Middle East Politics

What with one thing or another, thinking among the thoughtful is now turning to the subject of getting out of Iraq. As someone who opposed getting in there, I just wanted to set down a quick note on an important point; just as I always insisted before the invasion[1] that the question was not “War?” but “this war now?”, it also has to be taken into account that the question now is not “Withdrawal?” but “withdrawal now?”.
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I finished reading George Packer’s “The Assassin’s Gate”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0374299633%2Fqid%3D1133794718%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3Fn%3D507846%2526s%3Dbooks%2526v%3Dglance on the plane back from Europe yesterday, and discovered when I got back home that “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_12/007689.php had already said half of what I wanted to say about it. Anti-war people should read this book – it really does a terrific job of setting out the complexities of politics in Iraq. Pro-war leftists and liberals should read this book too, and reflect carefully on Packer’s documentation of how badly “democracy-building” was implemented in practice. But there’s something quite troubling about the book’s rhetorical set-up. On one level, the book resembles Jason DeParle’s book on welfare reform, “American Dream”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/20/linkage/. It’s a meditation on the relationship between the abstract debates of policy wonks and intellectuals, how ideas from these debates get implemented (with quite astounding incompetence in this particular instance), and the results that implementation have for individuals’ lives. But on another, it’s an indirect defence of a particular policy stance. In the book’s closing pages, Packer sets out his indictment of the Bush administration:

bq. I came to believe that those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq War was always winnable; it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive.

This isn’t only an indictment. It’s also an apologia for a claim that is never directly defended – that the project of bringing democracy to Iraq could have worked if it had been executed more competently. Packer has documented over four hundred odd pages just how bad the implementation was. But proving the negative doesn’t prove the positive, and Packer’s method of presentation allows him to avoid making the case that deposing the Hussein regime in 2003 could feasibly have brought democracy to Iraq. There’s a strong case to be made that this wasn’t doable in the first place. Packer presents Rumsfeld’s decision to override Shinseki, and invade Iraq with a minimal number of troops, as one of the main causes of the current disaster. But as “Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10454 argue

bq. Perhaps the founding myth of the incompetence argument is that the postwar mess could have been avoided had the United States deployed more troops to Iraq. … A RAND Corporation effort … concluded that a ratio of 20 foreigners for every 1,000 natives would have been necessary to stabilize Iraq. … The 20-to-1,000 ratio implies the presence of about 500,000 soldiers in Iraq. That’s far more than it would have been possible for the United States to deploy. Sustaining a given number of troops in a combat situation requires twice that number to be dedicated to the mission, so that soldiers can rotate in and out of theater. . As there are only 1 million soldiers in the entire Army, a 500,000-troop deployment would imply that literally everyone — from the National Guard units currently assisting with disaster relief on the Gulf Coast to those serving in Afghanistan, Korea, and Europe to the bureaucrats doing staff work in the Pentagon and elsewhere — would be dedicated to the mission. This is plainly impossible.

Packer doesn’t address this argument, nor does he address the arguments more generally of the anti-war side with anything approaching seriousness. While he acknowledges in passing that a couple of anti-war people were sincere and thoughtful, he doesn’t even begin to consider their claims, and the implication of those claims for his own position. This isn’t to dismiss the book out of hand. As Kevin says, it should be required reading for anyone concerned with the Iraq war and its aftermath. It’s far more than another statement of the incompetence dodge. But it’s also much less than it should have been.

Update: thanks to Jay Conner in comments for pointing me towards this “interview”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/04/RVG4AFTDIL1.DTL&type=books with Packer in yesterday’s _San Francisco Chronicle_. Packer qualifies his statement that “the Iraq War was always winnable; it still is,” but only by saying that he “would not have written that line in the present tense” given recent developments. As best as I understand him, he isn’t prepared to revisit his belief that the Iraq war could have been won had it been conducted differently at the outset. I “fully agree”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/07/packer-and-iraq/ with Packer when he argues that “what liberals need to do now is argue very strongly for the U.S. to remain engaged in a responsible internationalist way around the world.” But if we’re to have the “serious national conversation” that Packer wants, he, and others like him, need to think more seriously about what the Iraq debacle means for the possibility conditions of pro-democratic intervention (this is also what I take Yglesias and Rosenfeld to be arguing in their piece).

