Thursday, June 30, 2005

More Comments on the War: Leslie G.

I believe, too, that the Iraqis would probably like freedom. It would be really interesting to go there, to conduct interviews among the people to see what "they" really think. As it is a bit dangerous at present, I think I will forego the trip...I am reminded, though, that some years ago, an acquaintance of mine from high school who writes for the NYT, conducted a radio interview about the middle east. Listening to him speak about the various points of view, I felt that I was getting the real scoop on the people's minds instead of just impressions. Interestingly, my business partner (from Iraq, btw) came to work that day raving about this columnist she had heard interviewed. It was the same guy - named Stephen Kinzer. I got in touch with him and we had a short exchange. I would like to find out what he says now about what is really going on there....and what the people think. From what I gather, everyone is glad to be rid of Sadam, but, even though they don't have a single enemy now to contend with, people's lives are far worse now that no one is in control. I have a lot of skepticism about whether you can actually hand freedom and democracy to people if they can't (or couldn't) do it for themselves. You pointed out that the Saudis are a deeply divided nation and that it took this strong kingdom to subdue the threat of its enemies. It used to be a safe place, but not anymore. The iron grip of the King is no longer so strong.The Iraqi sects, too, are deeply divided from each other. While they may want democracy in theory, I am not at all sure they understand it or can trust each other enough to allow it.


Which brings me to our president's glowing praise of democracy. He is another person who, I think, doesn't understand the concept. It disturbs me greatly - doesn't it you?- that while George Bush and his coterie say "let freedom ring" in Iraq, they are trying fairly desperately, to paint those who speak against the war, or even those who question any aspect of it, as unpatriotic. Bush's strategy -like Sadam's in Iraq - seems also to be to divide our country and rule as he wishes. He can talk all he wants about democracy and freedom, but letting Karl Rove give speeches to the effect that all those who question this war are terrorist sympathizers, trying to force (and succeeding!) Newsweek to rescind its reporting on the treatment of the Koran (when, as you know, many other observers, including Amnesty International, have noted the truth of the Newsweek content) encourages people NOT to speak, NOT to tell the truth for fear of being branded as terrorists, and is in effect, an effort to get rid of democracy even in our own country. His administration's attitude towards democracy here bespeaks no great love of it.

You wrote: We have now been attacked once again in a fashion on a par with Pearl Harbor. A similiar response is in order.

Yes, definitely a similar response! But, how does it help to invade Iraq when our enemies are and were all over the world? How did invading Iraq do anything to get our enemy? It's as if (I think Howard Dean said this) the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we marched resolutely into Mexico. We did a sane thing by going into Afghanistan, where the Taliban and Al Quaeda were in cahoots with each other, but then we just left it to fester again in order to go into a country that was no danger at all. There is so much circumstantial evidence that George Bush, the man born with the silver spoon in his mouth, wanted to get Saddam and that 9/11 gave him his opportunity. Regardless of his words, the Downing Street memos and his switching justifications for invading make it seem as if he is using the bodies of our citizens (soldiers) as cannon fodder. Our enemies are, as I write, re-organizing all over again, even in Afghanistan, and we don't have the troops there to stop them.

I agree that, now that Saddam is gone, there seem to be a lot of freedom haters fighting against us in Iraq. But what makes you think that, just because they are fighting us there, they won't fight us here, too? There are plenty of them to go around, plenty of them to blow up trains in Spain and attack the twin towers, and etc. Why do you think fighting them there is doing anything at all for our cause?

It seems to me that we have a worldwide menace that has discovered it can bring any people and any government to its knees by attacking civilians when they least expect it. We should have gotten together with the world governments and put as much money and energy and even blood if necessary into cooperating to stop terrorism wherever it festers.

Dangerous Incompetence: Bob Herbert

Dangerous Incompetence - New York Times:

"On July 2, 2003, with evidence mounting that U.S. troop strength in Iraq was inadequate, Mr. Bush told reporters at the White House, 'There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, Bring 'em on.'

It was an immature display of street-corner machismo that appalled people familiar with the agonizing ordeals of combat. Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, was quoted in The Washington Post as saying: 'I am shaking my head in disbelief. When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander - let alone the commander in chief - invite enemies to attack U.S. troops.' "

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

President Bush's Speech at Fort Bragg: More of the Same

Okay, I know the phrase more of the same isn't original.

Okay, I know it's easy to rip into this president and savage the poor man.

Okay, I know I shouldn't have called him a fucking donkey in a previous article. He's a foolish man, not a fucking donkey.

Now let's consider the title of this article, which is descriptive enough. The commentary on Bush's speech this morning uses the word strategy a lot. People were looking for a strategy from the president: a strategy for winning the war in Iraq, a strategy for winning the war against our enemies beyond Iraq. What did we hear instead? To sum it up, he said: I didn't have a strategy for winning the peace going into this conflict, and I don't have one now. Well I never liked the phrase winning the peace very much, but it seems appropriate enough now. Whatever you call the last two years - it's certainly not peace - it's clear the White House had no strategy for what to do after the first three weeks of fighting. Ever since they removed Hussein's regime from power and replaced it with near anarchy, they have improvised. Improvisation is not always a bad thing, but two things are obvious: the crew in the White House is not good at it, and this conflict does require a good strategy, not improvisation.

I heard a Brit on the radio yesterday. The Brits seem to be the only ones who can analyze this conflict: the debate here seems unable to rise above riffs on partisan bickering. The Democrats and Republicans go at it in Washington, and the rest of the discussion in the media seems to echo what's happening there. We should all go to London for a few weeks and find out what they're saying. I'd like to summarize some of the ideas expressed during the radio show, but I don't have time now.

So let's return to Bush's speech. Why can't this gentleman talk like he has a grasp on reality? The surest sign that he's still out there in fantasy land is his use of the phrase clear path. He actually sees a clear path to success in Iraq? And he thinks his speech showed that clear path to the rest of us? His credibility is low enough to begin with, but clear path is in there with last throes for believability. Can he possibly know how foolish he sounds when he talks like that, after all the other foolish things he has said? Who writes this stuff for him? Do his speechwriters know how bad they're making him look? We expect a president's remarks to be grounded. This president is oddly practical in what he says: figure out what's likely to go over well, and say it as seriously as possible. But you can't keep treating people like idiots and expect to get away with it over and over again. After a while people understand that you actually don't have anything valuable to say.

One thing did come out in the president's speech. He still thinks that the best way to defeat Al Qaeda is to defeat them in Iraq. From the evidence in the speech, he has given no thought whatever to the prosecution of this war after the conflict in Iraq is over. Democracy and stability in Iraq will lead to democracy and stability in the entire region. With freedom throughout the Middle East, the swamp, as we say, will dry up, and Al Qaeda won't be able to survive. So if we can win the war in Iraq, we'll win the larger war. Conversely, if we lose the war in Iraq, we'll lose the larger war.

