Matt Yglesias

Adviser: Time to “Declare Victory and Go Home” from Iraq

(dod photo)

This seems like good advice to me:

A senior American military adviser in Baghdad has concluded in an unusually blunt memo that the Iraqi forces suffer from deeply entrenched deficiencies but are now capable of protecting the Iraqi government, and that it is time “for the U.S. to declare victory and go home.”

Prepared by Col. Timothy R. Reese, an adviser to the Iraqi military’s Baghdad command, the memorandum asserts that the Iraqi forces have an array of problems, including corruption, poor management and the inability to resist political pressure from Shiite political parties.

Things have gone better than I expected over the past 12 months, which seems like an excellent chance to take advantage of the situation to cut our losses before any of the long-standing issues with the current Iraqi state create new problems.

Tuesday Screeching Weasel Blogging

The Punk President

I was looking at the archives of Ben Weasel’s blog earlier today for no particularly good reason and came across this September 2006 post about his desire to write a song called “The Surrender Hymn of the Republic” that would be about “giving up on a relationship” and take “the form of a series of sarcastic little barbs designed to mock the standard Leftist line on 9/11, the Iraq War and pretty much anything Bush says or does.” He also explains that he’s “actually written several songs on the theme of modern Leftist idiocy since 9/11 but they were all pretty straightforward attacks on dumb-bell ideology” and he’s very interested in “the notion that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism wouldn’t be a problem if we’d simply sit down and talk with the terrorists.”

At any rate, this struck me as an interesting sign of political change in the United States. Back in 1995’s “I Wanna Be a Homosexual”, being gay was posited as a way to “shock the middle class.” But eleven years later, it was probably the case that espousing a pro-Bush ideology and support for the Iraq War would be a much better way to épater le bourgeois than coming out of the closet.

Was Conquering the Philippines Worth It?

Manila skyline (wikimedia)

Ross Douthat offers a pregnant historical analogy:

These twists and turns make Iraq look less like either Vietnam or World War II — the analogies that politicians and pundits keep closest at hand — and more like an amalgamation of the Korean War and America’s McKinley-era counterinsurgency in the Philippines. Like Iraq, those were murky, bloody conflicts that generated long-term benefits but enormous short-term costs. Like Iraq, they were wars that Americans were eager to forget about as soon as they were finished.

I think the Iraq-Philippines analogy is an interesting one, because it’s something that both proponents and detractors of American imperialism can embrace as illustrative. I recall that George W. Bush himself analogized his imperial adventure in Iraq to McKinley’s in the Pacific. And while the situations don’t bear any resemblance in detail, there is a certain vague similarity in that while I would say counterinsurgency in the Philippines “worked” it’s hard for me to see that it actually achieved anything. I mean, suppose the Philippines had obtained independence from the United States in the 1890s rather than the 1940s. How would my life be worse? How would any American’s life be worse? What “long-term benefits” actually accrued to us as a result of the counterinsurgency effort?

It seems to me that unless you look at victory and conquest as being their own reward, it’s hard to see any. Anti-American rebels lost, but we didn’t really win anything of note. We spent a lot of money, suffered some casualties, killed a lot of people and in exchange got some military bases that were overrun by the Japanese as soon as it looked like they might be strategically useful.

Iraq for the Iraqis

(US Army Photo)

It’s a sign of the diminished role Iraq now plays in US politics that I managed to get through yesterday without writing anything about the historic handover of responsibility to Iraqis, the withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi cities, and the ensuing Iraqi celebration of the end of the daily experience of occupation.

Clearly, though, when you look back at the things liberals like me said about Iraq back in 2007 and thereabouts, you can find a lot of stuff that doesn’t look so much. General Petraeus’ post-midterms revamp of the tactical approach in Iraq achieved gains in security that look a lot more durable than I would have thought possible. At the same point, I think the overarching point I’ve been making about the US presence in Iraq since late 2004 remains incredibly valid—Iraqis don’t want an intrusive American military presence in their country and there’s ultimately no percentage in us trying to buck their will on this point.

It seems to me that if we’d begun to implement a phased withdrawal back in early 2005 when Iraq first got an elected government, we could have had a much better outcome than the one we got. Had we begun to implement one in late 2006 or some time in 2007, then we’d have been leaving a very messy situation behind us. Today in 2009 we’re in a lot of ways back to where we were four years ago—able for American forces to start leaving on a high note, confident that they performed their job with skill, and leaving Iraqi leaders with a handshake.

This Again?

