The new stage in the Libya War

Maybe the new stage will be called peace, democracy and improved government. Or it may be called a protracted civil war. Let's hope for the best.

Robert Dreyfuss gives an account of The Fall of Qaddafi The Nation 08/22/2011. Juan Cole, who is a careful observer and has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the NATO intervention, writes about the turn of events over the weekend in Top Ten Myths about the Libya War Informed Comment 08/22/2011.

While the fall of Qaddafi's government is certainly a dramatic event, it could be the start of a more problematic stage of US/NATO involvement in Libya's internal politics. The Afghanistan War began nearly 10 years ago, and the pariah Taliban government in Kabul fell to the US-backed Northern Alliance quickly. The 10th anniversary of the start of that war will arrive in a few weeks. There is no end to the war in sight.

The supposedly rapid success of US Special Forces and airpower enabling the Northern Alliance to take Kabul quickly boosted then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his conviction that Saddam Hussein's government could be overthrow with a minimal force. The neocons had visions of the US knocking off one Middle Easter regime after another with relatively little effort. Baghdad fell, the famous statue of Saddam came down. And then the looting in Badgdad started. Rummy cackled on TV at how silly it was to worry about the chaos in the capital city. But virtually all accounts of the Iraq War now agree that the looting in Baghdad was a disastrous turning point for the occupation. American troops are still in Iraq, though they are under pressure from the pro-Iranian government that resulted from the US invasion to get out later this year. The Pentagon is trying to keep troops there indefinitely.

Air war true believers saw the Kosovo War of 1999 as proof that airpower could win wars with virtually no ground troops involved. Serbian troops were able to proceed with ethnic cleansing during the air campaign. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were able to proceed with the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo under the subsequent NATO-protected regime. NATO troops remain in Kosovo today.

US military involvement in Libya isn't over. And this apparently ill-thought-out military intervention could have unpleasant consequences, even if things go well with the new government that will initially be the current Transitional National Council (TNC). As Dreyfus writes, "So who’s in charge in Libya now? We don't know. Qaddafi wasn’t entirely wrong when he said that he was under assault by Islamists, though Islamists were probably not the main component of the opposition and the so-called Transitional National Council (TNC)."

And as he also reminds us, this government was installed with difficulty through the heavy use of NATO firepower in aggressive military operations. It's worth remembering that the UN resolution authorizing foreign intervention gave a green light to establishing a no-fly zone to impede government massacres of civilians. The US and NATO went considerably beyond that:

What does Qaddafi’s departure mean? First, what it doesn’t mean is that the United States and NATO are powerful actors in the region. It took nearly six months for the full might of NATO, bombarding every Libyan tank and armored personnel carrier that moved, decimating Qaddafi’s command-and-control system, and serving as the air wing of the fractious Libyan opposition, to clear the way to Tripoli.

Our policymakers should be restrained about making "Tripoli" into another "Kabul" and assume that this is some hot new model for regime change on the cheap.

Then there is the fact that the Qaddafi regime had cooperated with what should always be one of the very highest priorities of American foreign policy, nuclear nonproliferation:

And we can all hope and pray that the “Libyan model”—an armed opposition backed by US and NATO air power—isn’t the model for Syria or, worse, Iran. At the very least, President Assad of Syria will look at Libya and draw the appropriate conclusion, namely, that he must at all costs prevent the emergence of a Syrian "Benghazi." For Ayatollah Khamenei, the equally mentally imbalanced leader of Iran, he’ll draw parallel conclusions, one of which will be that Qaddafi was foolish to give up his nuclear weapons quest in the 2000s and trust the West, which then seized the first opportunity to impose forcible regime change. Khamenei will likely conclude the Qaddafi would still be in power if he had had nuclear weapons, and although that conclusion would be idiotically wrong — the West would long ago have invaded Libya to stop it from getting the bomb [???] — Khamenei is going to think so, anyway, making a deal between the United States and Iran far more difficult. [my emphasis]

Über-Realist Stephen Walt gives advice on Avoiding a 'Mission Accomplished' moment in Libya Foreign Policy 08/22/2011:

The danger is that we will have another "Mission Accomplished" moment, when French President Nicolas Sarkozy, NATO head Anders Fogh Rasmussen, President Obama, and their various pro-intervention advisors give each other a lot of high-fives, utter solemn words about having vindicated the new "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine, and then turn to some new set of problems while Libya deteriorates. And as an anonymous "senior American military officer" told the New York Times: "The leaders I've talked to do not have a clear understanding how this will all play out."

Neither do any of the rest of us. We can all hope that the worst doesn't happen and that Libya's new leaders exhibit Mandela-like wisdom and restraint. Nobody expects perfection, of course; I can live with the "I told you sos" from hawkish liberal interventionists if it all works out reasonably well. But it will be no small task to construct a workable government in Libya, given the dearth of effective institutions and the potential divisions among different social groups. And then there's all that oil revenue to divide up, which tends to bring out peoples' worse instincts.

As in Iraq, therefore, ousting a discredited dictator is likely to be the easy part, and the hard part is just beginning. Aren't you glad the United States and Europe have lots of time and money to devote to rebuilding yet another potential failed state? [my emphasis]

Tags: juan cole, libya war, robert dreyfuss, stephen walt

Juan Cole and the complications of "humanitarian" war

Juan Cole was an enthusiastic supporter of the NATO intervention in the Libyan civil war. I wouldn't call his essay Top Ten Mistakes in the Libya War Informed Comment 06/19/2011 so much a rethinking of his position as continuing to think. But it's hard to imagine in reading it that the events of the real existing Libya War have given him a more sober viewpoint on the conflict:

War excites a lot of passions, as it should since it is so serious a matter. But it also excites a lot of black and white thinking, which is bad. Either you are for wholeheartedly or against. Some will take my essay today as a sign that I have become diffident. Not true. As I said, I think the UNSC did the right thing, and that those NATO and Arab League countries that have stepped up to the challenge are acting in accordance with international law, and that, whatever their ultimate motives, the side effect of their intervention has in fact been the salvation of thousands of lives and of a political movement for a freer Libya. But I think we would have all been better off if the emphasis had remained on civilian protection first and foremost, if better coordination with locals had be achieved more quickly, if the US component had comported with the US constitution, and if the Arab League had not lacked the courage of its convictions. If you go back through my previous essays on these subjects, I think you will find that I have been consistent on these emphases. [my emphasis]

The Kosovo War of 1999 created a lot of illusions: that "humanitarian" wars could be quick and effective; the air war could be a magic weapon; that a major intervention could be carefully limited in scope and costs; and, that a democracy could be established by external intervention quickly after the end of hostilities.

That Kosovo success story was a major boost for supporters of "humanitarian" war. In my view of the Kosovo War, it served a vital interest of the NATO countries by limiting the potential of the Balkan conflict spreading beyond the former Yugoslavia, with the real potential of NATO members Greece and Turkey intervening on opposite sides. It has never been that tempting to me to generalize much beyond the particular issues at stake in that conflict.

Which would be my main response to Cole's implied challenge here:

I think the UNSC did the right thing in calling for international intervention here. I can’t understand why the same people who have complained endlessly about the West, or the world, standing by while large numbers of people were killed in the Congo, Rwanda, Darfur, etc., are now cavilling that something practical has been done to stop the crushing of Benghazi et al.

I've always been highly skeptical of the potential for outside military intervention in those conflicts to have achieved constructive results. One of the lessons I took for the postwar experience in Kosovo is that even with the generally highly favorable conditions there for establishing a stable democracy, the presence of NATO troops is required there even today, the actual democratic government established has had severe corruption problems, and the Albanian majority there would up driving out a large portion of the ethnic Serbian minority.

