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Walter Watts
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Seeing Is Believing
« on: 2007-08-23 21:39:41 » |
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The New York Times
August 19, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Seeing Is Believing
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions.
It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you — the person reading this column. You know more than you think.
You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.
Either a peace overture is so obvious and grabs you in the gut — Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel — or it’s going nowhere. That is why the Saudi-Arab League peace overture is going nowhere. No emotional content. It was basically faxed to the Israeli people, and people don’t give up land for peace in a deal that comes over the fax.
Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.
There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.
Because if that is not the case, even if U.S. troops create more pockets of security via the surge, they will have no one to hand these pockets to who can maintain them without us. In other words, the only people who can prove that the surge is working are the Iraqis, and the way they prove that is by showing that violence is down in areas where there are no U.S. troops or where U.S. troops have come and gone.
Because many Americans no longer believe anything President Bush says about Iraq, he has outsourced the assessment of the surge to the firm of Petraeus & Crocker. But this puts them in an impossible position. I admire their efforts, and those of their soldiers, to try to salvage something decent in Iraq, especially when you see who we are losing to — Sunni suicide jihadists and Shiite militants, who murder fellow Muslims by the dozen and whose retrograde visions offer Iraqis only a future of tears. But we could never defeat them on our own. It takes a village, and right now too many of the Iraqi villagers won’t work together.
Most likely the Bush team will say the surge is a “partial” success and needs more time. But that is like your contractor telling you that your home is almost finished — the bricks are up, but there’s no cement. Thanks a lot.
The Democrats should not fight Petraeus & Crocker over their answer. They should redefine the question. They should say: “My fellow Americans, ask yourselves this: What will convey to you, in your gut — without anyone interpreting it — that the surge is working and worth sustaining?”
My answer: If I saw something with my own eyes that I hadn’t seen before — Iraq’s Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders stepping forward, declaring their willingness to work out their differences by a set deadline and publicly asking us to stay until they do. That’s the only thing worth giving more time to develop.
But it may just be too late. Had the surge happened in 2003, when it should have, it might have prevented the kindling of all of Iraq’s sectarian passions. But now that those fires have been set, trying to unify Iraq feels like doing carpentry on a burning house.
I’ve been thinking about Iraq’s multi-religious soccer team, which just won the Asian Cup. The team was assembled from Iraqis who play for other pro teams outside Iraq. In fact, it was reported that the Iraqi soccer team hadn’t played a home game in 17 years because of violence or U.N. sanctions. In short, it’s a real team with a virtual country. That’s what I fear the surge is trying to protect: a unified Iraq that exists only in the imagination and on foreign soccer fields.
Only Iraqis living in Iraq can prove otherwise. So far, I don’t see it.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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Walter Watts
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Blunderov
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Re:Seeing Is Believing
« Reply #1 on: 2007-08-24 14:59:02 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2007-08-23 21:39:41 ...
Is the surge in Iraq working?... |
"Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules.
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken."~Dylan
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9530
Bipartisan Elite Agrees - Surge, 'GWOT' Are Failures (And Hillary's Wrong)
by RJ Eskow | Aug 24 2007 - 1:27pm |
article tools: email | print | read more RJ Eskow
The left-wing blogosphere continues to slam the intellectual dishonesty of media-appointed foreign policy 'experts,' but there are people out there with real experience. A bipartisan group of former government officials has come to some very different conclusions than the pundits: The Surge is failing, the Global War on Terror has gone disastrously wrong, and Hillary Clinton has drawn some badly mistaken conclusions about America's safety.
The journal Foreign Policy and the Center for American Progress have published their annual survey of "America's 100 Most Respected Foreign Policy Experts" - State Department leaders drawn from from both political parties - and their evaluation of the Administration's "Surge" and the "Global War On Terror" is devastating.
The GOP and the media keep telling us that protecting us from terrorism is a Republican Party strength. So how badly is this Republican Administration failing in that effort? 91 percent of this bipartisan group say the world is becoming more dangerous for us and our country. That's up 10 percent ... since February.
Here are some of their other conclusions:
92 percent - in other words, virtually all of them - agree that the War in Iraq has adversely affected our national security. That includes 84% of those who describe themselves as "conservative."
Most (83 percent) doubt that Iran's nuclear intentions are peaceful, but less than 1 in 10 believe we should respond militarily. 8 out of 10 believe diplomacy or sanctions are an appropriate response. (How often have you heard that argument lately on television?)
