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

No-fly zone (NFZ) debate for Libya

Robert Dreyfuss takes a look at the current situation on possible US/NATO military actions toward Libya in Pressure Builds for a No-Fly Zone in Libya The Nation Online 03/14/2011

Policy ... remains confused. The French are pushing hard for intervention and an NFZ [no-fly zone], and France has tacitly recognized the Libyan opposition. But earlier reports that Paris had officially backed the rebels appear to be wrong, and the Arab League, too, refused to support the Transitional National Council in Benghazi. Today, in Paris, Hillary Clinton will meet with the Libyan council. Her husband, Bill Clinton, ever the liberal interventionist, has publicly called for an NFZ. The latest liberal to join the pro-NFZ forces is Princeton's Anne-Marie Slaughter, in an op-ed in today's New York Times, adding her name to the long list of hawks, including Newt Gingrich, many neoconservatives, and John McCain.

Logistically speaking, if an NFZ is set up, nearly all of the patrols and military action to enforce it will be carried out by the United States, whether it's done unilaterally, under UN auspices, or with NATO or Arab League support. [my emphasis]

Yes, that mavericky Maverick John McCain just can wait to add another war to the current US military burden.

Robert Pape offers his thoughts on Avoiding a new ‘problem from hell’ in the Turkish Today's Zaman 03/14/2011:

With Gaddafi digging in, many have called for international intervention in Libya. Thus far, the focus has been on regime change, with proposals ranging from military assistance to the rebels to no-fly zones over the country, and even to attacks against the regime’s military forces. These proposals would almost surely be viewed as an effort at Western domination of an oil-rich Muslim country -- solidifying support for Gaddafi in Libya and inspiring anti-Western terrorism by al-Qaeda and others outside it.

Indeed, the focus on regime change takes our eyes off the crucial problem that the world community can and should seek to avoid -- an exploding humanitarian crisis in Libya on the scale witnessed in Somalia, the Balkans and the Kurdish areas of Iraq in the 1990s.

... America does not have a vital stake in the outcome of this contest and intervention now, even for humanitarian goals, has the potential for an open-ended, costly commitment. Instead, we should pursue a more cautious approach in the west [of Libya]. [my emphasis]

Pape frames the humanitarian situation this way:

Libya is already a failed state. Large parts of the government and military have disintegrated. Gaddafi is now simply the largest warlord in a country where unity will be difficult to regain, even under the best of circumstances. As a result, the nature of the humanitarian challenge is different in the eastern and western parts of Libya. [my emphasis]

Nicolas Pelham of the International Crisis Group has a background article on The Battle for Libya at the New York Review of Books site 03/12/2011.

Tags: libya, robert dreyfuss

Randy Scheunemann

Tom Hayden and Bob Dreyfuss discuss McCain's top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann in, respectively, The Neo-Cons Who Fabricated Evidence for the Iraq War Are Back Huffington Post 08/20/08 and Scheunemann, Iraq and Georgia The Nation 08/21/08.

Hayden comes to the more drastic judgment about Scheunemann's influence on the Georgia-Russia conflict this summer:

Barack Obama and the Democrats are heading towards trouble in November because of a new Cold War with the Russians triggered largely by a top John McCain adviser and the same neo-conservative clique who fabricated evidence to lobby for the Iraq War.

This is not a conspiracy theory but a conspiracy fact, stated as boldly as possible before it is too late.

Dreyfuss also discusses Schuenemann's career as a Georgia lobbyist and active advocate for the Iraq War. But he contents himself with the conclusion about Scheunemann's highly-profitable Georgia connection and his role as McCain's adviser: "It's a blindingly obvious conflict of interest, and frighteningly it's one that conceivably could drag the United States into yet another war in that unstable part of the world."

