson calls for regime change in Iran 06/15/2017, "[Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson was asked on Wednesday whether the United States supports regime change inside Iran. He replied in the affirmative, saying that U.S. policy is driven by relying on 'elements inside of Iran' to bring about 'peaceful transition of that government.'"

Peaceful change? Like in 1953? Or maybe Brazil 2016? What could possibly go wrong?

Matthew Calabria and several co-writers wrote recently in a piece for the Atlantic Council, Bringing Iran Back into the Global Economy Will Bolster the JCPOA 06/07/2017:

Given the absence of bilateral ties, Washington lacks sufficient leverage to push Iran in one direction or another to advance core US regional interests—peace, security, prosperity, and stability. Unless the United States changes course, Iran will continue supporting anti-American aims, turning to European, Russian and Asian sources of investment and trade.

We recommend that the Trump administration issue a general license through the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to allow US banks to complete dollar-clearing transactions for Iranian entities, except for those individuals and organizations on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List.

A license for dollar-clearing transactions would signal that the United States intends to go beyond the letter of its JCPOA commitments and honor the spirit of the accord, which promised Iran major economic benefits in return for long-term restrictions on its nuclear activities. Licensing would also undercut anti-US rhetoric from Iranian hardliners who maintain that the United States does not want to improve relations with Iran. Iran has a sizeable young, well-educated and pro-Western population that supports relations between Washington and Tehran. The United States should strive to maintain the goodwill of the younger generation; improving Iran’s economy is crucial to this goal.

Approving dollar-clearing transactions would also facilitate increased trade between Europe and Iran. Generally, the more ties Iran has to international markets and to Western countries, the more willing Iran should be to abide by international norms. If the United States facilitates Iran’s integration into international markets, Iran would have more to lose by violating these norms. Moreover, it would lessen the possibility that the European Union or other countries would lobby to have their currency replace the dollar as the global reserve standard.

I remember in the 1990s when Bill Clinton signed off on a Congressional resolution pushed by warmongers committing the US to a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. And we did it in a few years, even though Iraq had given up its "weapons of mass destruction." Libya agreed to give up their "WMDs" and a few years later we intervened militarily to overthrow the same government and leave violent chaos behind. Oh, and the head of state that made the disarmament deal with the US was unceremoniously murdered in the process. Our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought that was a big laugh, saying, "We came, we saw, he died." More specifically, he was anally raped with a bayonet and murdered just afterward.

Now Iran reaches a nuclear agreement that goes beyond the Non-Proliferation Treaty - and a couple of years later the Secretary of State declares "regime change" to be our policy there, too. And the Senate passes new Bipartisan sanctions near-unanimously.

Hey, North Korea, have we got a deal for you! Give up your nukes and we'll always be nice to you after that, honest to goodness we will! Pakistan? India? Let's talk about you giving up your nukes!

Trump vs. Iran in Saudi Arabia

The opening portion on Trump's current international tour show has not been encouraging.

Fred Kaplan writes of the President's speech on Islam while he was in Saudi Arabia (Trump’s Sunni Strategy Slate 05/22/2017):

... read closely, without a grading curve, the speech was by turns shallow, clichéd, and repellent. Even the few times when its authors approached a bold theme, they veered away, lest it soften the visit’s three main missions: to assure the region’s Sunni leaders that they can run their countries and oppress their critics with no finger-wagging from Washington; to wrap up a massive $110 billion sale of American weapons; and to declare war on Iran, or at least unabashed hostility toward its regime.

Haroon Moghul also has some harsh words for it in While Trump Ingratiates Himself With Saudi Extremists, U.S. Muslims Are Abandoned Haaretz 05/21/2017:

Trump praised Saudi Arabia while denouncing Iran, even as millions of Iranians participated in an election which makes that country more democratic, at least, than almost any of the countries that make up the Gulf Cooperation Council. A speech that began ostensibly with a message of peace and love ended by arguing for the isolation and demonization of Iran.

Far from actually fighting terrorism, Trump’s speech promises to make conditions in the Middle East worse for everyone.

Trump professed love, the common roots of the Abrahamic faiths, and called us the children of God. Unless, of course, you’re a refugee, in which case Trump wants to slam the door shut in your face. He made no mention of banning citizens of Muslim-majority nations from traveling to the United States, either.

Terrorism is not a cause of the Middle East’s backwardness. It is a symptom. Terrorism is a non-state response to overly centralized states, which leave no room for political, religious or social diversity.

That Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric was not merely campaign bluster is clear in the policies he’s proposed and supported: Islamophobic, homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, anti-immigrant and anti-science.

... we are doubling down on an historic American-Saudi partnership that has not only prevented the rise of extremism, but has been unable to prevent the fracture of the Middle East.

This is where somebody says, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

Jaun Cole was also not impressed with the content of Trump's speech (Trump on Islam: Neo-Orientalism and anti-Shi’ism 05/22/2017):

Trump seems to think that pumping $110 bn in new shiny weapons into a volatile Middle East will lead to peace! If there is any sure correlate of war, it is massive purchases by one regional power of new armaments. You have to use them while you have the advantage or your rivals also acquire them.

For Trump to attack Iran, which just had a popular election where the electorate bucked the choice of the Leader, from Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy where the populace have no rights, is weird.

The American Right is deeply implicated in radicalizing Muslims. Afghan Islam was radicalized by the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union. Eisenhower and Reagan both attempted to enlist Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism against Communism. Most Palestinians were secular or mainstream until the Israelis cultivated Hamas as an alternative to the PLO.

"Spiegel International" story on the origins of Daesh/ISIS

Spiegel International has a story about the creation of Daesh/ISIS, The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State by Christoph Reuter 04/18/2015.

It claims that a former intelligence official in Saddam's regime, Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, originally organized and headed the group. It reports on organization charts and plans from Al-Hlifawi's Al-Khlifawi's files. Al-Hlifawi Al-Khlifawi was killed in January 2014, according to the Spiegel report.

The story was picked up by The Guardian with a Reuters wire story (Former Saddam Hussein spy masterminded the rise of Isis, says report 04/20/2015), the Daily Mail (Sara Malm and John Hall, The murderous blueprint which plotted the rise of ISIS 04/19/2015)and Aljazeera (Documents show Saddam-era Iraqi officer masterminded ISIL’s rise 04/20/2015)

The poor quality of some of Spiegel Online's reporting on the euro crisis and their willingness to pass along the German government's spin with American-style stenography makes me a bit more cautious than I used to be about Spiegel's reporting. I'm curious what Juan Cole may have to say about it. The last three paragraphs of the Spiegel piece pick up on the Sunni-Shi'a war narrative that Cole has been warning is a gross oversimplification of events in the Middle East. Spiegel:

As the West's attention is primarily focused on the possibility of terrorist attacks, a different scenario has been underestimated: the approaching intra-Muslim war between Shiites and Sunnis. Such a conflict would allow IS to graduate from being a hated terror organization to a central power.

Already today, the frontlines in Syria, Iraq and Yemen follow this confessional line, with Shiite Afghans fighting against Sunni Afghans in Syria and IS profiting in Iraq from the barbarism of brutal Shiite militias. Should this ancient Islam conflict continue to escalate, it could spill over into confessionally mixed states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Lebanon.

In such a case, IS propaganda about the approaching apocalypse could become a reality. In its slipstream, an absolutist dictatorship in the name of God could be established.

For some of Cole's cautions about that narrative, see Juan Cole on Europe's Muslims and More Carnegie Council 04/13/2015.

This article by Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal, ISIS confirms death of senior leader in Syria 02//05/2014, published soon after Al-Khlifawi his death, also indicates he was an important leader in Daesh/ISIS. The organization confirmed his death, referring to him by a pseudonym he adopted, Abu Bakr al-Iraqi:

The ISIS leader, known as Abu Bakr al Iraqi or Haji Bakr, was a senior military commander and top deputy to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the embattled emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham. Haji Bakr was first reported killed in early January after his group clashed with the Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade, a unit of the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo. A picture that purported to show Haji Bakr’s corpse was published on LiveLeak, but the image does not appear to match a picture released by the ISIS.