This argument doesn't hold. President Bush said in his speech, "When people write the history of our time...." Well that's not a bad way to think. The president said that future generations will be grateful that we stood for freedom in Iraq, that we held our ground against the terrorists. I believe on the contrary that the president led his country into the largest strategic mistake it has ever made. Future generations will see this war as the turning point: the point when our irreversible decline began. That's not to say that Al Qaeda will win the war. We may well win it eventually. But if we do win the war, it won't be because we went to war in Iraq. Even if democracy spreads from Baghdad to Islamabad in the east and to Tripoli in the West, Al Qaeda can still do fine. What Bush really means when he refers to democracy in the Middle East is a regional consensus about basic values that are friendly to the West. And he's not going to get that by doing what he's doing in Iraq.

The last point is that if even if we win the war in Iraq, and win the war against Al Qaeda, we'll still lose our position of leadership in the world. It took nearly two generations to recover from our Vietnam debacle, and at that time the poor Soviet Union was our only competitor. Now we are involved in a debacle much worse than Vietnam - not in terms of lives lost but in terms of our position of leadership - and our primary competitor is China. China is a wealthy country now, and getting wealthier. China is a powerful country now, and getting stronger. China is a respected country now, and becoming more admired with each passing month. While our soldiers get blown up by roadside bombs, picked off by snipers, ripped to pieces by car bombs, and become altogether demoralized because they don't see a clear purpose to what they're doing, China's waiting patiently. It'll take our place without ever having to fight us.

President Bush said that in the past, whether during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 or the Civil War, we have prevailed because we were steadfast in the fight and did not lose our way. We lost our way in the war against Al Qaeda when we invaded Iraq. President Bush will not recognize that he's responsible for that. He will not recognize that future generations will blame him for a huge misjudgment, no matter how the war in Iraq turns out in its particulars. Nothing President Bush does can redeem this mistake. The speech he made last night confirms that: it confirms that he has no clear vision of the future, no practical goals or realistic plans to reach them, no feel for the kind of situation we're in, and no ability to think outside the categories he's constructed for himself. Failure doesn't mean anything for someone like that. It doesn't lead him to rethink his actions in the past, his policies in the present, or his plans for the future. He just insists that he's been doing the right thing, and that's that.

President Bush said in the speech that he told us shortly after the September 11 attacks that the road would be hard: the fight would require much sacrifice and take a long time, with the outcome uncertain while we are in the midst of it. Then he made the connection between the war against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq even tighter than ever. The current war is an essential phase of the larger war he talked about when he addressed the nation after September 11. I think some people still believe that. They won't accept that their president could make such a gargantuan mistake. But he did. What if Franklin Roosevelt had declared that December 7, 1941, was a day that would "live in infamy," then had sent an invasion force across the Rio Grande to overthrow the government in Mexico City? What would future generations say about that? They could not understand incompetence on that scale. The march of folly, Barbara Tuchman called it. President Bush isn't the first leader in history to do something so foolish, but he's the first American leader to do it.

The Brit on the radio said we need to realize how much is at stake here. We could have a civil war in Iraq that makes the civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s look like a "picnic for teddy bears." If you want to see how bad it can get, look to the warfare in Zaire that ensued shortly after the genocide in Rwanda. The Shia and the Kurds still have armed militias that can contest the authority of the forces we are training. Syria, Iran, Turkey, Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and Sunnis in and out of Iraq all have a high level of interest in the conflict that's developing in the central, northern, and western provinces of Iraq. We could easily become spectators to a civil war that our government argued would occur only if we left. The Brit on the radio is correct: we have a lot to lose here, and we've only seen the beginning.

So the people who call for a reasonable, realistic plan for Iraq are correct. We need a plan that meets the requirements of the situation. Instead we hear two extremes in the debate in Washington. In one corner is President Bush's position: stay the course until the Iraqis can take over security for themselves. In the other corner is the Democrats' position: set a timetable for withdrawal, which really means: tell us you'll begin drawing down our troops in 2006, and once you've started, pull out most of them as quickly as you can. These two positions do not represent a useful debate about our future policy. Focusing on when the troops come home doesn't do us much good now. Our focus has to be on what we want our troops to accomplish over there, and how are they going to accomplish it. To suggest that our goals are clear and our methods effective is just stupid. No one who looks at our government's record of performance in Iraq over the last two years could argue that. The government has improvised, and the results speak for themselves.

So here's the first thing we have to do to resolve the mess, and to bring about an end to the civil war that has already started in Iraq. We need to go to the international community and say that we made a terrible mistake when we invaded Iraq. We need to explain openly why it was a mistake and apologize for it. And we need to ask for assistance to overcome the consequences of our mistake. A big part of our mistake was to go our own way, without the international community. If we acknowledge that mistake openly, we'll get some tentative support from countries that have withheld it. They won't send troops to Iraq, but they will help us.

We need to say these things in the United Nations, the forum for the international community. We need to ask for help from the United Nations in Iraq. In fact, we need to turn the entire civil war in Iraq over to the UN. The standard reply to that suggestion now is that doing such a thing would be worse than defeat. The United Nations is corrupt: the oil for food scandal proves it. Well, I can write more on the United Nations another time. Right now, I'll hold with the argument that the United Nations is the only body that can bring about an end to the civil war in Iraq in a way that serves the aspirations of the Iraqi people - the well meaning citizens of Iraq who want to live in peace and freedom from fear.

Naturally President Bush is not going to do such a thing. That's why the election last November was so discouraging. It assured four additional years of speeches like the one we heard last night. The end of our difficulties and the beginning of success is new leadership. That was our hope before the presidential election, and it's our hope now. The difference now is that we have three and a half years to go in President Bush's second term. That's a long time.

Meanwhile, it does seem we've come closer to a tipping point here. As Secretary Rumsfeld and General Casey give ever more frequent press conferences, it's a sign that they're concerned about the opposition they face here in the United States. That opposition needs as much vigor as it can muster. Everyone who opposes the government's policy in Iraq has to press the advantage now. Hearten your congressmen. Give them a good reason to speak for you on this issue. Make them see that you regard this issue as the most important one on the government's agenda. Make them see how much is at stake here. We should not be steadfast in a mistaken war in Iraq, but we should be steadfast in the love we have for our country. In this time of great trouble, when we are losing brave men and women every day in Iraq, we have to stand by our country and help her find her way again. That means we have to show President Bush that we reject his leadership. We'll find our own way.

Monday, June 27, 2005

The End of the War in Iraq

Bombing Attacks on Iraqi Forces Kill 38 in North - New York Times:

Four suicide bomb attacks struck Iraqi police and an army base in a 16-hour wave of insurgent violence in the northern city of Mosul on Saturday and Sunday, killing 38 people and wounding scores more. One American commander said the violence continued a trend in the past few weeks of insurgent attacks intensely focused on Iraqi security forces.

The attacks came as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld echoed remarks by his advisers in recent months suggesting that the insurgency could last as long as a dozen years and that Iraq would become more violent before elections later this year.

The rate of insurgent attacks remains steady, but the typical attack has grown more lethal, Mr. Rumsfeld said on 'Fox News Sunday.' 'They're killing a lot more Iraqis,' he said.

Bush administration officials have been at odds with military leaders over the strength and resiliency of the insurgency. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said last week that the insurgency was undiminished, seemingly countering a remark days before by Vice President Dick Cheney, who asserted it was in its "last throes."

With polls showing that support for the war is dropping, President Bush is expected to use a prime-time speech on Tuesday at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., to press his case for a large continued military presence in Iraq and explain why the administration's strategy will eventually work.