One of Cole's criticisms of NATO's conduct of the Libya War is:

NATO (and this where the Arab League could have helped) has been incredibly slow in developing the ability to coordinate with Free Libya forces, who are the ones who must necessarily assert themselves against Qaddafi's special forces and mercenaries.

Here again, the downsides of the experience in Kosovo illustrate the hazards of bringing a group of rebels to power about whose intentions relatively little is known. NATO held the strange collection of armed rebels known as the Kosovo Liberation Army at arm's length in the Kosovo War. But it was obvious that expelling Serb forces would likely give that motley crew an enhanced role. Stéphanie Maupas writes in her article, "The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal" in Roy Gutman, et al, eds, Crimes of War 2.0 (2007):

... the first trial of members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has also taken place, ending in two acquittals and one guilty verdict. At the beginning of March 2005, the Prime Minister of Kosovo and former member of the KLA Ramush Hardinaj was finally indicted by the tribunal's current Cief Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, despite political pressure against the move. [my emphasis]

Cole also writes as a criticism of NATO's intervention:

NATO put its emphasis on taking out command and control in the capital instead of vigorously protecting civilian cities under attack. The sieges of Misrata and of the Western Mountain regions went on for weeks with very limited NATO intervention. It is incredible that Qaddafi could roll tanks across the open desert and then concertedly shell noncombatants in cities without it being possible to intervene aerially.

This result should actually not be that surprising. The same thing occurred in Kosovo. The mission there actually had a limited immediate goal of protection Kosovar Albanians from ethnic cleansing actions of the Serbian army. The Serbian army continued its ethnic cleansing during the air war. Only with the final capitulation of the Serbian regime - in face of a credible threat of NATO intervention with ground troops - was NATO able to stop the ethnic cleansing actions. They were not so successful in restraining the Albanian majority with the Serbians minority, as noted above. Continuing with his argument:

The US should have already recognized the Transitional National Council in Benghazi. What, are we vacillating about whose side we are on?

This rebel force has a poor fighting record so far. Their victory over the Libyan government is by no means inevitable. And they can scarcely be considered at this point to have secure control over even the territories from which they operate. All those are good reasons to show some diplomatic restraint about recognition. We've refused recognition to the Cuban regime for five decades and it's still around. Switching formal diplomatic recognition from the current Libyan regime to a highly dubious group of rebels is unlikely to add much effect clout to Qaddafi's opposition.

Cole also writes:

That the Libyan intervention is legal does not mean that the war has been prosecuted wisely. I urged after the UNSC resolution that it be a limited intervention aiming at protecting civilians from Muammar Qaddafi’s vicious attacks on innocent crowds and reckless endangerment of non-combatants in the tenement buildings being shelled by his tanks and cluster bombs, and from his forces’ relentless rolling of tanks on Free Libya cities. ...

NATO has focused on a ‘shock and awe’ strategy of pounding the capital, Tripoli, especially targetting [sic] the compound of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Shock and awe does not work, and to the extent that it looks like a targeted assassination, it raised questions in critics’ minds about the purpose of the intervention. If command and control is being hit to protect noncombatants from military operations against them, this should be explained more clearly by NATO generals and specifics given.

Cole makes important and legitimate points there. It testifies to his willingness not simply to act as a cheerleader in a war he supports that he is willing to see and articulate those problems.

But what else did he really expect? Honestly. This is how NATO makes war. That's what it's equipped and trained for: bombing the bejeezus out of the Soviet Union that hasn't existed in two decades. And if NATO decides to make a "humanitarian" intervention in Syria or (God forbid!) Iran, they will do it in the same way. And it was no different in the model "humanitarian" war in Kosovo. Anatol Lieven wrote in"Hubris and Nemesis", Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001):

Mogadishu — along with Beirut, Grozny and other battlefields — suggests that the locus of political and military struggle is shifting from the mountains and jungles of the past, into the "urban terrain" of Third World cities — conditions unfavorable to the style of warfare preferred by American or Western European forces. Within those cities, the most dangerous enemy is not the general schooled in the conventions of traditional warfare, but the cunning, charismatic irregular who combines in one person the terrorist, ward politician, clan leader, criminal warlord, and gang boss. To defeat such an adversary requires an intimate knowledge of local conditions, exceptionally difficult for the "imperial police" to acquire. It may also demand commanders who themselves manifest the gang leader's mix of flexibility and utter ruthlessness — not qualities nurtured in the officer corps of the typical Western democracy. In the movie Casablanca, the character played by Humphrey Bogart taunted a German officer, "Major, there are parts of New York I wouldn't advise you to try and invade." In the decades since, New York may have been (partially) pacified, but Western nations contemplating intervention in quarters disordered by civil war, ethnic conflict, or massive violations of human rights would do well to heed Bogart's warning.

The UN Security Council resolution authorized only a no-flight zone. But this was a real act of war. The no-flight zone the US and Britain maintained over Iraq throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century was a continuing combat operation that made a recurrence of the Gulf War of 1991 far more likley.

One can't help but notice that the first in Cole's list of criticisms of NATO's Libya War is the contempt for Constitutional legality shown by the Obama Administration:

President Barack Obama should have gone to Congress for authorization to stay in the Libya war. Not doing so weakened the legitimacy of the war in the US public, and involved his setting aside the legal advice he received from government lawyers. He could have set a precedent for the return to constitutional rule in the US, but tragically declined to take up that opportunity. (I have held this position from the beginning, by the way). But a corollary I am not sure American nationalists will accept is that even if Congress authorizes a war, in the absence of an attack on the US, that would be illegal in international law unless the UNSC signed off on it. That is what did not happen with regard to Iraq. Those criticizing Obama now often did not criticize W., and often still do not, for a much more important legal violation.

I'm sure the recent revelation that the Cheney-Bush Administration demanded that the CIA conduct a smear campaign against Cole himself re-enforced his awareness of the importance of legal conduct in national security affairs. He blogged about it in Ret'd. CIA Official Alleges Bush White House Used Agency to "Get" Cole 06/16/2011 and in several subsequent posts.

I don't say that as any kind of criticism of Cole's critical post on NATO's war in Libya. Although I imagine that his somewhat defensive parenthesis "I have held this position from the beginning, by the way" reflects some sensitiveness on that point. What the Bushies wanted to do to Cole is a disgrace. Cole has been consistently critical of the many abuses of law and human rights that came along with the post-9/11 incarnation of the national security state. The revelation about the Cheney Administration targeting him that way should be a strong reminder not only to him but to all of us that the kind of national security and permanent war state we have in incompatible with the maintenance of a Constitutional democracy. And in reality, important parts of the Constitutional order - including Congressional war powers - have already been sacrificed to it.

Tags: anatol lieven, kosovo war, juan cole, libya war

Is there an Al Qa'ida 2.0?

Moisés Naím in Al Qaeda 2.0 El País 08.05.2011 gives a picture of the status of Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida organization that is very similar to that I heard recently from Anatol Lieven a month ago. Naím writes of the post-Bin Laden Al Qa'ida, "la nueva Al Qaeda es más una inspiración que una organización que actúa siguiendo órdenes emanadas de una sede central." (the new Al Qa'ida is more an inspiration than an organization that acts in accord with orders emanating from central authority.)

Anatol Lieven also thought there was not much left of Bin Laden's group in the sense of a cohesive, command-and-control type organization. While he thought it would be a great morale booster for the West to kill or capture Bin Laden or his deputy Zawahiri, he also believed it would not likely make much difference in terms of the actual terrorism threat for the United States.

Naím cautions, "Esto no significa que la vieja Al Qaeda haya desaparecido. Osama bin Laden seguía planeando ataques terroristas desde su guarida en Abbottabad." (This doesn't mean that the old Al Qa'ida has disappeared. Osama bin Laden kept on planning terrorist attacks from his refuge in Abbottabad.)