The ISIS announced the death of Haji Bakr in an official statement that was released on a jihadist Twitter account on Feb. 2. The statement was obtained and translated by the SITE Intelligence Group.

“We congratulate the mujahideen in general and in Iraq and al Sham in particular, for the martyrdom of the Mujahid Sheikh, the Commander, Abu Bakr al Iraqi,” the ISIS eulogy stated. The ISIS claimed he was “knocked down by the cowardly, insidious hands in the countryside of Northern Aleppo by the criminals of the Awakenings.” The group has tagged Free Syrian Army and even allied Islamist groups as Awakening, or anti-al Qaeda groups, that are supported by Western and Arab countries.

Digby has commented on the story in Yet another terrifying lesson in the perils of blowback Hullabaloo 04/19/2015. So has Charlie Pierce in The Many Wars Of Fred Hiatt: The Unique History Of One Man's Mongering Esquire Politics Blog 04/20/2015.

Oil glut and falling prices

"Venezuela is Latin America's biggest exporter of crude oil and has the world's largest petroleum reserves." - Brian Ellsworth and Andrew Cawthorne, Venezuela death toll rises to 13 as protests flare Reuters 02/24/2014

This post is not mainly about Venezuela. But given the kind of unrest that country has seen this year, especially toward the first of 2014, I like to keep that reminder prominent.

Christopher Adams et al report on another twist in world oil prices in Market rout as oil slide rocks energy groups Financial Times 11/28/2014. The OPEC cartel has declined to lower production to boost oil prices, which produced a drop in price of energy company stocks:

The sharp slide in the price of Brent oil after Opec’s decision not to cut output triggered warnings that oil companies would cut as much as $100bn of capital spending in response, imperilling [sic] the US shale bonanza and threatening much Arctic oil exploration.

Meanwhile oil’s fall continued to play havoc with the currencies of oil exporting countries, especially Russia. At one point on Friday, the rouble slid to a record low. ...

Opec said on Thursday that it was leaving its output ceiling of 30m barrels a day unchanged, prompting a swift 8 per cent drop in the oil price, which was already down by nearly 40 per cent since mid-June. Brent fell $2.80 on Friday to $69.78, a four-year low.

The move showed that Saudi Arabia, Opec’s largest producer and effective leader, had decided to relinquish its traditional role of balancing the oil market by increasing or reducing output, letting prices do the job instead, analysts said. [my emphasis]

I'm not familiar enough with oil price politics and markets to jump to any big conclusions about what the recent drop in oil prices mean. With the possible exceptions of the JFK assassination and Area 51, few things give rise to as many bizarre conspiracy theories as oil price changes. So I'm trying to be parsimonious in any conclusions I might draw at this point.

The particular vulnerability of Russia, a major oil exporter, to problems from drops in oil prices is one major factor to watch. While it may reduce oil companies' megaprofits to some extent, it could have significant benefits for other sectors, as noted in the Adams article: "Falling oil prices, meanwhile, are driving down expectations for global inflation, putting additional pressure on central banks to step up economic stimulus programmes."

An earlier article by Geoff Dyer and Ed Crooks, Saudi Arabia tests US ties with oil price Financial Times 10/16/2014, focuses on Saudi Arabia's current role in the process, one of the more interesting aspects of this. The Saudis have usually been willing to help out the United States' geopolitical goals by their stands in OPEC. It's not entirely clear they are doing that this time: "At a time when the US and Saudi Arabia are fighting a new war together in Iraq and Syria, the Saudis have taken the bold step of asserting their pivotal role in the oil market and subtly squeezing the finances of some of America’s fledgling shale companies." It may be a stretch to say that the US and the Saudis are fighting on the same side, not least because the US currently seems to be fighting on multiple sides at once in the same conflicts.

On the other hand:

Yet, at the same time, the falling oil price will deliver a de facto tax cut for American consumers and – if sustained – will hit both Russia and Iran at a time when Washington is trying to pressure both countries.

Deborah Gordon, director of the energy and climate programme at the Carnegie Endowment, sees the Saudi pressure on oil prices as a carefully calibrated move that will not alienate allies but will cause problems for rivals and foes such as Russia and Iran.

“The Saudis seem to have concluded that this could be a game-changer for them,” she says. “They get several benefits without hurting the people they do not want to hurt.”

With global demand for oil slowing sharply and US production surging, Saudi Arabia faced a choice. It could have cut production to stabilise the market, shouldering the burden itself. Instead, it appears so far to have decided to let the price fall, indicating that it would be happy with an oil price around $80, rather than the $100 it has previously backed.

Another factor at work is that high domestic US oil production from shale (using fracking) is challenging Saudi Arabia's current heavy-hitter role in the world oil markets, so the Saudis may also be concerned to counteract that.

Venezuela, Washington's least favorite Latin American country right now - after the perennial least-favorite, Cuba, of course - has also been feeling negative effects from lower oil prices, as Sebastian Boyd reports in Venezuela Quelling Default Talk Spurs Bond Surge: Andes Credit Bloomberg Businessweek 10/30/2014: "Venezuela’s gross domestic product will shrink 3 percent this year, the most since 2003, according to the International Monetary Fund. The nation’s reserves have dropped 8.7 percent in the past year to $20.2 billion." Algeria, for some reason, apparently extracted extra from Venezuela from oil they imported in November the Venezuela needed for mixing with some of their oil. (Maher Chmaytelli and Sherry Su, Algeria Bucks OPEC Discounts as Crude Goes to Venezuela Bloomberg Businessweek 10/29/2014)

US ally Japan, however, is seeing some good and some bad effects. (Louise Lucas and Ben McLannahan, Oil price fall offers mixed blessings for Japan Financial Times 10/16/2014 )

Matthew Philips wrote last month (It Looks Like $80 Oil Is Here to Stay Bloomberg Businessweek 10/30/2014):

A “structural transition has been reached,” analysts at Goldman Sachs (GS) wrote this week, and the ability to determine oil prices has shifted from OPEC to the U.S. The report, entitled “The New Oil Order,” argues that it’s time for American oil producers to slow down in the face of weak demand growth around the world and the quick pace of change. Goldman predicts that U.S. West Texas Intermediate oil will hit $75 a barrel during the first half of 2015 and that Brent will settle around $85 a barrel, about where it is now.

The shale boom in the U.S. isn’t likely to pull back until oil gets so cheap that people can’t make money drilling for it. There are a lot of estimates of the break-even price for U.S. shale producers. Some think it’s around $80 a barrel, others think it’s closer to $60, and it’s obviously not going to be the same for everyone. The number changes depending on where you’re drilling and how good you are.

According to the Christopher Adams article linked above, there already seem to be at least threats from major producers to cut back on capital investment significantly at current prices.

Phillips also points to Russia and Iran as possible targets of oil-pricing decisions:

It’s hard to predict how Vladimir Putin or Iran’s leaders will react to the economic squeezes that are likely to come their way. A year ago, Iran signaled its willingness to negotiate over its nuclear weapons program after tight sanctions crushed its ability to sell its oil for a decent price. Those sanctions would not have been nearly as effective without the U.S. shale boom, which kept a lid on prices while the world turned away from Iran’s oil. Whether anything fruitful comes of it remains to be seen.

As for Putin, there’s no real evidence that lower oil prices are making him more compliant. If anything, they have made him more desperate. Still, lowering the price of oil is likely the most effective lever the U.S. has to pull at the moment—more effective than almost any economic sanction or diplomatic effort.

But Benjamin Bidder in Wegbrechende Einnahmen: Ölpreis-Verfall würgt Russlands Wirtschaft ab Spiegel Online 28.11.2014 discusses ways in which the low oil prices could be a major problem for Russia, even a regime-change size problem.

