The Bush Administration has finally conceded, on the record, that it decided, for political reasons, not to go after leading terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the leadup to the Iraq war. The question remains, which political reasons were decisive?
From the category archives:
International Politics
I watched the first part of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, “The Power of Nightmares”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/listings/programme.shtml?day=wednesday&service_id=41532&filename=20041020/20041020_2100_41532_40078_60 , last night. The hype around the series has been that it claims that Al Qaida is a myth. Anyway, I thought it might be useful to use “David Aaronovitch’s reaction”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1330499,00.html as a template for my own. Here’s Aaronovitch:
bq. I admire Curtis greatly, but this time his argument is as subtle as a house-brick. It is, essentially, that everything in American politics in the past 25 years from Reaganism, through Christian fundamentalism and anti-Clintonism, to the war on terror, has been got up by Dick Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and others that the programme identifies as conspiring neocons. They have created a “dark illusion” about Islamist terrorism, just as they earlier created one about that tin-pot, ramshackle, essentially harmless old flea-bitten bear, the Soviet Union. Curtis’s is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.
To which my reaction is: not really. I did find the organising trope of the first episode somewhat irritating: a supposed parallelism between Sayyid Qutb and Leo Strauss. But there was a good deal of highly suggestive and illuminating material amid the polemic. The efforts by “Team B”, for example, systematically to exagerrate both the offensive capability and the aggressive intentions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. These included the assertion, based _on no evidence whatsoever_ that the Soviets had developed a non-acoustic submarine detection system, the reasoning being that since they didn’t have a working acoustic version they must have had a secret ultra-modern technology that the US didn’t know about! And then there was the bizarre demand that the CIA provide the evidence to back up a claim that the Soviets were behind a single, interlinked global terror network (IRA + Baader Meinhof + etc). This fell down because the CIA operatives knew that what was being cited as “evidence” was, in fact, black propaganda that they themselves had concocted and planted in European newspapers! (Today, of course, such “evidence” would be endlessly recycled around the blogosphere by credulous dupes.) Does Curtis exaggerate the influence of the neocons? Almost certainly.
For example, next week’s episode is supposed to be about the neocons and the Islamic fundamentalists joining forces to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, as if this was a project dreamed up in the neocons’ heads. But the idea of drawing them into a war in Afghanistan was conceived not by the neocons but by Zbigniew Brzezinski under the Carter administration. In the latest LRB, “Chalmers Johnson”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/john04_.html has Brzezinki saying:
bq. “CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”
bq. Asked whether he in any way regretted these actions, Brzezinski replied: ‘Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”‘
It is hard to know exactly where Curtis will go next, but I expect him to argue that whilst Islamic terrorist groups certainly exist (who could deny that!) they don’t constitute a co-ordinated international network (AQ+ Hamas + Hezbollah, etc etc) of the kind that is often suggested. He’ll probably suggest that such “links” as are claimed are largely an artefact of similar propaganda to that behind the last “international terror network”. Anyone who has followed the pathetic attempts by figures like the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin to demonstrate a Saddam-AQ link will probably suspect he has a point.
[One further thought, on Brzezinski’s lack of regret. On a view of moral responsibility that one frequently finds deployed in parts of the blogosphere, Brzezinski and other proponents of the Afghan “trap” bear no responsibility for the millions of dead in Afghanistan — and elsewhere — since. It isn’t a view I can share.]
If you’re reading this, it’s a fairly safe bet that you’re in need of time-management tips[1]. On the other hand, the idea of a blogger giving time management tips is problematic, to say the least. Undaunted by this contradiction, I’m going to offer a few. The details reflect my main activity, which is academic research but may be more or less adaptable to other kinds of jobs.
For once, there has been a little bit of encouraging news coming out of Iraq. I’ve also been encouraged by some of the reactions I’ve seen.
I didn’t do much for my reputation (never a great one) as an election tipster with my assessment of the Australian election. I thought Labor had a good chance (a week or so before the election, I thought a very good chance). In fact, the Howard government won easily[1]
But I was just about spot-on in my pre-election prediction that,
Whatever the outcome, I expect it will be treated in the international press as something of a referendum on the Iraq war
whereas, in reality, the issue barely came up.
On cue, here’s Glenn Reynolds complaining of inadequate coverage of
an Australian election that was run in no small part as a referendum on the war
Can I sue for copyright violation here?
After a campaign that’s been long by local (but not US) standards, Australia will hold its Federal election tomorrow. The polls are close but generally favour the incumbent conservative government.
Whatever the outcome, I expect it will be treated in the international press as something of a referendum on the Iraq war – Australia was the third country to join the Coalition of the Willing, after the US and UK, while the Labor opposition has consistently opposed the war. I can’t complain too much about this, since I predicted at the start of the campaign that the war, and also the Free Trade Agreement with the US, would be major issues. In fact, the FTA has been ignored completely, and the war has played only a minor role in the campaign. The election has been fought almost entirely on domestic policy, with both sides promising lots of increases in public expenditure.
We’ve all heard about the US embassy in Baghdad, with its thousands of employees, advisers in every department, and capacity to instantly countermand any decision made by the Allawi government. But until now, I’d never given much thought to its opposite number, the Iraqi embassy in Washington. It turns out to be a kind of funhouse mirror image, as indicated in this story in the Washington Post which discusses Allawi’s tour and the ghostwriting of his speech
The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and British Foreign Service officials also helped Allawi with the text and delivery of his remarks, said administration officials who were involved. The State Department and officials elsewhere in the government took the lead in booking Allawi’s interviews. Administration officials said that the Iraqi Embassy in Washington consists of just a few officials and has only a dial-up Internet connection, so was incapable of preparing for the high-profile tour.