Lieven sees the terrorism threat from radical jihadists as being a loosely connected network of groups, some of which use the name "Al Qa'ida" (like Al Qa'ida in the Magreb) and may have had some direct connection to Bin Laden's group at some point, and others of which are radical Salafi jihadists with similar ideas but no direct connection to the original group. He said that some of the connections between such groups are like nodes in a computer network, with others are more diffuse like (he used a literally cosmic example) intergalactic gases clumping here and there.

But he also told an interesting story about a group of Baluch smugglers who got busted in Pakistan within the relatively recent past. This was a group who had worked closely with Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida smuggling Qa'ida fighters back and forth across the Afghan-Pakistan border. It emerged that they were smuggling a variety of international fighters into Afghanistan to work with the Afghan Taliban, including a group of Muslim doctors from Russia. (I believe he said Russia and not the former Soviet Union.) Lieven concludes from this that some remnant of Bin Laden's group is using that loose international network to act as personnel "headhunters" for the Afghan Taliban. But he stressed that this was not in the sense of a centralized organization with officals like a "station chief in Karachi" or whatever. But rather a dispersed network where word gets passed along that the Afghan Taliban is looking for certain kinds of specialists, like medical personnel and they arrange for them to be smuggled in.

Naím points out that the biggest challenge for the current jihadist movement, or "Al Qa'ida 2.0", are the democratic upheavals in the Arab world. Those movements are not demanding theocracies, much less a new Islamic caliphate, the nominal goal of Bin Laden. He also notes that the "Al Qa'ida 2.0" movement will have trouble rescuing their "brand." Organizations fighting under the "Al Qa'ida" name have killed far more Muslims than non-Muslim Americans or Europeans. Such an organization "tiene mucho que explicar" (has a lot to explain).

Lieven's pointing to evidence of Bin Laden's original organization still having a dispersed network that worked together with the Afghan Taliban is consistent with observations that Juan Cole makes about the post-Bin Laden quick withdrawal of Taliban fighters from some areas (Taliban, al-Qaeda Flee N. Afghanistan as Morale Collapses with al-Qaeda admission of Bin Laden’s Death Informed Comment 05/07/2011):

Pajhwok News Agency is reporting that in the wake of the death of Usama bin Laden at the hands of US Navy SEALs, Taliban guerrillas in the northeastern Afghan province of Qunduz are fleeing the province.

It appears that the Taliban were still linked to, and perhaps taking direction from, al-Qaeda, more than most analysts had suspected. It also appears that Bin Laden had more of an operational, strategizing role than we had thought.

If it is true that radicals are fleeing Qunduz, and indeed other provinces as well, and heading for safe havens in places like North Waziristan in Pakistan’s lawless tribal belt, it is likely primarily because they had direct contact with Usama Bin Laden and now fear that information about them is in American hands, since the SEALS captured his hard drives and thumb drives.

The Taliban and a few Arab al-Qaeda started being active in Qunduz about three years ago, in part in an attempt to block supplies for NATO and the US coming through Tajikistan.

Qunduz, with a population of about 800,000, is said to be about one third or more Pashtun in ethnicity, despite being in the north where most Afghans speak Persian. Qunduz city was among the Taliban’s last outposts in the north when they were forced to withdraw to Qandahar in late fall, 2001 as a result of the US air support to the Northern Alliance. Talibanism in Afghanistan has virtually no audience outside the Pashtuns or Pashto-speakers, who are Sunni Muslims, though it is also true that a majority of Pashtuns reject the Taliban and support the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai (a Pashtun) instead.

The strategic and anti-logistics character of the Taliban campaign in Qunduz raises questions about whether Bin Laden and some lieutenants were not actively directing a war against the US, NATO and Karzai.

That observation in the last paragraph strikes me as unlikely from what we know about how Bin Laden was concealing himself. One of the reports that has been consistent is that he didn't have Internet connections or telephone landlines in his hideout house. He was relying on an individual courier to carry messages. I suppose the fact that he was using a courier shows that he had his fingers in something, or at least hoped to. But the idea that he himself could be playing any kind of central command role in the Taliban's war against NATO seems far-fetched. Not impossible, but really far-fetched. For the same reason, one has to wonder just how much usable information is likely to be found on the hard drives and computers disks seized during the raid.

Tags: afghanistan war, anatol lieven, juan cole, mosés naím, osama bin laden

The "new" torture debate

Amerika schlittert in neue Folterdebatte (America slides into a new torture debate) reads the headline for a Der Spiegel Online article.

Juan Cole writes (No need for Torture. Did a Telephone Call to al-Qaeda in Iraq Unravel Bin Laden? Informed Comment 05/05/2011)

The Obama team is said to have been dismayed by the rapidity with which the national subject has switched from the death of Usama Bin Laden to the use of torture in interrogations.

The first thing to say is that Democratic leaders and the Obama administration only have themselves to blame for this torture issue still being salient. It can be deployed by the Cheney family and their surrogates only because Democratic leaders made a decision not to have anyone prosecuted for the crimes of the Bush administration. Not torture. Not warrantless domestic surveillance. Nada. If there had been prosecutions, and, better, convictions for torture, then people defending it would be defending convicted criminals,and would reveal themselves for what they are. [my emphasis]

This is right. The Obama Administration gave torture advocates a new validation. The opposition party came to power and refused to enforce the laws against torture against perpetrators who had publicly admitted to ordering it. This Administration accepted the Guantánamo mess and the Cheney-Bush alternative prosecution track for terrorist suspects - including indefinite detention without trial. And at least in the case of Bradley Manning, torture is still being practiced by the military. (Or at least was until public and international pressure got them to place Manning in more decent cond

Jonathan Hafetz writes in Bin Laden and the Torture Debate Balkinization 05/04/2011:

Bin Laden's death won't resolve the torture debate, nor will it be the last time the capture or trial of a suspected terrorist reignites controversy over the basic direction of U.S. counter-terrorism policy. What the response to bin Laden's death shows is how questions that before were not subject to debate--i.e., is torture permissible (answer: no, never)--have seemingly become a legitimate subject of public discourse. It also suggests that until the United States establishes a meaningful accountability mechanism and comes to grips with the abuses committed after 9/11, those who support torture will continue to exploit each new opportunity to defend it through the creation of a pro-torture narrative. [my emphasis]

The torture issue isn't going away. There has to be a real accounting for it.

Tags: accountability for torture, jonathan hafetz, juan cole, torture

How bad is the drift in American national government? Is Minerva's Owl flying yet?

The drift that I mean is the domination of both parties, especially the Republican Party, but what in Andrew Jackson's day he called the Money Power. Turning points look more clear in retrospect. The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, as Hegel famously said.

Owl

Minerva

But it seems to me that a long "democratic moment" (as Jerry Brown might call it) that started around the time of the Katrina hurricane and flood in 2005 and peaked in Obama's election as President in 2008. The labor activism this year in defense of workers' rights against aggressive, reactionary Republican Governors is a sign that there is plenty of popular energy and fight left. So I actually hope we're a long way from the "dusk of this "democratic moment."

The idea of the democratic moment would be difficult to define in social-science terms. But it is a useful concept to understand situations like the ones Juan Cole defines in Hundreds of Thousands of Arabs Protest their Governments Informed Comment 04/09/2011:

On Friday, the US Congress endeavored to decide whether American democracy has irretrievably broken down because the representatives of the Billionaires refused to compromise with the representatives of the People ("cutting spending" while "cutting taxes" means "shifting the cost of running society to the middle class from the filthy rich"). The answer was that it had not, as long as the representatives of the People showed sufficient deference to the Billionaires, shuffling, keeping their eyes down, and obediently emptying their pockets. The middle class, successfully distracted by racial and religious hatreds and by attempts to impose patriarchal fundamentalism, was wreathed in vapid smiles as the billionaires sent movers to their homes to pick up the belongings they had just fleeced from them via their enforcers, the tea baggers.