Carol Matlack earlier this week looked at how Russia is handling the oil price situation (Why Russia Said 'No Deal' to OPEC on Cutting Oil Production Bloomberg Businessweek 11/26/2014)

Juan Cole looks at the effects of low oil prices on Russia, Iran and Iraq in Oil Price Fall: Saudi Arabia targets US Shale Oil, Iran, Iraq, Russia Informed Comment 11/29/2014. But he doesn't see politics as the main driver in Saudi Arabia's unwillingness to have OPECC cut production:

The cause of the fall, by $40 a barrel, in petroleum prices since last summer is almost completely on the demand side. Asian economies, especially China, are dramatically slowing, and won’t be requiring as much petroleum to fuel trucks, trains and cars to deliver people and goods around the country. Most petroleum is used to fuel transport. Some is used for heating or cooling, as in Saudi Arabia and Hawaii, but that practice is relatively rare. US journalists seem to feel it obligatory to mention US shale oil production as a contributor to the price fall, since prices are a matter of supply and demand, and US supply has increased by a couple million barrels a day. But frankly that is a minor increase in world terms– global production is roughly 90 million barrels a day. Between Iran, Iraq (Kirkuk), Libya and Syria, enough oil has gone out of production to more than offset the additional American oil. It isn’t that there is more oil being pumped, it is that the world doesn’t want it as much because of cooling economies. ...

Saudi Arabia did not cause the oil price fall, though since 2011 it has been flooding the market to offset the decrease in Iranian exports because of US sanctions. Riyadh, however, is the main geopolitical winner here, which is why the Saudis stopped the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries from reducing country production quotas. (That step would have reduced supply and put up prices). As it is, the Saudis can afford to wait as fracked oil is driven out of the market because too expensive, so that they regain their market share. [my emphasis]

But Cole also adds, "The Saudis must enjoy punishing Iran and Russia for defying them by propping up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus and the Da’wa Shiite regime in Baghdad."

Izabella Kaminska in A game of ‘chicken’ threatens the oil production balance Financial Times 10/30/2014 addresses the breakeven price point at which investment in shale production would become uneconomic:

Yes there is. According to Wood Mackenzie, US shale oil developments would remain economic even if prices were as low as $70 or $75 a barrel. Some even say that most American producers would break even if a barrel fetched only $57. But the difference is that in the US, none of the producers are state-owned. Also, America doesn’t depend on oil export revenues to balance the government’s books. True, lower prices might no longer be a cause of unalloyed economic cheer. Because they thin the wallets of oil producers, they make life harder for the people whose livelihoods depend on them. Still, cheaper oil could also help stimulate the economy by reducing the price motorists pay at the pump, and bringing down the cost of industrial inputs. That would help put more people in work, and give them more money to spend after they leave the petrol station forecourt. [my emphasis]

They are currently running just around $70/barrel (on Brent crude, the standard general measure cited). See: Yuji Okada and Sharon Cho, OPEC Inaction Signals Pain for Refiners With Costly Oil Bloomberg News/Yahoo! Fiance 11/28/2014.

Argentina could also be affected in its plans to boost energy production to the extent they involve fracking. (See: Benedict Mander and Jude Webber, YPF seeks foreign partners to tap Argentina’s shale Financial Times 11/02/2014)

Iraqi provincial elections

Juan Cole at Informed Comment 02/01/09 gives an unsparing judgment of the poltical situation reflected in the provincial elections that took place Saturday:

Early reports say that 60% of Iraqi's electorate came out for Saturday's election of provincial councils. The results will be announced by the end of this week, and only after "weeks" will the final tally be published. There was a lockdown of the whole country, in which US troops assisted, with no private automobiles allowed to run. Given this datum, the breathless newspaper headlines that the elections came off without any major attacks are reporting a given. Guerrillas can't detonate a car bomb if they can't drive a car to their target.

Glitches prevented thousands of voters from casting their ballots McClatchy says, causing big demonstrations and protest rallies to be held. The Iraqi government electoral high commission said that the main problem was that some Iraqis had not registered and then just showed up expecting to be able to vote anyway. There were widespread reports of vote-buying.

American corporate media will report the Iraqi provincial elections as a vindication of the 2003 US invasion of that country, and as a sign that Iraqis are eager to be like Americans. In places like Sadr City, the teeming slums of East Baghdad, many Iraqis voted as a protest against continued US military presence. Likewise, Sunni fundamentalists saw the vote as an assertion of Iraqi sovereignty. The elections come in the wake of the Status of Forces Agreement that pledges all US troops will be out of the country by 2011, and in the wake of the election of Barack Obama in the US, who has committed to having most US troops out in 16 months. The sharp fall in deaths of civilians and security personnel in January, to 189, is not a sign that Bush won but rather that the Iraqis have. No point in blowing things up if the US is leaving anyway, and less reason to resist the new federal Iraqi government if Sunni Arab elites can rule their own provinces.

It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure. [my emphasis]

He also gives the names of the parties in Prime Minister al-Maliki's current electoral coalition, which we don't often see named in regular press reports:

Al-Maliki's coalition consists of the Islamic Mission Party, the Islamic Mission Party - Iraq Organization, Solidarity in Iraq, The Islamic Union of Iraqi Turkmen, the Iraqi Fayli Kurdish Brotherhood Movement, the 1991 Popular Iraqi Uprising Bloc and independents. The core of this coalition is the two major branches of the Da'wa Party, the oldest Shiite fundamentalist party in Iraq, founded around 1958. ... Although Da'wa or the Islamic Mission Party is Shiite fundamentalists, it is not a clerical party and it is not as close to Iran as ISCI. It is benefitting from a perception that al-Maliki has gotten a handle on the security situation. [my emphasis]

Inspecting Iraq for WMDs and Clinton's Desert Fox operation

Doing a bit of review, I see that I have drafts scattered here and there that I haven't posted yet. So I'm going to do a bit of catch-up.

Scott Ritter is providing a fresh account of his experience with the end of the Iraqi WMD inspections in 1998 as part of this article, A Farewell to Arms Control Truthdig.com 07/05/07.

I should mention that former UN weapons inspector Ritter was one of the informed people who turned out to be right about the wrongheadedness of invading Iraq. And so therefore our "press corps" doesn't consider him one of the people to be taken seriously. No, our press barons haven't learned very much from the Iraq War experience.

I haven't read Ritter's book on the inspections or combed through the details of the 1998 end of the inspections to know if he's providing new information here. I do know that Saddam's government blocked UN inspectors at some point that year on the grounds that American intelligence had infiltrated the inspection teams. This was true, and the US government admitted that later. It became common in the runup to the 2003 invasion for Bush and others to say that "Saddam kicked out the inspectors" in 1998 but that was also not true. The inspectors decided on their own to withdraw, although I'm unclear whether the UN ordered it or whether Ritter as the head of the team ordered it on his own authority. According to this account, it was President Clinton who order the UN team out:

President Bill Clinton had the gall to claim that Saddam Hussein had refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors in December 1998, evicting the WMD sleuths from Iraq on the eve of the 72-hour bombing campaign known as Desert Fox. Clinton knew full well that his administration had deliberately created a provocation against the Iraqis, seeking to inspect a Baath Party headquarters, and once it became clear the Iraqis would accede to this outrageous demand, it was Clinton, not Saddam, who ordered the inspectors out of Iraq, seeking to cover his tracks with a bombing campaign that ostensibly targeted "WMD sites," but which in reality was a thinly disguised assassination attempt against the Iraqi president. A leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Hillary Clinton, continues to uphold the fiction of her husband’s policy in Iraq, much to the detriment of truth. (my emphasis)

We don't hear that much any more about Operation Desert Fox, although it was a significant military operation. And it's a significant part of the story of the ongoing US conflict with Iraq. I'm not sure how they managed to pick the name "Desert Fox", which is the well-known nickname of the German Field Marshal Ernest Rommel in the Second World War. (Rommel did late in the war join the July 23, 1944, anti-Hitler plot and was allowed to commit suicide rather than be executed for his role in it.)

Tags: iraq, operation desert fox, scott ritter

Peter Galbraith on Iran and Iraq

Peter Galbraith has a long piece on Iran in the upcoming 10/11/07 New York Review of Books, which appears also at TomDispatch for 09/18/07. (NYRB puts its articles behind subscription after a few weeks, so TomDispatch is a more permanent link.) Galbraith is reviewing Trita Parsi's new book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007).

