Bush Says...










President Bush spoke to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their Kansas City convention and announced that the U.S. would not withdraw from Iraq like it did with Vietnam. The president also seemed to change his tune in regards to the current Prime Minister of Iraq when he stated that he still supports Prime Minister Maliki's government. Bush recently gave some sharp criticism of Maliki, particularly Maliki's comments of praise for the Iranian government and its role in supporting the Iraqi government.

Bush's speech in Kansas City came while Bush made his way back to his ranch in Texas after the conclusion of a North American Summit Meeting held in Canada between himself and the leaders of Canada and Mexico. Bush will remain on vacation at his ranch for the next week or so before returning to Washington with the Congress to get back to the business of running the nation. For more details on Bush's speech, LINK here.





Iran has developed a 2,000-pound (900 kg) “smart bomb”, official media quoted a Defense Ministry statement as saying on Wednesday, in the latest announcement from Tehran about progress regarding military hardware. The guided bomb, named Qased (Messenger), was developed by specialists within the ministry and is now operational, IRNA news agency said, adding it could be dropped from F-4 and F-5 jets. Full story details here.

Key members of Prime Minister Olmert's Kadima Party are said to be considering bolting from the party unless the Kadima Party decides to oust Prime Minsiter Olmert and call for new elections before the Independent Winograd Commission's final report on last year's Lebanon war is released to the public.

At least 10 key members of the Knesset of the Kadima Party are considered voting for a measure of no-confidence against Olmert and thus forcing new elections. Should 10 or more of the Kadima Knesset members revolt it would likely result in the Likud party returning to power with Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister.

A change in Israeli leadership will be necessary if Israel is going to be able to successfully defend itself against any new war threats, as Olmert has displayed total incompetence for leading his nation's defenses. For more details on the latest political intrigue in Israeli politics, LINK here.







Less than 24 hours after it announced that it would not honor understandings with Israel, Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, claimed responsibility for a shooting attack on IDF soldiers near Ramallah. The IDF confirmed that soldiers had come under fire during a military operation in the Ramallah area early Wednesday morning. No one was woundedt and no damage to IDF property was reported. Mroe details here.







Arab nations with "peaceful" nuclear energy programs under development are suddenly speeding up those processes with Mideast analysts now suspicious that those programs are not with merely peaceful intent. Skeptics point out that the speed up on such programs comes as Iran races to complete its nuclear program. Arabs are concerned that Iran is developing nuclear weapons capability that could also threaten Arab nations as well as Israel.

These Arab nations are thus stepping up 'peaceful' programs knowing that it wouldn't take much to convert a well-advanced peaceful nuclear program into a military weapons program to build nuclear weapons as a counter to any Iranian nuclear threat. For more details on this developing story, LINK here.





Three Pakistani soldiers have been killed in an overnight attack by suspected pro-Taleban militants in north-west Pakistan, police say. Several rocket-propelled grenades hit a checkpoint in Bannu town in North-West Frontier Province on the Afghan border. An exchange of gunfire also took place between security forces and the militants, police said. The US says the tribal areas near the Afghan border are a safe haven for the Taleban and al-Qaeda militants.

Troops battled the militants for more than an hour after the latest attack but there were no reports of any more casualties, the agency said. A month ago, eight people were killed and 40 others were injured in Bannu after a rocket attack by suspected Islamic militants. Bombings and attacks have soared in Pakistan since security forces ousted pro-Taleban militants from a radical mosque in Islamabad earlier in July. About 200 people, mostly police and soldiers, have died in the attacks. Details here.






Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, now living in exile in Saudi Arabia is seeking to retunr to Pakistan to run for election but the government is opposing his attempt to enter the country. He is not the only former Prime Minister in exile wanting to return to Pakistan to run for the office of Prime Minister. Benazir Bhutto, also a former 2 time Prime Minister is said to have agreed to a 'deal' with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to return to power in a joint power-sharing arrangement. More details here.

National Intel Report Slams Iraq Government
Posted on August 23, 2007 at 8:51 AM.

U.S. intelligence agencies have written a mixed report on Iraq, finding some progress but judging that the Baghdad government may not be able to carry it forward, a defense official said Thursday.

Declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq are to be released Thursday afternoon. Like an earlier report released in February, the document is expected to cover the pressing issues facing Iraq: its ethnic and sectarian strife, the troubles of the elected government, and the meddling of neighboring Iran.

Read the full story »

Deflating Tenetby Rowan ScarboroughPreviously secret findings from 2005 blow holes in former CIA Director George Tenet's testimony

Maliki as Diem?

Bush, Vietnam and 14 More GIs Dead
By RON JACOBS

After checking the baseball scores this morning, August 22, 2005, I turned to the front page only to read that fourteen US soldiers died in a copter crash near Baghdad. Of course, preliminary reports from the military claimed that the cause was an accident and not from hostile fire. The actual truth of that summation may change but the men will remain dead, no matter what the reason, just like the other 3704 soldiers and marines killed in that war. Meanwhile, here in the US most of the politicians who authorized this debacle continue to wrangle about how best to continue it. As they do this, they also provide the US people with ever-changing rationales.

US politicians from both sides of the aisle continue to talk about the need for Iraqis to achieve political reconciliation, as if it were something Washington can create. Even if Washington could create such a reality, it would probably not be one acceptable to too many Iraqis. Furthermore, its only intention would not be true reconciliation between all Iraqi parties, since many armed actors would be left out, but an agreement among hose willing to go along with the next phase of the imperial occupation project.

Members of both factions of the war party are calling for the PM's head and one wonders how much longer he will survive politically, if not literally. If he did die in a "terrorist" attack or coup it wouldn't be the first time the US was involved with the death of an uncooperative puppet. Does the name Diem ring a bell?