So, how about that Surge? The report says it all:
More than half say the surge is having a negative impact on U.S. national security, up 22 percentage points from just six months ago. This sentiment was shared across party lines, with 64 percent of conservative experts saying the surge is having either a negative impact or no impact at all.
58 percent believe that Sunni-Shiite tensions will have increased in ten years' time.
Only 3 percent believe Iraq will become a "beacon of democracy."
Only 5 percent believe Al Qaeda will be weaker.
Pakistan, for its part, is a nightmare. The report says:
When asked to choose the nation that is most likely to become the next al Qaeda stronghold, more experts chose Pakistan than any other country, including Iraq ... More than half of those surveyed believe the current U.S. policy toward Pakistan is having a negative impact on U.S. national security.
Will the terrorists "follow us home"?
Only 12 percent believe that terrorist attacks would occur in the United States as a direct result of a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Eighty-eight percent of the experts said that either such a scenario was unlikely or that they see no connection between a troop withdrawal from Iraq and terrorist attacks inside the United States. This line of thinking was consistent across party lines ...
On June 3, Sen. Hillary Clinton said "I believe we are safer than we were." Yet virtually all of these experts say she's wrong, including those who worked for her husband. And her comments this week about those "new tactics" she claims are working were similarly off-base. Sen. Clinton promotes herself as the candidate with the most experience, but experience doesn't bring much value unless a leader also demonstrates good judgment.
To be fair to Sen. Clinton, most experts also disagree with Sen. Obama's statement that he would not negotiate with Hamas, and with Sen. Edwards and others who call for an immediate withdrawal (although the number of experts supporting immediate withdrawal is growing rapidly). And a great majority disagree with Giuliani's contention that the Surge is working and Sen. McCain's assertion that terrorists would "follow us home" if we withdrew.
So why does that new Brookings Institution report suggest that the Surge may be working, if these experts overwhelmingly disagree? As Kevin Drum explains, it's because the report's authors ignored seasonal variations to pretty up what is otherwise an exceedingly grim record. For consultant/wonk types, that's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Guess who's listed as "spearheading" that report? None other than noted "expert" and alleged "war critic" Michael O'Hanlon.
Not that the "Surge" isn't accomplishing anything. As the New York Times reports, more Iraqis have been driven from their homes since the increase began. Per the Times, "... the United Nations migration office calls (it) the worst human displacement in Iraq's modern history." The Iraqi Red Crescent has reported a doubling of internally displaced Iraqis, to 1.1 million, since the February build-up. That's 100,000 new refugees per month.
A question for Sen. Joe Biden and Michael O'Hanlon: Is this what you guys mean by a "soft partition"?
And a question for the media: Why do we continue to see wildly inaccurate and deceptive prognosticators like O'Hanlon on television day after day, while this bipartisan pool of experts goes unseen and unheard?
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Seeing Is Believing
« Reply #2 on: 2007-08-24 15:41:25 » |
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I remain a bit disillusioned by our new Democratic majority in congress. I've heard several of them make tentative forays into the GOP propaganda reality that things are getting better, some only to backtrack once they figure it out for themselve. Yes, deaths, both US and Iraqi are down in July, compared to previous months, and that's the current meme the GOP noise machine is spreading (Faux News, Limbaugh clones etc., then picked up by the "mainstream" post-spin).
Reality Check: Things are not getting better. If anything they are worse despite the surge. The proper comparisons to make are not with the previous months (April, May, and June) but with previous July's (July 2004, July 2005, July 2006). Because Summer in Iraq is like Winter in the mountains of Afghanistan. War and conflicts naturally subside in these seasons, not because people are becoming peaceful, but because the weather makes it less possible. Of course one could carry out violence any time of the year, but in the middle of summer in Iraq one is more likely to die of heatstroke than inflict meaningful damage on the enemy. Likewise in in the mountains of Afghanistan getting frostbite, or stuck in the snow is a more likely outcome in the winter.
By this more rational metric, this July was bloodier than any previous July in Operation Iraqi Liberation . . . oops I mean Operation Iraqi Freedom.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/080907.html
Quote:| Indeed, compared to earlier July casualty reports, the July 2007 death toll of 80 was the worst of the war for U.S. troops. In July 2003, 48 American soldiers died; in July 2004, the death toll was 54; in July 2005, it was 54; in July 2006, it was 43. [For details, see icasualities.org.] |
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Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Hermit
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Re:Seeing Is Believing
« Reply #3 on: 2007-08-27 07:25:10 » |
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[Mo] I remain a bit disillusioned by our new Democratic majority in congress.