Galbraith has a been a partisan of Iraqi Kurds, which one should keep in mind in his analyses of the Iraq War. But he's very well-informed about that war and makes perceptive observations about a central dilemma in the Cheney-Bush Middle East policy. Iran and the United States shared perceived common interests in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and of Saddam Hussein's secular Baathist regime in Iraq.

Yet the administration still manages to see Iran as the central bogeyman in the Middle East. The German journalist Peter Scholl-Latour entitled a 2005 book that dealt largely with the Bush policies in the "war on terror" and the Iraq War, Weltmacht im Treibsand. Bush gegen die Ayatollahs (World Power in Quicksand: Bush Against the Ayatollahs). He explains that even though Bush's military actions have been directed primarily against Sunni targets (Saddam's regime, the Taliban, Al Qa'ida), that the administration's outlook is dominated by its perceptions of radical Islam stemming from the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and its strategic perception that Iran is the root of America's problems in the Middle East.

Galbraith describes this central problem well with relation to the Iraq War:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran's strategic victory is the most far-reaching. In establishing the border between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Empire in 1639, the Treaty of Qasr-i-Shirin demarcated the boundary between Sunni-ruled lands and Shiite-ruled lands. For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran's allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini's army could not. Today, the Shiite-controlled lands extend to the borders of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain, a Persian Gulf kingdom with a Shiite majority and a Sunni monarch, is most affected by these developments; but so is Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, which is home to most of the kingdom's Shiites. (They may even be a majority in the province but this is unknown as Saudi Arabia has not dared to conduct a census.) The U.S. Navy has its most important Persian Gulf base in Bahrain while most of Saudi Arabia's oil is under the Eastern Province.

America's Iraq quagmire has given new life to Iran's Syrian ally, Bashir Assad. In 2003, the Syrian Baathist regime seemed an anachronism unable to survive the region's political and economic changes. Today, Assad appears firmly in control, having even recovered from the opprobrium of having his regime caught red-handed in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In Lebanon, Hezbollah enjoys greatly enhanced stature for having held off the Israelis in the 2006 war. As Hezbollah's sponsor and source of arms, Iran now has an influence both in the Levant and in the Arab-Israeli conflict that it never before had. (my emphasis)

And he observes that the foolish optimism of the neocon ideologues - and their soulmates in war like Dick Cheney - had a ludicrous expectation of the effect the conquest of Iraq would have on Iran:

The scale of the American miscalculation is striking. Before the Iraq war began, its neoconservative architects argued that conferring power on Iraq's Shiites would serve to undermine Iran because Iraq's Shiites, controlling the faith's two holiest cities, would, in the words of then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, be "an independent source of authority for the Shia religion emerging in a country that is democratic and pro-Western." Further, they argued, Iran could never dominate Iraq, because the Iraqi Shiites are Arabs and the Iranian Shiites Persian. It was a theory that, unfortunately, had no connection to reality.

Galbraith also points out that the lead party in the current Iraqi government is the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), previously called Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and that it has far closer affinities with Iran than "Mookie's boys", Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army (Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM). He writes:

The United States cannot now undo President Bush's strategic gift to Iran. But importantly, the most pro-Iranian Shiite political party is the one least hostile to the United States. In the battle now underway between the SIIC and Moqtada al-Sadr for control of southern Iraq and of the central government in Baghdad, the United States and Iran are on the same side. The U.S. has good reason to worry about Iran's activities in Iraq. But contrary to the Bush administration's allegations - supported by both General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in their recent congressional testimony - Iran does not oppose Iraq's new political order. In fact, Iran is the major beneficiary of the American-induced changes in Iraq since 2003.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, iran, iran war, peter galbraith

The US future in Iraq

Steve Benen at the Talking Points Memo cites a Tom Ricks report on the Pentagon plans for a long-term presence in Iraq. One problem with many of these reports and discussions is that they often assume that the choice of how long to stay is exclusively that of the US. It's not, and US troops will eventually have to leave.

But leaving that aside for now, Benen reminds up that all this talk about reducing the number of troops in 2008 and adopting the "Baker-Hamilton" approach and so on has been going on since 2003, with only slight variations in the formula:

This comes on the heels of a report two weeks ago that the White House is "developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year." It'd be more encouraging if we haven't been hearing similar rhetoric for years.

Indeed, the same problem exists here. As publius noted today, we've seen reports just like Ricks' for a long while, and none came to fruition.

Tom Englehardt also looks back at how much we previously knew about the administration's plans for permanent bases in Iraq, lately known as the "Korean model": The Great American Disconnect TomDispatch.com 06/07/07.

Tags: iraq, iraq war

The "patrol base" attack

The suicide-bomb attack this week that killed nine American soldiers in Iraq has understandably received a lot of attention in the news:Al-Qa'ida group behind US deaths in Iraq by Patrick Cockburn Independent 04/25/07. What hasn't been clear in a lot of the reporting is that they were struck in a "patrol base" which is an essential part of the Petraeus strategy for the McCain escalation currently under way. As a point of historical reference, at the height of American fighting in Vietnam, American KIAs (killed in actions) were running at about 10 per day. Cockburn reports:

The US military said that only one truck had exploded yesterday at a patrol base of the 82nd Airborne Division in the much-fought over province of Diyala, north-east of Baghdad. The death of the paratroopers brings to 85 the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq so far this month. This is higher than the total in each of the previous three months.

Residents in the Ameen area south of the provincial capital, Baquba, said the base attacked was in an old primary school called Sheikh Abdul Qadir al-Qailani. In a sophisticated attack, gunmen opened fire on US snipers on the roof of the school. Then one suicide truck bomb blasted a gap in the concrete wall protecting the base through which a second truck was able to pass before blowing up and causing the school building to collapse. (my emphasis)

The current strategy calls for establishing these small "patrol bases" staffed by American troops in neighborhoods throughout Baghdad and other target areas; the one sucessfully attack this week was in Diyala province, as Cockburn reports. Previously, American troops had been concentrated in larger and heavily-defended bases, emerging for individual patrols and then returning to base. The "patrol bases" are supposed to let the Americans get more familiar with the neighborhoods and developed better intelligence on insurgent operations.

In counterinsurgency theory, this getting closer to the people is a necessary step, though it will be likely to produce higher US casualties, including KIAs, in the short run. Cockburn writes:

But the US strategy since the start of the "surge" in Baghdad on 14 February has been to make greater use of US troops and give less priority to training Iraqi forces. This is likely to lead to an increase in US casualties that are often a function of the number of patrols being made. ...

The most effective method of attack against US and British forces has been the roadside bomb, to which neither has found an effective answer. No less than 1,310 US military fatalities have been caused by bombs in or beside roads. While the suicide bombers have hitherto not concentrated on US forces, possibly because they are too well defended, the more aggressive use of US forces is likely to make them more of a target.

But there are a couple of problems with this. At least a couple. One is that most American troops don't speak Arabic. And they are foreigners in Iraq. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are too unreliable for the Americans to trust them enough to make the joint counterinsurgency operations effective. Plus, there aren't nearly enough of them, and the ones that are there are more loyal to sectarian militias than to the Iraqi government. And the military is apparently giving up for the time being on hoping for American training of the ISF providing any immediate relief.

The PBS Newshour on Tuesday featured Judy Woodruff interviewing Phil Carter, who has served in Iraq as an Army captain and writes on intelligence issues, and neocon ideologue Frederick Kagan, who is considered one of the intellectual godfathers of the McCain escalation, aka, The Surge: Iraq's Diyala Province One of Deadliest for Troops 04/24/07. Carter explained how the current strategy is affecting Diyala province, where he has served:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain [Carter], yesterday's suicide attack on the 82nd Airborne, it was a third brigade. We know nine paratroopers killed, 20 injured. Since November, we're told 56 U.S. service members have been killed in Diyala. Why do we see the violence spiking there?

PHILLIP CARTER: Well, it looks like this is the unintended consequence of the surge. That is, you squeeze the bad guys out of Baghdad, and they pop like a water balloon up into the Diyala province, which borders Baghdad.

There's also a sense that we drew down, as Professor Kagan says, too many of our forces in this province. And so as we were squeezing in Baghdad, we were squeezing the insurgents and the militias into an area where there was not a sufficient U.S. presence.