Speaking of Diem and the "country " he ruled at the behest of the United States, Mr. Bush is now comparing the US occupation of Iraq to the US war in Indochina. Of course, he is doing so for all the wrong reasons. "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left," Mr. Bush will tell the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields. Naturally, Mr. Bush fails to note that if the United States had never been in Vietnam, there would not have been the need to add these terms to "our vocabulary." It was the decision by Washington to refuse the right of the Vietnamese to hold countrywide elections as agreed to in the 1954 Geneva agreements and the subsequent machinations by the US military and intelligence agencies to install a client government in southern Vietnam that created the situation that precipitated all of the newly termed phenomena.

Furthermore, (to borrow most of Mr. Bush's words), if there is one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam it is that the price of America's involvement was paid by millions of innocent victims.

Mr. Bush is now calling the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan part of an ideological struggle on the scale of Dean Acheson and the Dulles brothers' war against Soviet communism in the post World War Two era. Besides the sheer hyperbole of this assertion, the fact is that this perception of the current wars is held by very few people on the planet including US residents.

This late-in-the-game rationale for the slaughter and waste undertaken in our name is merely the most recent excuse the Washington establishment is using to sell their war for total dominance. It is unlikely to receive any more support than the previous lies and half-truths have, even at the VFW convention where Mr. Bush will officially present it.

If the US was not in Iraq, the fourteen men killed in that copter crash would never have died there. In the same way, if the US had never been in Vietnam, there never would have been boat people or the other things Bush mentions. Talk about revisionism.

Beware, this is only the beginning of a new effort to sell these wars. The next salvo will take place on September 11, 2007, when General Petraeus, the latest general to run the war in Iraq, presents his commercial for an extended surge and an increased commitment to the ongoing occupation of that country. Of course, the date has "absolutely nothing" to do with the anniversary of the attacks in New York and Virginia six years ago.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net

http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs08232007.html

Talks with the Taliban gain ground
Exploratory talks between the Taliban and Afghan and Pakistani officials over a peace agreement are inching forward. It is proposed that small jirgas (councils) are staged with the Taliban and related parties, such as tribal elders, at various sites in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The administration of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul and the Western coalition have agreed. All that is needed now is the Taliban's approval. - Syed Saleem Shahzad (Aug 23, '07)

Welcome to Hillary's wars
With her eye on the US presidency, Hillary Clinton is jockeying for a macho political position. Whether she means it or not, the reality if she becomes president is that she knows the US powers-that-be, even if they are in decline, will never accept a majority-Shi'ite Iraqi government aligned with an Islamic Republic of Iran. - Pepe Escobar (Aug 23, '07)

Maliki's options rapidly shrinking
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's recent two-day fence-mending trip to Syria did little to endear him to the Sunnis and his other opponents, though an olive branch of sorts offered by members of the disbanded Iraqi Ba'ath Party calling for "dialogue" is an offer he would do well to consider. - Sami Moubayed (Aug 23, '07)

Bush whips up a storm over 'surge'

Seemingly blind to the historical realities he cites, such as Vietnam and Cambodia, US President George W Bush continues to urge support for his "surge" strategy in Iraq and its beleaguered prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki. It's apparent that even with pressure from some of his fellow Republicans to change course, Bush has no intention of considering an exit strategy before he leaves office. - Jim Lobe (Aug 23, '07)

As US sinks, Asia
unable to swim
The pending US economic crisis will drag Asia down with it, despite life-saving measures Asian countries could take, such as China allowing full convertibility of the yuan. China's conflicting political and economic systems make such a scenario unlikely, and the region remains vulnerable to an oncoming economic tsunami from the other side of the world - Walter T Molano

Central bank impotence and market liquidity
What the US Federal Reserve is trying to do in the current subprime crisis is not merely to restore market liquidity, but to preserve excess liquidity in the market. In other words, it is trying to avoid a crisis by setting the stage for a bigger future crisis. - Henry C K Liu

SPENGLER
It must be the end
of secularism ...
... It's in the New York Times! In a despairing vision of the political future, a Columbia University professor opines that secular liberalism stands helpless before a new century of religious wars. But he cannot bear to surrender to Western Christians; instead, he proposes to surrender to the Muslims. (Aug 20, '07)

When the Fed's big guns fail, call in China
The US Federal Reserve has three main cannons. One is open market operations, another the discount window, and the third is targeting a specific level of the Federal Funds rate. In the past 10 days, the Fed has shot off the first two - one was an abject failure, the other had an infinitesimally small effect. Rather than shoot the third cannon, China could be called in to bail out the US. - Julian Delasantellis (Aug 20, '07)

Ex-Nixon advisor blasts Bush's Vietnam comparison







'Well, if you've learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?'
In his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention Wednesday, President Bush surprised many people by invoking the example of Vietnam in arguing against a withdrawal from Iraq. CNN invited David Gergen, who served as an advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, to comment on that aspect of Bush's speech.

"He may well have stirred up a hornet's nest among historians," Gergen stated. "By invoking Vietnam, he raised the automatic question, 'Well, if you've learned so much from history, Mr. President, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?' ... It's surprising to me that he would go back to that, and I think he's going to get a lot of criticism."

"This is not a man who's talking about compromise," Gergen emphasized "This is not a man who's talking about a Plan B. ... This a man saying, 'I'm hanging tough.'"

CNN asked Gergen about Bush's statement that "there's one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam, and that is the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'"

Gergen acknowledged Bush's point that there were "massive killings" when the US left Vietnam, but insisted, "He's wrong to say that Cambodia only occurred because we pulled back. There are many who believe, had we not gone into Cambodia ourselves ... this country might have been more stable."

Gergen added that "everybody understands" there's going to be a US pullback in Iraq when the surge ends in the spring. "We're not going to stay there forever to prevent killings," he stated. "When we start pulling back, there's likely to be a bloodbath in Iraq, too."