[Hermit] Only a bit? Clearly she assumes that Iraq, devastated by unnecessary and indefensible sanctions that resulted in about as many surplus deaths as the subsequent unnecessary and illegal war is going to be something other than a failed state (but doesn't say how). She avoids noting that our allies, the failed state of Pakistan, whose government we have pushed into ignoring its constitution (practically guaranteeing a total collapse there too) in order to operate in the autonomous tribal regions (which nobody in the US government appears to comprehend). She clearly buys into the Israeli bogeyman of Iran which hasn't attacked anyone outside its borders for over 2,000 years, and she elides the ifs - clearly from self interest. Also notice how, almost certainly not accidently - those AIPAC contributions are so necessary to any US political campaign, she acknowledged here real motivation for the weaseling and rejection of the mandate which lead to a Democratic majority in the first place. "Israel's interest."
If Elected... Clinton Says Some G.I.’s in Iraq Would Remain
Source: New York Times
Authors: Michael R. Gordon, Patrick Healy
Dated: 2007-03-14
WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.
In a half-hour interview on Tuesday in her Senate office, Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.
In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”
She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.
The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said. “It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.”
“So it will be up to me to try to figure out how to protect those national security interests and continue to take our troops out of this urban warfare, which I think is a loser,” Mrs. Clinton added. She declined to estimate the number of American troops she would keep in Iraq, saying she would draw on the advice of military officers.
Mrs. Clinton’s plans carry some political risk. Although she has been extremely critical of the Bush administration’s handling of the war, some liberal Democrats are deeply suspicious of her intentions on Iraq, given that she voted in 2002 to authorize the use of force there and, unlike some of her rivals for the Democratic nomination, has not apologized for having done so.
Senator Clinton’s proposal is also likely to stir up debate among military specialists. Some counterinsurgency experts say the plan is unrealistic because Iraqis are unlikely to provide useful tips about Al Qaeda if American troops end their efforts to protect Iraqi neighborhoods.
But a former Pentagon official argued that such an approach would minimize American casualties and thus make it easier politically to sustain a long-term military presence that might prevent the fighting from spreading throughout the region.
Mrs. Clinton has said she would vote for a proposed Democratic resolution on Iraq now being debated on the floor of the Senate, which sets a goal of withdrawing combat forces by March 31, 2008. Asked if her plan was consistent with the resolution, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers said it was, noting that the resolution also called for “a limited number” of troops to stay in Iraq to protect the American Embassy and other personnel, train and equip Iraqi forces, and conduct “targeted counterterrorism operations.”
(Senator Barack Obama, a rival of Mrs. Clinton, has said that if elected president, he might keep a small number of troops in Iraq.)
With many Democratic primary voters favoring a total withdrawal, Senator Clinton appears to be trying to balance her political interests with the need to retain some flexibility. Like other Democratic candidates, she has called for engaging Iran and Syria in talks and called on President Bush to reverse his troop buildup.
But while Mrs. Clinton has criticized Mr. Bush’s troop reinforcements as an escalation of war, she said in the interview, “We’re doing it, and it’s unlikely we can stop it.”
“I’m going to root for it if it has any chance of success,” she said of Mr. Bush’s plan, “but I think it’s more likely that the anti-American violence and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place, like the old Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear Ramadi, then maybe it’s back in Falluja.”
Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she believed the next president is likely to face an Iraq that is still plagued by sectarian fighting and occupied by a sizable number of American troops. The likely problems, she said, include continued political disagreements in Baghdad, die-hard Sunni insurgents, Al Qaeda operatives, Turkish anxiety over the Kurds and the effort to “prevent Iran from crossing the border and having too much influence inside of Iraq.”
“The choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited,” she said. “And from the vantage point of where I sit now, I can tell you, in the absence of a very vigorous diplomatic effort on the political front and on the regional and international front, I think it is unlikely there will be a stable situation that will be inherited.”
On the campaign trail, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly vowed to bring the war to a close if the fighting were still going on when she took office as president. “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will,” she has said.
In the interview, she suggested that it was likely that the fighting among the Iraqis would continue for some time. In broad terms, her strategy is to abandon the American military effort to stop the sectarian violence and to focus instead on trying to prevent the strife from spreading throughout the region by shrinking and rearranging American troop deployments within Iraq.