As Americans rushed to surrender their constitutional rights, the peoples of the Middle East rose up from Libya to Iraq to demand those very rights for themselves– freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly, as well as safeguards against a secret police state that engages in routine unreasonable search and seizure and imposes cruel and unusual punishments while keeping prisoners hidden, denied habeas corpus, and often denied a speedy civil trial or even a trial at all.

Something's got to "give" in this situation. Democracy and the Constitution seem to be "giving" an awful lot to make our plutocrats wealthy whiners who don't pay their taxes investors who create all wealth happy.

Tags: democracy, juan cole, us economy

The ghosts of wars past and not-yet-passed: Libya, Kosovo, Afghanistan

This report by Kim Sengupta, Rebels die as victims of their own disarray The Independent 04/03/2011 illustrates one of the limitations of air power in the Libya War:

The rebel fighters were celebrating "victory" in their usual wasteful way, loosing off round after round into the air, using up ammunition in short supply. But this time it was a suicidal mistake: seconds later their vehicles, and an ambulance parked near by, were destroyed in an attack arriving with shattering explosions.

Air strikes had been carried out by a pilot from the international coalition who then thought an anti-aircraft barrage was being directed at him. Fifteen people, including three members of medical staff, were killed instantly when the warplane, believed to be an A-10 Tankbuster, responded with its devastating firepower.

These were the second set of "collateral casualties" in two days: eight others died in another bombing aimed at a regime convoy passing through the village of Argobe, near Ajdabiya. It ignited ammunition, spraying shrapnel into nearby houses. Four of those killed were female, including three girls aged 12 to 16 from the same family; two others were teenage boys.

This 04/02/2011 report from Aljazeera English reports on the same two incidents:



Initially, the US-French-British approach in Libya sounded a lot like their approach in the Kosovo War. I've speculated that Juan Cole's enthusiasm for the intervention in Libya was largely based on an optimistic view of the Kosovo War. In a post of 04/01/2011, Defections, US Withdrawal Point to Political Solution in Libya Informed Comment, he seemed to confirm this:

US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates clearly has a model in his mind somewhat like Serbia in 1999-2000. In spring 1999 Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic sent troops into Kosovo, which began committing a massacre. NATO intervened to roll that back. During that war, Milosevic was indicted at the International Criminal Court for war crimes.

Milosevic's attempt to tinker with the presidential election of October 1999 provoked massive street protests against him. His military informed him that they would not support him. By spring of 2001 he was arrested by his own people and that summer he was surrendered to the United Nations.

NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops. But it was the world community's relegation of Milosevic to pariah status that helped the Serbian elite turn against him.

There are two problems with this. It's an unrealistic view of the Kosovo War, and the Western strategy in the Libya War is starting to look more like Rummy's fanciful approach in Afghanistan.

What we saw in the Kosovo War of 1999 was that air power can inhibit the use of ground troops but didn't prevent it. Cole writes, "NATO's aerial bombing missions were what stopped the advance into Kosovo of Serbian troops." But in fact, Serbian troops intensified their ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars after the bombing campaign began. William Arkin in "Operation Allied Force: 'The Most Precise Application of Air Power in History'," from Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, eds, War Over Kosovo: Politics and Strategy in a Global Age (2001) explains:

From the perspective of allied pilots, attacking forces in Kosovo translated into huntng down and hitting individual vehicles - with negligible effect on the progress of Operation Horsehoe [the ethnic cleansing campaign Serbia launched in March 1999 just before the NATO bombing began]. [US Defence] Secretary [William] Cohen would later claim that the attacks proceeded according to plan, creating the conditions that shifted the "balance of power" toward the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). NATO, he said after the war, had been "creating the possibility that the military efforts of the Kosovar Albanians, which were likely to grow in intensity as a result of Milosevic's atrocities in Kosovo, might be a more credible challenge to Serb armed forces." But that is patent nonsense. In claiming that its Phase 2 efforts [which started after the initial 48-hour Phase 1 bombing] constituted a serious effort to stop ethnic cleansing by killing its perpetrators, NATO (and by extension the Clinton administration) was being either stupid or disingenuous.

NATO initially hoped that Serbia would relent on the ethnic cleansing campaign after the Phase 1 bombing campaign of the first 48 hours had taken place. That didn't occur. NATO then had to extend the bombing into Serbia proper and strike urban targets. The air war began on March 25. Arkin relates:

Toward the end of May, with the support of American intelligence and Albanian artillery, the KLA mounted a counteroffensive. "The is the beginning of a new phase of aggression, the so-called land operation," Major General Vladimir Lazarevic, commander of the Yugoslav Pritina Corps, said. Regardless of the ferocious debate inside NATO about the need for a ground war, Belgrade saw threatening signs that suggested NATO preparations for just that contingency.

NATO shored up their international diplomatic support with the crucial backing of Russia, which had been Serbia's supporter. There was also increasing anger among the Serbian public toward Milosevic. The combination of these factors persuaded him to call off the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and leave the area, which was a part of the nation of Serbia, as a de facto NATO protectorate.

Milošević, like Muammar Qaddafi more recently, was indicted for war crimes and thus faced the prospect of criminal prosecution under UN auspices, it's highly questionable whether this makes the leaders more likely to capitulate in an immediate conflict, whatever its value may be in the larger scheme of things. Ousting Milošević was never a war aim of the Kosovo War. Had NATO had to send in ground troops, Milošević had to calculate that it might become the goal. Combined with the internal political pressure in Serbia, Milošević could and apparently did calculate that he was more likely to survive in power - and stay out of the hands of international prosecutors - if he capitulated to NATO on Kosovo.

Its now obvious that regime change is the goal of the US-French-British forces in Libya. More is on the line for Qaddafi and his close supporters in this war than there was for Milošević in the Kosovo War in 1999.

But we also now know that the CIA, the British MI6 and Western Special Forces are operating on the ground, giving military direction to rebel fighters and coordinating air strikes. This sounds far more like the approach that the Cheney-Bush Administration used under Rummy's direction in 2001 in the initial stage of the ongoing Afghanistan War. The idea was to use the CIA, Special Forces and air power to support the Northern Alliance forces to take power in Kabul.

That strategy worked in Afghanistan to put the Northern Alliance in power in Kabul. It didn't work so well in bringing maximum power to bear directly against Bin Laden's Al Qa'ida, although the damage done to Al Qa'ida seems to have been very substantial. In a grim irony, advocates of permanent war want to pretend that the bogeyman of Al Qa'ida is a greater threat to the United States than the nuclear-armed Soviet Union was, so even a decade later, it's hard to tell from the information in the public record just how far-reaching the damage to Al Qa'ida was in 2001-2.

But the "Afghanistan model" for the Libya War looks to me like an even grimmer prospect that the Kosovo War model. With bombing and no-fly zones, the external powers have the option to limit their involvement or to pull back, however complicated that might be in practice. It's not so easy to do when the US is so deeply involved in the Libya civil war as we've becoming in the last three weeks (and maybe earlier than that?).

Tags: afghanistan war, juan cole, kosovo war, libya war, william arkin

Juan Cole's defense of the Libya War to "the Left"

Juan Cole has posted a personal manifesto of sorts, An Open Letter to the Left on Libya Informed Comment 03/27/2011 defending the so-called humanitarian war in Libya. Cole's value in commentary on the Middle East and the Muslim world has been in his depth of knowledge of Islam and of the area and his attention to facts and their meaning in context. And that continues to be so in the Libya War.

But in justifying the Libya War on essentially the same grounds as the Obama Administration, he allows himself to float off into careless abstractions. One is a classic example of a sophomoric argument:

The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi's destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya's workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people.