The success of Iraqi forces is the linchpin of the United States' exit strategy from Iraq, as many battle commanders contend that the country will slip into a civil war if the United States withdraws large numbers of troops before Iraqi forces are ready to take over.

"There's only one way for the insurgents to win: that's to drive us out before the Iraqis are ready to assume the battle space," General Abizaid said Sunday on the CNN program "Late Edition." "If that's what happens, they could win. But it's very, very clear to me that we're going to stay the course."


It's getting too easy to take pot shots at these guys. Rumsfeld says that the insurgency could go on now for another dozen years. Cheney says that the insurgency is in its last throes. Cheney's remark is even more laughable than Bush's much ridiculed Mission Accomplished visit to the USS Abraham Lincoln. No one in this administration has any credibility, and the interesting is, the officials themselves don't seem to know it. It doesn't matter what they say now - a dozen years, last throes, gonna be hard work - no one believes anything they say anymore. Crying wolf about WMD did it for them, but they're acting like they still have sheep that will follow them.

Did people follow President Bush nine months ago, during the election, because they're stupid, as some people think? Two other possibilities come to mind. They voted for Bush because they're scared. A related reason is that they recognized Bush is pursuing a bad policy, but judged that Kerry would be worse. They would have liked someone better than Bush, but they found Kerry not acceptable. Still another possibility is that people gave more weight to domestic policy than to the war, and they liked Bush better in that area. An election compiles well over a hundred million individual decisions, so even with lots of polls we won't be able to make sound generalizations about why people voted the way they did.

Here is something that becomes more and more clear as this war drags out to its uncertain end. It'll end someday, and the Republicans will take credit for it. Someday Iraq will find some sort of peace, under some sort of government other than the one they had when we invaded, and the Republicans will call it a success. Victory may have taken longer than we expected, and it may have cost more than we predicted, but we stuck it out, and our policy is vindicated. The Iraqis have a freely elected government, they'll say, and it wouldn't have happened without us. If the current pattern holds, the Democrats won't even have an answer.

So tell me this: If the Israelis, with all their advantages, haven't been able to stop a campaign of guerrilla warfare and suicide bombings for decades, how do we think the Iraqis can stop the same kind of warfare? Israel is a very small country, a little slice of land where most people live in an area smaller than the size of Connecticut. It's military is highly capable, its intelligence services unmatched in their ability to gather information and conduct undercover operations. Yet the war in Israel has continued year after year after year. The United States has not been able to deal with the same kind of warfare in Iraq. How do we expect the Iraqi armed forces to do what we can't?

You might say that the Iraqi forces can obtain better intelligence than we can. People are more willing to give information to the Iraqi soldiers than they are to the American forces. Well let's see about that. The Israeli example suggests that in a country divided deeply along ethnic lines, no amount of intelligence leads to decisive victories or defeats.

Let's not hear any more references to an Iraqi civil war in the future tense. The latest phrase is that the country will slip into civil war if we leave before the Iraqi armed forces are ready. The civil war has already started. We could not prevent it. The Iraqi forces can't prevent it. The so-called coalition, back when it existed, couldn't prevent it. So the argument that the country would slip into a civil war were we to leave has no weight. The only future oriented questions now are when the civil war will end, and how.

Yes, pulling out now means a defeat for us and victory for the other side. So far, that by itself has been enough to stamp out suggestions that we set a timetable for withdrawal. The Democrats demand a timetable, the Republicans say that we will not pull out before the Iraqis are ready to take over. To do so before that would mean defeat. And that's the end of the discussion. What sophisticated policy planning we have in this conversation! The administration's policy for over a year now has been to prepare the Iraqi forces to take over from the American forces, and the enemy has only become stronger and more effective during that time. The enemy becomes stronger, and the vice-president says that the insurgents are in their last throes. What total incompetence.

Do you know why people hold the Congress in such low regard right now? I haven't read any analyses, but I can venture a guess. They think members of Congress are gutless wonders because they haven't had the courage to stand up to the administration. People admire courage, even if the stand taken disagrees with their own. Congress as a body hasn't shown any courage in its relations with the White House. Individual members have. It's true too that the Republicans have a disciplined operation in both houses, so that leaves the Democrats to get organized and speak up. Hilary Clinton says that it's hard to oppose the administration when the Republicans are so shameless in their dishonest tactics. Perhaps. Then she criticizes the media for folding so easily when they're criticized by the administration. She might have directed her judgment toward her own party. The Democrats, especially since the election and even during last year's campaign, seemed unable to counter the Republicans' aggressive campaign with one equally agressive. They were outfought last year, and the Republicans are outfighting them again this year.

That opens the question, why are the Democrats so weak? Or, why do they appear so weak, if they're not in actuality? We can take up that question another time, perhaps. I don't know that much about what's going on inside the Democratic party, so it's hard to frame an answer from that point of view. The best answer, lacking that perspective, is the reluctance we have to appear unpatriotic, unsupportive of the troops, inconsiderate of the memory of the people who died on September 11.

Well, you know you won't find any restraint on that score here. The administration's policies are unfaithful to our dear American traditions: they have destroyed our tested Constitution by waging this so-called war of choice, the worst euphemism for aggressive war I've ever heard. If you want to find someone who is unpatriotic, who wears an American flag in his lapel, look to the person who currently lives in the White House. If you want to find an administration that's willing to let our brave men and women die for nothing, look at the incompetents who are still sending our soldiers to Iraq. If you want to find people who are so thoughtless that they would start a war that has nothing to do with the September 11 attacks, look to our current leaders.

We will not win this war because we do not deserve to win. We are the aggressors, and the war as it is currently playing out will stop when we leave. The so-called insurgents have three primary goals, to judge by their pronouncements and their tactics. They want to expel American forces from their country, they want to destroy the fighting ability of the Iraqi forces we've sponsored, and they want to prevent the formation of a government in Iraq by people allied with us. We know the insurgents are not strong enough to achieve these goals under current conditions. The insurgents know that, so far, they're strong enough to prevent us from achieving our goals of establishing security, building a democratic, unified government, and rebuilding Iraq's institutions and economy. No one can see a way out of this balance, but the insurgents can see correctly that time is on their side.

Does that sound like defeatism to you? Who wants to say that I'm unpatriotic, a traitor, just as people said that Jane Fonda was a traitor? Well, I read an article on Jane Fonda, following her recently published memoir, that contained a worthy reminder about what she did back in the sixties and seventies. The reminder is that Jane Fonda was right to oppose the Vietnam war, just as John Kerry was right to oppose it. She opposed it out of her own patriotic sense that her country was on the wrong path, and that she should do what she could to change our policy. The problem occurred with the means she used to voice her opposition to the war. She should not have gone to Hanoi and hooked her celebrity up to their propaganda machine. When Kerry threw his medals away in Washington DC after he returned from the war, he did something that he can be proud of. When Jane Fonda turned her visit to Vietnam into a photo-op, she made a big mistake. She acknowledges that mistake in her book, but she's right to insist the cause was good.

