I am by nature an optimist but frankly I do not see much good lying in wait in 2007. Peace shows no sign of breaking out anywhere.

In Sri Lanka, the conflict between the Tamil Tiger separatists and the government seems to be intensifying again, with the attempts at talks by the Norwegian mediators going nowhere.

The situation in Iraq shows no signs of easing and the idea of escalating the war there by sending in more US trooops seems to be the option that is being favored by Bush.

Afghanistan seems to be unraveling, with some analysts foreseeing increased strength for the Taliban and that the US will be defeated by the insurgency there.

All these things have been steadily worsening situations. What alarmed me over the break was a new conflict, the sudden invasion by Ethiopian troops into Somalia, to depose the government of the Union of Islamic Courts. At first blush, this seems like a regional conflict that has nothing to do with the US but in actuality the US is quite deeply involved in it and this recent development is not a good sign, since it indicates a further escalation.

To understand what is involved there, we first need to look at the map, which immediately shows why the US is concerned about what goes on there. Somalia occupies a very strategic position on the horn of Africa. It overlooks crucial bodies of water (the Red Sea and Arabian Sea) across which lie Saudi Arabia and Yemen and the Gulf states.

Then we need to look at the history of the country. Somalia has been a country with an unstable government for some time, battling with its neighbor Ethiopia, suppressing secessionist movements, and subject to periods of being ruled by military coup leaders like Mohammed Siad Barre (1970-1991), and after he was overthrown, being in a state of near anarchy, with warlords and clan leaders battling for supremacy.

In 2004 a truce was cobbled together and a shaky transitional government was formed by the warlords, but it failed to establish any security or provide basic services. In June 2006, this transitional government was overthrown by an Islamist group that seized control of most of the country and the capital Mogadishu. It crushed the power of the warlords and set up the government called the Union of Islamic Courts and managed to bring some sort of order and security. In many ways, the UIC reminds me of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a group that advocates enforcement of a strict Islamic code on its people but is also able to provide security and basic services. It puts the Somali people in the tough position of having to balance the disadvantages of strict religious rules enforced in all aspects of life against the advantage of security and the promise of a reasonably ordered society.

It is the UIC government that was routed by the Ethiopian armies over Christmas. Its followers have dispersed but not disarmed. The Ethiopian armies have restored the fragile transitional government that was dominated by the corrupt warlords that was routed by the UIC six months earlier.

Here is the danger. It is clear that the Ethiopian government, which is pro-US and whose powerful military is supplied by the US, is acting as a proxy for the US in this conflict, although they have their own goals as well. But Ethiopia has its own internal ethnic problems as well as a long-standing border conflict with its northern neighbor Eritrea (which broke away from Ethiopia in 1993) and its government has a reputation for brutality. Furthermore, Ethiopia has had wars with Somalia in the past so they are not likely to been by the Somalis as a disinterested party.

The Ethiopians have indicated that they will stay in Somalia as long as the weak transitional government needs them but the history of what happens to foreign invading forces who don’t leave immediately is not a pleasant one, as we should have all learned from the bitter lessons of history but which countries seem to repeatedly ignore.

What happens if the UIC supporters, like the Taliban in Afghanistan, regroup and wage an insurgency against the Ethiopian forces, as they have threatened to do? There are already signs that this is their plan. The ability of the Iraqi insurgency to hold off the US forces cannot help but encourage them in the belief that they can do the same to the Ethiopians. If the Ethiopians start sustaining losses in a guerilla war, what are the options available to them and the US? Have the Ethiopians withdraw, allowing the UIC to regain power in a country that has great strategic value? Or reinforce support for the Ethiopians and give them the green light to unleash massive casualties in an attempt to eliminate all UIC sympathizers? Or even directly send in US forces? The US navy is already involved and acting in concert with Ethiopian forces.

The ethnic and religious and clan politics of Somalia is, if you can imagine it, even more complicated than in Iraq. (See this excellent analysis of the Somali situation by Eric Margolis. Justin Raimondo also provides some useful background and history.) By throwing its support behind the corrupt and warlord-backed transitional government (the very warlords who were behind the killing of 18 US troops in 1993 that was dramatized in Black Hawk Down), the US has reversed course, deciding that the warlords it once opposed and hunted down are now its friends, or at least preferable to the Islamists.