The historian Henry Steele Commager used to be fond of quoting James Madison saying that "theory" can lead us astray, so experience should be our guide. As a general position, it's a little to Lockean for my taste. But it applies well to Cole's particular argument. We could just as easily say that because Juan Cole isn't in Los Angeles shooting it out with the Crips and Bloods, he de facto supports violent urban street gangs.

It's true that the UN Security Council action makes the intervention legal in international law. It does not in itself make it a good idea. It does not mean that the United States has to take part in implementing this good idea; France and Britain were both eager to do humanitarian service by shooting down planes and bombing and rocketing military sites. No doubt their bombs and rockets, like our own, carefully distinguish between Bad People and those deserving to live.

In the real world of week before last, what happened was that the United States pushed hard for UN authorization for the war against Libya. It did not push for war against Yemen or Bahrain, where protesters are also being killed by their governments. It did not push for UN Security Council authorization to overthrown the government of Saudi Arabia to end its abuses of human rights. Are we to conclude that this means the Obama Administration therefore approves of the Wahhabi version of Islamic law in Saudi Arabia? Or that it approves of repression and human rights abuses in Yemen and Bahrain? Obviously not. It's a silly, sophomoric argument and I'm surprised to see him using it.

Very relevant in terms of politics in the Middle East and the Muslim world especially - but not only there - is the painfully obvious fact that for decades, the United States has acquiesced in and in many ways actively supported Israel's overt violations of occupation law and their targeting of civilians in their wars, even though US policy officially condemns at least the settlement policy. In this case, the support is not passive in the sophomoric sense of "you don't support international intervention to overthrow the Israeli government so therefore you support everything it does." It is active support and could scarcely be more obvious. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid, with Egypt the second largely because of its peace policy toward Israel. Right or wrong, practical or not, this is a real contradiction in US foreign policy with real consequences. It ought to be enough to discourage adults from making the sophomoric argument. But obviously it isn't.

Cole implicitly recognizes that such generalizations as he makes in the sophomore argument are irrelevant. Because he goes on to explain how particular conditions in Libya make its situation different than those in other countries currently involved in the Middle East/North African wave of hopefully-democratic revolution and also different from Darfur. I heard a commentator on Aljazeera English yesterday referring to the rebels fighting in Libya as the "democratic" forces; I hope they are.

He also falls into some careless historical analogies. The Kosovo War is the most relevant recent historical example, though thinking by analogy is tricky, in fact one of the worst problems in American foreign-policy making. The only good news on that score - and one that really amazes me - is that I've yet to hear of anyone invoking "Munich" or warning about the dangers of "appeasement." Nor any comparison of Qaddafi to Hitler. Amazing! Although Cole makes some not-very-useful general comments about the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 and the Second World War

I'm guessing based on his various comments that Cole is working from a very optimistic set of lessons from the Kosovo War. The more relevant lessons from it would be: air power inhibited the use of ground troops against civilians but didn't prevent it; initial expectations of a quick capitulation by Serbia turned out to be dead wrong; "strategic bombing" of Serbian cities was soon added to the campaign (Chinese Embassy! Oops!); Milošević didn't accede to NATO demands on Kosovo until he thought he would soon face a ground campaign; and, regime change in Belgrade was never part of the war aim.

Helena Cobban also reminds us about the eventual outcome here 12 years later:

Now, it is extremely unclear what the political upshot of all this will be in Libya. In Kosovo, Washington ended up midwifing a tiny, landlocked little statelet that is a hub of organized crime at the heart of the Balkans, and whose people have a very stunted quality of life.

Cole makes this reference early in his piece:

I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed. I can still remember when I was a teenager how disappointed I was that Soviet tanks were allowed to put down the Prague Spring and extirpate socialism with a human face. Our multilateral world has more spaces in it for successful change and defiance of totalitarianism than did the old bipolar world of the Cold War, where the US and the USSR often deferred to each other’s sphere of influence.

There was no way in the world that the United States in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, was going to blast its way into Eastern Europe and go to war with the Soviet Union over the Warsaw Pact intervention in what was then Czechoslovakia. Nor did it have the power to do so. Even aside from the huge commitment of resources to the Vietnam War, US Cold War military strategy in Europe was defensive, based on repelling a Soviet invasion, and was based on the use of tactical nuclear weapons. It was never part of the military assumption there that US conventional forces would be able without nukes to defeat a Soviet invasion of western Europe. That's a huge part of the reason that the US refused to adopt a no-first-use policy on nukes. It would have been an enormous investment in arms, personnel and defensive military installations to have made a conventional defense (i.e., not using nukes) of western Europe possible against the Red Army.

Cole may have been a kid in 1968. But he's all grown up now. Is he seriously suggesting that the world would be better off today if the US had initiated a war with the Warsaw Pact in 1968 that would have involved nuking East Germany? What the hell kind of humanitarian notion is that? Whatever the motivations, it made no practical sense then, and it's pure fantasy now to suggest that it did.

Cole's comparison of the international legitimacy of the Libya War in comparison to the Iraq War is good. And it has practical relevance, because the international legitimation affects the course of the war and its repercussions for the United States. But again, that fact that it's legal doesn't mean its a good idea. To use a homey example, it's legal to invest your retirement savings in blackjack games in Las Vegas, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Nor does it mean that it's a good idea for the United States at this particular time.

I haven't seen Cole grappling with the very real risks of the Libya War yet. I fully expect him to as they arise. And let's stipulate that something very close to miracles do happen, even in war. Muammar Qaddafi could decide to stop down tomorrow and Libya could establish a democracy modeled on the United States Constitution. I would recommend they be careful of the Supreme Court, though. And that might want to tighten up the Article 1 war powers clauses. Failing that, though, here are some of the problems:

• Smart as our humanitarian bombs are, they kill people and inevitably kill civilians. The longer the war continues, the more they are likely to kill. (Note to Christian Rightists: our freedom bombs kill unborn babies, too.)

• According to Steven Metz, whether Qaddafi stays or goes in the short term, "there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya." That's more than a trivial consideration.

• Republican warmongers, bless their cold little hearts, actually have a point that an intervention like this doesn't make sense if regime change isn't part of the war aim.

• Who in the name of the Prophet are we supporting in Libya? Call it whatever you like, we're backing one side in a civil war. Who.Are.They? Cole addresses that question this way, "The question is what kind of leadership was emerging in places like Benghazi. The answer is that it was simply the notables of the city." Wouldn't those same notables have been supporting the Qaddafi regime for decades? It's possible they have sterling democratic credentials. But do we the American public have any good reason to think so?

• Nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation should be the highest strategic priority for United States foreign policy; it's hard to imagine that the Libya intervention - after years of rewarding Qaddafi's regime for going along with US policy on nonproliferation - doesn't significantly set back nuclear nonproliferation. A nuclear weapon is the best insurance against being invaded by the United States, UN authorization or not.

• I'm convinced that for the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) to ever become a meaningful standard for military intervention, it would have to be done by an independent military force, responsible directly to the UN and not to individual countries. Otherwise, it becomes an excuse to cover for cold power politics.

• There are also real limits to United States power. That applies to "humanitarian" wars as well as to Cheney wars.

Tags: israel, juan cole, kosovo war, libya war, militarism

It really is revolutionary contagion in the Arab world - at least for the moment

This Aljeerza English (AJE) video provides a long analysis on the unrest in Libya. It includes some interesting comments on the clout that Libya, as a major oil producer, has been able to apply to Western governments. Commentators note that despite his eccentricities, Muammar Qaddafi has shown real sophistication in applying that pressure and also improving the general international position of Libya in recent years.