Who wants to be the last man to die for a mistake? Who wants to be the last woman to be blown up in a country where only our stooges in the government want us around? Who will have the stomach to fight the war we should be fighting when this one finally ends? Will it end in a dozen years? Two dozen? How about if the war were to end tomorrow? What if the insurgents stopped fighting and joined Iraq's constitutional process next week? Would we have a plan for how to fight the war against Al Qaeda, the enemy that attacked us? Who would want to fight that war at this point? No, if the war in Iraq were to end tomorrow, the administration would claim success. It'd say that our victory in Iraq seals our ultimate victory over the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. They consider victory in Iraq so important in the war against Al Qaeda, so critical to success in that other war, that they don't even have a plan for conducting that other war when this one is over.

I think they expect Al Qaeda to fold when the war in Iraq is over. But how can that be? They didn't fold when they suffered a direct defeat in Afghanistan. They didn't fold when we pursued them into Pakistan. They didn't fold when we leveled Fallujah and attacked them again and again all over Iraq. Why should they fold when we withdraw our forces from that troubled place? And why should Americans want to fight another war, when this one has proven so unproductive? We'll pull out of Iraq sometime down the line, and that'll be it. We'll be back to our usual preoccupations after that, and if anyone suggests at that point that we fight the war we should have been fighting, people will say: "What war? We just finished fighting a war. And we won it. Why should we fight another one?" Ask yourself whether that response gives proper respect to the people who died on September 11.

Friday, June 24, 2005

The War President - Paul Krugman

The War President - New York Times

In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.

America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.

But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.

Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.

Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.

The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.

And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.

"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.

Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.

Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.

In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.

Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

Morning in America : How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s, by Gil Troy

Amazon.com: Books: Morning in America : How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980's (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)

Entering the realm of the proverbial chicken-and-egg problem, historian Troy examines the relationship between Ronald Reagan's presidency and the materialistic and politically vibrant culture of the 1980s. In chapters organized by year from 1980 to 1990, Troy weaves his narrative of Reagan's presidency into an impressionistic portrait of the cultural and political phenomena that defined the decade-from network shows Dynasty and the Cosby Show, through the rise of MTV, CNN, yuppies, Madonna and Donald Trump, to the culture wars of race, gender and political correctness. The effort makes for a lively read, packed with insightful comments about the decade and its legacies.

Dubbing Reagan's era "the Great Reconciliation," "where the sixties met the eighties culturally and politically," Troy dismantles the myth of a politically passive mainstream. Treading a line between lionizing Reagan and disparaging him as "airhead," he highlights the contradictions of Reagan's conservatism, with its emphasis on wealth and glamour on the one hand and, on the other, "an ascetic streak that recoiled at such excess." Beside Reagan's vision of a "morning in America," manifested in a soaring economy, surging patriotism and faltering Soviet Communism, Reagan presided over "mourning in America" with spiking crime, drugs, family breakdowns and AIDS. Troy avers that Reagan "dominated, and defined, the times" and "remains the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt."

But the Reagan that emerges from his analysis is less the captain steering American culture than a symbol of the 1980s whose greatest strength lay in placing his finger on the pulse of "the American id." As Troy writes, Reagan projected a vision that "was the vision of themselves most Americans wanted to see." Whether Reagan consciously sought to do so, however, remains an open question.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

Iraq and the Polls - David Brooks

Iraq and the Polls - New York Times:

Iraq and the Polls

By DAVID BROOKS

There's a reason George Washington didn't take a poll at Valley Forge. There are times in the course of war when the outcome is simply unknowable. Victory is clearly not imminent, yet people haven't really thought through the consequences of defeat. Everybody just wants the miserable present to go away.

We're at one of those moments in the war against the insurgency in Iraq. The polls show rising disenchantment with the war. Sixty percent of Americans say they want to withdraw some or all troops.

Yet I can't believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and accept defeat. I can't believe they want to abandon to the Zarqawis and the Baathists those 8.5 million Iraqis who held up purple fingers on Election Day. I can't believe they are yet ready to accept a terrorist-run state in the heart of the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq, the crushing of democratic hopes in places like Egypt and Iran, and the ruinous consequences for American power and prestige.

What they want to do, more likely, is somehow escape the current moment, which is discouraging and uncertain. One of the many problems with fighting an insurgency is that it is nearly impossible to know if we are winning or losing. It's like watching a football game with no goal lines and chaotic action all over the field.

On the one hand, there are signs of progress. U.S. forces have completed a series of successful operations, among them Operation Spear in western Iraq, where at least 60 insurgents were killed and 100 captured, and Operation Lightning in Baghdad, with over 500 arrests. American forces now hold at least 14,000 suspected insurgents, and have captured about two dozen lieutenants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. There were reports this week of insurgents fighting each other, foreign against domestic.

There is also the crawling political progress that is crucial to success. Sunni leaders now regret not taking part in the elections and Sunnis are helping to draft the constitution.

These tactical victories, however, have not added up to improvement over all. Insurgent attacks are up. Casualties are up. Few Iraqi security forces can operate independently, so far. There aren't enough U.S. troops to hold the ground they conquer. The insurgents are adaptable, organized and still learning.

Still, one thing is for sure: since we don't have the evidence upon which to pass judgment on the overall trajectory of this war, it's important we don't pass judgment prematurely.

It's too soon to accept the defeatism that seems to have gripped so many. If governments surrendered to insurgencies after just a couple of years, then insurgents would win every time. But they don't because insurgencies have weaknesses, exposed over time, especially when they oppose the will of the majority.

It's just wrong to seek withdrawal now, when the outcome of the war is unknowable and when the consequences of defeat are so vast.

Some of you will respond that this is easy for me to say, since I'm not over there. All I'd say is that we live in a democracy, where decisions are made by all. Besides, the vast majority of those serving in Iraq, and their families, said they voted to re-elect President Bush. They seem to want to finish the job.

Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be right. Time will tell. But right now, this isn't about your personal vindication. It's about victory for the forces of decency and defeating those, like Zarqawi, who would be attacking us in any case.

On Tuesday, Senator Joe Biden gave a speech in Washington on Iraq, after his most recent visit. It was, in some ways, a model of what the president needs to tell the country in the weeks ahead. It was scathing about the lack of progress in many areas. But it was also constructive. "I believe we can still succeed in Iraq," he said. Biden talked about building the coalition at home that is necessary if we are to get through the 2006 election cycle without a rush to the exits.

Biden's speech brought to mind something Franklin Roosevelt told the country on Feb. 23, 1942: "Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us."

That's how democracies should fight, even in the age of polling.

Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The Big Picture - Part II

I have a correspondent who believes the argument about this war rests on facts. The person with the best argument is the person who has his facts right. I've replied that the argument about this war rests on judgments, not facts. I reached a judgment long before the war started that it is wrong, and no facts will change the judgment. My opposition to the war is based on reasons, and nothing has occurred to change those reasons, to weaken my convictions. In a sense, even though the war has offered plenty of opportunities to say I told you so, judgments about the war are largely independent of day to day developments.

Let me give an example. In a recent article I said that no one wants to join the military anymore. My correspondent wrote back to say, you have your facts wrong! Here are the statistics to show that the military is still able to recruit soldiers. One response on my part might be to acknowledge that if I took more care to get my facts right, I'd be able to argue my case more effectively. But that's not my response at all. I don't really care how many people the army is able to recruit each month. The disturbing phenomenon we see is that the army is having trouble finding people qualified for the positions it needs to fill, at a time when the whole country should be united behind fighting the war that started on September 11, 2001. Instead of a united country, we have a divided one, one where the military itself says that recruiting numbers are down. When I say that no one wants to sign up for the military any more, the exaggeration is intentional. It's a way of stating a judgment, not a way of stating facts.