If there is one lesson that Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught is to tread very warily into the sectarian disputes of other countries. The US in its seeming determination to prevent an Islamic government emerging in the strategic horn of Africa has, through its proxy Ethiopia, got involved in another dangerous and volatile situation that does not look at all good for the future.

I fear that the people of Somalia are going to end up like the beleaguered people of Afghanistan, constantly buffeted by outside powers in a geostrategic game. And the US is opening up a third front of involvement in an Islamic country even while the other two fronts are going badly.

Not a good way to start 2007.

(Due to the holidays, I will be taking a break from blogging.

Today’s is reprinted from a year ago, since I don’t think I achieved any of last year’s resolutions, although some I may never know due to government secrecy.

New posts will begin on Wednesday, January 3, 2007.)

A long time ago, President Nixon, descending into paranoia, maintained an “enemies list” that was leaked to the press. But Nixon had by then become so unpopular that being on Nixon’s enemies list was actually seen as a badge of honor. Humorist Art Buchwald expressed his outrage at not making the list, despite all the articles he had written making fun of Nixon. Buchwald said that as a result of this omission, his wife was being snubbed by society and he could not get the best tables in restaurants, which were being reserved only for people on the list. “What kind of government is this” he fumed “that does not even know who its real enemies are?”
[Read more…]

There might still be options that are good for the Iraqi people but to achieve them we would have to forego the idea that the US can continue to occupy and control that country. One such option is to begin withdrawing all US forces immediately in as orderly a manner as possible while spending a huge amount of money to help rebuild the destroyed infrastructure of that country.

The reasoning behind this argument is that although there are no guarantees that it will succeed, people who have something of their own that they would regret losing are more likely to want to preserve it. Nothing more surely drives people to destruction and violence than the feeling that there is no hope for the future and that things are just going to get worse. This is what results in people being apathetic and fearful about, or giving tacit support to, the armed groups roaming the country wreaking havoc.
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So what went wrong with the US plans for establishing a client state in Iraq? When historians look back on Iraq, they may well point to two key decisions: the first was to not go through the tried and true method of instigating a coup by military officers friendly to the US, and then after making the decision to mount an invasion, making the fateful decision in the immediate aftermath to disband the Iraqi army and the Baathist administrative structure that was running the country.

With the army and the Baathist structures still in place, it might have been possible to maintain order and stability in those crucial first few weeks after the invasion, to provide the Iraqi people with the day-to-day security they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein but without the political repression. Then once an orderly transition was achieved, it may have been possible to hand over power to a client Iraqi government that would allow the US considerable influence, but without the Iraqi people feeling that they were being directly dominated by a foreign power.

But once the Iraqi military and administrative structure was summarily dismantled, like Humpty Dumpty it could not be put together again. With the levels of anarchy and civil war rising as a result of this power vacuum, this leaves the US in the current mess where it can neither stay nor leave without appearing to lose.

So who was responsible for that disastrous decision to disband the army and the Baathist structure? The actual order was given by Coalition Provisional Authority leader L. Paul Bremer but it seems like this was too big a decision to have been made on the fly by someone at his level. One has to suspect that it was signed off at the highest levels of government, at least by Rumsfeld and Bush, and going all the way up to Cheney.

But it has long been established that no one in this administration admits to any mistakes. We have never been told what they might have done differently knowing what they know now. With an almost religious certainty they insist that they made the right calls all the way down the line.

But this is belied by the fact that the rosy predictions of success in Iraq have proven to be tragically wrong. Consider these predictions, all made in 2003 prior to the war’s commencement:

* Feb. 7, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy: “It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”

* March 4, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a breakfast with reporters: “What you’d like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. . . . Iraq is much weaker than they were back in the ’90s,” when its forces were routed from Kuwait.

* March 11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars: “The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator.”

* March 16, Vice President Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . . . I think it will go relatively quickly, . . . (in) weeks rather than months.”

Now that things have started to go terribly wrong, those who enthusiastically supported the war and still think it was a great idea initially placed the blame on the media or the feckless allies of ‘Old Europe” like France and Germany for not bailing the US out its mess (the latter being a curious charge since those countries predicted that invading Iraq would be a mess) but those attempts did not gain any traction.

Now they have split into two camps as far as assigning blame goes. There are those who say that the administration has bungled the conduct of the post-invasion occupation and now blame Rumsfeld and even Bush. (See here and here.) But others cannot bring themselves to turn on their idols, so their fingers are being pointed at either the Iraqi or American people.