And the third problem in Diyala is that the provincial government and the security forces are both ineffective and corrupt, and they are far more beholden to their own agendas than to any mission or security in the province.

Kagan, being the ideologue that he is, kept trying to stress the al-Qaida role in Diyala:

FREDERICK KAGAN: Well, they're going to a variety of difference places. And they've been moving around. And we've been following, as al-Qaida has been trying to establish new bases. They've been trying to do this in Salahadeen, as well.

But Diyala offers a prospect for them, because it is a mixed area, and al-Qaida's methodology in Diyala has been to attack the Shia, drive them away, and then attack the Sunni to terrorize them. That's been sort of their trademark out there, and they've been hoping that that would work for them. Diyala is a province that offers that prospect.

Carter smoothly called Kagan on it, and also talked more about how the current approach is likely to mean higher US KIA counts:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Captain Carter, again, the worst attack on the 82nd Airborne, they were saying today, in almost 40 years. Is there something that makes them particularly vulnerable in this location?

PHILLIP CARTER: There is, but first it's important to note a couple of things. First is that Diyala has long been home to Baath party elements and others. It was a favorite sort of retreat area for Iraqis in Saddam Hussein's government. So there's a fertile area for Sunni insurgents to go up there.

The second is that Colonel Sutherland's brigade has really adopted a muscular approach to counterinsurgency up there. And since when we left, it appears that they have almost resumed major combat operations. It's possible that there is a spiral effect between the way that the U.S. is acting and the way that the insurgents are acting, in the absence of reconstruction effort.

On your question, yes, this is a deadly attack. And it's because of the new way that the U.S. is postured. No longer is the U.S. simply occupying these massive super bases outside the city, but they're now pushing out into smaller outposts throughout the cities, the kind of things that might resemble a community policing substation in a housing area. We're talking small bases, with small-sized units, and they're much more vulnerable than the large bases outside of town. (my emphasis)

Kagan agreed about the higher risk of casualties involved:

So it is sort of Counterinsurgency 101, as Captain Carter described, that you really do have to get out among the population in order to make any of this work. You accept a certain degree of greater risk, especially initially, by doing that. But over the long term, the hope is that the risk goes down because you get a lot more intelligence from the people when you're doing more than just sort of driving through neighborhoods, where nobody knows you and doesn't expect you to stay there.

The Pentagon will be tempted to pull back from this "patrol base" arrangement to emphasize "force protection", i.e., minimizing American casualties. Which is likely to interfere with whatever good the current counterinsurgency approach might produce. But given the incredible difficulties in their way, that's probably just as well. Why lose people in a counterinsurgency approach that is hopeless for other reasons anyway?

Of course, the obvious follow-on question is, why lose people in a counterinsurgency war that cannot be won by Americans at any remotely acceptable cost, if at all?

Tags: frederick kagan, iraq, iraq war, patrick cockburn, phil carter

Just curious...

How do these two things match up?

From Waiting for GODOT in Iraq by F. J. Bing West Military Review (US Army professional journal) Jan/Feb 2007. (In HTML at US Army Professional Writing, but their 3rd quarter 2006 date for the article is incorrect.)

The U.S. Military strategy must also change. Over the next year, most of the battle space will be handed over to the Iraqi Army, with U.S. Combat units pulling back to be used more as quick reaction and raiding forces against al-Qaeda in Iraq and death squads. American units are not going to continue to occupy Sunni cities and try to win the support of the Sunni population or protect them from the insurgents that were hiding in plain sight among them. Counterinsurgency is no longer central. The primary task has shifted to training Iraqi security forces.

...We are training Iraqi troops to be the cement holding Iraq together in place of Americans. (my emphasis)

From Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy by Nancy Youssef,
McClatchy Newspapers 04/19/07:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

Presumably West's article went to print before the "surge" was announced. But still, are our generals effectively just throwing in the towel on training the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)?

Tags: iraq, iraq war, f j bing west, mccain escalation, nancy youssef, surge

Occupying Germany and occupying Iraq

Typical scene in a German city, 1945

Helena Cobban has a thoughtful post at her Just World News blog that among other things, mentions some of the qualitative differences between the postwar occupations of Japan and Germany and the massive disaster in Iraq: Peace, justice, and war-crimes courts: the view after Iraq 04/20/07.

She emphasizes three points of comparison. Her first point is this:

In 1945, in both Germany and Japan, the national society and the national state had alike been devasted by long years of devastating war (which included extremely fierce and lethal Allied bombardments of most major cities in both countries.) In Japan, a weakened Emperor still survived and was able to submit a surrender and negotiate its terms, though from a very weak position. In Germany, no national command authority survived to surrender; and in addition, nearly all the big military formations crumbled under the final assault. There was little need to "disband" the German army, since it had effectively fallen apart; all that remained in the various parts of Germany to which demoralized small units had fled was to gather them up and put them into POW camps as the Allies swept in for their final advance. In Iraq, by contrast, most of the Iraqi Army's big units had done little or nothing to resist the Allies' advance. They still existed-- and equally importantly, most of their armories still remained intact. When Bremer summarily ordered the disbanding of the entire Iraqi Army he overnight caused the disaffection of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men who had served in the army until then, as well as of all the family members who had been dependent on that man's salary. Moreover, these disaffected men had fairly good military training. They often retained unbroken ties with their former comrades-in-arms. And they had access to huge amounts of weapons and explosives lying in the armories that the occupation forces - mysteriously - did little or nothing to secure. The potential in Iraq for the emergence of well-armed, well-trained forces that would resist the occupation regime made this occupation, from the beginning, very different frm that in Germany or Japan.

I left the following comment there in response to that particular point, with a couple of small wording mistakes that I've corrected here:

What I would add to your point 1 on the German and Japanese postwar occupations is that it's somewhat misleading in the German case to say that the "national state" was "devastated". It's true that the Wehrmacht had been defeated and demobilized, and that the Nazi Party had lost its power and credibility.

But the normal governmental institutions had never been completed wiped out to the extent that occurred in Iraq. The police still functioned, the civil administration could continue to function under new direction. I wouldn't want to exagerate the point: there was some chaos in the cities, with young gangs going around robbing and plundering. But Germany was far better off in that regard than Iraq.

In Iraq, the American invasion "smashed the state" in a way that was no doubt gratifying to the conservative-Troskyist neocons whose pet project it was. (Though Lenin's notion of "smashing the state" had to do with changing its political character, not erasing the entire machinery of government and starting from scratch.)

It also reflected American military assumptions about "shock-and-awe" quickly destroying the command-and-control functions of the enemy, minimizing own-side (American) casualities and achieving a rapid conventional military victory. That figurative "decapitation" of the leadership, combined with the massive looting in Baghdad and other cities that virtually destroyed the physical assets and resources of the civilian governmental institutions, created a power vacuum that was far more drastic that what existed after Germany surrendered.

Germany was defeated. But Iraq was quickly thrown into a state of literal anarchy, of no government.

This is one consequence of a stategy based on "shock-and-awe", in which the military consideration of how to most quickly beat the opposing army was in contradiction to the political needs of the occupation that was to follow. I hope we never undertake another war like this one. But the "lessons of the Iraq War" should include a thorough re-examination of how "shock-and-awe" functioned in winning the (conventional) war but losing the (conventional) peace.

Her second point is this:

The US-led force that occupied Iraq in 2003 was extremely small compared with the forces that had occupied Germany and Japan 58 years earlier.

True. Also much smaller relative to population than the NATO forces in Kosovo. This is already one of the military's main alibis for their failures in the Iraq War, that those mean civilians like Rummy made them go in with too small a force.

While that's true as far as it goes, when our infallible generals were faced with the task of going in with the "army you have", in Rummy's famous phrase, they also had decisions to make about how to approach the task. Their "shock-and-awe" approach had the drawback I mentioned for an operation that clearly would involved a postwar occupation. The failure to have sufficient resources of the right kind available to protect key government buildings is also not something that can be laid entirely at the feet of the bad civilians. Our generals did, after all, manage to protect the Oil Ministry in Baghdad quite well from the looting.