Hayden may well be correct, though he establishes a broad circumstantial case rather than anything so specific it could legitimately be called a conspiracy. His main point is that the neocons and other advocates of militarism see the Georgia-Russia conflict as the chance to open a New Cold War. And he believes that the peace movement needs to make its opposition to such policies clear, even though that involves criticizing Obama and Biden during the election campaign. The following sounds like good advice to me:

At the very least, Obama can stop going out of his way to celebrate McCain as a great American war hero, which only reinforces McCain's strongest rationale for victory. And Obama's surrogates might delicately suggest that McCain shoots before he thinks. McCain was the pointman pushing the neo-conservative war against "islamo-fascism", centered in Baghdad, months before the Bush Administration revealed its intentions. While Obama urged caution about a "dumb war", McCain was supporting Ahmad Chalabi's misleading assertions about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq-al-Qaeda ties that didn't exist.

The broad peace movement has to awaken a burning memory from below. Everyone recalls George Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished", but does anyone recall John McCain standing on another aircraft carrier on January 2, 2002, yelling to young Navy pilots like himself during Vietnam, "Next up, Baghdad!" (my emphasis)

Tags: georgia, robert dreyfuss, russia, russland, tom hayden

Mission accomplished in Iraq at last?

Don't worry, be happy - and just what are you smoking in that pipe, dude?

Jo Fish at FireDogLake came up with a great euphemism, "Wire Service that Must Not Be Named" for the A********* P****. It was a kooky idea of them to try to stop people from even linked to their stories. But I'm beginning to wonder if they weren't just embarrassed to have some of their stuff highlighted for a wider audience.

For instance, here is a McCain campaign press release credulous article, As insurgency fades, fragile peace unfolds bylined to Robert Burns and Robert Reid 07/27/08, this version from the Orlando Sentinel.

Mission is finally accomplished in Iraq, according to this article. No kidding:

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point at which the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

It's not the end of fighting; it looks like the beginning of a perilous peace.

The combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, curbing illicit weaponry from Iran, boosting links between Baghdad and local governments, integrating former insurgents into government jobs and rebuilding the economy. Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaeda holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance has all but ceased. (my emphasis)

First, I need to repeat my obligatory comment every time someone announces Glorious Victory in Iraq: Great news! Let's have the troops home by Christmas!

Let's also recite the reality-based reasons for the reductions in violence. The goal of the surge was political reconciliation including a series of major compromise that have not been achieved. So, by the terms on which it was originally presented to the public, The Surge, aka, the McCain escalation, is a failure.

But there have been reductions in violence, from the more horrific to the less horrific. Yes, the increase in US troops had a role. I guess that's what the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named means by "a perilous peace". But so did other things. There was the Sunni Awakening, in which Sunni tribal leaders started fighting against the Al Qa'ida in Iraq (AQI) group, whose connections to the Al Qa'ida that pulled the 9/11 attacks is pretty tenuous from what we've seen in the public record. Our Savior-General Petraeus decided to use a variation of the buy-off-the-local-warlords strategy that we've been using in Afghanistan, which has resulted in an exceptionally weak central government, the massive growth of narco-trafficking, and an escalating war in that country. In other words, the US military made an effective truce with and provided funds to many of the Sunni guerrilla ("terrorist") groups that oppose the heavily pro-Iranian Shi'a government in Baghdad which we support. This Awakening process began months before The Surge was even announced, and had very little to do with the increase in US troops. But strengthening these Sunni militias makes the long-term political reconciliation more challenging, not easier.

Muqtada al-Sadr's JAM (Mahdi Army) has observed a ceasefire for most of 2007 and 2008. There seems to be little evidence that it has lost power or influence. On the contrary, it's a more formidable political force than in was in 2004 when it clashed openly with the US occupation forces for the first time.

The level of killing has also been affected by five million refugees leaving places where they were more likely to be killed by sectarian and tribal enemies to place where they were less likely to be killed. About half of those are internal refugees, the other half external, mostly in Syria and Jordan. See Helena Cobban's Iraq: Provincial elections and displacement 07/23/08 for how the refugee problem affects the provincial elections, which were recently postponed until likely sometime in 2009.

Then there was the effective completion of "ethnic cleansing" in Baghdad itself. The A********* P**** has a euphemism that is a new one to me, "neighborhoods purged of minorities":

Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006. That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital.