The Iraqis are being blamed for being ungrateful wretches who are actually going to the extent of attacking the very troops who overthrew Saddam Hussein. Some of the people who blame the Iraqis are even calling on the US to teach especially the ungrateful Sunnis a lesson by throwing all its support to those Shia forces that are engaged in killing Sunnis. Of course, this kind of shallow thinking overlooks the fact that many of the Shia (such as the followers of Muqtada al Sadr) are also hostile to the US presence and have carried out attacks on the US. Also the Shia tend to be friendly towards Iran so backing the Shia forces actually strengthens Iran in the region, which is hardly consistent with the grand goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein as the first step in a sweep through the Middle East that had Iran as the next target.

Those advocates who suggest that since the Iraqis are so ungrateful the US should simply encourage them to kill each other also ignore the enormous debt that the US owes the Iraqi people. The US helped Saddam Hussein come to power and actively supported him during the time of his internal repressions and in his tragic war against Iran. The US instigated and controlled the sanctions against Iraq from 1991 that reduced Iraq from a prosperous and advanced society to an impoverished one by the time of the invasion in 2003, resulting in the deaths of an enormous number of Iraqis due to the lack of food and medicine and other basic services. And the US has now, by its invasion in 2003, created conditions of anarchy and lawlessness and an additional huge number of deaths, as was seen by the Lancet study.

Those who are snarling at the Iraqis and calling for them to be punished for their ingratitude remind me of the psychology of people who take out their rage on their helpless pets or on infants who don’t stop crying. There is something about seeing oneself as being very powerful and yet not being able to get others to do what you want them to do that drive some people into an impotent rage and lash out destructively.

The other tack that is being taken is to blame the American people. This has happened before, during Vietnam. When wars don’t go well, it is tempting for those in power to say that it is because the people did not support it enough. The war was a great idea, the political and military leadership was perfect, but the people somehow let them down.

Stephen Colbert quotes and then hilariously satirizes those who takes this route, saying: “American people, you are losing this war. . .American people, you should be ashamed! The President went off and bit off a big piece of the Middle East, and like an eagle, brought it back to the nest, and he’s regurgitating it into your mouths. Why won’t you swallow? When history looks back at the actions of this president and the decisions he made regarding this war, you will go down as the most incompetent American public of all time.”

Blaming the American public for defeat in Iraq by citing their lack of support does not really make sense since the loss in public support for wars (In Iraq as in Vietnam) usually occurs after the military campaign has gone sour. But what this argument seems to be hinting at is that even though the war is currently going really badly, so badly that the American public is fed up with it, there is something new that could be done that would dramatically change the tide of events, but cannot be put into practice because the public will not support this new push. The problem is that this brilliant new idea, often dramatically described as “one last shot” or “turning point” is never quite specified or is so outlandish (“Triple the number of troops in Iraq” or “Drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq/Iran so they know we mean business” or “Round up all the militants and throw them in prison or kill them”) that it falls outside the realm of reality. Pushing for ideas that are not likely to be accepted enables its advocates to position themselves to avoid blame since they can then say that if only their idea had been followed, the war could have been won. Keeping alive the vague idea that other options exist enable the warmongers to delude themselves that theirs were the right decisions, but were foiled by poor execution or lack of will.

The brutal reality is that there are no good options left in Iraq that would constitute a ‘victory’ in the sense that the Bush administration envisions. And this brings us to the current options that are being floated to ‘turn things around’ in Iraq.

Next: The battle for rhetorical supremacy

POST SCRIPT: Iraq petition

Here is an online petition that you can sign that calls for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

One of the things that always puzzled me about the Iraq war was the decision that was taken immediately after the fall of Baghdad to disband the Iraqi army and send them all home. This was a radical break with past US policies because the standing armies of other countries have always been the key element of past US attempts at changing the governments of other countries.

It is no secret that the US military industry provides a vast amount of the hardware for foreign armies. A large fraction of the warplanes, tanks, ships, armaments, and the other paraphernalia that foreign armies love to accumulate are sold to them by the US. On one level, this can be seen as a huge taxpayer subsidy to the defense industry. Much of the US taxpayer provided ‘aid’ to other countries (and this also applies, on a smaller scale, to other major weapons suppliers such as Britain and France) comes in the form of funds that are designated for weapons purchases that have to be bought from the aid ‘donor’ countries. So essentially much of US taxpayer ‘aid’ money ends up with US defense contractors, by being used by the foreign military to purchase US-made weapons.