I see that the White House is calling the suggestion that George W. Bush suggested bombing the headquarters of “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage in Qatar (a friendly state) “outlandish”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201784.html . Anyone who watched BBC’s Newsnight last night will have seen Frank Gaffney defending (indeed advocating) attacking “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage as entirely legitimate on the grounds that the station is an arm of enemy propaganda. There is also the small matter of the fact that the civil servants who leaked the transcript of the Bush–Blair conversation are facing prosecution for doing so and that the “Daily Mirror has been subjected to pressure”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16401707%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=law%2dchief%2dgags%2dthe%2dmirror%2don%2dbush%2dleak-name_page.html . It is hard to see how someone could “leak” or could be prosecuted for leaking a document if it was other than genuine. One of the neocon themes has been the need for free institutions in the Arab world. Such institutions presumably involve a free and independent media. And yet the closest thing to such a media in the region is discussed as a possible target of attack (and indeed there have been numerous “accidental” attacks on “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage staff).

Cheney “asks”:http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31120

bq. “Would the United States and other free nations be better off or worse off with (Abu Musab al-) Zarqawi, (Osama) bin Laden and (Ayman al-) Zawahiri in control of Iraq?” he asked. “Would be we safer or less safe with Iraq ruled by men intent on the destruction of our country?”

Let me get this straight. At time _t_ you advocate a policy involving the invasion and occupation of Iraq on multiple grounds, none of which include the forestalling of an Al Qaeda seizure of power in Iraq (since such an eventuality is risibly improbable). At time _t+n_ , as a direct consequence of that brilliant policy, the only options are (a) its continuation or (b) an Al Qaeda takeover of Iraq. Genius. No wonder that man got re-elected.

The Economist‘s Lexington starts an “article”:http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5169493 (behind paywall) on whether Bush lied with a piece of self-justificatory hackishness.

bq. The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating their biggest weakness—their reputation for being soft on terrorism and feeble on national security. So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense. Nobody has yet produced any solid evidence for this. Sure, Mr Bush made mistakes, but they seem to have been honest ones made for defensible reasons. He genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—as did most of the world’s security services. And he was not alone in thinking that, after September 11th, America should never again err on the side of complacency. More than 100 Democrats in Congress voted to authorise the war. But being right and being seen to be right are different things. Mr Bush may not have consciously lied, but, egged on by Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he made dreadful miscalculations.

The issue, as the Economist‘s journalists know bloody well, isn’t whether the Bush administration believed at one point that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s whether or not the Bush administration mendaciously manipulated intelligence to make the public case for their beliefs. The critics mentioned in the piece aren’t making “the charge that [Bush] knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.” I’m not aware of anyone apart from a few crackpots who are. They’re making the case that the Republican administration “deliberately suppressed”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_11/007556.php information that didn’t support its case, and presented highly dubious information as providing a slam-dunk case for imminent war. In other words, the administration “stitched up”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/21/stitch-ups/ a regime that turned out not actually to have weapons of mass destruction, let alone an active nuclear programme, through spin, lies and use of ‘evidence’ that they knew at the time to be dubious. I’d like to see _Lexington_ explain exactly how the claims of al-Qaeda links, the aluminium tubes presentation, the yellowcake claims and so on were “honest [mistakes] made for defensible reasons.” But of course he does no such thing – instead he attacks his very own, custom designed straw man in an attempt to disassociate the heap of political trouble that Bush is now in from the fact that the Bush administration undoubtedly lied in the run-up to the war. Shoddy, shoddy stuff.

John Murtha says “get out of Iraq now”:http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/pa12_murtha/pr051117iraq.html. C&L has “the video”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/11/17.html#a5913, which has a lot more powerful commentary in addition to the content of the statement. Personally, I’d like to see Dick Cheney tell Murtha (who spent 37 years of his career in the Marine Corps) to his face that he’s “losing his memory, or his backbone”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/17/cheney/.