The Iraq War has gone on for so many years that there are some well-established traditions connected with it. Election-year optimism about how well things are going is one of them. Then there's the late-year predictions that huge drawdowns will occur the following year.

With both Obama and the Iraqi government demanding that the withdrawal of American troops should start in 2009, the latter may actually come true this time. If Obama gets elected and the antiwar movement succeeds in bringing enough pressure to bear on his administration.

Tom Hayden discusses the Iraqi withdrawal demand Maliki Endorses Obama Timeline in Huge Blow for McCain, Bush Huffington Post 07/19/08.

For a less happy-face view of the current state of affairs in Iraq than that of the Wire Service that Must Not Be Named, check out Bob Dreyfuss' Iraq: Poised to Explode The Nation Online 07/27/08:

Despite the Optimism of the Neocons, which has pushed mainstream media coverage to be increasingly flowery about Iraq's political progress, in fact the country is poised to explode. Even before the November election. ...

There are at least three flashpoints for an explosion, any or all of which could blow up over the next couple of months. (Way to go, Surgin' Generals!) The first is the brewing crisis over Kirkuk, where the pushy Kurds are demanding control and Iraq's Arabs are resisting. The second is in the west, and Anbar, where the US-backed Sons of Iraq sahwa ("Awakening") movement is moving to take power against the Iraqi Islamic Party, a fundamentalist Sunni bloc. And third is the restive Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, which is chafing at gains made by its Iranian-backed rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).

Tags: iraq war, mccain escalation, robert dreyfuss, surge

What? The bold Maverick wanted to cut and run?

Bush and soulmate

In 1983, McCain voted against a bill to extend Reagan's deployment of U.S. troops [in Lebanon]. Reagan wanted more time to strengthen the fragile Lebanese government, but McCain worried that the American force was too small and that U.S. interests did not justify the risk. ...

[In 1993] after 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in an ambush in Mogadishu, Somalia, McCain decided that it was time to force a withdrawal of the troops, and he introduced an amendment to cut off funds. He wrote later that he regretted the step as an encroachment on the president's power and "as a retreat in the face of aggression from an inferior foe." (my emphasis)

So reports Paul Richter for the Los Angeles Times 03/16/08 in McCain's mixed signals on foreign policy.

But, this being good ole McCain, the Straight Talker and press corps darling, all this is not evidence of inconsistency, hypocrisy, cluelessness or (God forbid!) "surrendering to The Terrorists." No, it's evidence of McCain maverickness and his willingness to boldly speak to truth to the Republican power structure. And his general openmindedness about bipartisanship, the Holy Grail of High Broderism. Richter writes:

... before his first presidential run in 2000, he declared he would work with the Democratic Party's brain trust to devise his foreign policy.

... he infuriated Republicans as a freshman congressman in 1983 by trying to thwart President Reagan's deployment of troops in Lebanon.

[The bold Maverick] has adopted a surprising diversity of views on foreign policy issues during his 25 years in Congress.

In forming his views on national security, McCain has always relied on a large circle of outside advisors and a handful of trusted aides, say former staffers and others who know him. But he has typically worked out his own conclusions. And taken as a whole, they seem quirky and a la carte, rather than developed from a single philosophy.

Even while he wants to extend American authority, McCain as a lawmaker has regularly bucked the Republican establishment. (my emphasis)

The main point of Richter's article, though, seems to reflect an attempt by the Maverick's supporters to start positioning their 100 Years War man as a pragmatic, sensible guy on foreign policy who carefully and thoughtful considers a wide range of views. For instance:

McCain has staked out a more hawkish position on Iran than the Bush administration, saying that "the only thing worse than military action against Iran is a nuclear-armed Iran."

But McCain has sent conflicting signals as well.

In 1998, he suggested to the Weekly Standard magazine that as president he would seek to develop a kind of consensus foreign policy, consulting the "best minds I know," including President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski; Clinton Secretary of State Warren Christopher; President George H.W. Bush's secretary of State, James A. Baker III; Scowcroft; and Kissinger.