Back in the summer of 2003, the right’s big idea was that the bombing of the UN compound in Iraq was not, as it first seemed, a bad thing. Rather, it actually demonstrated that we were making progress in Iraq and the opposition was growing desperate. My post on that theory is lost to the vicissitudes of linkrot, but it was BS then and it doesn’t sound much more convincing today:

Earlier, Mrs. Clinton described the violence as the last gasp of “rejectionists” who feared that the government would succeed in creating a united and peaceful Iraq. The attacks, she said, are “in an unfortunately tragic way, a signal that the rejectionists fear that Iraq is going in the right direction.”

More likely, the uptick in violence signals exactly what it seems to signal. The surge never produced political reconciliation, and in the absence of political reconciliation violence is resuming. Nir Rosen has an excellent rundown of the background to these incidents. He’s also quite confident that Maliki and his government will prevail in any renewed violent struggle. So in that sense, yes, Clinton may be right to say that this doesn’t augur a return to chaos. But it’s not a sign of progress.

We Have Ways of Making You Bolster Our Erroneous Preconceptions

Now here’s a good reason to torture someone. As explained by Jonathan Landay one important use of torture to the Bush administration was to force detainees to cough up “evidence” of the Iraq/al-Qaeda ties that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. already “knew” existed:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

“While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq,” Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. “The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”

There’s much more in the article. And note that when people say that “torture doesn’t work” as an intelligence-gathering method, the point isn’t that it never produces an accurate piece of information. The point is that its application doesn’t systematically enhance the quality of your intelligence. In this case, for example, not only does torture appear to have vastly eroded key elements of America’s strategy of self-presentation in the world, it contributed to our undertaking a massive policy blunder that led to much more loss of innocent life than occurred on 9/11.

Non-Turnarounds on Afghanistan

Starting in 2002-2003, many Americans were opposed to the war in Iraq. And over time, that group grew to include more people. Since opposition to the war was pretty broad-based, war opponents including people with a great diversity of views on foreign policy and national security questions, including some people on both the right and the left who are very strongly opposed to foreign military operations writ large. All of which is fine. What’s not fine, I think, is the way that a lot of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress are now finding themselves accused of hypocrisy or some sort of opportunistic turnaround for not thinking the same things about Afghanistan as some of their fellow opponents of the war in Iraq. This item from Justin Raimondo at The American Conservative caught my attention in particular since it mentions me by name:

The Center for American Progress, a liberal-Left think tank that sheltered many foreign-policy analysts who opposed the Iraq War and was beginning to develop a comprehensive critique of global interventionism, has recently issued a report on Afghanistan that includes a number of short-term, medium-term, and long-term (ten-year) goals, including among the latter:

* Assist in creating an Afghan state that is able to defend itself internally and externally, and that can provide for the basic needs of its own people.

* Prepare for the full military withdrawal from Afghanistan alongside continued diplomatic and economic measures to promote the sustainable security of Afghanistan.

Simply substitute Iraq for Afghanistan, and what we get is the war policy of the Bush era. That the center is run by John Podesta, who served as Obama’s transition chief, is perhaps explanation enough for the complete turnaround. One wonders, however, if the center’s more anti-interventionist scholars, such as Matthew Yglesias, whose popular blog has attracted a substantial audience, will be forced to toe the new line—or be forced out.

As I’ve said before there’s no need to find an “explanation” for the “turnaround.” The authors of CAP’s recent report on Afghanistan have long held the view that we should send more troops to Afghanistan. This is what they wanted in 2005, it’s what they wanted in 2006, it’s what they wanted in 2007 (and again). This became Barack Obama’s position during the 2008 campaign, and became his policy as President in 2009, but this is a case of Obama coming around to something similar to the CAP view and not the reverse.

Will I be toeing the line? Well, I think Raimondo and I won’t be in complete agreement about this issue, just as we’ve never been in complete agreement about the engagement of American military force abroad. But people are invited to read my posts on Afghanistan and draw their own conclusions. I would say that I’m cautiously supportive of what the administration’s outlined but I’m worried about the logic of escalation and think it’s necessary to put some meaningful benchmarks in place lest we get stuck in a hopeless quagmire.