_La Repubblica_ has another “story”:http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq70/sileita/sileita.html today on the role of Italian intelligence in feeding bogus evidence on Niger to Hadley and others in the US and elsewhere. There’s one key piece of new information. UK intelligence claimed to have evidence independent of the forged documents, which showed that Iraq had indeed been trying to obtain uranium in Niger. According to _La Repubblica_:

bq. This “evidence” has never been brought forward … “If it ever were brought forward,” said a source in Forte Braschi to _la Repubblica_, with a smile, “it would be discovered, with red faces, that it was Italian intelligence collected by SISMI at the end of the 1980’s, and shared with our friend Hamilton McMillan.”

As best as I can piece this together, the timeline that _La Repubblica_ is arguing for goes as follows. Italian intelligence collected [genuine] information that Hussein was trying to obtain raw uranium at the end of the 1980’s, before the First Gulf War. This information was stored by the branch of Italian intelligence dealing with weapon proliferation issues. When the invasion of Iraq was imminent, this information was brought out from the archives, and bundled together with fake documents in order to make the latter look more legitimate. This dossier was then circulated to UK and US intelligence. The latter didn’t bite at first, causing the director of Italian intelligence to use back channels to Hadley and to Wolfowitz via Ledeen. UK intelligence did bite, either then or later. UK intelligence later claimed that it had a source of intelligence independent from the faked documents saying that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium. However, according to _La Repubblica_ the ‘independent’ source was also from Italian intelligence, and related to efforts by Hussein’s regime to obtain uranium _in the 1980’s_. Hence, it was for all intents and purposes irrelevant to the question of whether Hussein was trying to obtain uranium in post-sanctions Iraq.

Again, this should be taken with a considerable pinch of salt, until and unless there’s independent confirmation. There’s clearly a backstory to this – someone in Italian intelligence with his own agenda is leaking like crazy. There’s a word in Italian – _dietrologia_ – for the science of shadowy manipulations in the background which never come to light – it’s a national pastime. But it raises some troubling issues – and not only for US politics. At key points, the _La Repubblica_ narrative contradicts the claims made in the Butler Report. What did UK intelligence ‘know’ about Niger, and when did they know it?

As “various”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_10/007414.php “bloggers”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/006827.php have noted, the Italian paper _La Repubblica_ seems to have a “scoop”:http://www.repubblica.it/2005/j/sezioni/esteri/iraq69/bodv/bodv.html on the sources of the famous forged Niger documents, and the role played by the Italian intelligence services. “Laura Rozen”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10506 has a summary article in the Prospect, but there’s some additional detail in the original article. For the benefit of non-Italian readers, I’ve done a quick translation of the relevant bits and put it below the fold. Two health warnings. First – this is a rough and ready translation – I’m not a professional, and there may well be a few inaccuracies (please point them out in comments if you spot them). Second, _La Repubblica_ is, as Italian newspapers go, a trustworthy publication – but like all Italian newspapers, it’s surrounded by a swirl of politics and special interests. I’m obviously not in a position to attest to the veracity of its claims – but at the least, they’re very interesting.
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Der Spiegel has “an interview with Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,380858,00.html — currently facing criminal charges for having publicly discussed the mass murder of Armenians during the First World War — which touches on his career as novelist, the political evolution of Turkey, the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU, among other matters.

The last time Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam was discussed on this blog, he was “being deported from the US as a threat to national security”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/22/cat-stevens-banned-from-the-us/ . Now, via “Amanda”:http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005/10/crossposted-at-hickorywind_11.html , I see that he’s been busy recording with Dolly Parton. As Amanda puts it:

bq. call me profane, but the idea of a noted religious ascetic picking with the Texas Whorehouse lady herself really appeals to me.