Her third comparison point is:

Finally, the US occupation regime in Iraq differed from those of 1945 in that it did not have within its cadre anything like the required amount of expertise on how to run the occupied country. ... In Iraq, by contrast, though the State Department had done quite a lot of earlier planning for running the occupation, those plans were all summarily jettisoned by Rumsfeld and his aides; and beyond that, Rumsfeld and his aides in the Pentagon made a point of trying to staff their entire occupation administration with people who were not Arabic speakers or experts on Iraqi affairs. Instead, in line with many philosphical predilections of the Bushists, they outsourced most of the tasks of planning for an running the occupation - a job that was outsourced largely to the small coterie of Iraqi exiles convened by Ahmad Chalabi...

Here again, this is true. But we shouldn't let our glorious generals get off by blaming it all on Rummy and Wolfie and their boys. The military had good reasons to anticipate, at least since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, that they needed far more people who were fluent Arabic-speakers. Even today, in the fifth year of war with no end in sight, there has been no push to put a substantial number of soldiers through intensive, year-long Arabic courses that could raise them to a decent level of fluency. That's not just Rummy's fault. It's also due to our generals who are more interested in fighting their inter-service rivalries and winning contracts for expensive and high-profile boondoggles like the Star Wars program than they are in taking care of an obvious need like this.

Tags: germany, iraq, iraq war, postwar germany

Et tu, Stars and Stripes?, or, the credibility gap widens

Stars and Stripes is a newspaper for soldiers, published by the Pentagon. But it's not just an outlet for puff pieces from the service PR offices. They actually do some real journalism. Like this article from the Mideast ediiton: Soldiers building wall separating Sunnis, Shiites: Three-mile structure in Baghdad is a disputed part of security plan by Joseph Giordono, and Monte Morin 04/19/07. They start off reporting about a wall under construction since last week:

U.S. soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division in a Baghdad district are “building a three-mile protective wall on the dividing line between a Sunni enclave and the surrounding Shiite neighborhood,” according to a U.S. military press release issued Wednesday.

Troops with the 407th Brigade Support Battalion began constructing the wall on April 10 and will continue work “almost nightly until the wall is complete,” the release read.

"The area the wall will protect is the largest predominately Sunni neighborhood in East Baghdad. Majority-Shiite neighborhoods surround it on three sides. Like other religiously divided regions in the city, the area has been trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," according to the release.

Then they report on the chief PR officer in Iraq for "coalition" forces just bald-faced denying they were doing such a thing:

But after a regularly scheduled news briefing in Baghdad on Wednesday, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq, said he was unaware of efforts to build a wall dividing Shiite and Sunni enclaves in Baghdad and said that such a tactic was not a policy of the Baghdad security plan.

"We have no intent to build gated communities in Baghdad," Caldwell said Wednesday.

When even a military paper finds itself holding up the chief military PR guy in Iraq as a blatant liar, then probably "credibility gap" is just the wrong term. "Credibility abyss" would be more like it.

Caldwell's statement reminded me of an infamous statement by East German Communist leader Eric Honeker, just days before they started building the Berlin Wall in 1960, "No one has any intention to put up a wall".

Tags: iraq, iraq war, william caldwell iv

Virginia and Iraq

Juan Cole makes a point that, in the context of our present moment, needed to be said. Today, we have banner frontpage headlines across the United States and internationally about the murders of 33 students in Virginia. It's a genuine horro that deserves the headlines. In our various media, this will be commented upon, mourned, discussed, analyzed and editorialized about for at least a few days. The US Attorney General postponed his latest round of perjury before Congress for two days because of it. Cole writes in his Informed Comment blog 04/17/07:

I keep hearing from US politicians and the US mass media that the "situation is improving" in Iraq. The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. Virginia Tech will be gone from the headlines and the air waves by next week this time in the US, though the families of the victims will grieve for a lifetime. But next Tuesday I will come out here and report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?

I wrote on February 26,

'A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.'

That isn't "slow progress" or just "progress," the way the weasels in Washington keep proclaiming. It is the most massive manmade human tragedy of the young century.

Thirty-three deaths in a mass killing in America grips the whole country's attention, as it should. The daily slaughter in Iraq is still being spun by the Cheney-Bush administration as improvement, progress, turning corners, and so on.

If the killing decreases for a day or two, they claim its a sign of success. If the killing increases, they claim it shows that The Terrorists are desperate and that's a success, too. Men like Dick Cheney and George Bush should never, ever, be given the power of life and death over other human beings.

International headlines on the Virginia murders:

Amokschütze war 23 Jahre alter Südkoreaner Der Spiegel Online 17.04.07 (Germany)

Horror, Sorrow and Angry Questions Der Spiegel International 17.04.07 (Germany)

European Press Reactions: Blaming Charlton Heston Der Spiegel International 17.04.07 (Germany)

El autor de la masacre de Virginia era un estudiante surcoreano de la universidad El Mundo (Spain) 17.04.07

Tragedia en Virginia Tech El País 17.04.07 (Spain)

Otra vez las armas El País editorial 17.04.07 (Spain)

Amokläufer war 23-jähriger Student der Uni Der Standard 17.04.07 (Austria)

Täter nach Uni-Massaker jetzt bekannt: 23- jähriger Südkoreaner richtete US-Blutbad an Profil Online 17.04.07 (Austria) (no direct link to article available; I don't know why Profil does that, it's dumb)

Amokschütze war 23-jähriger Student aus Südkorea Frankfurter Rundschau 17.04.07 (Germany)

Schockstarr FAZ 17.04.07 (Germany)

Europe Offers Condolences for US University Shooting Victims Deutsche Welle 17.04.07 (Germany)

So überlebte Österreicher das Massaker Österreich 17.04.07 (Austria)

Liebesdrama löste Amoklauf aus Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.04.07 (Germany)

Massacre on campus: 32 students shot dead at American college Independent 04/17/07 (Britain)

El tirador era un alumno surcoreano que residía en el campus La Nación (Argentina)

Korean student was campus killer Aljazeera (Qatar)

Will this terrible day in Virginia be enough to dent America's love affair with guns? Independent 04/17/07 (Britain)

Atacante en universidad de EU, estudiante surcoreano El Universal 17.04.07 (México)

Indian professor killed in US varsity shootout Times of India 17.04.07

Israeli lecturer died shielding Virginia Tech students from gunman Ha'aretz 04/17/07 (Israel)

Tags: iraq, iraq war, virginia shooting

Israelis in Kurdistan

Laura Rozen has an article following up on reports, including one from Seymour Hersh, about Israeli activity in the Kurdish area of Iraq, possibly aimed at causing unrest among Kurds in Iran: Kurdistan's Cover Back-Channels Mother Jones 04/11/07.

She wasn't able to confirm the stories about Israeli military activity aimed at Iran. But she's added more details to the story, in this article reporting on the activities in Kurdistan of an Israeli businessman named Shlomi Michaels. It's also just a good read about an intriguing mystery still not fully solved. The subtitle of the article is, "How an ex-Mossad chief, a German uberspy, and a gaggle of top-dollar GOP lobbyists helped Kurdistan snag 15 tons of $100 bills".

Tags: iran, iraq, iraq war, israel, kurdistan

The McCain escalation

"But we have also made, in recent weeks, measurable progress in establishing security in Baghdad and fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province." - Maverick McCain, yesterday

Reality, today: a bombing in the Green Zone - Explosion at Iraq parliament cafe BBC 04/12/07; Al menos dos diputados muertos y 10 heridos en un atentado suicida en el Parlamento iraquí El Mundo 12.04.07; Explosion hits Iraq's parliament Aljazeera 04/11/07.

Of course, by the administration's logic, a decrease in attacks is a sign of progress, and an increase in attacks is a sign of the enemy's desperation and therefore also a sign of progress. There's just no end of progress in this war!

Tags: iraq, iraq war, mccain

The Maverick speaks on the Iraq War

That bold Maverick McCain just gave his much-anticipated April 11 Speech on Iraq. It was mostly the usual cheerleading, trash-the-Democrats stuff.

He did have this rousing line: "We have a long way to go, but for the first time in four years, we have a strategy that deals with how things really are in Iraq and not how we wish them to be."