But on the general subject of “intervention” I think it’s helpful to draw distinctions. This week I wrote one column arguing against folks who want to invade Somalia and another about how the defense budget should be cut. I’ve inveighed many times against the advocates of preventive military strikes against North Korea and Iran. And in general, I’m dubious that the United States should be using force outside of the cases of self-defense, defense of an ally, or a mission authorized through the United Nations Security Council. That makes me a lot less of an interventionist than most of the powers that be in Washington, though still more of an interventionist than many other people. But it’s not a form of hypocrisy; it’s a different opinion. Both the legal status and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan are different from the situation in Iraq.

Iraq’s Still Unreconciled Political Conflicts

CAP’s Brian Katulis offers his take on what the past weekend’s crack in the edifice of sectarian relations in Iraq:

The stated goal of the surge, according to the Bush administration, was to reduce violence in order to help Iraq’s political factions bridge their divides over power, but that has simply not occurred in a meaningful way. Iraq remains plagued by enduring political divisions, as I argued last September in a paper on Iraq’s political transition after the surge.

A key tactic used in the Iraq surge could essentially be likened to what was done in the run-up to the current financial and banking crisis in the United States—steps were taken to make things look better than they actually were, while real problems lurked beneath unaddressed. A day of reckoning must at some point occur, because the structural imbalances of power in Iraq will naturally address themselves, as sure as the force of gravity that keeps us all sitting in our chairs. The inexorable force in Iraq is demographics. Iraq is a Shia-majority country now governed by Shia factions, with nominal participation by Sunni forces. This represents a fundamental shift from the balance of power during decades of Saddam Hussein’s rule, which ended nearly six years ago. Ever since his regime’s ouster in 2003, the fundamental story has been one in which Iraqis adjust themselves to the new reality of Shia rule in Iraq.

This weekend’s incident was the first crack in a shaky foundation constructed by the 2007 surge of U.S. troops—a foundation that largely glossed over long-standing political rivalries. And frankly this tension between the central government and these independent militia groups is less dangerous than the growing tensions between Arab and Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.

As if often the case in Iraq, one can read this two ways. The potential deterioration in the situation could be used as a pretext to backslide on the Obama administration’s commitment to abide by the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement and leave Iraq. Alternatively, you could see the continuing unstable nature of the Iraqi polity as a reason that we shouldn’t be endlessly optimistic about the idea that tens of thousands of U.S. troops can stay in Iraq safely. Personally, I’m inclined toward the second reading. But the point is about larger strategic vision—some see it as in American interests to maintain a large military force in Iraq come what may; others, the people who are right about this, see that idea as contrary to our interests. Either way, it’s useful to recall that despite “surge” triumphalism, the bulk of the underlying issues in Iraq remain unresolved.

Sons of Iraq Unraveling?

Back during the high tide of the “is the surge working?” debate, I was among those who kept worrying that the policy of funding Sunni “Sons of Iraq” militias who hadn’t by any means reconciled themselves (or vice-versa) to the idea of a Shiite-led Iraqi state seemed like something likely to blow up at the end of the day. Then it kept not happening, and attention sort of shifted to other grounds. But now as DDay observes, we’re seeing some blowups as Sunnis are not getting paid money they were promised, the government arrested a Sons of Iraq leader, and now some SOI folks have staged an armed uprising.

Perhaps this will boil over, more likely some way will be found to put a lid on things. But either way, fundamental questions about the nature of the Iraqi state continue to be unresolved. Part of the issue over “residual forces” is whether or not we think it’s smart to have the US military perpetually playing referee in these kind of disputes. Doing so will give us continued “influence” in the country and the region, but the costs will be high and the concrete benefits to American citizens are hard to see.

Obama Administration Goals in Afghanistan

One important question that’s been kicking around in Washington is how will the administration define its goals in Afghanistan. Now fresh in my inbox from the State Department is the answer:

Achieving our core goal is vital to U.S. national security. It requires, first of all, realistic and achievable objectives. These include:

• Disrupting terrorist networks in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan to degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks.

• Promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people and can eventually function, especially regarding internal security, with limited international support.
• Developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces that can lead the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism fight with reduced U.S. assistance.
• Assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan and a vibrant economy that provides opportunity for the people of Pakistan.
• Involving the international community to actively assist in addressing these objectives for Afghanistan and Pakistan, with an important leadership role for the UN.

I think this falls somewhere between what those pushing for a paring-back of goals have had in mind and what the neocons pushing back against that talk have been saying. Of course, the neocon adoption of maximalist objectives in Afghanistan is a bit of an after-the-fact phenomenon since back in the winter of 2001-2002 this was the crew that pushed, successfully, for us to ignore Afghanistan in favor of a senseless war in Iraq. So for the past seven years we’ve been adrift in Afghanistan without real policy objectives of any kind.