One might think that with the IMF and World Bank located in Washington, not to mention the US Congress, the Iraqi government might feel the need for a more substantial presence, and that a few million of the billions of dollars supposedly allocated to reconstruction might have been used to establish it, if only for PR purposes. But obviously these institutions negotiate directly with the US Administration. Why talk to the monkey when the organ-grinder is right next door?
Two more hostages murdered by Ansar-al-Islam, and a third (the Briton) likely to die tomorrow … all one can do in these circumstances is to express the deepest sympathy for the families and repeat everything John said at the time of the Nick Berg murder. We had the chance to take out Zarqawi before the war; why the hell didn’t we take it?
(Update) By which I mean two things: 1) can it really be true that it wasn’t done in order to avoid undermining the case for war; has anyone denied or shot down this theory yet? and 2) are there any other good reasons why it might not have been done, or at least attempted?
The idea that the forthcoming US election would be a good one to lose keeps on spreading. Here’s Andrew Sullivan
if Bush wins and heads into a real, live second Vietnam in Iraq, his party will split, the country will become even more bitterly polarized than now (especially if he’s re-elected because he’s not Kerry) and he’ll become another end-of-career Lyndon Johnson.
In my view, any rational supporter of the Republican party should hope for Bush’s defeat, since a victory will be disastrous for all concerned. A Kerry victory would be better for the United States and the world, but not necessarily for the long-term interests of the Democratic party.
Some updates over the fold
“Kevin”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_09/004738.php and “Matt”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/09/gerrymandering.html are talking redistricting, with Matt favouring proportional representation on the grounds that it would introduce intraparty competition into American politics. This is rather odd – it’s only been a few months since the Presidential primaries, which are the most vigorously and open contested intraparty political fights in the world outside of the New South Wales Labor Party. And any experience with internal Labor (or Labour) Party fights does not immediately make one think it would make the world a better place to expand that kind of fighting.
But I didn’t want to make a substantive proposal, just ask a procedural question. To the best of my knowledge there are only two classes of country where the electoral system, from drawing boundaries to determining ballot order to deciding whether there will be recounts and so on, is run by partisan appointees.
bq. Class One: China, Cuba, etc., i.e. countries where it is known in advance how the results will turn out.
Class Two: The United States of America (with the honourable exception of Iowa).
Are there any other countries in Class Two, or is America unique in being a democracy where one of the prizes of victory is getting to be the umpire next time the game is played?
We’ve posted on this one before, but I’m a believer in the vital importance of audit. And it is troubling me somewhat that in carrying out my audit, I cannot find any news reports about atrocities committed by the Sadrists during their period of control of Najaf, which are dated later than 28 August, the day after the siege ended. Reports filed during the course of fast-moving events are often unreliable, and it strikes me as odd that there has been no follow-through at all on this story. Could anyone steer me in the direction of any more information, or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?
For those trying to work out whether the Bush Administration’s stated commitment to democracy in the Middle East reflects Wilsonian idealism or just a tactical choice, reflecting the fact that the Administration’s enemies in the region are mostly not democrats, Venezuela provides a useful data point.
An article over at Harry’s Place gives what I think is probably the most eloquent version of the pro-(that)-war-(then) Left’s take on current events in Iraq. My main point of disagreement would be that I don’t think we’re making matters better by staying there (I also think that it’s probably a mistake to regard the anti-US forces as monolithic and undifferentiated “terrorists”). But it makes a number of good points which need to be taken seriously.
“Matt Yglesias”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/09/index.html#004032 says that there’s “no content to the Bush democracy agenda,” and that it’s “just a rhetorical flourish.” I don’t think that this is quite accurate – the real problem is that the Bush democracy agenda wasn’t intended to promote the worldwide spread of democracy as an end-goal; democracy was supposed to be an intermediate means towards a fix for America’s security problems in the Middle East. As “Josh Marshall”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html pointed out last year, the rationale was that democracy in Iraq would lead to the eventual creation of “a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam.” In short, this was democracy promotion as _Realpolitik_ by other means. Thus, there’s no real inconsistency in principle with the toleration and indeed occasional encouragement of human rights abuses and autocracy in those parts of the world where US security interests wouldn’t be furthered by democratic reform. The problem, it seems to me, wasn’t so much the incoherence of the objectives (which were coherent, if wrong-headed) as the lack of any fundamental commitment to democracy _as such_, the unwillingness to use means of democracy promotion that might have had increased international legitimacy because they limited US power, and, of course, the profound and near-total incompetence with which the US pursued its goals.
Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or leaders of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local legislatures – and only after the president’s nomination. Seats in the lower house of the federal Parliament, or Duma, would be elected entirely on national party slates, eliminating district races across the country that now decide half of Parliament’s composition. In elections last December, those races accounted for all of the independents and liberals now serving in the Duma.
The Moderate Voice has a long roundup of comments and analysis about Putin’s power grab in the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Southern Russia. (Link via Obsidian Wings). I find myself agreeing with Ogged that this may be turn out to be the most serious story of the year.
There are any number of reasons why this story is horrible news. I find it historically unlikely that central, unchecked power will improve the lives of the people of Russia. I’m concerned about the precedent, in which a major power declares that security and democracy are incompatable. He’s going to get away with it, and he won’t be the last. I’m concerned about the muscular claims that Putin is making about the right of Russian forces to fight terror (defined solely by Putin) wherever he wants. Cold War II, anyone?
More than anything, I’m concerned about Russian nukes. I’m flabbergasted at the fact that we haven’t done more to take Russian weapons out of commission, (here, too) but at least we’ve had the benefit of Russian cooperation so far in our efforts. I’m very concerned that Putin is about to say to the West, “Thanks, but we’ll handle it from here.” Russia still has the materials to make tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. What in the world could we do?