Well, we've screwed things up for four years, longer than the US was in the Second World War, while I and most other Republicans were constantly telling you how great things were going. But, trust me, now we've got a strategy that might someday work and do, well, something we'll be able to call "Mission Accomplished". Now, that should send people flocking to the Army recruiting offices!

He also had a message for Democrats about what happens when they cooperate with today's Republicans on the Iraq War. The bold Maverick said:

Democrats in Congress and their leading candidates for President, heedless of the terrible consequences of our failure, unanimously confirmed our new commander, and then insisted he be prevented from taking the action he believes necessary to safeguard our country's interests.

The Dems approved Bush's candidate for commanding general, and the Reps act like it was an across-the-board endorsement of Bush's war policies. So, when the Republicans offer some kind of compromise on the war spending bill that removes the withdrawal deadlines, the Democratic leadership should remember that if they support it, the Reps will claim that as an endorsement of Bush's war policies.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, mccain

Things that make you go, "Huh?"

Some days the news is exceptionally weird. Today, we've got the neoconservative theologian Michael Novak saying that Joseph Ratzinger, aka, Pope Benedict XVI, is a leftwinger. Ratzinger a leftwinger. We're into Bizarro World with that one. (See Benedict vs. the War Party by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com 04/11/07, and, no, I'm still not comfortable with the way Raimondo uses "War Party".)

Then we have a Page 1 story by Robert Fisk, Divide and rule - America's plan for Baghdad Independent 04/11/07, reporting that the Pentagon has a spiffy new plan for the new strategy (The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation). They're going to wall off several section of Baghdad and not let anyone in without proper ID. Hey, building that wall in the West Bank has brought permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians, hasn't it? It's bound to work in Baghdad. And, as a special bonus benefit of this grand idea, that will free up 40,000 troops to be stationed near the Iranian border to be positioned "in the event of a US or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year". Well, all rightie, then! Victory is just around the corner, no doubt.

Wierdest of all, Peter Baker and Tom Ricks report that three four-star generals have turned down a position that apparently still exists only somewhere in a dark recess of Dick Cheney's brain, "a high-powered czar to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with authority to issue directions to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies" (3 Generals Spurn the Position of War 'Czar' Washington Post 04/11/07)). Presumably this new General Czar of War would only be directing the State Department on matters related to those two wars. But who knows? There are several possible ways to understand this story. If I were to use a political-science version of Occam's Razor - the least malign explaination that accounts for the known facts is probably the best - I would guess that this would be a position formally reporting to the President but really to Dick Cheney, and which would let Cheney basically run all of Middle East policy directly.

What in the name of Pallas Athena are these people thinking?

Update: Not surprisingly, a number of bloggers have been commenting on this War Czar report. Josh Marshall at TPM 04/11/07 compares it to a previous Onion spoof, illustrating once again how hard it is to actually make satire about an administration as off the tracks of this one. He takes it as a sign that Bush is feeling overwhelmed, and says it shows "why the Republic is genuinely in peril as long as this pitiful goof remains in office".

Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly sees it as an attempt to fix problems by juggling boxes on an org chart, though he also says, "the fact that Bush apparently thinks that a bit of org chart shuffling will make a significant difference in Iraq is just one more sign of how deeply out of touch with reality he is." (Out of Gas 04/11/07)

Tim Grieve at Salon's War Room focuses on the Post's quote from Gen. Jack Sheehan, one of those who turned down the job emphasizing Cheney's stranglehold over foreign policy. Grieve quips about the War Czar position, "The catch? Dick Cheney already has the job, and he's not letting go." (Cheney in charge 04/11/07)

Steve Soto at The Left Coaster writes, "Yet as the story indicates, a czar won’t do any good if the fundamental policy is wrong and is being pushed by a delusional VP with too much power." (Bush Has No Takers For "War Czar" 04/10/07).

Robert Farley at TAPPED thinks it's another sign of Republican incompetence at government and asks, "Right; we don't have one guy, we just have several guys, including the commander of CENTCOM and the Secretary of Defense, who should have this kind of authority" to coordinate the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Matt Iglesias comments on the fact that nobody will so far take the job, "The Bush family's one-way understanding of loyalty also has to make this a relatively unappealing post."

The Armchair Generalist says (Failure of Leadership 04/11/07):

What the hell is wrong with these people? Maybe I'm naive, but I thought there was a guy in charge of coordinating the execution of national strategy in the region. He's called a National Security Advisor, but then again, if Condi set the bar, maybe that's not working. And of course, there's always the SecDef, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the CENTCOM combatant commander who have responsibilities there. I think all those retired generals understand that implicitly and really don't want the headache of playing butt-boy between the White House, State, DOD, and CENTCOM. As the article suggests, the obstacle here is more that there is already a civilian micromanaging the details of the wars - that would be Vice President Dick Cheney.

The most substantial blog comment on this I've seen is from Marcy (emptywheel) at The Next Hurrah (A Failure of Management 04/11/07):

We taxpayers pay a National Security Advisor to make sure that someone mediates the opinions and agendas of the many strong-willed people running our foreign policy. We pay that person to make sure that our foreign policy is managed well. But once again, the person in the position is not up to the task.

At some point, we need to face the overriding management issue. Is the problem that Condi and Hadley are incompetent (yes, partly)? But this constant shuffling, this search to find someone who can put unity to our foreign policy approach, suggests another problem. It's not just that Condi and Hadley are incompetent. It's that Bush himself can't see the issue with the requisite clarity to empower his National Security Advisor to do the job well.

Marcy is right in seeing this, as she explains in her post, as a continuation of management flubs on both wars.

But management flubs are a given in this administration, especially on the most critical foreign policy issues. I'm concerned that there's more to this, and that it's disturbing beyond the desperation and confusion it seems to show.

Marcy and the Armchair Generalist both remind us that the National Security Adviser, currently Stephen Hadley, is supposed to provide management and information coordination for overall foreign policy. But the NSA is a statutory position, and it was set up for good reasons as a formal position.

This War Czar as described in the Post article sounds like an Executive Branch creation that could be given the authority, or in practice exercise the authority, to overrule both the Secretaries of Defense and State on matters relating to the two wars.

But I'm wondering what the statutory position of a position like that would be. And since Dick Cheney apparently never does anything without thinking how it might provide an excuse to keep even more of the public's business secret from the public, Congress should start asking questions sooner rather than later. Is this a way to make an end-run around legal restraints of some kind?

One possibility relates to the covert operations that Rummy had started running out of the Pentagon. That gave him and Cheney the ability to do secret operations not subject to the requirements for authorization and reporting that are mandated for the CIA. Rummy's replacement Robert Gates has been reported to want to give the black-ops portfolio completely back to the CIA. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the War Czar idea is a play to keep a secret-war capability in Dick Cheney's hands, one not subject to the CIA's reporting requirements.

At a minimum, I hope that Congress will look more into this. The press, too, if our "press corps" can tear themselves away from montoring the fashion statements they think the Democratic candidates are making with their attire and from defending their good buddy Don Imus.

Tags: dick cheney, iraq, iraq war, michael novak, pope benedict XVI, robert fisk, tom ricks

Learning from the Iraq War (classic Rummy quote included)

The Iraq War lesson-learning, and lesson-imagining, is already well under way. For instance, The Iraq War: Learning From the Past, Adapting to the Present, and Planning for the Future by Thomas R. Mockaitis (US Army Strategic Studies Institute) Feb 2007; the text was apparently completed before the November 2006 Congressional elections.

In his introduction, Mockaitis explains that the US military was let down by the gutless public and civilian officials. But they've done a great job anyway:

The Vietnam War and popular reaction against it severely damaged army morale for perhaps as much as a decade. The American public’s low tolerance for protracted, unconventional conflict and the long shadow of Vietnam clearly can be seen in the initial response to the insurgency in Iraq. Strong support for the war declined soon after a swift victory and assurances of a speedy withdrawal gave way to a desultory struggle promising to last years. ...