Generals Perturbed By Senators’ Obstruction of Chris Hill

I don’t think I’ve posted yet on John McCain and Lindsey Graham acting to hold up veteran diplomat Christopher Hill’s appointment to serve as Ambassador to Iraq. Hill’s a career foreign service officer whose views are sufficiently compatible with conservative politics that George W. Bush made him Ambassador to Poland, Ambassador to Korea, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. But neocons are mad that in that last role he helped avert a war with North Korea, so they’re holding up his appointment. There’s no real prospect of blocking him, but McCain and Graham are managing to annoy some of their erstwhile friends. Laura Rozen reports:

There’s one as yet unremarked constituency increasingly disturbed by some Republican senators’ efforts to block the confirmation of former North Korea envoy Christopher Hill to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq: the U.S. military.

Sources tell The Cable that Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, top Iraq commander Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are frustrated by the delay in getting a U.S. ambassador confirmed and into place in Iraq, and support Hill’s confirmation proceeding swiftly.

That said, the nominal source of opposition to Hill is not his work in North Korea but his lack of experience in the Arab world. I think this is a concern that deserves to be taken seriously, but anyone who’s serious about it would recognize that it’s a systemic issue. One might think that the Foreign Service ought to be organized around regional or cultural areas of specialty. But that’s not generally how our system, which prefers to emphasize a form of generalized diplomatic expertise, works. It may be worth reconsidering this choice as a general matter. But there’s no reason to single out one senior FSO for problems here, and everyone knows that their real issue is Cheneyite opposition to the North Korea policy that Hill, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush followed at the end of the Bush administration.

Ricks’ The Gamble Leaves Out Iraqis

When any book comes to be as highly praised as Thomas Ricks’ The Gamble, my natural instinct is to start looking for the flaws the praisers are leaving out. And Spencer Ackerman, while not denying the book’s virtues, delivers the goods in his review for The National:

We do not learn from The Gamble what the Iraqis – or any Iraqi factions – think of the surge. At the beginning of the book, Ricks prints an account of how an Iraqi witness to the 2005 Marine massacre in Haditha viewed the horror. An analogous Iraqi viewpoint might have complemented his description of an initiative known as “gated communities”, in which Petraeus’s subordinates built huge blast walls to separate Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad from Shiite ones. Petraeus meant the barriers to reduce sectarian violence, but Sunni residents of the Adhimiya neighbourhood protested loudly that the US was ghettoising Baghdad. Al Maliki publicly sided with the protesters, but the walls kept going up. Similarly, Odierno recognised that fighting in the “belts” around Baghdad was key to reducing violence inside the city (slyly, Ricks compares him to Saddam Hussein, who adopted a similar strategy). This peri-urban fighting was fierce and sustained, even if it helped protect the population from the insurgency. How did the Iraqis view this predicament? [...]

It’s possible that Ricks’s blindness to the SOFA reflects that of his sources. During the month when the SOFA was signed, Odierno tells him, “I would like to see a… force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000” in 2014 or 2015 – years after the SOFA mandates the US must leave. A discomfort with the prospect of US forces leaving Iraq permeates the quotes from Odierno’s deputies. “The American military is trying to persuade the American people that this is going to take a long time,” Odierno aide Maj James Powell says. Emma Sky, a British liberal who improbably serves as Odierno’s political adviser – and who took the job, she says, to see if the US could “exit with some dignity” – tells Ricks: “We have to buy time in the US to complete the mission.” There is no recognition evident in their quotes that it is the Iraqis, not the Americans, who ultimately decide when the mission is completed.

To lean a bit speculatively, but not too much I would say, I think we can conclude that the limits of Ricks’ perspective reflect the limited perspective of his sources—sources within the U.S. military. And that this, in turn, reflects the fairly inherent limits of an imperial enterprise. The American military forces charged with administering Iraq report to politicians in Washington, DC who report to voters and interest-groups scattered throughout the country. Whether or not one acknowledges Iraqi opinion to be, in some sense, the “center of gravity” of one’s counterinsurgency campaign the fact of the matter remains that one’s key bases of support are all back home. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pose a much more credible threat to cut off your supply lines than does the insurgency. Naturally, then, the focus remains to a large extent on sentiment back home.