Gergen further pointed out that "Vietnam ... after 30 years has actually become quite a thriving country. ... So there are those who say ... 'Yeah, when we pulled back, there was bloodbath in the immediate aftermath, but after that the Vietnamese started putting their country together.' Is that not what we want Iraq to do over the long term?"

"The reason we lost Vietnam, in part, was because we had no strategy," said Gergen. "And the problem we've got now in Iraq, what is the strategy for victory? ... It's not clear we have a winning strategy in Iraq. That's what cost us Vietnam. That's why we eventually withdrew under humiliating circumstances."

"[Bush] talks black and white," Gergen concluded. "Victory or withdrawal, those are the two options. And Democrats and Republicans are saying, 'Mr. President, there is a third option here, and that is a partial pullback. Stay there, try to prevent a civil war.' ... Today, there was no indication he was willing to do that."

In addition to Gergen's comments, several of the major national newspapers have already printed statements by scholars and historians of the Vietnam War, disputing Bush's comparison of Iraq to Vietnam and his suggestion that the US could have imposed a successful outcome in Vietnam if it had just stayed longer, as Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell outlines in a column entitled "Apocalypse...Now? Press Examines Bush Linking Iraq to Vietnam."

"Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars," Senator John Kerry (D-Mass) said, in a statement sent to RAW STORY.

The following video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast on August 22.

After Bush's Iraq speech, area veterans dispute Vietnam analogy
Buffalo News - 37 minutes ago
We must not withdraw as we did from Vietnam Times Online
Behind Bush's Iraq-Vietnam Gambit TIME
Toronto Star - INQ7.net - Wall Street Journal - Huffington Post
all 975 news articles »

FFF BLOGS

Information about RSS

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Jacob Hornberger’s Blog [Blog Archives]


Bush, Iraq, and Vietnam
by Jacob G. Hornberger

President Bush is now comparing his occupation of Iraq with the Vietnam War. He says he’s concerned about the Iraqis who are going to die if the U.S. exits Iraq, as people in Southeast Asia did when the U.S. exited Vietnam.

Unfortunately, President Bush’s latest justification for the continued occupation of Iraq is just as faulty and fallacious as his many previous ones.

First and foremost, in World War II Germany and Japan were the aggressor nations and the United States was the defending nation. That is, Japan attacked the United States without a declaration of war, which then was followed by a declaration of war by Germany against the United States.

With Iraq, the United States is the aggressor nation and Iraq the defending nation. The U.S. government attacked Iraq without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war, making the invasion and resulting occupation illegal under our form of government.

In raising the Vietnam issue, Bush unfortunately failed to mention a critical fact — both the Vietnam War and Bush’s war against Iraq were based on lies. In the case of Vietnam, U.S. officials claimed that the North Vietnamese had attacked a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, knowing that such a claim was false. In Iraq, Bush claimed that the reason the U.S. was invading Iraq was because Saddam Hussein was threatening the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction, a claim that was as false as the Gulf of Tonkin claim.

The alternative reason that Bush relied upon for his invasion — democracy-spreading — was also a lie. After all, if Bush was really so interested in democracy-spreading, would he be supporting the military dictator of Pakistan and the unelected dictators in Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and other countries? Indeed, why would he still be angry with the Iranian people for ousting their U.S-installed dictator, the Shah of Iran?

Moreover, Bush’s supposed concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people after the U.S. exits the country also lacks veracity. After all, how many tears have been shed among U.S. officials for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died as a result of the brutal sanctions or the hundreds of thousands who have been killed in the current invasion? Instead, the cavalier attitude has been — and still is — that these deaths have been “worth it,” as UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright put it.

Considering all the concern that Bush is showing toward the Iraqi people, wouldn’t you think that that would be reflected in a policy of open immigration for Iraqi immigrants, especially the Quislings who have cooperated with the occupiers? What Bush seems to be saying, in essence, is “We love you and we are willing to sacrifice the life and limbs of hundreds of thousands of you to free you, but don’t even think about coming to live near us.”

The true reason Bush invaded Iraq revolves around the core element of U.S. foreign policy — regime change, a policy in which recalcitrant rulers are ousted or assassinated and replaced with rulers who will do the bidding of U.S. officials. That’s what both Iraqis and Americans have died for in Bush’s war.

By the way, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki himself should be a bit concerned about Bush’s comparison with Vietnam. Don’t forget that when U.S. officials became dissatisfied with South Vietnamese President Diem, as they are becoming with Maliki, Diem was removed from office through coup and execution.

The central issue that the American people must confront is a moral one: The United States had no moral right to kill even one Iraqi, much less hundreds of thousands of them. The Iraqi people had the moral right to be left alone to decide for themselves the future direction of their country.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

http://fff.org/blog/index.asp

Nye's Wrong: Last night NPR interviewed Joseph Nye, Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who commented on President Bush’s VFW speech yesterday -- and, specifically, on the president’s invocation of Vietnam. According to Professor Nye: This mess . . . Go

PETER W. RODMAN: The president has his history right. “Returning to Cambodia” 08/23 6:00 AM

MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS: Apparently George W. Bush is the only person not allowed to invoke Vietnam. “Maroons Rush In” 08/23 6:00 AM

What September Won’t Settle – George Will, Washington Post

Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable. After the First World War, politics in Germany's new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power. The Weimar Republic was fragile; America's domestic tranquility is not. Still, remember the bitterness stirred by the accusatory question "Who lost China?" and corrosive suspicions that the fruits of victory in Europe had been squandered by Americans of bad character or bad motives at Yalta. So, consider this: When Gen. David Petraeus delivers his report on the war, his Washington audience will include two militant factions. Perhaps nothing he can responsibly say will sway either, so September will reinforce animosities.