Faced with a conflict they did not expect to fight and denied the resources, training, and requisite troop strength to fight it, the U.S. military understandably has resented criticism of its efforts in Iraq. Since armed forces in a democratic society must fight the wars that they are given, not those that they would choose, American troops have made the best of a difficult situation. They have adapted their methods to an evolving war, learned from their own mistakes, and even benefited from study of historic conflicts.

I'm already getting so tired of this transparent alibi-making that I hardly feel like bothering with the obligatory "of course our troops have done a wonderful job". Here Mockaitis merges the officers and infallible generals who direct the soldiers into "the troops", who we of course must always honor and praise and never, ever criticize. At least that's what a lot of alibi-makers hope.

Mockraitis' paper has a lot of good information, including an historical narrative on the development of the Iraqi insurgency and civil war. But the alibi-making is already becoming a standard part of many such accounts, so it's necessary to keep that in mind with such papers and articles. Mockraitis uses an argument which has some weight because, in itself, it's hard to argue with the factual premise: "More than any other factor, the shortage of troops in Iraq has hampered the U.S. response."

That certainly was a critical problem. But what does that actually mean? And how many more troops are we talking about? Would more troops who were also not trained for counterinsurgency and could not speak Arabic really have made a decisive difference in the outcome?

But if our infallible generals are going into battle with fewer troops that they would have recommended, the question also becomes whether they made the best use of the troops and resources they did have. For instance, one of the key questions that needs to be examined in any serious attempt to learn the "lessons of the Iraq War" is whether the decapitation, "shock-and-awe" approach really made sense in that context. Because the goal of shock-and-awe is to take out the enemy's leadership and disrupt their command-and-control capabilities as quickly as possible. But in a war in which victory would require years of occupation, that also contributed to the rapid disintegration of the entire Iraqi state, from police to garbage collectors. On balance, did the advantages outweight the downside results? Those are serious questions that our glorious generals shouldn't be allowed to brush under the rug by just saying, "not enough troops".

The same is true with economic reconstruction, the tardiness of which has also become a favorite alibi for the military. Those arguments should be examined carefully in light of the chicken-and-egg dilemma involved: economic reconstruction is needed to remove underlying causes of dissatisfaction that help the insurgency, but reconstruction can't take place without a basic level of military security and civil order.

To his credit, Mockraitis does give some attention to the very real problems in discipline and retention that have accompanied the Iraq War:

On November 19, 2005, a Marine patrol on duty in Haditha lost one of its members to an IED. The troops were young, tired, and over extended, part of a company of 160 asked to keep order in a town of 90,000 with a strong insurgent presence. The death of a beloved corporal provided the proverbial last straw. The unit allegedly returned to the town that night, and in the morning delivered the bodies of 24 Iraqis, some of them women and children, to the local hospital. An investigation is currently underway, but there can be little doubt that an atrocity of some kind occurred. Evidence that the Marines may have tried to cover up the incident has further undermined U.S. credibility. Another unit has been charged with summarily executing an Iraqi civilian, and a third group will stand trial for the rape of an Iraqi woman and the murder of her family for covering it up. These incidents probably are isolated, a handful of excesses that inevitably accompany counterinsurgency. Other evidence, however, suggests that they may be symptomatic of more serious problems. [He seems to be saying two things at once: the atrocity incidents are "isolated" but there are more systematic problems.] As units prepare for their third rotation to Iraq, other strains are beginning to show. In August 2006, the Army recalled 300 members of the 172nd Striker Brigade home to Alaska from a year’s tour of duty in Iraq and sent them back for another 4 months to deal with escalating violence in Baghdad. The soldiers had gotten to spend between 3 and 5 weeks with their families. In 2005, more than one-third of West Point Graduates from the class of 2000 left the army after fulfilling their mandatory 5-year term, the second year in a row to see such declining retention rates. And the divorce rate among army personnel doubled between 2001 and 2004. Even the Marines have had to resort to mandatory recalls of inactive reservists because of an anticipated shortfall of 2,500 volunteers for Afghanistan and Iraq. (my emphasis)

And he does recognize that the levels of stress on the soldiers and officers in the war under the existing conditions are an important factor, although he hides that behind the lack of Will of the public back home:

Predicting the outcome of an ongoing conflict is always tricky, but never more so than in a counterinsurgency campaign. The United States clearly has an effective strategy to defeat the insurgents [he means the 2005 strategy which has already been superceded] and probably can produce the resources to implement it if the political will to stay the course in Iraq can be maintained. Actual operations and the trajectory of the conflict offer much encouragement. Outside the Sunni triangle and Anbar Province, the security situation has been improving, and much rebuilding of critical infrastructure has taken place. The political situation also has gotten better with the country’s first democratically elected government in decades taking office. Growing sectarian violence that threatens to erupt into civil war combined with the increasing stress on U.S. forces could, however, undermine these accomplishments. (my emphasis)

Mockraitis hardly mentions the air war, which is surely having an effect on the conflict and the Iraqis' attitudes toward the US and their government allied to the US that goes far beyond the almost non-existent reporting we get on it from the press. He does mention a couple of time how precise and careful the targeting has supposedly been. As Rummy said back in the first few glory days of the invasion (PBS Newshour "Shock and Awe" 03/21/03):
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/rumsfeld_3-21.html

The targeting capabilities and the care that goes into targeting to see that the precise targets are struck and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see. The care that goes into it, the humanity that goes into it, to see that military targets are destroyed, to be sure, but that it's done in a way, and in a manner, and in a direction and with a weapon that is appropriate to that very particularized target. (my emphasis)

Yeah, that Rummy was quite the humanitarian.

But Mockraitis wants us to remember that the real question is the one addressed in Dick Cheney's Stomach Theory of war, i.e., does the feckless American public have the "stomach" for an indefinite continuation of war in Iraq:

This long-term commitment may be the decisive issue in the conflict. The real struggle for control [of] Iraq in fact may occur not in Baghdad, but in American living rooms. As mid-term elections approach and American public grows less and less supportive of war, pressure to withdraw probably will increase. Iraq will be an important issue in the November 2006 midterm elections and may be the decisive factor in 2008 presidential race. If calls to bring the troops home continue to mount, the insurgents may have cause believe that they can win merely by persevering. (my emphasis)

As I noted in a recent post, it's hard to see how this way of conceiving of a foreign war is compatable in the long run with a democratic approach to governance. If the military's decisive barrier to Victory is criticism from the American public, it's hard to see how that's not defining the public and the voters as in some important sense the enemy.

Tags: iraq, iraq war, thomas mockaitis

Cordesman on the Iraqi Security Forces

Anthony Cordesman gives Congress his estimates on the prospects for the successful development of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War: The Critical Problems and Failures the US Must Address if Iraqi Forces Are to Do the Job (Center for Strategic and International Studies) 03/28/07.

Here's his "things go well" scenario:

If things go well, Iraqi forces will steadily improve with time and play a critical role in bring the level of security Iraq needs to make political compromise and conciliation work.

Iraqi forces will largely replace Coalition and other foreign forces, at most seeking aid and limited assistance. Iraq’s military will shift its mission from counterinsurgency to defense of the nation against foreign enemies, Iraq’s National Police will defend the nation’s internal security interests and not those of given ethnic and sectarian groups, deal with counterterrorism rather than counterinsurgency, and focus on crime and corruption. Iraq’s other police and security forces will act like the police and security forces of other nations, focusing on crime, local security issues, and providing border security against smuggling and low-level infiltration.

Things can only go well, however, if Iraq can create a working compromise between its sects and ethnic groups, and if US and other outside powers will have the patience and will to support Iraq as it develops into such a state for at least two to three more years of active fighting. Iraq will also need massive additional economic aid to help Iraq unify and develop. Major assistance and advisory programs will be in place until at least 2010, and probably 2015. (my emphasis underlined)

That's Cordesman's best case: something like current levels of fighting with full US combat participation until 2009 or 2010; major US assistance; an advisory combat role for the US until maybe 2015.

The not-going-so-well options? He describes them beginning on page 30 in three broad categories: continued civil war indefinitely; stability via ethnic cleansing followed by an useasy internal balance of power among the competeing groups; and, partition of the country with the accompanying risk of regional war.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq, iraq war