Meanwhile, for Iraq to be run decently, it’s really necessary that Iraq be run by people who are accountable to Iraqis. Which means that Iraq needs to not be run by foreigners. Which is precisely why Iraqis from across the spectrum were able to unite around the principle that the Americans have to go. And it appears that the new Obama administration recognizes that reality and is planning to leave. And thanks to the security gains associated with the surge, we’ll get to do so with our heads held much higher than they would have been had we started leaving in 2006. But the strategic, human, and material costs of dragging things out have been high and all the successes of the surge period didn’t change the fact that in the end we need to go.

Writing Iraq Out of the Fall of the DLC

It seems Al From is stepping down as head of the Democratic Leadership Committee in favor of Bruce Reed who’s a font of clever small-bore policy ideas:

From always relished the conflicts. Lately, though, the problem has not been these intramural quarrels so much as obscurity. Barack Obama ascended to the presidency without much debate over whether he was a “new” or “old” Democrat, and did not seem much interested in the DLC—spurning the Clinton precedent and never addressing the group’s annual conventions.

Reed, a close friend and one-time co-author with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, said he plans to run a leaner organization focused less on internal party battles and more on “post-partisan” policy ideas.

Most of this article I agree with, and I think Reed taking over is a good idea. There’s some valuable work to be done in that kind of policy space, and I hope a Reed-helmed DLC makes it. But it’s ridiculous to discuss the waning influence of the DLC without talking about the war in Iraq. Back in 1992, I don’t think anyone thought that being a “DLC Democrat” entailed the idea that it would be good to respond to a terrorist attack with a unilateral preemptive invasion of a country that wasn’t involved in the attack. I don’t think anyone thought that in 1993. Or in 1994. Or in 1995. Or in 1996. Or in 1997. Or in 1998. Or in 1999. Or in 2000. Or in 2001. As of 2001, guys like Al Gore and Howard Dean were DLC Democrats in good standing. And that’s because for all this time friends and foes of the “centrist” tendency in Democratic Party politics didn’t see a very specific and weird foreign policy doctrine as the essence of what the centrist tendency was all about. But starting in the fall of 2001 and continuing through 2003 and 2004 the DLC completely overhauled its brand around a war focus, loudly and frequently complaining that expressing doubts about the wisdom of such a unilateral preemptive invasion would condemn the Democratic Party to electoral oblivion. This was a huge tactical and substantive error and opened up a lot of space for other groups to blossom and fill some of the valuable functions that people once associated with the DLC.

I’ve complained about this repeatedly with regard to the post-hoc history of the Obama–Clinton primary race, but I think political journalists have spent an enormous amount of time forgetting about the intra-party fight over Iraq that Democrats had in 2003 and the following few years. But this was a big, bitter battle with a lot of consequences (including ironic ones—progressive doubts about Clinton’s national security judgment drove a series of events that ended with her being put in charge of foreign policy) that linger to this day.

Obama Moves Decisively to End the War in Iraq

Upon closer examination, the Obama Iraq announcement turns out to be more clear-cut and less in need of analysis than I’d initially thought:

What threw me off initially was that he’d slightly pushed back his already somewhat-murky promise to withdraw “combat forces” to a 19-month schedule rather than a 16-month schedule. That’s a little disappointing, but the precise calendar was always much less important than the question of what happens next. And here the news is extremely good. As Spencer Ackerman writes:

For the first time as president, Obama attempted to resolve ambiguities about a full withdrawal along the Dec. 2011 framework that the Iraqi government insisted upon in last year’s Status of Forces Agreement, committing himself to its mechanisms. Some on the left have wondered warily why Obama hadn’t made such a public commitment. Those worries will probably end with this line: “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. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned.”

Larry Korb observes:

By strengthening our commitment to leave, and setting an earlier deadline for the end of combat operations, Obama has also taken an essential step in building trust with the Iraqi government and people. Even after the signing of the SOFA, some Iraqis publicly doubted whether the United States would leave the country. Obama’s announcement today is a definitive sign that he does not intend to keep forces in Iraq indefinitely, and will work toward fully turning over our responsibilities to the Iraqi government and security forces.

This is huge, and calls for some Rancid:

Now if only he could fix the banking system.

Obama’s Iraq Announcement

For the record, I am aware that the administration made a big announcement about Iraq today. But I’m pretty busy attending a conference so I haven’t really had the time to digest what’s going on, and I’d rather offer too-slow commentary on it than low-quality commentary.