Great. Before he bombs Iran, he'll invite a couple of old realists like Brzezinski and Scowcroft to the White House for a photo op, after which they will hopefully tell the press how impressed they were at how seriously the Maverick listened to their views. Then he'll start bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bombing Iran and turned the Iraq War into a far bigger catastrophe than it is.

When you start from the framework that the question is whether the Iraq War should last 100 years or 10,000 years - let's assume for the moment his "million years" suggestion was hyperbole - it kind of limits the immediate practical alternatives that could come out of having photo ops with a few level-headed foreign policy bigwigs.

Robert Dreyfuss casts considerable doubt on this image of open-minded, reflective Maverick in Hothead McCain 03/06/08 (03/24/08 issue):

And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

Tags: mccain, robert dreyfuss

A hopeful development with Iran

Robert Dreyfuss in Khamanei: Ties with United States? 01/03/07 at his blog calls attention to this Reuters story, Iran leader suggests U.S. ties may be possible one day 01/03/07. Dreyfuss points to what should be a set of hopeful developments in US-Iran relations:

This statement comes after (1) the U.S. intelligence estimate saying that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program four years ago; (2) comments from David Satterfield, the top State Department official for Iraq, that Iran has apparently halted its provocations in Iraq; and (3) Ambassador Ryan Crocker's announcement in Iraq that he is re-starting talks with Iran in Baghdad.

Tags: iran, robert dreyfuss

The Nightmare before Cheney and Bush leave office

On to Iran, my pretties! Mephisto in the Air (1828) by Eugène Delacroix

I remember sometime in the early/mid 1980s hearing Jerry Brown mention in a speech that everyone recognized that the fall of the Soviet bloc had huge repercussions for the politics of Europe. But that no one seemed to expect that the end of the Cold War could also have momentous consequences for American politics. As he often does, Brown was seeing currents of change in a way that few others were conceiving them at the time.

John Esposito wrote in the 1998 edition of his book The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?:

With the triumph of the democratization movement in Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet empire, Islam constitutes the most pervasive and powerful transnational force in the world, with one billion adherents spread out across the globe. Muslims are a majority in some 56 countries ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia, and they exist in growing and significant numbers in the United States, the former Soviet Union, and Europe. For a Western world long accustomed to a global vision and foreign policy predicated upon superpower rivalry for global influence if not dominance - a U.S.-Soviet conflict often portrayed as a struggle between good and evil, capitalism and communism - it has been all too tempting to identify another global ideological menace to fill the "threat vacuum" created by the demise of communism. (my emphasis)

Islam became a convenient enemy for many, though it took the 9/11 attacks for it to become credible to enough people so that those interested in threat inflation could use it as the central justification for an American military establishment that spends half or more of the military spending of the entire world.

But the convenient enemy becomes more and more inconvenient when it requires hot war after hot war after hot war, each of them leaving behind military commitments that could linger for a decade or longer. Gareth Porter reminds us that For Neocons, Iran War Aim Is Still Regime Change Inter Press Service 10/30/07.

But the costs and benefits are spread unevently. Robert Scheer writes in his weekly column about the real existing military industrial complex, Cashing In on Terror Truthdig.com 10/30/07. War is profitable for some companies. And while we hear endless references to "Munich" and "appeasement" and "1938" whenever somebody is agitating to start a war with yet another country, we hear and read very, very little about the how during the fabled Good War the United States imposed an excess profits tax and both Congress and the Executive actively regulated and investigated companies making money from war business.

Still, actual shooting wars threaten the cozy position of companies raking in profits from military business. The billions being poured down the ratholes represented by boondoggles like the ongoing Star War scam can go on for years without causing much of a public stir. But when something like the Iraq War exposes how deeply flawed many aspect of our military culture in general really are, it tends to raise embarassing questions. And to make more people pay attention to them.

Robert Dreyfuss blogs today on a Zogby poll with discouraging results: Americans favor bombing Iran 10/31/07. Dreyfuss also quotes Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institute in a panel presentation on Tuesday:

I can envision a scenario in which, sometime next year, the intelligence community is against a war, telling the White House it doesn't know enough; the military is against it, saying that they're bogged down in Iraq; the State Department is against it, saying that there won't be any allies for a war with Iran; and the political people tell the White House that Congress won't support it - and still, the president and the vice president decide to go to war anyway.