A Surge of War Support – Washington Times editorial

With positive military news continuing from Iraq, President Bush yesterday seized the moment. In a speech to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Kansas City, Mr. Bush recalled the naysayers of the previous century who questioned Japan's suitability for democracy. He recalled others who regarded the setbacks in the fight against Communist aggression in Korea as evidence that that the war was a blunder. The first dissenters were wrong. The second were myopic. Many who oppose the war now see progress in Iraq after the "surge" of new troops. Sens. Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton have lent their voices to that chorus, and this poses difficult questions for their friends on the left. "We've begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Anbar province, it's working," Mrs. Clinton said. Just about everyone today applauds the foreign-policy goals and ideals that undergirded the commitment to Japan and Korea more than a half-century ago. If the good news of the surge continues from Iraq, the president's critics will no doubt ask why he didn't send enough troops in the first place. It's a fair question. But if the good news continues there won't be a logical basis to continue the clamor for withdrawal.

Who Lost Iraq? - James Dobbins, Foreign Affairs / Real Clear Politics

In the aftermath of national catastrophes, people have a natural tendency to look for an explanation based on a single point of failure. Such explanations are often unhelpful in devising subsequent policy. Simplistic lessons drawn from World War I persuaded the United States to embrace isolationism and Europe appeasement, both of which contributed to World War II. The lesson many Americans drew from not opposing Hitler sooner -- "no more Munichs" -- became a powerful rationale for the United States' entanglement in Vietnam in the 1960s. The subsequent national rejection of counterinsurgency missions -- "no more Vietnams" -- greatly hampered U.S. military performance in Iraq. If the current debate over the United States' failure in Iraq is to yield constructive results, it will have to go beyond bumper-sticker conclusions -- no more preemption, no more democracy promotion, no more nation building. Individuals have been the first target of criticism: President George W. Bush, of course, but also Vice President Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense; General Tommy Franks, the former commander of U.S. Central Command; Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority; and George Tenet, the former CIA director. All except two of these individuals have been out of office for some time: the Bush administration is already on its second defense secretary, third CIA director, third commanding general in Iraq, and fourth top diplomat there -- and thus far, none of these changes has reversed a worsening situation. This suggests that the source of at least some of the United States' difficulties in Iraq transcends particular personalities. Meanwhile, the White House, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA have engaged in continuous blame shifting over Iraq.

The Misleading Vietnam Analogy - Los Angeles Times editorial

With rhetoric that would stir any patriot but logic that should persuade few, President Bush on Wednesday waded into the historical quagmire of the Vietnam War. Then, as now, Bush said, "people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end." He then listed the tragedies that followed the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia -- the Khmer Rouge slaughter in Cambodia, the harsh communist rule in Vietnam. "The price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.' " Likewise, he argued, innocents will pay if a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq empowers Al Qaeda. The president's Vietnam-Iraq analogy begins with a large kernel of truth, but goes astray. First, no serious Iraq expert believes U.S. withdrawal would end the killing. The debate today centers on whether the civil war that has been only partly suppressed by the surge of 30,000 U.S. troops will inevitably rage until the Sunnis and Shiites reach a rough equilibrium on the battlefield. It's true that millions of Iraqi civilians have already paid a terrible price and may suffer even more as fighting may well worsen after a U.S. withdrawal -- whenever that occurs. But it seems equally clear that the civil war cannot be suppressed indefinitelyunless the U.S. plans to occupy the country for decades. Killing fields? Iraq's already got them: A dozen or two corpses are found dumped in the streets each morning, and bombs go off daily. Boat people? Two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and perhaps 50,000 more leave each month. Could it get worse? Absolutely. But can we stop it?

Iraq and Vietnam - London Times leader

For months American critics of the war have been muttering about “another Vietnam”. President Bush’s decision yesterday to make lessons from Vietnam the core of his argument for greater American patience in Iraq was politically audacious. Politicians do not raise that ghost lightly. But he did so because it was public opinion at home that accelerated, with fateful consequences, the US withdrawal from Vietnam; and public opinion could play the same forcing role in Iraq. American opposition to the Vietnam War peaked with 1968 Tet Offensive. Militarily, it was a great defeat for Hanoi, as it immediately admitted; but politically, nothing could shake the American public’s determination to get out. The key question is how public opinion will respond to the better news out of Iraq. No day passes without explosions and more deaths, and in the British sector, the situation in Basra is perilous. But in central Iraq, America’s military “surge”, combined with a counter-insurgency strategy that gives priority to the protection of Iraqi neighbourhoods, has begun to pay off. As General David Petraeus and his commanders underline repeatedly, it is too soon to say whether local and tactical successes point to an enduring trend. Yet in areas of Iraq such as Anbar province, until recently rootedly hostile, there is now a semblance of order based on cooperation with US forces. The flow of local intelligence has improved, support for al-Qaeda is down and so is the number, though not the ferocity, of suicide and mortar bomb attacks. In Baghdad itself, where the rate of sectarian murders has halved, the annual Shia mass pilgrimage to the Kadhimiya shrine, marred by terrible carnage in previous years, passed this month without incident.

An Imprudent Comparison that Undermines the American Case - Bronwen Maddox, London Times

It is a desperate move for President Bush to invoke Vietnam as justification for staying longer in Iraq. But his speech yesterday was the first of two in which he called on Americans to take a long view of the Iraq conflict and argued that the lesson of history was that some wars took a long time to win. His history lecture is disputable, not least in his elision of Vietnam and Cambodia. However, he is beyond controversy at the banal core of his main point: that Iraq has not yet come right but could in the future, although he skirted around the US’s almost complete lack of control over that course of events. But the oddity of Bush’s comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, the twin peaks of contemporary US foreign misjudgment, is that it reveals the absence of the US’s vision of its role in the region. There has been a wisp of a sense, in the Administration’s arguments for sitting tight in Iraq, that it believes that the US cannot afford to leave for fear of the regional turmoil that might follow, a case that Bush expanded yesterday. But although this is his best argument, it is pursued with none of the tenacity of the Vietnam-era visions of communist dominoes toppling on to one another, exaggerated as they turned out to be.