So let's take another look at the big picture. I've said that we should stay away from consequentialist reasoning when we think about this war, because a good outcome down the line won't justify what we've done. But I want to have it both ways. I do want to think about the bad consequences of this war. If good consequences come about years from now, I won't ignore them. They'll have to go in the balance against the bad consequences now. I can't imagine any good outcome that would outweigh what we've already seen. The government argues that the good outcome it's working for is victory in the war that began on September 11. That's a fantasy. No one ever won a war with a plan like the one these guys have. A lot of superpowers have lost their way with a plan like this one, though.

Here are some of the bad bits:

- Total ruination of our military: its credibility, its respect around the world, its ability to attract new soldiers, its ability to wage the type of war we're in, its whole reputation as a force for good in the world. Notice the exaggeration? Not all of these things have happened yet: not everywhere, anyway. The process is far along, though, much further along than we care to think.

- Loss of our position as the world's leading power. World leadership does not depend on our power to blow things up. It depends on our ability to persuade people to follow us. We can't do that anymore. We have lost a lot of followers during the last three years, since Bush began to prepare the world for our attack.

- An inability to fight our real enemies, now and in the future. The war in Iraq is the only game we have. When it's over, what plans will we have to fight Al Qaeda, the people who did us harm, and who continue to plan our destruction? Our plans to fight them will be no further along than they were when we launched the Iraq war in March 2003. Our motivation to fight them will be nil, until their next successful attack. In a way, though, they don't even need to launch another attack against us. They have already managed to remove us from our position of world leadership, with a lot of help from us, and I don't think they could ask for a lot more. We put Al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan, but they've already achieved their aim of weakening our influence.

- Loss of the initiative in the fight. Al Qaeda took the initiative on September 11, and except for a short time in Afghanistan during the winter and spring of 2002, they have kept it. If I were in their place, I would like my position: time is on their side, they can hardly deal with all the people who want to blow themselves up for them, they have money and new recruits are flowing in, their opponent is struggling, on the defensive and unable to achieve any of its goals.

- No opportunity to redeem ourselves. We've missed them all. Others have given up on us. We will pay the price of arrogance and fight without friends. Did you think we would reach this point in the weeks after September 11? We all knew that a war started on that day. Did you envision this one three and a half years later? How did you think the war would look to its participants once we got mobilized to fight? Did you think it would look like this?

In the balance on the good side is the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. No one can argue the beneficial impact of that result, accomplished in three violent weeks in the spring of 2002. Removing Kim Jong Il would have a benficial impact, too, but there are reasons we don't do it. On balance, the bad consequences of the war in Iraq far outweigh the one good one. And that's a matter of judgment.

That's all for tonight. Thanks for reading,

Steve







Monday, June 20, 2005

Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks - Frank Rich

Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks - New York Times:

President Bush quoted in Frank Rich's article:

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda," the president said on May 24.

When the president himself calls his own speeches propaganda, we have a new form of democracy in the making. As in his run-up to the Iraq war, he's open about his dishonesty.

Someone Else's Child - Bob Herbert

Someone Else's Child - Bob Herbert:

"I don't know how you win a war that your country doesn't want to fight."

"The president and these home-front warriors got us into this war and now they don't know how to get us out. Nor do they have a satisfactory answer to the important ethical question: how do you justify sending other people's children off to fight while keeping a cloak of protection around your own kids?"

Friday, June 17, 2005

Discussion Board on Ronald Reagan

Here is a link to a Reagan site that has a good discussion board: www.RonaldReagan.com.

Iraq Is FUBAR

I had a car accident several years ago. I was driving to church on a Sunday morning with my little daughter on a quiet Sunday morning. On a street that runs between Allston and Brookline, I entered an intersection at the top of a hill. A large vehicle slammed into my wife's small Chevy Nova, at the front door hinges on the passenger side. The driver had run a red light in an intersection with poor visibility. My one-year-old, in the car seat in the back, had a small bruise on her neck. I went to the hospital to have eleven stitches in my forehead, where my head hit the rear view mirror.

Well, these accidents happen. What's interesting is that the driver of the other car, who wasn't hurt, never asked how I was. He didn't ask about my daughter, either at the accident scene or later. As far as he was concerned, the car he hit was empty. The damage he caused wasn't too important to him. More interesting, he lied about what he had done. He said I had run the red light. How do I know? When we tried to get fair compensation for our car, which was not repairable, the insurance adjuster refused to give us more than half of its value. The adjuster said the driver of the other car claimed I was at fault in the accident. Take fifty percent, because you're not going to get more.

Here was an individual who would not take responsibility for what he had done. It just wasn't possible for him to imagine that he could cause damage like that. Nope, it didn't happen that way. Blame lies elsewhere, not with me. I didn't do anything wrong. ...Does that kind of thinking sound familiar to you?

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When I was in the Navy I served first as the gunnery officer, then as the electronics material officer. My men in the gunnery division took care of the forward, five-inch gun mount as well as the fire control equipment. My men in the electronics material division took care of the radar and communications equipment. They had an expression for equipment that had to be replaced: FUBAR. I believe the word dates all the way back to the men who did so much with so little in World War II. It means Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. As often as my men used the term, it actually represented an important decision making standard. If a piece of equipment, or a module or a circuit board or a wiring harness or some important mechanism couldn't be repaired, you had to order the whole thing right away. You didn't have time to tinker away with various repair strategies when the fighting readiness of the whole ship was at stake.

I'd like to say more about the title of this article at this point, but time is short as usual. Plus the condition of Iraq - fucked up beyond all repair - is pretty self-evident now. We slammed into the country with a big vehicle, and now the condition of the country is someone else's fault. Colin Powell said that if we break it, we own it. Well we sure broke it, and we sure don't know how to fix it. It's hard work, President Bush says, which means we have to have patience. Give us some time and Iraq will become an exemplary, constitutional republic. Twenty-five years from now Iraq probably will be an exemplary nation-state, and the Republicans will take credit for it.

Let's follow the example of Thomas Aquinas now. He liked to pose a question, offer an answer, make objections to the answer, then answer the objections. I'm not going follow that pattern as rigorously as he did, but it's a good model of argumentation to keep in mind.

On the Aquinas model then, our question is: What do we do now in Iraq? One answer is, we should get out of there as soon as we can. We consider the objections to that proposal, and we respond to the objections. At another point, we might want to consider other proposals in response to the original question.

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Have you noticed how the war's defenders have the same answer to all criticisms? If you don't want to stay the course, they say, what would you do instead? You're not suggesting that we pull out, are you? You're not suggesting that we concede defeat, are you? We don't have any choice now but to see it through. We have to finish what we started. You may not like the war - nobody does. But we don't have much choice but to stay.