At this writing, El Mundo/EFE is reporting on the possibility of Muammar el Qaddafi leaving the country in the short term. (Reino Unido dice que Gadafi podría haber abandonado el país 21.02.2011) The Justice Minister of Libya resigned in protest over the level of repression. AJE is also reporting a new massacre of protesters in Tripoli on Monday, including using planes to fire on protesters. (Libya protests spread and intensify 02/21/2011)

The anti-government movement that began in Tunisia really did spread to other countries. This things are near-impossible to predict. Processes can develop for a long time, then with the right spark can break out into rapid change. It's rare, but it happens. It's obviously happening now in the Arab world, and apparently to some extent in (mostly Persian) Iran.

Über-Realist Stephen Walt published a post on 01/16/2011 at his Foreign Policy blog whose title is now embarrassing, Why the Tunisian revolution won't spread. He wrote then of revolutionary contagion in such situations, "the history of world revolution suggests that this sort of revolutionary cascade is quite rare, and even when some sort of revolutionary contagion does take place, it happens pretty slowly and is often accompanied by overt foreign invasion." Among other reasons, he writes, "the actual revolutionary potential of any society is very difficult to read in advance, and a rising revolutionary wave often depends on very particular preferences and information effects within society." True enough.

But his caution is still partially applicable:

All of this is not to say that a cascade is impossible, that events in Tunisia won't exert a long-term effect on political discussion elsewhere, or that it is not a telling sign of democratic aspirations that are likely to bear fruit eventually. But "eventually" could be a rather long time, and if you are expecting to see a rapid transformation of the Arab world in the wake of these events, you're likely to be disappointed. [my emphasis]

Walt obviously quickly realized that in this case, short-term revolutionary contagion did start occurring. He explained ten days later in his post From Tunis to Cairo? 01/26/2011:

Do the large and angry demonstrations in Egypt mean that I was wrong to predict that the revolution in Tunisia wouldn't spread? Not yet, but I will be watching events closely and developments there could eventually prove me wrong. (As Keynes famously retorted, "when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?") But thus far, I'm sticking with my original forecast. ...

A couple of quick points. In my original post on the subject, I emphasized that revolutionary upheavals are always inherently unpredictable, because it is hard to know how much the population is willing to risk to overthrow the authorities and because each person's reaction will depend on what they think others will do. (Someone might be reluctant to join an angry mob if they thought only ten other people will show up, but if they are convinced that 5000 other people will be there, then there's safety in numbers and they'd be willing to be the 5001st).

I didn't deny that events in Tunisia might generate some sympathetic rumblings elsewhere, because this is common after a revolution, but I said that I didn't expect a wave of upheavals that ultimately overthrew neighboring governments. The main reason was that authoritarian governments would be on their guard against contagion, and would act quickly to snuff out any rising revolutionary tide. Thus far, that's precisely what the Mubarak regime seems to be doing, and they have a lot of practice at this sort of thing.

As we know, Mubarak is gone. But it remains to be seen - maybe I should say it remains for the Egyptians to accomplish - what kind of regime will replace his dictatorship.

Juan Cole analyzes the fast-changing situation in Libya in Revolutionary Situation in Libya Informed Comment 02/21/2011. As he points out, Libya has many of the contradictions familiar to other "oil states", and also a potentially more immediate effect on international oil prices:

Because Libya is an oil state that exports 1.7 million barrels a day, its fate has more immediate implications for the international economy than unrest in non-oil states such as Tunisia. On Sunday, the eastern Zuwayya tribe threatened to halt petroleum exports in protest of the brutality of the regime in Benghazi, a city of over 600,000.

Petroleum accounts for much of Libya’s $77 bn. a year gross domestic product, the 62nd in the world, which affords Libyans a per capita income on paper of over $12,000 a year, more than that of Brazilians, Chileans or Poles and the highest in Africa. In fact, the oil income is not equitably distributed, so that a third of Libyans live below the poverty line and 30% of workers are unemployed. The regime favors the west of the country with oil money largesse, neglecting the east. [my emphasis]

But as his title indicates, he judges this to be a real revolutionary situation:

All of these developments– the falling of Benghazi, the split in the military there, the defection of major tribes, and the outbreak of protests and violence in the capital– point to a revolutionary situation. Central to such a situation is dual sovereignty, the development of two distinct camps with authority in the same country.

Tags: juan cole, libya, stephen walt

Obama's Iraq War exit plan

When will peace come to Iraq? (The photo is of a destroyed French village in the First World War)

Juan Cole, who has consistently been one of the best commentators on the Iraq War - he's an expert on Shi'a Islam and actually know Arabic and Persian - writes about Obama's exit plan announced last week in We're really leaving Iraq Salon 03/03/09.

He's basically pretty positive about Obama's exit plan:

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.

I'm not trashing Obama's plan at the moment. But I'm still going to take a very skeptical view of that situation. For one thing - a major thing - it's to some extent a rhetorical trick to call the 50,000 troops he plans to have there after August 2010 "non-combat" troops. All the troops there are in a real practical sense potential combat troops.

But the momentum is in the right direction. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) requires that all US ground troops by out by 2011. And Obama specifically reaffirmed that he intended to abide by that commitment. Prime Minister al-Maliki achieved new popularity with the SOFA because it gets the US troops out. There is still a national referendum coming on the SOFA, which will create even more political pressure in Iraq for the US to exist completely. With the prospect of a less hostile relationship to the US, Iran also has incentive for the moment to discourage any escalation in violence in Iraq against the US and to see the SOFA withdrawal schedule observed.

The Cheney-Bush administration never built up more than a rudimentary Iraqi air force. So building up a minimal air force for normal national defense creates a dependence and need for US assistance in that regard. Cole writes:

Iraq's military also continues to need logistical support from U.S. forces. ...

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.

All of this reflects the fact that Cheney and Bush intended for Iraq to be a permanent US military base.

But it also repeats in a significant way the situation in Vietnam after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. The US had trained a massive South Vietnamese Army. But it trained them on American conventional-war approaches, which relied heavily on close-air support, which they proved not capable of providing on their own to anything like the level needed. I haven't encountered much if any commentary on that similarity. But it's there.

I hope Cole's optimism in his conclusion turns out to be justified:

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:

Partial Peace, Looming War by Tom Hayden The Nation Online 03/01/09. Hayden points out how off-base New York Times reporter Tom Ricks was in his prediction that Obama would plan to hold some kind of permanent residual force in Iraq. Like Juan Cole, Hayden focuses on Obama's commitment to observe the SOFA deadline:

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.

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]

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."

War critic Bob Dreyfuss, writing also at The Nation Online, takes a more dour view in Obama's Iraq Plan Ain't It 02/27/09.

The invaluable Gareth Porter reports on Obama's plan in Drawdown Plan May Leave Combat Brigades in Iraq Inter Press Service 02/27/09:

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.

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.

Former Sen. George McGovern favors a faster withdrawal, as reported in McGovern: Troops Should Come Home This Year Keloland.com 02/27/09:

"I give the President credit for setting a date certain, that's something the previous administration would not do," McGovern said.

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.

Tags:

gareth porter, george mcgovern, iraq war, juan cole

There are experts, and then there are experts

In the blogosphere, in the cyber-version of the alternative press, and occasionally on PBS we have people like Juan Cole, the highly articulate professor of history at the University of Michigan who is actually an expert in Shi'a Islam, speaks Arabic and Persian and Urdu talking about the situation in the Middle East and South Asia. For instance, in Neoconservatism dies in Gaza Salon 01/08/08, Cole starts out by writing:

The Gaza War of 2009 is a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy. For over a decade, the leading figures in this school of thought saw the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a parliamentary regime in Iraq as the magic solution to all the problems in the Middle East. They envisioned, in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, the moderation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the overthrow of the Baath Party in Syria and the Khomeinist regime in Iran, the deepening of the alliance with Turkey, the marginalization of Saudi Arabia, a new era of cheap petroleum, and a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms favorable to Israel. After eight years in which they strode the globe like colossi, they have left behind a devastated moonscape reminiscent of some post-apocalyptic B movie. As their chief enabler prepares to exit the White House, the only nation they have strengthened is Iran; the only alliance they have deepened is that between Iran and two militant Islamist entities to Israel's north and south, Hezbollah and Hamas.