Fighting for Hearts, Minds, and Souls - Clifford May, National Review

The first concept to grasp is that the global conflict now underway involves both a clash of arms and a clash of ideas. To succeed in this war will require effective combat on both fronts. The second concept is this: The clash of arms and the clash of ideas influence one other, often in peculiar and even counterintuitive ways. One example: Al Qaeda in Iraq could not challenge American troops directly. Their solution has been to target innocent Iraqis instead, to slaughter innocent Muslim men, women, and children by the hundreds. Why wouldn’t this cause outrage around the world? It did — but al Qaeda calculated that in much of the West, the outrage would be directed less at them than at Americans for “stirring up a hornet’s nest.” And, as they also expected, images of death and destruction, coupled with reports of soldiers killed by roadside bombs, soon would erode the will of many Americans to continue the fight. Now, however, a new phase in the clash of arms may be having an unanticipated impact on a different audience. A shift in strategy initiated by the new U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is changing ideas about both al Qaeda and the U.S. in Muslim societies — and on the theological plane.

The Battle of Basra - London Daily Telegraph leader

What began as unattributable sniping from anonymous Pentagon sources has turned into a full-throated, on-the-record whinge. Washington does not like what the British military is doing in Basra and doesn't care who knows it. Retired General Jack Keane, the architect of the American "surge" in Baghdad, broke cover last weekend when he voiced his disappointment that the situation in Basra was "coming apart". Lest Downing Street hadn't noticed the outburst, he returned to the theme in an interview yesterday with BBC Radio 4's Today programme, when his language was even fruitier. Accusing the British military of a "general disengagement" from Basra, he complained there was now "almost gangland warfare" in Iraq's second city and a deteriorating situation that would only get worse. Such disobliging remarks from our closest ally cannot be ignored. General Keane at least had the grace to concede that, just like the American forces in central Iraq, Britain has never had enough manpower to protect the civilian population in its sector adequately. And that brought him to the nub of his argument. He said the United States had accepted that it needed to increase troop numbers on the ground - the British had to do the same.

The U.N.’s Role in Iraq - Carlos Pascual and Brian Cullin, Washington Post

When Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker report next month on the results of our "surge" in Iraq, the most important category, political progress, should receive an F. Even if our military forces have made real progress of late, their sacrifices will have been for naught because our diplomatic strategy has been disconnected, anemic and ineffective. The importance of diplomacy is rooted in Iraq's sectarian civil war. The war in Iraq is not the United States against a single enemy but the United States interjecting itself among many enemies fighting each other. That war cannot be solved by military means. Even if the United States were to quell the violence in the short term, fighting would erupt again with an American withdrawal. Until there is a political compact among Iraqi parties, endorsed by neighbors and the international community, there will be no prospect for peace in Iraq. Yet thus far there has been no serious effort in this direction. Regional meetings in Baghdad and Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, did not produce action agendas. Regional visits by the secretaries of state and defense will produce little concrete action as long as "support" is seen as bolstering Shiite dominance. President Bush's remarks yesterday on promoting democracy only reaffirm his administration's lack of realism about the complexity of political reconciliation and what's needed to achieve it. The passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1770 this month may offer the chance for a radical departure. The resolution renewed the mandate for the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq and called for the United Nations to promote reconciliation -- a daunting task but one crucial to any lasting settlement.

Easy Scapegoat – Washington Post editorial

As the clock ticks toward a September evaluation of progress in Iraq, President Bush and congressional Democrats opposed to the war appear close to agreement on at least one key point: disappointment with the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Returning from a trip to Iraq, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Monday called Mr. Maliki's government "non-functional" and urged the Iraqi parliament to vote it out of office. The next day Mr. Bush acknowledged "a certain level of frustration" and added that if the government didn't meet the demands of Iraqis, "they will replace the government." Mr. Bush retreated a little yesterday, saying Mr. Maliki was "a good guy" whom he supported, but the message was clear. Washington finds the Iraqi government's performance "extremely disappointing," as Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, put it. The frustration is understandable enough. As American soldiers have fought and died to stabilize Baghdad and other key areas in recent months, the parallel progress toward political reconciliation expected by the White House -- and promised by Mr. Maliki -- has been virtually nonexistent. It's more likely than not that none of the major steps the administration hoped for by Sept. 15 -- a new oil law, constitutional changes, the curtailment of a ban on former Baathists -- will be completed. On the contrary, the divide between Mr. Maliki's Shiite alliance and Sunni parties seems to have grown, and the government's policies, whether in the distribution of reconstruction funds or the management of the police and army, continue to be tinged with sectarianism.

A New Sheriff’s in Town - Ilya Shapiro, Weekly Standard

Just across the Tigris from the Green Zone, the surge has established what may be its most important non-military beachhead: the Rule of Law Complex (ROLC). Based in Baghdad's Rusafa District, the traditional home of the Baghdad Police, the ROLC brings together the three legs of the criminal justice stool: courts, police, and corrections. Inside a heavily fortified compound not far from Sadr City, the ROLC houses a branch of the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI), the Baghdad Police College, and a detention facility for 5,000 detainees (soon to be expanded to 7,000), as well as secure accommodations for key judicial personnel and their families. The project has moved quickly from PowerPoint slides in February to the start of operations in April and its first trial in June, all of which required significant cooperation among the Ministries of Interior, Justice, and Finance, as well as the Higher Judicial Council. Last month the Iraqi government approved $49 million for the effort and, as of August 1, ROLC's full operating budget--including security expenses--comes out of state funds. What Coalition forces have provided, meanwhile--in addition to advice on the ROLC's design, construction, and implementation--is the Law and Order Task Force (LAOTF). LAOTF is a key part of Multi-National Force-Iraq's (MNFI) renewed emphasis on building up the rule of law and combines the expertise of attorneys and investigators, both military and civilian.