Still, I would hate to see a sense of inevitability arise around this. Because expanding the Iraq War to Iran is a bad, bad idea.

It would certainly help if our Democratic Presidential candidates would show some real leadership on this. Because the Establishment press certainly is not going to. From the excerpts I've heard from Tuesday's Democratic debate, Chris Dodd sounds the best on this issue to me.

Tags: gareth porter, iran war, jerry brown, john esposito, robert dreyfuss, robert scheer

Soldiers and strategy

One thing that the Congress needs to avoid is to simply add more troops based simply on the reality that troop shortages quickly developed in the Iraq War. The armed forces should be "right-sized" (to use a corporate clichee of a few years back) based on a long-term strategy of what kind of conflicts are expected. We already see how both parties can agree on "more" without any decision - or even discussion - on the longer-term assumptions.

Andrew Bacevich recently addressed this issue in More troops, more troubles Los Angeles Times 06/18/07. Citing the broad bipartisan support for increasing the number of active-duty Army and Marine soldiers, he writes:

In fact, this enthusiasm for putting more Americans in uniform (and for increasing overall military spending) reflects the persistence of a second consensus to which leading Democrats and Republicans alike stubbornly subscribe.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

Increasing the number of troops is not right or wrong in itself. But it should be based on clear strategic decisions about the role the United States intends to play in the world. And continuing to pursue the neocon-inspired Bush Doctrine is not an acceptable option.


Certainly Bacevich does not think it is:

The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush's conception of waging an open-ended global "war" to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and "liberate" — will not reverse that failure.

Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote (Financing the Imperial Armed Forces TomDispatch.com 06/05/07):

[P]residential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

The armed forces in 2001 were optimized for conventional warfare with heavy reliance on high-tech airpower. Rumsfeld's goal for military "transformation" was to continue and increase such reliance, further minimizing the number of troops required for wars.

If that's the direction the Congress and the country want to continue, it may not make much sense to be expanding the size of the Army and Marines. But if the direction needs to change to optimize the services for expected counterinsurgency operations, then the need for the current level of investment in aircraft and missiles is too high. (The Star Wars "missile defense" program is a question of a different order; only if the goal is to optimize the military for boondoggle projects does that system make sense.)

Tags: andrew bacevich, military budget, robert dreyfuss

War updates

Robert Dreyfuss writes in Iraq: Pulled Out Or Pushed Out TomPaine.com 03/09/07:

Tremendous obstacles stand in the way of pro-peace forces both in Congress and in Iraq’s parliament, but if I had to guess, I’d bet that the Iraqis will ask the United States to get out of Iraq long before Congress can force the issue.

Dreyfuss speaks to a serious disconnect in the American discussions about the Iraq War, in which both the still-dwidling number of war supporters as well as war critics assume that when US troops leave primarily depends on American decisions. That's not an entirely sound assumption.

Dreyfuss points out the central dilemma for the antiwar movement in the United States right now. The public has turned overwhelmingly against the war and confidence in the Cheney-Bush administration is down to the most hardcore Republican base voters. But Cheney and Bush are committed to the war and even if they wanted to pull out American forces, that is a complex process that its doubtful in the extreme if they could pull it off successfully. And with the Senate Republicans still committed to the administration's war policies, at least enough to filibuster any major restrictions proposed, the prospects for Congress forcing a withdrawal are not good right now. But, he writes, political shifts in the Iraqi parliament right now could result in some kind of majority there demanding a US timetable for withdrawal:

The emerging new Iraqi coalition is fragile, and it could easily fall apart or fall victim to intensified sectarian warfare. Many obstacles lie in its way, including the attitude of the Kurds, the opposition of the powerful Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and other factors—including, of course, the machinations of the United States and its ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. But it’s at least possible that by the summer a new government could start taking shape in Baghdad, one that could (among other things) assert its nationalist credentials by demanding a timetable for a U.S. pullout.