Over There

“Suicide Attack on Iraq Pilgrimage Kills 30″

At this point, I have no doubt that the doves are doomed to lose the argument as to whether or not the “surge” was the right policy to pursue in January 2007. At the same time, I have no doubt that had we instead pursued a policy of strategic redeployment starting in January 2007 and the exact same situation had played out, that the facts on the ground would be cited as evidence that the doves were wrong to leave behind an Iraq torn by violence, riven by factionalism, and governed by Iran-linked parties.

Alan Wolfe on Liberal Hawks

Alan Wolfe has an interesting essay on liberal hawks (via Jon Chait) that I think winds up going a bit awry by running together humanitarian arguments about the desirability of military intervention in particular (whether or not the arguer wanted to invade Iraq), with national security arguments about the desirability of invading Iraq that were offered by liberals (whether or not the arguer was making any distinctively “liberal” appeals). Thus you get a strange effort to simultaneously treat Samantha Power, who didn’t want to invade Iraq, and Kenneth Pollack, who wasn’t saying anything particularly liberal about Iraq. The fact that Wolfe doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the narrow national security issues would further argue for just leaving it aside.

What I think’s missing from Wolfe’s account of the “humanitarian” case is the extent to which it was an idiosyncratic case. Because the proponents of this argument were influential in the media, lots of people in the media are very aware of it and talk about it a lot. But it’s not as if the world’s major human rights organizations were clamoring for this invasion. Nor is it the case that governments known for their commitment to international humanitarian causes (Norway, say) were pushing for war. You didn’t see international civil society mobilizing for the liberation of Iraq the way you saw people all around the world standing in solidarity with the people of South Africa. And you certainly didn’t see the Arab public sphere praising George W. Bush’s bold intervention on behalf of Iraqi well-being. What you saw was a handful of writers plus Bernard Kouchner making this case. You also saw a lot of people who believed they had independent security-based reasons for favoring war offering up humanitarian rationales as a kind of “gravy” and/or noting the alleged “irony” that liberals who claim to support humanitarian causes were against launching an unprovoked war.

I think that if you look at history, you’ll find that wars of aggression are essentially always cloaked in high ideals. Certainly the classic imperialism of nineteenth century Europe was associated with an enormous amount of idealistic rhetoric about civilizing missions and improving the well-being of the to-be-conquered population. It’s difficult to say, in retrospect, how much of that was sincere and how much merely cynical. But surely it wasn’t all cynical. But sincerity ultimately does you little good—aggressive warfare combines lawlessness, violence, and coercion and that’s not a very good recipe for humanitarianism. It’s one thing to go to war in self-defense or to see another group fighting a war of self-defense and come to their assistance, and another thing entirely to launch a war allegedly on behalf of another population.

Obama, Odierno, and Iraq

The New York Times has an article about some pushback President Obama is getting from some military figures, notably General Odierno in Iraq, regarding his plan for a relatively rapid redeployment of forces out of the theater. Basically, Odierno thinks we need to go slower. But while I can sympathize with General Odierno’s desire for maximum flexibility and the largest quantity of resources possible, the president needs to consider the wider strategic perspective and the large global and regional costs of maintaining an indefinite military presence.

But even with regard to Iraq here, Odierno seems to me to be thinking too much in narrow operational terms. The “go slow” idea is that we should stay in Iraq in force through the elections, to maximize security and give us flexibility in terms of figuring out what to do down the road. The trouble with this perspective is that it fails to recognize that U.S. military policy is one of the important inputs into the Iraqi political process. As Marc Lynch says, going slow will poison the wells for the summer referendum on the Status of Forces Agreement, make the United States look untrustworthy, enhance the hostility of the Iraqi public to American forces, and destabilize the political situation. Ultimately, we’ll just wind up being forced out anyway. But it’ll have to be done more chaotically, and without the goodwill and spirit of mutualism that the SOFA embodies. A relatively rapid move toward withdrawal will complicate the operational situation, but it will also serve as a “downpayment” on further withdrawal down the road and establish American seriousness about getting to the point where Iraq is a real sovereign country without a foreign occupying army.

In a broader context, I think it’s just difficult to overstate the importance of ending the war and occupation in Iraq to advancing America’s broader international agenda. There were a lot of things wrong with the Bush administration’s policy, but in concrete terms the world is looking for a new approach to detention and torture, a new approach to Israel and Palestine, and a new approach to Iraq. Obama has acted decisively on the first item, has shown a lot of promise on the second, and needs to follow through on the third. Diplomacy with Iran, a renewed focus on the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation, a rapprochement with Europe, a partnership with China and our allies in Asia on the global economic situation, etc. all require us to get out of an Iraq-focused foreign policy. And the complexities of Iraq are such that the best way to do that is to get out of Iraq.