Drama of a Tough Marine “Shoot or Don’t Shoot” Call – Ralph Peters, New York Post

What if al Qaeda were setting the entire thing up to get us to attack a home where women and children were present? What if they were playing all of our technical advantages against us and springing a political trap? Contrary to the myths of the left, no Americans leaders want to harm the innocent. And the local repercussions of bad targeting could set back reconciliation efforts by months. Still, everybody in that room wanted to shoot. Hitting back is the natural impulse for Marines or soldiers - get the enemy, any time you can. Nail that mortar team while we've got them.

The CIA Report? – New York Times editorial

The C.I.A. inspector general’s report on the agency’s failures before Sept. 11 was devastating — but not because it showed that America’s spies missed the rise of Al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the “war” with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president’s closest advisers to agitate for a strike on a Qaeda base in Afghanistan. The disturbing thing was that this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job (through such innovative antiterrorism measures as naming the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters for Mr. Bush’s father). The Bush team was so busy in 2001 trying to upend America’s global relationships according to a neo-conservative agenda that the then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, did not see any urgency in reports that Al Qaeda was determined to strike in the United States. Mr. Tenet later helped hype the “slam dunk” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify diverting the military from the war of necessity against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to the war of choice in Iraq.

A Nuclear-armed Iran Would Not be Good - Greg Sheridan, The Australian

A few weeks ago US President George W. Bush issued an unusual request to the Australian Government. He wanted to see the Australian ambassador to Iran, Greg Moriarty. The Americans don't have an ambassador in Tehran and it is no news to anybody that the Australian and British ambassadors brief their US colleagues on goings-on there. But I believe a US president requesting a meeting with our ambassador is a first. The episode demonstrates the absolute intensity of White House attention to Iran right now. Make no mistake, the world is building to a crisis in Iran. The technical detail is endlessly fascinating and the manoeuvres by all the players gothic in their complexity. But the basic story is simple enough. Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. It has two programs for this: a highly enriched uranium program and a heavy-water reactor that will produce plutonium. These facilities were constructed in secret and in contravention of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to which Iran is a signatory but has consistently flouted. Iran is the leader of the Shia version of fundamentalist and extremist Islam. It sponsors terrorism promiscuously. Its most important terrorist client is Hezbollah, a Shia group that de facto rules southern Lebanon. It is also the most important foreign sponsor of Hamas, a Sunni terrorist organisation that rules the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad, which has been responsible for much Palestinian terrorism, is effectively a branch of the Iranian intelligence services.

U.S. and China: Which Way? - Alvin Rabushka, Washington Times

Current U.S. headlines about China trumpet dubious dog food and lead paint in toys. Too bad all that is burying another important story. China's emergence as an economic power has set off alarms among national security and military experts in Washington, D.C., about China's rapidly rising military expenditures, including the acquisition of world-class submarines, development of a blue-water navy, modern aircraft, satellite-launch and -destruction capability, a broad range of missiles, and a more professional army. An immediate concern is Taiwan's security, but the longer-term threat resides in China's growing influence throughout Asia and its forays into Africa and Latin America in quest of natural resources. What, then, should U.S. policy be toward China?

-----

SWJ News Links

http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/08/2...j-oped-roundup/

Nuclear NonProliferation News:

• "U.S. National Security and Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century," By James Doyle, Carnegie Analysis
• "U.S. Sees Limits, Manipulation in Iran Deal With IAEA," By Mark Heinrich, Reuters
• "Iran's Revolutionary Guards Beat Sanctions: Exile," By Paul Eckert, Reuters
• "Mideast Countries Speed Up Nuclear Development Projects," By Yoav Stern, Haaretz
• "India's Singh Faces Biggest Test," By Peter Wonacott, The Wall Street Journal
• "A Really Big Deal," Op-Ed, The Times of India
• "Russia Steps Up Military Expansion," By Luke Harding, The Guardian

James Dobbins, now at Rand formerly at the State Department, sets the Iraq post-mortem ball rolling in this article from the current issue of Foreign Affairs.
August 23, 2007 Who Lost Iraq?
By James Dobbins

In the aftermath of national catastrophes, people have a natural tendency to look for an explanation based on a single point of failure. Such explanations are often unhelpful in devising subsequent policy. Simplistic lessons drawn from World War I persuaded the United States to embrace isolationism and Europe appeasement, both of which contributed to World War II. The lesson many Americans drew from not opposing Hitler sooner -- "no more Munichs" -- became a powerful rationale for the United States' entanglement in Vietnam in the 1960s. The subsequent national rejection of counterinsurgency missions -- "no more Vietnams" -- greatly hampered U.S. military performance in Iraq. If the current debate over the United States' failure in Iraq is to yield constructive results, it will have to go beyond bumper-sticker conclusions -- no more preemption, no more democracy promotion, no more nation building.
Individuals have been the first target of criticism: President George W. Bush, of course, but also Vice President Dick Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense; General Tommy Franks, the former commander of U.S. Central Command; Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority; and George Tenet, the former CIA director. All except two of these individuals have been out of office for some time: the Bush administration is already on its second defense secretary, third CIA director, third commanding general in Iraq, and fourth top diplomat there -- and thus far, none of these changes has reversed a worsening situation. This suggests that the source of at least some of the United States' difficulties in Iraq transcends particular personalities.