I'd like to know why the burden of explaining the future falls on the war's critics here. What plans have the war's leaders offered that are convincing and effective? Every single thing we have tried has failed. What's more, the war's leaders can't articulate any course of action that's convincing. The long-range plan in place now is to train Iraqi troops to take over security responsibilities. But everyone acknowledges that the key problem is not training but leadership. The Iraqi units don't have good leadership among the non-commissioned and junior officers. We can train new soldiers how to fire an automatic rifle, but no fighting unit is effective without good leadership. Without it the soldiers aren't motivated. We have motivated, well-trained and well-equipped soldiers in our units, and we have not been successful against the opposing forces. How do we expect the Iraqi units to do what we haven't been able to do? No plan from the administration has answered that question.

Instead of a plan we have counter-objections. The war's defenders say that if we leave, the country will tip toward civil war. But the civil war has already started. Iraqis have been killing Iraqis by the hundreds and thousands for many months now. That looks like a civil war to me. It doesn't matter what we call the people on the other side: terrorists, insurgents, foreign fighters, gangs, rebels, tribesmen, Sunnis, a restive population, Shiites, suicide bombers, gunmen, fundamentalists, militant Islamists, Al Qaeda, criminals, kidnappers, Baathists, Hussein loyalists, members of the feared intelligence services, Sadr's army, diehards or dead-enders. The country has fallen into a civil war since we invaded, and we don't know how to deal with it.

Another objection from the war's defenders is that if we leave, it will embolden our enemies. That's a good one. Half a dozen members of the opposing force blow themselves up every day as part of their war-fighting strategy, and we think our withdrawal will embolden them. We will give ourselves a new set of problems if we withdraw, but an enemy that is more willing to fight isn't one of them. Our enemies have been willing to fight for a long time, and we've given them a great opportunity to prove it in Iraq.

A third objection is that we can't concede defeat. A superpower of our stature can't do that. Why not? Why can't we concede defeat? What terrible thing would happen that's worse than what's happening now? A concession of defeat, with recognition that the war was a mistake from the beginning, would show maturity and an ability to deal with the truth. But I'm past arguing for that now. In fact, we don't actually have to concede defeat. We can, as one writer put it rather unoriginally, declare victory and go home. We invaded Iraq to change the regime, and we accomplished that. We can't do any more good there, so let's pull our forces out. We can explain why we're doing it, and put a good face on it. We know the administration is good at putting a good face on things. We can undertake the process slowly - no sudden redeployment is required here. We can undertake the process in close coordination with the new government, and with other groups throughout the country. As ambivalent as some political and religious leaders might be about our presence there, I don't think many of them would try hard to make us stay.

That brings me to a last point. We say we want to bring democracy to Iraq. We've transferred sovereignty to the newly elected Iraqi government. We know that by a very large majority, the people want us to leave. If the new government were to hold a referendum on the question of our presence there, we don't have any reason to doubt the outcome of the vote. So how can we say now that our staying promotes democracy, that our leaving inhibits it? How did we reach a point where we occupy the country, against the people's will, in order to establish democracy? How did we reach a point where we refuse to leave, when the people clearly want that, because it would endanger democracy? Everyone says that the security situation would worsen were we to leave, but would it? It's an article of faith now, but I haven't seen any convincing arguments on that question. No one has explained the process by which things would get worse were we to leave. People just believe that it's so.

So let's take another look at the proposition, "We got ourselves into this mess, now we have to see it through." Perhaps we've already seen it through, and we don't know it. For that matter, how will we know when we've seen it through? When everyone in Iraq is prosperous, happy and secure, right? Good luck. That's going to take a long time. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might see new goals for ourselves that look better than the ones we say we have now. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might see new possibilities that benefit both us and the Iraqis, new insights that come from acknowledging our mistakes, and new ways to fight the war we should be fighting. If we were to take another look at that proposition, we might win.

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So far I haven't been able to think of a good subtitle for Ugly War. The possibilities seem too long, too depressing, too uninteresting, too pessimistic: not anything that would make someone want to read the book. Five years from now, who would want to read a book titled: Ugly War: Why the United States Should Get Out of Iraq? The title I just thought of sounds a little more perky: Ugly War: How to Succeed in Iraq. Altogether, it'd be good just to call it Ugly War, the way Thomas Paine titled his pamphlet Common Sense. The people who read Thomas Paine knew what he was talking about. He just had to reach his audience at the right time, when they were ready to agree and to act. I don't know when our citizens will reach that point, but I sure hope it's soon. I can't say that Ugly War will be the force that tips things the other way, but something has to do it. The longer we fight this war, the more we lose. We've lost a lot already.

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Comments from Hessam Khaleeli

I do not think the United States can leave Iraq really. Its a fight the United States picked, and must see through.

But what the US does not understand is it is not the fight with guns that counts. The real fight is in rebuilding the nation. Free and fair elections and new constitutions, however glorious, do not solve the problems of the man on the street. The United States needs a Marshall Plan for Iraq. It needs to show the Iraqi population it is, despite what people in the Middle East think, not an occupation force, but a force of freedom. This means freeing people from the miseries of daily life, not from the miseries of some political entity.

The real troubling fact in Iraq is that two years on, life in Iraq was still better under Saddam Hussein. Despite the sanctions and the bombings in the 90s, life was better then. And then the US comes in and destroys everything while saying "we bring freedom." Who the fuck cares would be my reply. I have no water, I have no electricity, and I have no security of life or property. Saddam lost the battle, but with the US bogged down in the military conflict, and forgetting about the "hearts and minds" of Iraqis, Saddam is winning the war!

America is the bad guy because all they have done is destroy. An Iraqi face on American controlled politics in Iraq will not help. The people know who is in charge and will place the blame as such. Food, water, schools, hospitals... this is the real battle field. If the US shows it is going to help the people of Iraq with these things, not just a constitution - that let's be honest, does nothing for the man on the street - it can and will still win this war.

Let's Talk About Iraq - Thomas Friedman

Let's Talk About Iraq - New York Times:

"Maybe it is too late, but before we give up on Iraq, why not actually try to do it right? Double the American boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort to bring in those Sunnis who want to be part of the process and fight to the death those who don't. As Stanford's Larry Diamond, author of an important new book on the Iraq war, 'Squandered Victory,' puts it, we need 'a bold mobilizing strategy' right now. That means the new Iraqi government, the U.S. and the U.N. teaming up to widen the political arena in Iraq, energizing the constitution-writing process and developing a communications-diplomatic strategy that puts our bloodthirsty enemies on the defensive rather than us. The Bush team has been weak in all these areas. For weeks now, we haven't even had ambassadors in Iraq, Afghanistan or Jordan.

"We've already paid a huge price for the Rumsfeld Doctrine - 'Just enough troops to lose.' Calling for more troops now, I know, is the last thing anyone wants to hear. But we are fooling ourselves to think that a decent, normal, forward-looking Iraqi politics or army is going to emerge from a totally insecure environment, where you can feel safe only with your own tribe."

Comment: Yes, but who thinks we could put 270,000 troops on the ground in Iraq now? We have two ways to do that: get help from the United Nations, and start a draft. We've rejected the first option, and at this point the UN wouldn't do it anyway. If we draft people to go to Iraq, then you'll truly see opposition to the war rise. One terrible consequence of the war has been to show our enemies how weak we are. Yes, we have the strongest army, navy and air force by far, but we can't put much more than 150,000 volunteers in Iraq indefinitely, and our enemies know it. And they know that domestic support even for the current commitment is waning. So they sense that time is on their side. That means we've lost the initiative, which has been obvious since, as Friedman puts it, "the looting started."