But there is more to this transaction that just money and weapons transfers. When a foreign military purchases US weapons, it allows the US to build links between the foreign armies and the US military. Their officers need to be trained to use the weaponry and so form links with US trainers, to the extent of coming for regular visits to the US (such as to the notorious School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA) and having US military and defense contractors visit those countries. The net result of such exchanges is the building of close relationships between the US and the foreign military, and this allows the CIA to relatively easily penetrate their ranks and either recruit agents or identify people they think would be sympathetic to US interests.

Having such links is valuable when the government of that country does things that the US strongly disapproves of because then the US can use those friendly officers to engineer a coup against the government and take over the reins of power. Since the military culture is to follow the command structure, the presence of a senior military person taking over the government enables the government to marshal the armed forces in support and crush any opposition to the coup by using brute force. The backing of the armed forces enables them to immediately take over the newspapers and radio and TV stations, arrest or kill opposition figures, and impose martial law and curfews until they have consolidated power over every aspect of that society.

This is what happened in Iran in 1953 when President Mossadegh was overthrown and Reza Pahlavi (the Shah of Iran) was brought in to rule, in Vietnam in 1963 when Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown by the military, in Indonesia in 1965 when President Sukarno was overthrown by General Suharto, and in Chile in 1973 when President Salvador Allende was overthrown by General Pinochet, just to name a few of the more recent cases. Many of the military officers who supported Pinochet were graduates of the School of the Americas.

This was such a smoothly working system that it is not clear why it was not repeated in Iraq when Saddam Hussein went against US interests. After all, Hussein himself had achieved considerable power (though not the leadership) as a result of a coup in 1968, and finally took over in 1979 after forcing the 1968 coup leader (and later President) Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr to resign. There is evidence that Saddam Hussein was himself supported by the CIA from the early 1960s until the first Gulf War in 1991.

So why did the US not go back to its old playbook and find a cadre of junior and senior Iraqi officers who were friendly to the US to stage a coup against Hussein? One possibility is that they tried to do this and failed. It may be that Hussein, himself a protege of the CIA, knew only too well how it operated and was able to ferret out those officers whom he perceived as potential threats and eliminated them.

Another possibility is that the US was after bigger fish this time and that it was not really that concerned with Iraq itself except as a gateway to the grander prizes of Iran and Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Installing a puppet leader in Iraq via a military coup would merely give it control over that country’s oil supplies but would still leave Iran under a government the US did not control, Saudi Arabia in the hands of a friendly but unstable oligarchy, and Egypt with a future that was uncertain once the current strong man Hosni Mubarak dies or is overthrown or leaves office.

The ultimate goal may have been to achieve control over all these countries and though them the entire Middle East. At least this was the vision presented to the Defense Policy Board, “a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues,” that was headed by leading neoconservative Richard Perle in 2002 when it was briefed on this grand world view by Laurent Murawiec, a Rand corporation analyst who used to work for Lyndon LaRouche.

So perhaps it was this vision of Middle Eastern dominos (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt) falling one by one to US power and influence, giving the US total control of the world’s major oil reserves, and at the same time neutralizing all the potential threats to Israel, that led the US to abandon its old policy of coups to change disliked regimes and go for the big invasion of Iraq as a dramatic show of US power. This would also explain why the attempts to form a broad UN military coalition for the invasion of Iraq (like that done for the first Gulf war in 1991) were so half-hearted. This long-term strategy was meant to establish exclusive US control of the Middle East in order to control the destiny of rival economic powers, and thus having other major powers come along for the invasion of Iraq would not be desirable.

It is probable that this heady vision of remaking the political map of the world led the Bush administration to indulge in wishful thinking, to actually believe that they would achieve a quick victory in Iraq and be greeted as liberators, and that a grateful Iraqi public would welcome them and quickly set up a new government friendly to the US that would allow the US to maintain a huge military presence. With the crippling sanctions dismantled, the US would then be able to use Iraqi oil revenues to create a prosperous country, and that combination of US military power and rapid improvement in the lives of the Iraq people in a stable country with relatively free political structures would be the trigger for the people in neighboring countries to realize that they could have something similar. They would then also rise up against their own governments, confident that the massive US presence in nearby Iraq, along with the other major regional power Israel, would support them and deter their governments from retaliating with a brutal crackdown.