Meanwhile, the White House, Congress, the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA have engaged in continuous blame shifting over Iraq. President Bush and Congress have accused the intelligence community of misleading them about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Tenet has responded that the administration's senior policymakers never seriously debated the decision to go to war. Rumsfeld says that the president never asked his advice on the matter. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he provided the president with his views on the wisdom of war unasked, but to no effect. Former intelligence officers allege that the Defense Department and the White House manipulated, exaggerated, and manufactured intelligence appraisals to support a decision to go to war. Bremer says that he learned after serving several months in Iraq that the Pentagon was not sharing his reporting with the White House or the State Department. Tenet insists that the CIA warned the administration of the difficulties that would be encountered in the occupation (and recent press reports quoting CIA memos substantiate this).
During the Vietnam War, dissatisfaction with the conflict first became evident at the bottom of the military pyramid, and criticism of the U.S. military's performance was often leveled at its lowest ranks: the conscript riflemen whose disaffection, alcohol consumption, and drug usage increased as the war dragged on. Today, no one is complaining about the performance of the United States' all-volunteer force. In this war, dissent has emerged among very senior officers and been directed at the top leadership. Last year, in what became known as "the revolt of the generals," half a dozen recently retired U.S. commanders, several of whom had just led major units in Iraq, came out publicly against Rumsfeld's management of the war. In May of this year, the Armed Forces Journal printed an article by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling entitled "A Failure in Generalship." Yingling, who is a veteran of two tours in Iraq and who is still on active duty, wrote of both Vietnam and Iraq, "These debacles are not attributable to individual failures, but rather to a crisis in an entire institution: America's general officer corps. America's generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy."
Similarly, the U.S. media have engaged in a good deal of self-criticism over their coverage of the war. The New York Times apologized for its prewar coverage of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Thomas Ricks, The Washington Post's defense correspondent, lambasted his own paper's editorial page for its pro-war boosterism in his book on the occupation. Bob Woodward, the Post's most famous journalist, acknowledged that he was part of the "group think" that helped sell the war. Bill Moyers devoted an entire PBS broadcast to the role of journalists in marketing the war. Dan Rather, of CBS, admitted that there was no excuse for his own performance in this regard.
As the difficulties and setbacks in Iraq have mounted, the level of partisan political recrimination has also increased. The Democrats have blamed the difficulties in Iraq on the Republicans. The Republicans have blamed the Iraqis. Now in control of Congress, the Democrats have insisted on conditioning further U.S. assistance to Iraq on Baghdad's meeting certain benchmarks. If the Iraqis fail to meet these goals, as seems likely, Congress may cut back funding for the war. This will allow the Republicans to blame the Democrats for the impending defeat, while the Democrats will blame the Iraqis.
In truth, there is more than enough blame to go around. The United States went into Iraq with a higher level of domestic support for war than at almost anytime in its history. Congress authorized the invasion by an overwhelming bipartisan majority -- something that had not occurred for the Gulf War a decade earlier, nor for any of the highly controversial military operations of the Clinton era, in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Precisely because responsibility for this misguided enterprise is so widely shared, the temptation to make the Iraqis the scapegoat for U.S. failure may ultimately prove irresistible.
But to serve any useful purpose, the debate over who lost Iraq will need to cut a good deal deeper than this. Reform comes in the wake of disaster. Sadly, Iraq represents an opportunity in this regard, one too good to be passed up. Whether one concludes that the war itself was a mistake or merely that its execution was badly managed, Americans need to consider wherein their leaders, institutions, and policies have been at fault.
THE LEADERS
So far, there is little disinterested information available on decisionmaking within the Bush administration. Nearly all of it has come from self-serving sources, such as former officials writing in their memoirs or current officials speaking anonymously to journalists. From these first drafts of history, one thing already seems clear: neither the president nor the secretary of defense relied on structured debate and disciplined dissent to aid his decision-making. Under their leadership, both the White House and the Pentagon used management models that emphasized inspiration and guidance from above and loyalty and compliance from below. In such an atmosphere, individuals within the administration who doubted the wisdom of invading Iraq or the adequacy of plans to occupy and rebuild the country were not encouraged to articulate those concerns. By adopting such a top-down approach to decision-making, the president and the secretary of defense denied themselves the more carefully considered proposals and better analysis that a dialectical process of structured debate would have produced.
Had President Bush fostered debate, the State Department would have made the case for continuing to contain Saddam Hussein. Had the administration investigated the likely costs of occupying and reconstructing Iraq, the arguments for continued containment would have gained additional weight. Had Rumsfeld sought military or civilian expert advice regarding the manpower requirements for stabilizing Iraq, he might have sought to increase rather than decrease the already low estimates he was getting from his field commander, General Franks. Had the White House sought to integrate lessons learned during the various nation-building efforts of the 1990s, many early missteps in Iraq could have been avoided.
To be sure, a candid appraisal of the likely costs and risks of invading Iraq would probably have leaked, gravely complicating the administration's ability to secure congressional and public support for the war. Such fears probably explain why the administration silenced Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki and Assistant to the President for Economic Affairs Lawrence Lindsay after they publicly aired uncomfortably high estimates of the military manpower and economic resources necessary to occupy Iraq.
President Bush is by no means the first U.S. leader to understate the likely costs of an intervention. In 1995, President Bill Clinton promised to have U.S. troops out of Bosnia in a year; they remained a full decade. Yet it is equally true that Clinton was extremely reluctant to commit forces in this and other instances and that his decisions to do so were taken only after the most exhaustive internal debates, in which almost every conceivable alternative was explored, all relevant agencies listened to, and all the downsides considered.
There are undoubtedly costs to dependence on structured debate and disciplined dissent as aids to presidential decision-making. The process is time-consuming, the proceedings cannot be kept entirely confidential, and the ensuing public debate will be anything but disciplined. Yet a decision to go to war should be difficult, not easy. The Founding Fathers intended that these issues should be decided in open congressional deliberations. But current practice has departed so far from this model that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not even fully debated within the executive branch.
THE FOLLOWERS