SOFA Needs Congressional Approval

Peter Juul observes for the Wonk Room that much as President Bush really should have sought congressional approval for the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq, President Obama really should seek congressional approval for the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq.

Obama Still Ending the War

This should hardly come as a surprise since if you ask me Barack Obama has always been pretty clear about it, but for the record he’s still planning to end the war in Iraq:

his first full day as president, Barack Obama will meet with high-ranking military officers to discuss the Iraq war, a conflict he has vowed to end after six years of fighting, a top adviser to Obama said Saturday.

Wednesday’s meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military commanders and aides will fulfill a key campaign promise and bring the war back to the political forefront after months of being overshadowed by the economy.

Michèle Flournoy, who Obama has tapped to be Undersecretary of Defense for Policy (the #3 job in the Pentagon), was involved with the production of a think tank report that was relatively hawkish on Iraq in terms of residual forces, but appeared to back away from that position at her confirmation hearings.

Gulf Stability and the New Iraq

One way to think about U.S. policy toward the Persian Gulf since the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War is that we’ve been struggling to create a situation in which Iraq is strong enough to avoid being dominated by Iran while not being strong enough to dominate Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Basically, right now there are four oil rich countries all very close to each other and we want to make sure that they remain four separate countries so that none of them becomes too strong. The situation is one of enhanced concern because not only are these countries oil rich, but they share important cultural affinities that make successful domination seem more plausible. So when we feared that Iran was going to win the Iran-Iraq War, we backed Iraq. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, we rushed to the defense of Saudi Arabia and pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. We then shifted to a policy of “dual-containment.” But by the end of the Clinton administration, officials such as Kenneth Pollack who’d been charged with implementing the policy became convinced that it was slowly unraveling and that we should take advantage of the political opportunity presented by 9/11 to mount an invasion of Iraq and resolve the issue. As of now, it remains fairly mysterious what exactly George W. Bush was thinking when he invaded Iraq, but this line of thought was evidently influential among Democratic supporters of the war (not just Pollack, but Hillary Clinton and most of the advisers she’s bringing with her to the State Department), so my best guess is that his administration was thinking roughly the same thing.

And whatever else you may say about the war in Iraq, based on my colleague Peter Juul’s informative take on Iraq’s recent weapons-buying spree we may have hit the sweet spot. Peter writes:

By the time these sales are complete (~2011), Iraq will on paper have an army quantitatively and qualitatively equivalent to those of its neighbors. Its 2,250+ U.S.-upgraded T-72 and M1A1M tanks will be quantitatively equal and qualitatively superior to the armor forces fielded by Iran. Its armor forces will be quantitatively superior to those of Saudi Arabia, while being qualitatively equivalent (if slightly smaller than those) of Turkey’s. The Iraqi Army’s biggest handicap in conventional warfare will be its lack of artillery.

By comparison, the Iraqi Air Force will be relatively small compared to those of its neighbors. Should the potential F-16 deal go through, Iraq will have just 36 modern combat aircraft – compared to 254 in Saudi Arabia and 243 in Turkey. Its air force will be comparable to those of smaller regional power such as Kuwait (39 modern fighters) or Bahrain (21 modern fighters). While Iraq will have a greater number of modern combat aircraft than Iran (36 to 25), Iran will have a greater number of obsolete aircraft.

That combination of strong land forces and a weak air force ought, it seems to me, to create the desired outcome. Such an Iraqi military can defend itself against Iran, but would have enormous difficulty mounting offensive operations. But one has to wonder how stable this dynamic is. For one thing, there continues to be a risk that Iraq’s central government will remain hopelessly divided and ineffectual, which would make the possession of tanks essentially useless in preventing Iranian political domination. Alternatively, the Iraqi government could pull itself together in which case it ought to be be able to build up its stockpile of modern aircraft in due time. And the underlying balance of power calculus that Kuwait has lots of oil, few people, and a government with little legitimacy will stay in place.

But even if the new balance stays in place, it’s worth reflecting on the enormous cost that our past 25-30 years worth of fiddling around with this has entailed. We’ve done it, more or less, to prevent any one country from securing monopoly power in the oil markets. That’s not a totally crazy objective. But truly vast sums have been invested in this goal—the approximately $1 trillion in Bush’s latest adventure is just a small part—sums that could, instead, have been spent on the goal of moving the US economy to a place where it’s less impacted by fluctuations in the oil market. For the costs we’ve been willing to incur in the Gulf, it would have been easy to substantially reduce the oil-intensity of our economy. That would have accomplished much the same economic goals, but also entailed significant advantages in terms of public health and the environment. To say nothing of the people killed or maimed by the bullets and explosives.