That's actually quite a bit of information into that one paragraph. Along with some sane analysis packed And that's just the beginning of the article.

In the lurching dinosaur we know as the Establishment press, we have star columnists like Tom "Suck.On.This." Friedman, who appears all over the place and is taken to be an authority on the Middle East, also. (Update 10/02/2011: The video is now available from John Amato, Thomas Friedman and Iraq: Suck on This!: UPDATED with Video 11/18/2007) As well as the country's most influential columnist (not to be confused with The Dean Of All The Pundits, David Broder) and a general cheerleader for neoliberal (i.e., laissez faire) globalization. His New York Times column The Mideast's Ground Zero 01/06/08 can be briefly summarized as follows:

• I haven't yet figured out that the Iraq War I cheered for made Iran the predominant power in the Middle East.

• If Hamas no longer had any significant support or influence among the Palestinians, then it would be okay for Israel to negotiate with them.

• Hamas in Gaza, Iran, Sunni suicide bombers in Iraq, and wimpy European are all kinda sorta connected.

Tags: juan cole, thomas friedman

Russia/Georgia conflict and the Iraq War

Juan Cole points to yet another reason that entangling ourselves in a protracted war in Iraq has been a huge blunder in his Informed Comment post of 08/09/08:

In the wake of the outbreak of the Russian-Georgian War over Ossetia, Georgia wants to withdraw the 2,000 troops it has in Iraq. These troops appear to have been based in Diyala or Wasit provinces, where they have been preventing Shiite militiamen from smuggling arms in from Iran. Although the US military is playing down the impact of their withdrawal, it seems to me significant. The Iraqi army certainly could not be counted on to take up their work, since so much of it was recruited from Shiite militias. The US would have to divert 2,000 men to this dangerous task (and it is intrinsically dangerous to have US troops directly on the Iranian border). The Georgians beefed up their presence because they are trying to join NATO; from a Russian point of view this development is highly undesirable, which is part of the point of the fighting over Ossetia.

All this is not to mention that a US airlift of 2000 Georgian troops to fight Russian ones at this juncture does not look friendly to Moscow. (my emphasis)

Someone tell me again why being the rogue superpower is supposed to be such a great thing for the United States.

Tags: iraq war, juan cole

Obama and the Afghanistan War

I'm glad to see Obama looking Presidential and even sounding visionary on his overseas trip that the bold Maverick McCain thought he was badgering him into taking.

But Juan Cole has some excellent advice for Obama on the Afghanistan War in his article, Obama is saying the wrong things about Afghanistan Salon 07/23/08:

... Obama's pledge to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan will not be easy to fulfill. While coalition troop deaths have declined significantly in Iraq, NATO casualties in Afghanistan are way up. By shifting emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, would a President Obama be jumping from the frying pan into the fire? ...

Before he jumps into Afghanistan with both feet, Obama would be well advised to consult with another group of officers. They are the veterans of the Russian campaign in Afghanistan. Russian officers caution that Afghans cannot be conquered, as the Soviets attempted to do in the 1980s with nearly twice as many troops as NATO and the U.S. now have in the country, and with three times the number of Afghan troops as Karzai can deploy. Afghanistan never fell to the British or Russian empires at the height of the age of colonialism. Conquering the tribal forces of a vast, rugged, thinly populated country proved beyond their powers. It may also well prove beyond the powers even of the energetic and charismatic Obama. In Iraq, he is listening to what the Iraqis want. In Pakistan, he is simply dictating policy in a somewhat bellicose fashion, and ignoring the wishes of those moderate parties whose election he lauded last February. (my emphasis)

If Obama as President escalates the war by adding more troops to the circa 33,000 American troops already in Afghanistan, or if Bush does it before Obama takes office, I would hope Obama and his advisers would take a cold-eyed, realistic look at the results when the overall violence increases after the "surge".

Tags: afghanistan war, juan cole

Progress [sic] in Iraq and embassies attacked

Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog is a daily illustration of the fact that some good news reporting is being done, even by some of our generally dysfunctional Establishment press. We can't expect every metropolitan daily to have experts in Shi'a Islam like Cole on staff. But our news organizations (print, cable, broadcast, online) should be organizing and presenting information in much the way Cole's blog does it.

His posts for just the two days 02/22/08 and 02/23/08 illustrate this well. For instance, the Reuters news agency has an Iraq Special Coverage page at their Web site that includes daily updates on the fighting in Iraq. Cole quotes their "Factbox" reports of 02/23/08 on the fighting in Iraq the previous day, Security developments in Iraq, Feb 23. For instance, just on Friday, "A barrage of mortar bombs or rockets hit Baghdad's heavily protected Green Zone, home to the U.S. embassy and the Iraqi government. The U.S. embassy refused to say whether there had been any casualties or damage."

Now, it's always tricky when you start speculating, "if this had been in so-and-so, it would have been bigger news." But in this case, it's entirely appropriate for us to compare how this news was treated compared to the attack on the US Embassy in Serbia on Thursday. That at least attracted some prominent reporting, and led UN Ambassador Kalmay Khalilzad (neocon bigwig and former US Ambassador the Iraq) to go before the TV cameras at the UN and express his outrage at this attack on sovereign US territory, which Embassies are. The attacks there involved demonstrators burning part of the embassy buildings. And that was a really serious event.

But the compound housing the US Embassy in Baghdad, the most expensive and heavily defended US Embassy on the planet, came under fire by a "barrage of mortar bombs or rockets". And even in Reuters' report, it ranks second paragraph. Just another day in Baghdad. Midday Saturday, I did a quick and admittedlly unscientific Web surfing to see how many online outlets of major papers had homepage headlines like, "US Embassy compund in Baghdad hit by explosive projectiles: Attack follows Thursday assault on US Embassy in Serbia", or even mention it. San Francisco Chronicle? Nope. Los Angeles Times? Yes. (Blasts Strike Baghdad's Green Zone, an original report; New York Times? Yes. (Mortars or Rockets Strike Green Zone, AP report) Washington Post? Yes. (Baghdad Green Zone Attacked, an AP report)Chicago Tribune? Yes. (Baghdad Green Zone Attacked AP report) Atlanta Journal-Constitution? No. St. Petersburg Times? No.

That makes four of seven, with three of the four being the AP wire report. And in all four cases, it's one of the small-print headlines. But even in small print, it tells about a serious incident. And makes a joke of the chatter by the Republicans and the Big Pundits about how The Surge has been such a stunning success. And that's just one incident on one day!

Just to be clear: I think the attack on the US Embassy in Serbia is a more significant event. The point I'm making here is that if anyone really believed that the situation in Baghdad is stable or peaceful, the blasts in the Green Zone would be bigger news, and the Sunday talking heads would be chattering ernestly tomorrow about whether this was an new "Al Qa'ida" intitiative or merely some other militarily bold and competent terrorist group attacking. But it really is more like "just another day in Baghdad", although any time the Green Zone is attacked, it's worth paying attention. Setting up mortars and/or rockets to fire into what may be the most heavily defended piece of real estate on earth is not something the neighborhood drug dealers would do for a lark. When was the last time you heard of mortar or rocket fire on a police station or courthouse in an American city? If such a thing occurred, it would be front page news across the country (even allowing for press dysfunctionality). And we would hear solemn speculation about whether that city or state or even the whole country was being "Colombianized", and whether we needed a Surge in the War on Drugs? (Remember the "war on drugs"?)