President Bush, of course, would do everything he could to prevent the emergence of such a new coalition in Iraq, including possibly the use of military force against its leaders. Unlike with Nancy Pelosi’s legislation, however, at least the White House can’t veto something that the Iraqi parliament passes.

Via Juan Cole, this article looks at the notion of Sunni-Shi'a conflicts becoming central in the Middle East, The Shia-Sunni divide: myths and reality by Omayma Abdel-Latif Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo) Mar 1-7, 2007. He uses the example of Hizbullah in Lebanon to illustrate why trying to force events in the Middle East into a simple Sunni-Shi'a split can be misleading:

A number of Lebanese Shia thinkers and academics refute such arguments. The most important fault lines, they insist, are, and will remain, political, not sectarian: the tendency to frame conflict and politics in the Middle East within an exclusively sectarian frame is no more than a rehash of the colonial attempt to reduce the region to a serious of tribes, sects and communal groups rather than viable states.

One of the recurrent themes in the speeches of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is his insistence that the Shia "cannot be lumped together in one basket". Nasrallah's assertion is commonly interpreted as an attempt to distance the resistance movement from Shia political groups elsewhere, particularly in Iraq, where they maintain an intimate relationship with their occupiers.

In one of his Ashoura speeches last month, Nasrallah fell just short denouncing Iraq's current rulers as a liability. He was nonetheless keen on emphasising the need to understand political developments in Iraq within an Iraqi context. Such a discourse, coming from the leader of one of the biggest socio-political Shia movements in the Arab and Muslim world, exposes the fallacy of supposing the Shia's rise to power in Iraq as part of some grand Shia design.

It was military success against Israel in Lebanon and not the rise to power of a corrupt ruling elite in Iraq, says one Shia thinker close to Hizbullah, that has empowered the Shia, just as has the Sunnis. What is happening in Iraq, he continues, is not something from which strength can be drawn; rather, the opposite is true, and the Iraqi situation weakens political Shiism.

This seems to be the general consensus among Hizbullah's leaders about the Iraqi situation, complicated as it is by Iranian involvement, the operation of death squads and the ambivalent relationship between occupiers and occupied. (my emphasis)

We can't assume that the sectarian divide between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims overrides other shared goals among various states, he argues. Despite suspicion of Persian, Shi'a Iran among Sunni Arab countries, Iran's foreign policy shares some major goals with Sunni states. As he puts it here, Iran also pursues some "Sunni foreign policy goals":

A recent Zogby International poll found that close to 80 per cent of Arabs consider Israel and the United States to be the biggest external threats to their security whereas only six per cent cited Iran. ...

The popular view is a result, says Ali Fayad, head of the Consultative Centre for Strategic and Documentation Studies, a Hizbullah think tank, of Iran's pursuit of Sunni foreign policy goals.

"At the heart of Iran's foreign policy are two key issues; the Palestinian cause and confronting Washington's hegemonic schemes in the region," says Fayad. "There is nothing particularly Shia about the two issues. Indeed both have been presented as the causes for the majority Sunni Arabs. In this sense Iran's foreign policy is Sunni. One can say that the Islamic Republic has transcended the sectarian issue in its foreign policy." (my emphasis)

Tags: iraq, iraq war, robert dreyfuss, shi'a, sunni

Iraq, post-US presence

A couple of recent articles challenge the worst-case scenarios for Iraq if the United States withdraws its troops: Apocalypse Not by Robert Dreyfuss Washington Monthly Mar 2007 and What If We Leave? by John Mueller The American Conservative 02/26/07 issue.

I'm pessimistic on this score. I think it's likely that the Iraqi civil war will get worse for some period if the US were to withdraw over a six-month period. But I also think that we've reached the effective limits of American power in Iraq and it's well past time to recognize that. There is a lot of evidence that the American presence is fueling the civil war and is likely to worsen sectarian tensions the longer we stay.