Rice Slams Non-Inclusive United States

The Washington Post writes up an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

Arguing that Iraq shows signs of becoming an inclusive state — it even “declared Christmas a national holiday” — Rice said that if the country eventually emerges as a democratic, multiethnic state that has friendly ties with the United States, “that will be more important than what anybody thought in 2002 or 2003.”

My colleague Amanda Terkel observes that here in the US we don’t meet Rice’s standard of inclusiveness. Christmas is a national holiday, of course, but this is a majority Christian country. Religious minority groups get no federal holidays for our key religious observances. Nevertheless, one suspects that in the ways that matter the US is still a more inclusive country than Rice’s Mesopotamian paradise.

The Success of the Surge

Anthony Shadid has a great story in The Washington Post that offers a microcosm look at the kind of compromises by which we’ve brought down the level of violence in Iraq. Specifically, he takes at Nadhim Khalil, the bossman of a Sunni Arab town called Thuluyah. I would say that these compromises have been worth making, but they really don’t look much like victory:

His zeal soon drew him into the ranks of an incipient insurgency, leading 30 armed men and meeting colleagues in Baghdad, where he sometimes sought shelter at the Um al-Qura mosque. He ventured to the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, towns in Diyala province, and across the border to Syria. The U.S. military jailed him twice: as prisoner No. 159705 when he spent nearly six months in the massive prison at Abu Ghraib in 2004, and as No. 200331 when he was incarcerated for a similar stint at Camp Cropper in Baghdad nearly two years later. By his count, U.S. soldiers searched his house 67 times. They occasionally brought dogs, he said, to inspect his mosque.

By August 2006, after a meeting in Homs, Syria, he had joined al-Qaeda in Iraq, a homegrown Sunni movement that U.S. officials say is led by foreigners and that embraced a radical strain of Islam.

Later, he abandoned that path. But he’s not really repentant about it, he’s practical. He’s a successful case of appeasement. And notwithstanding the extent to which he’s been successfully appeased, he’s not a cuddly pro-Western democrat:

But he still calls himself an Islamist, and to his followers, his words remain harsh.

“Our country is occupied and our bodies are torn apart, but we shouldn’t forget our families in Palestine,” he proclaimed in a sermon recently to an overflow crowd in his austere mosque, its white walls gouged by shrapnel from his assassination attempt.

“Those sons of monkeys, enemies of God and killers of prophets,” he declared, his voice rising in denunciation of Jews, “are killing our brothers and sisters in Palestine.”

The city has a city council. There’s also an organization of tribal elders. But real political power grows from the barrel of a gun, and he has it, the result of his command of a militia that wears “mismatched uniforms or civilian clothes” and is loyal to him rather than to the Iraqi state or the formal city government. The militia’s efficacy stems in part from the fact that the US military collaborates with them. This is all definitely better than what was happening before. But the irony of the conservative celebration of General Petraeus and the past two years’ worth of efforts in Iraq is the extent to which it goes against everything the right normally believes about the conduct of these things. We haven’t defeated an insurgent like Khalik — we’ve barely even co-opted him. Rather, we’ve agreed to help him gain power and in exchange his men don’t try to kill our men.

Operation Safe Haven Iraq 2009

The issue of the desperate plight facing America’s Iraqi collaborators has gotten some fitful attention over the years. But it’s never really been possible to do anything about it, because for the United States to implement a serious policy in this regard would require an administration that’s not committed to trying to maintain the illusion that a happy, stable, pro-American democracy is right around the corner. Fortunately, we’ll have just such an administration in two weeks.

Thus, the time is right for things like this proposal from Brian Katulis and Natalie Ondiak for an emergency airlift to get these endangered people to safety. Of course that will still leave the broader issue of Iraq’s millions of displaced people, but it’d be a start.

Bush: Compassion is Good

Sure am gonna miss this guy:

President Bush called for a “compassionate” Republican Party and warned against the GOP becoming “anti-immigrant” in one of his last interviews as president, defending his vision of the party, which has become unpopular among some Republicans.

No word yet on how launching unprovoked wars and torturing people fit into the compassion frame.

UPDATE: I forgot about the time Bush showed compassion by vetoing health care for poor children.