McClatchy Newspapers (which bought out Knight-Ridder) has been doing probably the best job of any American news service of covering the Iraq War since the runup to the war itself. Much of the newspaper-reading and TV-watching public doesn't learn about much of their reporting. But it is there.

And, oh, yeah, McClatchy reports that Kurdish troops, i.e., militias controlled by the Iraqi Kurdish political parties, have mobilized against the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq, though this article doesn't report direct military clashes (Iraqi Kurds ready to confront Turkish troops by Yasseen Taha and Leila Fadel 02/22/08). Or, to put it another way, our critical ally in the Great War Against Terrorism And Bogeymen, Iraq, has been invaded by our NATO ally Turkey. The Turkish army is now in a military confrontation with the militias of the Kurdish parties, the most pro-American (or, at least until now, the least anti-American) of the major groups in Iraq. As Cole observes, "this is the stuff of which hot wars are made, folks."

Cole also comments on Three Events that changed the World 02/21/08: the Turkish invasion of northern Iraq; the assault on the American Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia; and, Clinton debating Obama only to a draw. Perhaps he's being a bit over-dramatic about the third one. But his comments on the situation with Serbia are worthwhile:

Note that Neoconservative pundits kept telling us that there was something deeply wrong with Muslims for protesting when they were kicked or expelled, saying that look, the Serbs have been harmed by US policies but they don't go around attacking US embassies. I guess they'll have to find a new argument.

And given that the Serbs are Eastern Orthodox Christians, will the Republican Party and Fox Cable News now start fulminating against "Christofascism?"

In Turkey invades Iraq... 01/23/08, he writes:

I review the news below and don't somehow conclude that the US occupation of Iraq is a success story. I know we are paying a lot for our presence in Iraq. I can't figure out what the average American is receiving for the money. It isn't increased security, since Iraq is a training ground for terrorists who will likely hit the US or US interests in future. It isn't extra petroleum, at least not for us ordinary folks. Maybe the US oil majors will do well out of it. But even they say they can't do business in Iraq without oil legislations. And petroleum prices held above $98 a barrel on Friday. The Turkish invasion of Iraq was cited as one reason for the price increase. Instead of asking "are things hopeful in Iraq?" or "is there progress in Iraq?", the American media and public should be asking, "What are we getting out of all this?" That is the question the US Right fears most of all, which is why they ask the 'progress' question all the time. They only have two settings, "slow progress" and "progress." A burned out hulk of a city like Falluja? A sign of "slow progress."

What a disaster. Heckuva job, Cheney, Bush, Rummy. You'll be remembered for this for a long time.

Tags: iraq war, juan cole, serbia

What the great progress of The Surge (aka, the McCain esclation) looks like

Despite Maverick McCain's unbounded faith in his Surge plan and the claims of brilliant success from our Savior-General Petraeus, the Iraq War goes on. Juan Cole comments on the horrific double-suicide bombings on Friday in Baghdad (91 Dead in 2 Baghdad Blasts Informed Comment blog 02/02/08):

Two women set off separate suicide bombs in two markets in Baghdad on Friday, killing at least 91 persons and wounding a similar number. Contrary to what this AP squib implies, the bombings suggest neither that "al-Qaeda" is running out of men nor that it is desperate. Women were used because they would be less likely to be closely searched, in a society where gender segregation and female honor and chastity are important values. The story that the women had Downs syndrome seems unlikely to be true; you wouldn't trust a sensitive terror plot to someone without their full faculties. Rather, the bombings show that the Sunni Arab guerrillas seeking to destabilize Iraq have not been defeated and are still capable of making a big strike right under the noses of the surge troops. And that is how guerrilla war is-- large conventional forces find it difficult to curb it.

McClatchy News (formerly Knight-Ridder) is still doing a good job on reporting on the war as they have since the buildup to the invasion, making them nearly unique among major American journalistic enterprises: Iraqi insurgents find female bombers can skirt security by Leila Fadel and Hussein Kadhim 02/01/08. Fadel and Kadhim note in their report, "As is frequently the case in accounts of violence, U.S. officials offered a death toll that was only half that of Iraqi authorities'."

See also Women suicide bombers kill 72 in attacks on Baghdad markets by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 01/02/08. Cockburn is still doing reporting from Iraq despite the not-inconsiderable dangers. He also speaks Arabic, which many of the US reporters who have done Iraq War reporting do not. He writes:

Al-Qa'ida has mounted a series of attacks in the past week, mostly targeting leaders of the Sunni tribal militia, al-Sahwah, which opposes al-Qa'ida. The bombing of Ghazil, in a predominantly Shia part of the city, will also have been aimed at provoking Shia retaliation against Sunni Muslims, who might then look again to al-Qa'ida for protection. ...

Al-Qa'ida has increasingly been using women as suicide bombers because they are never searched by male police officers men or soldiers, and there is a shortage of women to do the job in Iraq's overwhelmingly male security forces.

The atrocities show that al-Qa'ida is still a powerful force with many recruits willing to kill themselves, and is backed by an organisation with intelligence, explosives and the means to detonate them. In recent weeks, it has been targeting al-Sahwah leaders and has often succeeded in penetrating their security. Last week, a car bomb exploded next to the house of Abu Marouf, an al-Sahwah leader commanding 13,000 men, in the village of Khan Dari, between Baghdad and Fallujah.

When I met him four days earlier, he was surrounded by guards and chose which of his many vehicles to travel in at the last moment to prevent assassination. Even so, al-Qa'ida was able to get a bomb close to his home and wounded four of his guards.

Despite improving security, Baghdad was a very fearful city even before yesterday's attacks and will now be more so.

Hasn't Cockburn heard from Savior-General Petraeus and Maverick McCain that things are going great in Iraq?


And, whatever the mix of motivations that produced the 2003 invasion, oil revenues are very much part of what is at stake in Iraq. The Information Clearing House in reports on a 01/31/08 item in on Akhbar Alkhaleej newspaper (Iraqi sister paper to Bahrain's Gulf Daily News):

An Iraqi MP preferred to remain anonymous told the newspaper that highly confidential negotiations took place by representatives from American oil companies, offering $5 million to each MP who votes in favor of the Oil and Gas law.

Juan Cole also corrects the record that Hillary Clinton misstated about the 1998 end of weapons inspections in Iraq which was used as the justification of the Operation Desert Fox bombing in 1998. (Probably not the most inspired name for an American military operation in light of the fact that the Second World War German Gen. Ernst Rommel was famously known as the "Desert Fox".) Our crack "press corps" manages to pretty much ignore the periodic bombing that the US conducted against Iraq throughout the 1990s, of which Operation Desert Fox was the most significant. Cole writes (Iraq and Iran in the Democratic Debate 02/01/08):

It is worth noting that Clinton misstated the 1998 events. The US did not bomb Iraq because Saddam "kicked out" the UN weapons inspectors. The US decided to bomb Iraq for other reasons and therefore ordered the inspectors out of the country. The myth that Saddam "kicked out" the inspectors just won't die.

For more of the details, see the links above and also Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR): Common Myths in Iraq Coverage 11/27/02; USA Today Repeats Myths on Iraq Inspectors 08/12/02.

Additional Iraq War news and commentary:

Bomb takes death toll of journalists in Iraq war to 126 by Patrick Cockburn The Independent 01/31/08.

Torture does not work, as history shows by Robert Fisk The Independent 02/01/08:

"Torture works," an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men's anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the "waterboarding" technique – before they could be seen by US investigators?

Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner's eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said "waterboarding" was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition. ...

Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA's "waterboarding" did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him. (my emphasis)

Tags: iraq war, juan cole, operation desert fox, patrick cockburn, robert fisk, torture