All this is admittedly speculation on my part, though not without evidence. But one can see how it could be a heady brew to a visionary with particular a type of ideology, such as the neoconservatives. Such ‘big picture’ people tend to see things in terms of the grand sweep of history. They are almost always so convinced and entranced by the magnificence of their own vision that they think that others will immediately embrace it too, and they do not want to listen to naysayers who see potential problems. They feel that they are on the crest of a wave of history that will sweep away all opposition, both domestic and foreign.

But if this surmise of mine is true, then that plan ganged seriously agley, as the poet Robert Burns might say.

Next: What went wrong with the grand plan?

Now that the Iraq Study Group report [.pdf] has been delivered with great fanfare, there is a curious sense of anticlimax as various people ponder what is to be the next step in Iraq. As I suspected it would, the White House distanced itself from the report’s recommendations since it essentially repudiates the premises of its current policy.

It seems clear to me that what we are going to witness in the near future is not any substantive changes in policy but we will see changes in rhetoric, in the way that the war is packaged. Hence it is probably a good time to closely examine the rhetoric of the debate.

The president speaks repeatedly of not willing to listen to the defeatists and says that the US will stay until “victory” is achieved and “the job” is completed.
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In the previous post, I suggested that as the competition for resources becomes more acute, it is likely that military force will be increasingly used in a brutally transparent manner in order to maintain the current inequalities in consumption rates. This was not simply a guess on my part. It is based on historical precedent.

In 1948, George Kennan of the US State Department wrote what has since become a famous memo outlining in frank and stark terms what he saw as the main issue facing the United States in its newfound post-world war II role as the dominant economic and military force. He was officially writing about Asia but his analysis extends beyond that.
[Read more…]

There is perhaps nothing that exemplifies the disgraceful contempt displayed by this administration for law and human rights than the way they have treated Jose Padilla, the man labeled by the government as a ‘dirty bomber’ although the indictment that was finally brought against him says nothing of the sort and has been reduced to vague charges of being involved with terrorism. But because of the huge amount of government propaganda surrounding his arrest, he will always be thought of in the public mind as having planned to detonate a radioactive bomb in an American city.

The news article by Deborah Sontag in the December 4, 2006 issue of the New York Times reveals the depths to which the government has sunk in its cruelty to this man. This is something that will be a source of shame for a long time, if it isn’t the case that we have lost all sense of shame already.

In an affidavit filed Friday, [Andrew Patel, one of his lawyers] alleged that Mr. Padilla was held alone in a 10-cell wing of the brig; that he had little human contact other than with his interrogators; that his cell was electronically monitored and his meals were passed to him through a slot in the door; that windows were blackened, and there was no clock or calendar; and that he slept on a steel platform after a foam mattress was taken from him, along with his copy of the Koran, “as part of an interrogation plan”. . . [The lawyers] argue that he has been so damaged by his interrogations and prolonged isolation that he suffers post-traumatic stress disorder and is unable to assist in his own defense. His interrogations, they say, included hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent execution and the administration of “truth serums.”

As Digby points out:

I think isolation and lack of a sense of time and strange repetitive interrogations may be even more cruel than physical punishment. The belief that it will never end, that you’ve lost all normal sense of personhood and control — that your mind is being stripped away and there’s nothing you can do about it — must be terrifying.

This one telling detail alone illustrates the extent to which the government will stoop in its cruelty. To take him to a dentist, in addition to shackling his legs and manacling his hands, the government put on thick noise-blocking headphones over his ears and blacked-out goggles over his eyes so that Padilla would not see or hear anything from the outside world while making the trip, thus keeping his isolation from humanity complete. Even the guards’ faces were hidden behind plastic visors because how terrible it would be if he should make eye contact or even exchange a smile with another human being, or that he should see the sun or trees or hear birds or even a bit of music from a passing car. Experiencing those sensations would have the disastrous effect of reminding him that he was a human being and not just a collection of cells subject to experimentation on the effects of sensory deprivation.

Of course, those seeking to justify this kind of treatment will employ the usual trope to justify execrable behavior and point to someone who might do even worse: “al Qaeda wouldn’t take their prisoners for a root canal.” They will try and portray Padilla as someone who is actually being treated well and is just a whiner complaining about minor discomfitures. But Digby sees through this bogus toughness.

I know that all the tough guys on the right will say that Padilla is just being a typical whining malcontent but I have a feeling that most of them would crumble into blubbering babies after five minutes in his position. This treatment is extremely inhumane.