It is always dangerous to start a Middle East thread on CT. But I just wanted to react to the first episode of the BBC’s new series “Israel and the Arabs: The Elusive Peace”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/elusive_peace/default.stm , which British viewers saw last night [and some Americans on PBS, it turns out! H/T Nick in comments]. Others will undoubtedly disagree, but I thought nearly everyone depicted in the first episode, which centred on Clinton’s attempt to broker peace, came out of the documentary with credit. Both Barak and Arafat emerged as serious about peace, but as being too limited by their respective constituencies to deliver an agreement: Barak feared electoral defeat, Arafat assassination. The other players, especially Albright and Clinton, came across as the tough, competent and impressive people they are (such a contrast with their successors). And one was left with a sense of how recent all this was, and how distant it now feels (post 9/11).

I said nearly everyone emerged with some credit. There were two exceptions: Chirac and Sharon. Chirac for the way in which he let his absurd vanity interfere with a historic chance for peace, Sharon for his irresponsible and provocative grandstanding at the Temple Mount.

“Yesterday on Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/10/shock_and_mock.html :

bq. Is it just that, for secular liberals and leftists, all those invoking a line to, or about, God in decisions and actions in the public realm, with far-reaching effects on others, are to be seen as laughable, grotesque, or worse? I guess that must be it. But hold on. This seems to apply only sometimes. Like to the US President; or to Republican voters of devoutly Christian outlook; or to fundamentalist Jews in the occupied territories. It seems not to apply so much, or at all, when Islamists appeal to religious sources as a basis for blowing up themselves and, more particularly, others.

Today in the Guardian, “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1589101,00.html , who must surely exemplify the Guardian-columnist-in-Norman’s-head (if anyone does):

bq. Are religious societies better than secular ones? It should be an easy question for atheists to answer. Most of those now seeking to blow people up – whether with tanks and missiles or rucksacks and passenger planes – do so in the name of God.

Ascription to a whole group, of the sort Geras engages in here, is now a standard move of the “decent left”. I don’t believe it is dishonest, I think they have constructed an image in their own heads of what most “secular liberals and leftists” believe, an image sharpened by their own sense of embattlement and by every BBC or Guardian story that doesn’t exactly resonate with their own views. In this, of course, they increasingly reproduce the paranoid groupthink of the American right about “liberals”.

I’ve been noticing a more and more frequent theme in the writings of the pro-war “left” recently, but no-one, I think, has managed to achieve “the narcissism and self-pity of John Lloyd”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/63736aa8-2fc4-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8.html in the Financial Times:

bq. The great betrayal of liberalism and of the left was not opposition to the war but the insouciant, opportunist, morally indignant denunciation of those who, for diverse motives to be sure, sought to give force to the rhetoric of liberation. They have been so content to denounce that they think nothing of what they damage. It is the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.

Good intentions should count for nothing here. You backed a disastrous project, mismanaged by morons, sold by lies, and it has turned into a bloody mess. But those who point this out attack “freedom itself.” Sheesh!

Scott Horton has an “indispensable post”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2005/09/shirking-responsibility.html at Balkinization on the armed forces’ response to the torture scandals. One telling paragraph:

bq. Harvey and Schoomaker also claim that the reports reflect that the Army took a “critical look at itself” and that it “investigated every credible allegation of detainee abuse.” But the cumulative evidence shows that, although the investigators and staff took their work seriously, the focus of those higher up was on a whitewash. An excellent example of this can be found in the work of MG Fay, who before being called up was a New Jersey insurance executive best known for his fund-raising activities on behalf of the Bush-Cheney campaign. As it happens, I was in Germany in the spring of 2004 at roughly the same time that MG Fay was there interviewing soldiers and officers with V Corps MI units. Having some contacts with these units, I took the time to speak to a number of NCOs and officers to get a sense of just how Fay was conducting his investigation. What I heard was consistent and very disturbing. Fay repeatedly warned soldiers that if they were involved in incidents, they would be put up on charges. And if they had seen things and not reported them, they would be up on charges. Then he asked if the soldiers had anything to report. One soldier told me that when he began to describe an incident to Fay, he was stopped and told “Son, you don’t want to go there.” This process was constructed to stop soldiers from coming forward with evidence about what had happened — the opposite of a fair or critical inquiry. But I stress that among the twelve investigations conducted, the Fay/Jones report was one of the best. One wonders what it would have netted had proper investigatory technique been used.