The idea of repositioning American forces to minimize American casualties, discourage Iranian, Syrian and Turkish intervention, and forestall the Kurds’ declaring independence is not a new one. It has been advocated by Dov S. Zakheim, who served as the Pentagon’s comptroller under former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Mr. Zakheim has estimated that no more than 75,000 troops would be required, compared to the approximately 160,000 troops the United States will have in Iraq when the additional brigades in Mr. Bush’s plan are deployed.
While Mrs. Clinton declined to estimate the size of a residual American troop presence, she indicated that troops might be based north of Baghdad and in western Anbar Province.
“It would be far fewer troops,” she said. “But what we can do is to almost take a line sort of north of — between Baghdad and Kirkuk, and basically put our troops into that region, the ones that are going to remain for our antiterrorism mission, for our northern support mission, for our ability to respond to the Iranians, and to continue to provide support, if called for, for the Iraqis.”
Mrs. Clinton described a mission with serious constraints.
“We would not be doing patrols,” she added. “We would not be kicking in doors. We would not be trying to insert ourselves in the middle between the various Shiite and Sunni factions. I do not think that’s a smart or achievable mission for American forces.”
One question raised by counterinsurgency experts is whether the more limited military mission Mrs. Clinton is advocating would lead to a further escalation in the sectarian fighting, because it would shift the entire burden for protecting civilians to the nascent Iraqi Security Forces. A National Intelligence Estimate issued in January said those forces would be hard-pressed to take on significantly increased responsibilities in the next 12 to 18 months.
“Coalition capabilities, including force levels, resources and operations, remain an essential stabilizing element in Iraq,” the estimate noted, referring to the American-led forces.
Mrs. Clinton said the intelligence estimate was based on a “faulty premise” because it did not take into account the sort of “phased redeployment” plan she was advocating. But she acknowledged that under her strategy American troops would remain virtual bystanders if Shiites and Sunnis killed each other in sectarian attacks. “That may be inevitable,” she said. “And it certainly may be the only way to concentrate the attention of the parties.”
Asked if Americans would endure having troops in Iraq who do nothing to stop sectarian attacks there, she replied: “Look, I think the American people are done with Iraq. I think they are at a point where, whether they thought it was a good idea or not, they have seen misjudgment and blunder after blunder, and their attitude is, What is this getting us? What is this doing for us?”
“No one wants to sit by and see mass killing,” she added. “It’s going on every day! Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our presence there is not stopping it. And there is no potential opportunity I can imagine where it could. This is an Iraqi problem; we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had stopped the looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority — you can go down the lines, if, if, if — ”
[Hermit]
If, if, if... A game of consequences
Given that Kuwait was historically governed out of Basra, that the bulk of the Kuwaitees (which is not a democracy and is ruled by a tiny religious minority of a different sect to the bulk of the population) welcomed Iraq's takeover, and that April Glasbie, erstwhile Ambassador to Iraq has acknowledged that the US assured Saddam Hussein that it would not respond if Iraq took back Kuwait, what if:
If George H.W. Bush had simply shrugged at the ousted Kuwaitee royal family's marketing campaign then;
If the US had not become involved at all, then we would not have been guilty of war crimes including the deliberate planning of genocide in Iraq. We would not have triggered the oil fires that decimated the reduction in oil production from Kuwait or the sanctions that reduced output from Iraq. We would not have covered the gulf with depleted uranium and the complex byproducts of unplanned weapons disposal, then;
If Iraq had not been deliberately converted by sanctions into a failed state (and possibly if Afghanistan had not suffered the same unnecessary fate), and if we had played an honest broker in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians by our friends the Israelis, we would likely not have posted troops in Saudi Arabia, so then;
If neither the Cole nor 9/11 had happened, then;
If the employees of the Israeli moving company (aka Mossad) would not have been on the roofs of New York filming the aircraft crashing into the twin towers for posterity, then;
If we would not have been responsible for the 500,000 to in excess of 1 million dead Iraqis the war has added to the 2 million surplus deaths caused by sanctions under George H. W. Bush and Mrs Clinton's husband, then;
If fuel had only doubled in cost to under $50/barrel, then;
If the US economy had been 4-7 trillion dollars better off, then;
We would likely not have seen the disaster of having had Emperor George W Bush acting as our great decider and probably wouldn't be contemplating the almost as great a potential disaster of facing the unpleasant reality of potentially seeing Hilary Clinton as the next president of the USA.
If only.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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