It seems like Padilla is already a broken man, so destroyed psychologically that he is unfit to stand trial. In his affidavit, Mr. Patel said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.'” He was denied access to any lawyers for 21 months so that even now he is mistrustful and unsure whether his lawyers are on is side or are secretly working against him. Furthermore, according to the New York Times report:

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., who examined Mr. Padilla for a total of 22 hours in June and September, said in an affidavit filed Friday that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.”

“It is my opinion that as the result of his experiences during his detention and interrogation, Mr. Padilla does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, i.e., post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation,” Dr. Hegarty said in an affidavit for the defense.

No one has better expressed outrage over Padilla’s treatment and the cruelty with which the government is treating so-called enemy combatants than Glenn Greenwald. He is also amazed that a country that prides itself on being a nation of laws has sat back and let this happen not only without an outcry, but with some sectors even cheering the government on. And if this can be done to Padilla, who is a US citizen who was arrested within the US, think what must be happening to those unfortunates who are not citizens or who were captured abroad or are being held in foreign prisons.

As Greenwald says:

As I have said many times, the most astounding and disturbing fact over the last five years — and there is a very stiff competition for that title — is that we have collectively really just sat by while the U.S. Government arrests and detains people, including U.S. citizens, and then imprisons them for years without any charges of any kind. What does it say about our country that not only does our Government do that, but that we don’t really seem to mind much?

Along those lines, it is hard to express the contempt merited by the drooling sociopaths who not only endorse this behavior but, with what can only be described as serious derangement, laugh about it and revel in its cruelty and its lawlessness.

In a subsequent post, he examines the reasons for the public apathy on this issue and points to the disgraceful attitude taken on this issue by Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post.

This is the reason why. Over the last five years, the media (with some notable and noble exceptions) essentially embraced the central premise of the Bush administration — that in order for us to be protected, we must place our faith in the Leader and know that he is doing Good, because he wants to protect us.

He may err at times. He might even go a little too far or be a little zealous in what he does to make us safe. But there are Very, Very Bad People in the world who want to kill us — Padilla is “accused of plotting a dirty-bomb attack”! — and the Leader needs the power to get his hands dirty and take care of them. The last thing we should be concerned with is what the Leader does to them.

Greenwald gets it exactly right. What is happening is a disgrace.

POST SCRIPT: Staying in Iraq “until the job is done”

As the Iraq Study Group delivers its report today, the Daily Show looks at all the advice the Bush is getting and what he is likely to do.

Many years ago, David Halberstam wrote a book about the Vietnam war called The Best and the Brightest. In it he pointed out how the architects of the Vietnam war under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were considered brilliant thinkers and strategists, successful in many other fields before they entered government. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara came from being the head of General Motors and was supposed to be a real genius, brilliant with numbers and having a reputation as a formidable thinker and strategist in the corporate world. Others like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow were also seen as the very smart people.

And yet, as Halberstam pointed out, this did not prevent Vietnam from becoming a total debacle. It seemed that all the brilliant minds and their strategizing could not prevent the US from sliding slowly and painfully into defeat. The problem was, of course, that strategy cannot save you when the underlying political decisions are bad. In Vietnam, that bad decision consisted in sending in forces to prop up a corrupt minority government in the face of an insurgency that was determined to oust the foreign US forces and had already defeated the French colonial power. The insurgents even had the support of a substantial fraction of the local population, as well as the backing of the significant standing army of North Vietnam, which in turn was headed by the wily General Giap. This combination of factors almost certainly doomed the US to a bad end. In such a situation, all that strategizing can do is perhaps determine what is the best way to leave.

I was reminded of those days in the current breathless speculation around the Iraq Study Group (ISG), the body headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton whose report on what to do about Iraq is eagerly anticipated within establishment circles and is due to be released on Wednesday, December 6, 2006.

What struck me is this extraordinary situation in which the US government is seemingly outsourcing an important policy and military decision to a group of people outside the government. As Robin Wright of the Washington Post reports: “In the history of U.S. foreign policy, there’s been nothing like it: a panel outside the government trying to bail the United States out of a prolonged and messy war.” What does it say about the level of competence of this administration when the president, asked about what he plans to do about Iraq, says that he is waiting to see the recommendations of outside groups like the ISG?