Monday, June 06, 2005

Hillary Clinton Assails the G.O.P.: Follow-Up Remarks

Lately General Bush has made us remember V. I. Lenin’s saying, “If you are not with me, you are against me.” There’s another saying, from the Middle East, I believe: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Well, I didn’t think I’d ever root for Hillary Clinton, but a Democrat or anyone else who has courage to denounce our current leaders has to get support. So go, Hillary, go!

Howard Dean recently made another snide remark about the Republicans, and some Democrats are saying – again – that he’s gone too far. Let’s see what Hillary does when they try to move Dean out of the party chairmanship as the 2008 elections approach.

Hillary’s remarks in her second paragraph may be true enough, but it’s not the whole truth. The Democrats can’t do more to stop the Republicans because they’re acting like a bunch of wimpy nincompoops who don’t have any guts. What Hillary says about the media in her last two paragraphs applies to the Democrats as well.

Senator Clinton Assails G.O.P.

Senator Clinton Assails G.O.P. at Fund-Raiser:

Some remarks by Hillary Clinton at a fund raiser in New York:

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the gathering.

"I know it's frustrating for many of you, it's frustrating for me. Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

In some of her sharpest language, Mrs. Clinton said that abetting Republicans was a Washington press corps that has become a pale imitation of the Watergate-era reporters who are being celebrated amid the identification of the Washington Post source, Deep Throat.

"It's shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today," Mrs. Clinton said, again to strong applause. "They don't stand their ground. If they're criticized by the White House, they just fall apart."

"I mean, c'mon, toughen up, guys, it's only our Constitution and country at stake."

Laziness in the Media

“The problem of …liberal/conservative bias (in the news media) is a red herring. The real bias is toward laziness, toward entertainment, toward confrontation, toward that which will drive the ratings. The real story is this incredible laziness. It seems like the whole institution has lost its way.”

David Javerbaum
Head writer for “The Daily Show”
Quoted in The Holmes Report
Monday, May 30, 2005

Sunday, June 05, 2005

The Big Picture

I just wish the journalists would think for themselves for once. Okay, I know I shouldn't paint all the journalists with one brush, but you know what I mean. Once they get on a line of thought, you can't get them off of it. One line of thought, or premise, has been that we need to counter the insurgents' attacks with attacks of our own. So we level Fallujah and defeat Sadr's forces in Najaf. We mount an offensive against the insurgents near the Syrian border, and go after them in Samarra, Baghdad, and any number of other cities. We find their weapons caches and their hideouts, we capture their leaders, and we round up suspects to bring them in for what we used to call questioning, a euphemism for torture. None of it worked. The more we tried to limit the insurgents' ability to fight, the worse the insurgency became.

Another broad effort has been the transfer of sovereignty. The reasoning is that if the Iraqis see that they're running the show, they won't have any reason to resist the occupation any more. We want to bring democracy to the country, after all, and democracy means self-rule. So we have a formal transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June a year ago. We have elections at the end of January this year. The Iraqis will form a government and write a constitution. Most of all, we've been training Iraqi infantry and police forces to achieve the military and security objectives we haven't been able to achieve. Instead of more order, we see the beginnings of a civil war as the insurgents attack the poorly trained Iraqi forces. We have tried to reconstitute Iraq's armed forces for almost two years now, and it hasn't worked.

Civil reconstruction has been a third broad area of effort. No one even pretends that progress in this area is a goal anymore. Courts, schools, health facilities, pipelines, water purification plants, sewage treatment plants, oil refineries, electirical power plants, roads, civil service functions, garbage pickup, distribution of electrical power, all the things that make civil society run well: all these things are on hold until order is restored. Ask any Iraqi or American official when that will be, and their truthful answer is, "We're working on it." Press for another answer, and they'll say, "It could take years."

But here's something the journalists who write about Iraq have missed. No matter what the insurgents do, they've succeeded as long as they tie American troops down in Iraq. Yes, the Iraqi insurgents want to push the Americans out as soon as they can. That's their aim: get rid of the occupiers. The foreign fighters in Iraq must recognize that having American troops in Iraq is a bonanza for them. They can kill Americans there much more readily than they can kill them anywhere else. They know that while Americans fight in Iraq, they can't fight elsewhere. Al Qaeda knows that while we are in Iraq, they are winning, no matter how the battle goes from day to day.

So that's the problem with the goals we've laid out. That's the problem with our strategy. The car bombs could stop tomorrow. All the other attacks: sniping, roadside bombs, hit and run ambushes, mortar attacks, every sort of skirmish and sabotage, all the assassinations and kidnappings, all these could stop suddenly, and we would still be losing as long as we remain there. We have enormous resources committed there, and while they're tied up in Iraq they're unavailable for fighting anywhere else. We've had to pull forces from other parts of the world just to maintain a force of 135,000 in Iraq. When we do finally leave Iraq, will anyone here at home want to send our young men and women out again to fight Al Qaeda elsewhere? Will we have any motivation at all to fight the war we should be fighting? No, we'll be so happy that the war in Iraq is over, we'll have forgotten about the war we should have been fighting, the war we would have fought had we not gone into Iraq.

That's getting ahead of things, though, because the prospects for getting out of Iraq soon are nil. Supporters of the war there say that we don't bear any opportunity cost for committing our resources there. That is, they say, we are fighting the right war, for the right reasons, for the right goals. They maintain that when we leave Iraq, we won't need to fight elsewhere. Iraqi democracy will be established, and as it spreads throughout the region, to Saudi Arabia and Syria and even to Iran, Al Qaeda will have nowhere to hide. In the open air of free societies Al Qaeda will wither and dry up. No one will want to fight for Al Qaeda when the benefits of Western democracy and free enterprise are all around. That's the Wolfowitz cure. That's the democracy cures all ills strategy.

But who, in or out of our government, has made a convincing case that creating a democracy in Iraq will bring about the defeat of Al Qaeda? Why couldn't Al Qaeda operate just as effectively in an open, democratic society as it does in a closed one? The planning and execution of the 9/11 attacks showed that Al Qaeda could operate equally effectively in Afghanistan, Germany, and the United States. We say that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that we are pressing them hard in Iraq, but where's the evidence that we have reduced its ability to fight? Who believes that a quiet Iraq will mean defeat of the organization that attacked the World Trade Center? The scary thing now, two years into the Iraqi war, is that people don't even care any more how we're doing in the fight against Al Qaeda. They just want to be done with fighting, period.

So how can we counter the prevailing premise? How can we keep the big picture in front of us? The big picture is so different from the main line of thought we see in coverage of the war. Take for example the prevailing line of thought that existed while Reagan was president. Then most people thought that we had to reach an accommodation with the Soviets. The United States and the Soviet Union had to live on the same globe, and the only way to avoid a nuclear holocaust was to work things out with them. We didn't say nasty things about them, and we tried to find ways to cooperate. Least of all, we didn't want to provoke them. We had managed to survive the Cold War for more than a quarter century, and we should keep on keeping on.