The US would be far better off at this point pulling out of Iraq and pushing hard for measures that would help prevent the war from expanding into a more general Middle East war - although that also is a real possibility. But American influence to avert that result will be decreased by remaining in Iraq and enhanced by withdrawing. With Iran backing the Shi'a and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states backing the Sunni partisans in Iraq, it may already be too late to avert a more general war. But it's worth a try. And getting the US out of Iraq is a necessary step toward that goal.

Robert Dreyfuss points to how the Administration used a phony worst-case estimate on the WMDs to justify invading Iraq backed up by a Pollyannish best-case estimate on how American troops would be received, and is now using a worst-case estimate to justify the continuing US combat presence there:

The Bush administration famously based its argument for invading Iraq on best-case assumptions: that we would be greeted as liberators; that a capable democratic government would quickly emerge; that our military presence would be modest and temporary; and that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for everything. All these assumptions, of course, turned out to be wrong.

Now, many of the same people who pushed for the invasion are arguing for escalating our military involvement based on a worst-case assumption: that if America leaves quickly, the Apocalypse will follow.

Dreyfuss looks at the bogeyman of Al Qaida setting up a new "caliphate" or a "safe haven" in Iraq:

The idea that al-Qaeda might take over Iraq is nonsensical. Numerous estimates show that the group called Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its foreign fighters comprise only 5 to 10 percent of the Sunni insurgents’ forces. Most Sunni insurgents are simply what Wayne White — who led the State Department’s intelligence effort on Iraq until 2005 — calls POIs, or "pissed-off Iraqis," who are fighting because "they don’t like the occupation." But the foreign terrorist threat is frequently advanced by the Bush administration, often with an even more alarming variant—that al-Qaeda will use Iraq as a headquarters for the establishment of a global caliphate. In December 2005, Rear Admiral William D. Sullivan, vice director for strategic plans and policy within the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered a briefing in which he warned that al-Qaeda hoped to "revive the caliphate," with its capital in Baghdad. President Bush himself has warned darkly that after controlling Iraq, Islamic militants will "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia."

The reality is far different. Even if AQI came to dominate the Sunni resistance, it would be utterly incapable of seizing Baghdad against the combined muscle of the Kurds and the Shiites, who make up four fifths of the country. (The Shiites, in particular, would see the battle against the Sunni extremist AQI—which regards the Shiites as a heretical, non-Muslim sect—as a life-or-death struggle.)

Nor is it likely that AQI would ever be allowed to use the Sunni areas of Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks on foreign targets. In Afghanistan, al-Qaeda had a full-fledged partnership with the Taliban and helped finance the state. In Iraq, the secular Baathists and former Iraqi military officers who lead the main force of the resistance despise AQI, and many of the Sunni tribes in western Iraq are closely tied to Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which is bitterly opposed to al-Qaeda. (my emphasis)

After examining several scary postwar scenarios that war supporters use, John Mueller talks about the complications to diplomacy caused by the neoconservative policy and practice of threatening regime change in Iran and Syria. And he speculates on what the postwar public reaction in the US might be like.

The sorting-out process may be facilitated if, as seems likely, the U.S. reacts to its Middle East misadventure by embracing an Iraq Syndrome reminiscent of the Vietnam Syndrome that restrained America from meddling further in Africa and Southeast Asia, while the Soviet Union foolishly gathered up a set of expensive dependencies there (and in Afghanistan) that hastened the demise of the Cold War.

The American public would probably be quite capable of shrugging off defeat and failure, as it proved in Vietnam as well as in the lesser debacles of Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. And since American casualties are what matter in the U.S., little attention would likely be paid if a civil-war bloodbath developed in Iraq. Accordingly, there would likely be few, if any, calls to send troops, contrary to the current cry of war supporters that if things fall apart we would just have to go in again. Since Iraqi citizens do not vote in American elections, the U.S. government would likely reduce financial support for the Iraqi government after American troops leave.

This process might impel a suitably mellowed country to abandon some of its self-infatuated rhetoric. The United States has become a "superpower" unable to make electricity to work in Baghdad and an "indispensable nation" incapable of garnering international co-operation when it really needs it, and it may come to re-examine its role in the world. (my emphasis)

Tags: iraq, iraq war, john mueller, robert dreyfuss