The composition of the ISG is also interesting. It was formed by a hitherto obscure outfit called the US Institute of Peace which says on its website that it is an “independent, nonpartisan, national institution established and funded by Congress.” The ISG group membership seems to be composed of your standard issue, run-of-the-mill politicians (one could even label them political hacks), except for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. None of them seem to have any expertise with the Middle East.

Robin Wright says that “The panel was deliberately skewed toward a centrist course for Iraq, participants said. Organizers avoided experts with extreme views on either side of the Iraq war debate.” This sheds an interesting light on the Washington mindset which venerates “centrism” or “moderates,” without those words having any operational meaning other than simply standing for a very narrow range of opinions around the status quo.

Exactly what, for example, might constitute an “extreme” antiwar view? Since no one is seriously suggesting that the US government surrender to the Iraqi insurgents or re-installing Saddam Hussein as the Iraqi leader (even though an increasing number of people, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, are saying that average Iraqis are worse off now than they were before the invasion), one can only conclude that what the ISG considers an “extremist” view is that calling for a complete withdrawal of US troops beginning immediately. Thus the deck has already been stacked to produce a report that will not disturb the status quo, since it has eliminated one option that is widely supported.

The ISG group has supposedly listened to ‘expert’ advice given by four ‘Expert Working Groups’ and a Military Senior Advisor Panel.. But there is some cynicism as to whether the expert panels are just window dressing for a pre-ordained conclusion. As one member of one of the expert groups says: “[The ISG] doesn’t have to take any of our recommendations. . .They can come up with something entirely different. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what they do.”

In fact, although George Bush has said that he is looking forward to hearing what the commission is going to recommend, the very fact that he has been so outspoken in what he will and will not do seems to have caused the ISG group to try and tailor its recommendations to what they think that Bush may consider accepting, rather than what the expert groups might suggest are the best options.

One of the curious things about the ISG is the murkiness of its origins. It suddenly appeared in March of this year. Its website says that this “effort is being undertaken at the urging of several members of Congress and the White House welcomes it.” Who are these members of Congress? It does not exactly say and I have been unable to pinpoint exactly how and why the ISG came into existence. The only person I could find who is named as an initiator is congressman Frank Wolf (R-Virginia).

One possibility is that this murkiness is deliberate in order to hide one of two possibilities. The first is that the White House, despite its public statements of confidence about how well things are going in Iraq, privately agrees with those who say it is a disaster and is now seeking a face-saving mechanism to extricate itself from the mess without actually admitting they have blundered. This means that they have already decided what they want to do and the ISG will provide them with those options, but the White House does not want to admit that the ISG is merely a front group.

The second possibility is that the White House is still in such a state of denial, and that this detachment from reality has so alarmed even those people close to the administration (such as Bush’s father), that they cobbled together this commission to put further pressure on the White House to try and get them to face the facts rather than continue to wallow in delusions.

My guess (and it is only that) is that it is the second option. This is because the latest leak from the ISG says that they will “recommend withdrawing nearly all U.S. combat units from Iraq by early 2008 while leaving behind troops to train, advise and support the Iraqis.” Support for my guess comes from the harsh pre-emptive attack on the ISG from the most fervent and last-ditch supporters of the Iraq war, such as the Weekly Standard, the National Review and assorted columnists.

Given that Bush seems to think that leaving Iraq would mean that he has failed, that he has said that it will be up to future presidents to decide when and whether to withdraw all US troops, and “I will not withdraw even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me”, I predict that after the ISG presents their report to him he will say, “Thanks, but no thanks” and go on doing whatever he wants. Of course there is a little wiggle room between “all troops” and “nearly all U.S. combat units” to allow him to reverse course but, as Bush has famously said, he “doesn’t do nuance” and I doubt whether he will exploit that particular loophole.

Perhaps the last best hope for this country is that Barney looks like a smart dog. If he can be persuaded to turn against Bush, Bush might finally realize that his Iraq policy has been a failure.

POST SCRIPT: The God Delusion

Watch an excellent interview of Richard Dawkins talking about his new book The God Delusion on the BBC show Newsnight.

It is so refreshing to see a low-key interview in which the interviewer is thoughtful and quietly tries to probe the author about ideas, rather than engaging in a debate. There is no interrupting and no crosstalk and no grandstanding, and yet the questions posed were challenging. It was so unlike a lot of talk shows where the host sees the show as a vehicle for expounding his or her own views, rather than having the guest elaborate on their ideas.