Well, Reagan comes along and says about the Soviet Union, "These are bad guys and they're going to lose." Look what they've done, he would say. He even said, "How's this for a strategy: we win and they lose." You can't get much more blunt than that. Then he achieved his aim, using military force and diplomacy adroitly to force the Soviet Union into conceding Eastern Europe shortly after Reagan left office. No one thought he could do it until it happened. When it did happen, people said that he must have been right after all.

We're in a similar conceptual situation with Iraq. Everyone thinks that the only way we can succeed there is to bring democracy to the people while we train a new armed force capable of containing the insurgents. How often have you heard this one: "Whatever you think of the war, we're committed now, and we have to see the job through." How often have you heard: "We can't leave now. There'd be chaos and a civil war." Well let me tell you that the civil war has already started. Everyone all over the world has concluded correctly that we can't do anything to stop it. Everyone knows the limits of our strength, the extent of our weakness.

So the conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say that we have to get out of there as soon as we can. Even the most vocal opponents of the war concede that we have to stay there long enough to hand security responsibilities over to the Iraqis, and that, people say, will take at least until the end of 2006. Well, when we come to the end of 2006, come back to read this essay, and ask yourself if we've achieved any of the goals that the conventional wisdom has set out for us. Ask if we've reduced the level of violence, turned over responsibility to the Iraqis, or made advances in the area of civil reconstruction. Even if we have made progress in any of these areas, we'll have failed if we're still tied down in Iraq, still fighting people who weren't even our enemies until we made them so.

The conceptual box we're in won't allow anyone to say what Reagan said in 1980: "We win and they lose." People think that if we pull out, we lose. We'll have failed, they say, and that outcome is not acceptable. Everyone will see that we lost, that we can't stick it out. But it's not true. The only way to win this war is to leave this battlefield and correct our mistake. The sure way to lose the war is to stick it out in Iraq. The sure way to grant our enemies just what they want is to stay in Iraq and bleed ourselves there. We've gone down the wrong path there. We have to turn back if we want to win, because at the end of this path lies futility, defeat, humiliation, and a total loss of confidence in ourselves. These things will happen not because we couldn't win, but because we couldn't lose. We couldn't lose our self-certainty and conviction that we've done the right thing, that we've set out on the right course. Remember, if we win the war in Iraq by sticking it out, we'll lose the war against Al Qaeda that we should have been fighting.

One of my favorite passages from the New Testament is a quotation from Jesus: "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even that which he has will be taken away." The first part of the passage applies to the United States during its period of world leadership. The United States and its leaders had vision, optimism, practicality, judgment, good intentions, wisdom, faith, and hope. As promised, the country had everything a human society could want, in abundance. Now all the signs indicate that since 9/11, the United States and its leaders do not have any of these things. It has not vision but blindness, not optimism but discouragement, not practicality but utopianism, not judgment but thick-headed self-righteousness, not good intentions but selfishness, not wisdom but stupidity, not faith but gullibility, not hope but fear. As a result, everything that it has will be taken away. It has already begun to happen.

I said before November 2004 that if we didn't replace our leadership, we would not recover from the mistake our president made when he went to war in Iraq. We didn't replace him, but I don't want to believe that it's too late. I still think that some solution has to present itself, some way out has to appear. "Way will open," the Quakers say. But where? And how? I don't know if faith will answer those questions.

Making reference to the box we're in, Leslie recalled a moment during the debates last fall when Bush asked Kerry, "So are you saying that our troops in Iraq have died in vain?" At a time when no one can say anything against our troops, Kerry was stymied. "He had him," Leslie observed. I replied right away that Howard Dean would have responded differently. He would have come back at Bush directly:

"Yes, Mr. President, you're right. Those troops died in vain. They died in vain in a war you started. They died in vain in a war they should not be fighting, and you put them there. You're responsible for these useless deaths, and their futile sacrifice is on your head. These young men and women, so willing to give everything for their country, trusted you. Their parents and brothers and sisters trusted you. Their wives and children trusted you. The whole country looked to you after the September 11 attacks to lead us back from that dreadful loss. And what did you do? You sent our armed forces into a useless war, justified it with obvious, self-serving dishonesty, and refused to admit your mistake after everyone else could see the truth about what you had done.

"And you try to charge me with defeatism and with not supporting our troops? Mr. President, those troops took an oath to protect our Constitution. That means they promised to serve their commander in chief, and they trusted you to lead them well. Do you know what you did, Mr. President? You betrayed them. You asked them to do something that you wouldn't do yourself when it was your turn to serve, and you asked them to do it for dishonest reasons. So I need to ask you, Mr. President: When are you going to support our troops? When are you going to send them to fight our real enemies, rather than false enemies that you cooked up because you had a grudge against Saddam Hussein? You've misled the citizens of this great country much too long now. If you can't admit that you've done something wrong, shut your mouth and go home."

But the Democratic party thought that Howard Dean couldn't win against George Bush. They thought that John Kerry was a more effective fighter, more electable. Well, hindsight got 'em on that one. Kerry hardly talked about the war in his campaign until the fall, and even then he only raised his criticisms in a few speeches. He spent so much time, overall, trying to answer Bush's question: Why did you vote for the war? After Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, it seemed that his campaign was worried: criticism of the war might come across as unpatriotic. On the contrary, Kerry's criticism of the war in Iraq was patriotic, just as his stand against the war in Vietnam was an example of courageous patriotism. Unlike his anti-war activities in the 1970s, though, Kerry in 2004 acted too hesitantly. As a result his opposition to the Iraq war appeared unfounded and equivocal. Dean would not have been such a reluctant critic.

That's enough for this one. I've built up these thoughts for so long. Then when the dam opens, too much water goes down the spillway. Consequently I have an essay that's longer than anyone wants to read. But, it all counts toward the book I want to write. Ugly War is already nearly book length. If I add these other essays to the existing long essay, we'll be ready to publish. But it's hard to see who would want to read it. Mostly now I think these writings are of historical interest. Students of this time can see that some people could see what was happening, as it happened. We didn't have to wait for it to be over before we could see what a big mistake we had made. We could see that this war was a mistake before it was launched, and what a bad course of action it was as it unfolded. But seeing the truth about the war hasn't made people willing to do the necessary and right thing: redeploy our forces to fight the people who attacked us.

Goodnight, now.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Is Persuasion Dead? - Matt Miller

Is Persuasion Dead? - New York Times:

"But beyond this, the gap between the cartoon of public life that the press and political establishment often serve up and the pragmatic open-mindedness of most Americans explains why so many people tune out - and how we might get them to tune back in. Alienation is the only intelligent response to a political culture that insults our intelligence.

The resurrection of persuasion will not be easy. Politicians who've learned to survive in an unforgiving environment may not feel safe with a less scripted style. Mass media outlets where heat has always sold more than light may not believe that creatively engaging on substance can expand their audience. But if you believe that meeting our collective challenges requires greater collective understanding, we've got to persuade these folks to try.

I'm guessing Ann Coulter isn't sweating this stuff. God willing, there's something else keeping her up nights. In the meantime, like Sisyphus, those who seek a better public life have to keep rolling the rock uphill. If you've read this far, maybe you're up for the climb, too. "