President Bush finally went to Vietnam this week, after spending his youth trying to avoid going there when that war was going on. Needless to say that this was the source for much humor. Some said that he tried to avoid going this time too but that his father could not get him out of the trip. Others said that he was glad to go since the drubbing his party took at the elections made it awkward for him to have to deal with the new realities in Congress. As Ted Koppel said, Bush joined the Air National Guard to get out of going to Vietnam, but now he is going to Vietnam to get out of being in Washington.

But the curious thing that has been remarked upon is that when Bush was asked what was the lesson of the Vietnam war, he said it was the importance of perseverance. Bush said that what he learned was that “We’ll succeed unless we quit.”

Of course this invites ridicule since it seemed to imply that if the US has stayed on in Vietnam they would have won that war, a rosy view of that war’s history that is only clung to by those who refuse to concede that the US could ever be defeated militarily. The statement also seemed like a diplomatic blunder, to say the least, to tell the people of your host country that you feel that should have devastated their country even more than you did and perhaps should still be bombing them thirty years later.

The lesson that almost everyone else has learned from Vietnam is that one should never get involved in a guerilla war against forces fighting for national liberation.

But perhaps Bush was applying his words to the Vietnamese forces. If so, he was being very perceptive. The North Vietnamese regular army and the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front had long realized that all they had to do was persevere and stay fighting. As long as they did not quit, they would succeed because the US would have to leave. And that is exactly what happened.

That is the dynamic of any struggle in which an invading army ends up battling the local population, and it applies to Iraq. All that the Iraqi insurgent forces have to do is to keep fighting. If they do so, they will win even if they never win any single battle, since an invading force cannot maintain its occupation indefinitely in the face of sustained hostility. The famous Tet offensive in 1968 was a military defeat for the Vietnamese but a huge political victory since it dramatically illustrated to the American public that despite having been repeatedly told by their own government that the tide was turning, there was light at the end of the tunnel, and similar clichés about victory in the war being just over the horizon, the Vietnam conflict was still raging, with no end in sight.

One sure sign that things are going badly is when pundits keep looking hopefully over the horizon for good news that never comes. They usually put a time of about six months in the future for when either things will either get better or some decisive decision will have to be taken. It seems like they have decided that six months is just about what the public is willing to tolerate staying with the status quo. The catch is that when the six months is up and no progress has been made, a new six month horizon has to be created. The situation is not unlike parents on a long car journey who repeatedly tell their restless children that they will arrive at their destination in fifteen minutes, in order to keep them quiet.

This ploy has been used so frequently in Iraq by so many people that the six month horizon has even acquired its own name, the Friedman Unit (FU) (coined by Atrios), after that fount of banalities, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, was noticed by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has having repeatedly invoked it starting back in November 2003. So we are now six FUs further into the war and still waiting.

But coming back to Bush’s statement about the lessons of Vietnam, why would Bush be advising the Iraqi insurgents to learn from the Vietnamese people on the value of perseverance in order to defeat the US?

A person whose views I greatly respect once suggested that Mikhail Gorbachev may have deliberately set about undermining the Soviet Union and orchestrating its collapse because early in his life he had felt that that kind of social and economic structure was not sustainable and something new had to be put in its place. But that would not happen until the existing order had been dismantled. So Gorbachev quietly went along with official policies until he attained power in that country. Then he deliberately set about instituting policies from the inside that he knew would lead to the eventual collapse of the system.

Inspired by this idea, I thought that maybe Bush and Cheney, for whatever reasons known only to themselves, deliberately set about destroying the US as a world power militarily and economically and in terms of its ability to influence world opinion. They saw that the best way to do that would be to commit its forces to getting bogged down in an unwinnable and unpopular war that would break the US militarily, destroy its economy by spending huge amounts on both the war and counterterrorism efforts (over $500 billion so far and still rising rapidly), and so alienate world opinion that the US became almost totally isolated on the world’s stage, thus putting an end to any ideas of creating a powerful empire.

I am being facetious, I think, but I am not sure because this administration has effectively put an end to irony and satire by exceeding anyone’s imaginings of irrationality. But if that actually had been their plan, Bush and Cheney have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

POST SCRIPT 1: Spreading the word

Australian John Safran, ticked off by Mormon missionaries waking him up early on a Saturday morning to proselytize, decided to get his revenge by traveling all the way across the globe to Salt Lake City and going door-to-door to proselytize for atheism and Darwin.

POST SCRIPT 2: What should be done?

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has the solution to the Iraq problem.