Given the lack of receptivity to alternative views at the top, how much blame should be shouldered by people lower down who knew better and failed to speak up or who spoke up but failed to resign when their objections were brushed aside? Should the generals who revolted be condemned for awaiting retirement to lodge their protests? Should the nation foster a more critical climate within its military services, one in which officers are encouraged to challenge not only illegal orders but unwise ones as well?
Probably not. The military demands a higher degree of subordination, obedience, and discipline than other professions. Furthermore, civilian control of the military is an inviolable principle, which means that civilians should bear the chief responsibility when the military is misdirected.
If it is not the military's role to challenge lawful orders, still less is it the role of the press to manufacture controversy where none exists. In a democracy, the primary responsibility for opposing or at least critically examining the case for war falls on the opposition party. If the opposition chooses to duck that responsibility, as the Democrats largely did when the issue was put to them in late 2002, it is hard to fault the press for not stepping in to fill the void.
Much criticism has been leveled at the Bush administration's reliance on young, inexperienced ideologues to staff junior positions within the Coalition Provisional Authority. But this is hardly the primary example of political patronage undermining professional expertise. Bremer filled nearly all the senior jobs in Iraq with seasoned professionals and only turned to the White House patronage machine when the administration proved unable to staff the more junior posts with career professionals. In Washington, it is not the junior but the most senior and influential positions that are filled by individuals chosen primarily for their ideological convictions and personal loyalty.
The U.S. system of political patronage (unique in its scope among the world's democratic governments) ensures a high level of inexperience in the opening years of any presidency, promotes strong barriers to continuity of policy from one administration to the next, and results in diminished competence in a civil service whose members are permanently denied access to positions of greater responsibility. The system effectively insulates political leaders at the top from professional advice from the bottom, imposing several layers of ideological buffer between the two. Some administrations are worse than others in this regard, but all are bad. Neoconservative excess may have led to the current mess in Iraq, but well-meaning liberals are capable of the same sort of folly, as the late David Halberstam documented in The Best and the Brightest, his classic study of Vietnam War-era policymaking.
The U.S. military, police, and intelligence services are already largely fenced off from politicization on the grounds that national security is too important to entrust to amateurs. The nation should seek the same standard of professionalism for the senior civilian officials who staff the Defense Department and other national security agencies, including the National Security Council. Legislation that sets aside a certain proportion of subcabinet and White House staff positions for career professionals would go far toward encouraging continuity of policy and strengthening the competence of incoming administrations. So would a requirement that aspirants for top jobs in the national security field serve some time in another agency or a joint position, just as military officers now must serve at least one tour of duty outside their own branch of service to reach the most senior ranks.
THE INSTITUTIONS
Congress and the White House have already taken corrective action to address the intelligence failure that provided the war's main public rationale, demoting the director of central intelligence and creating a new post of director of national intelligence. Congress has only begun, however, to examine the uses, misuses, and abuses of intelligence by policymakers in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Corrective action here may be much more difficult. Some would like to further insulate the intelligence community from policymakers, effectively turning it into a fourth branch of government, independent of the executive and unreservedly free to criticize its intentions and undermine its policies. This would be a mistake.
The intelligence community proved overly pessimistic in its assessment of the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. It was equally pessimistic -- if more accurate -- about the problems likely to be encountered by a U.S. occupation of Iraq. Policymakers seized on one assessment and ignored the other. The problem was less one of flawed intelligence than of flawed use of intelligence by policymakers.
Intelligence analysts will almost always emphasize the downside of any risk and can never be one hundred percent certain in their judgments. Congress and the public should thus recognize and accept the inherent limitations of secret intelligence instead of trying to institutionalize yet another check on executive power.
Ineffectual performance in Iraq accompanied by constant blame shifting among Washington's agencies has led some to conclude that the entire interagency structure is defective. While still secretary of defense, Rumsfeld characterized the interagency system as broken, claiming that, as reported in Bob Woodward's State of Denial, "in the 21st Century we're still functioning with an interagency process and governmental structure that is in the industrial age of the last century." In his confirmation hearings to replace Rumsfeld, Robert Gates stated that the lack of interagency collaboration during the war in Iraq highlights the need to compel cooperation in the way the Goldwater-Nichols Act helped the military services work together in the 1980s.
The current system for integrating defense and foreign policy has actually functioned quite well for most of the past 60 years: it helped win the Cold War, unite Europe, cope with the collapse of the Soviet Union, deal with the early challenges of the post-Cold War era, and initially respond to the attacks of 9/11. Arrangements that seemed to be working adequately only six years ago are probably not irremediably broken today. Fixing them does not require a new department of national security or a further expansion of the White House staff, as some have suggested. What would help is legislation establishing a durable division of labor among the State Department, the Defense Department, and other national security agencies that are involved in postconflict nation building.
For the past 15 years, critical functions such as overseeing military and police training, providing humanitarian and reconstruction aid, and promoting democratic development have been repeatedly transferred from the State Department to the Defense Department and back again, leaving each agency uncertain what its long-term responsibilities are and consequently disinclined to invest in improving its performance. An executive order defining such roles, as Gates has proposed, would probably not outlast the administration that issued it. The national security establishment thus needs a legislated reorganization so that it can better conduct postwar stabilization and reconstruction missions, just as the Goldwater-Nichols Act over 20 years ago reorganized the military establishment to more effectively wage war.
THE STRATEGY AND FORCE STRUCTURE
Many of those calling for a reduced U.S. military presence in Iraq are simultaneously urging an increase in the size of the army. Underlying this apparent anomaly is widespread confusion regarding the appropriate role of military force in combating violent extremism.
Where the United States puts the bulk of its national security effort is heavily influenced by how Americans conceptualize the struggle against violent extremist movements in the Muslim world. If al Qaeda and its ilk are regarded primarily as criminal conspirators, then the United States needs a counterterrorism strategy that emphasizes police, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts. If the threat is deemed to have metastasized to the point where it is regarded as a global insurgency, then a greater reliance on military force may be justified.
Many experts believe that the threat of Islamist terrorism has indeed grown to the point where its purveyors have the capacity to overturn existing governments and seize control of substantial territory. Others continue to regard al Qaeda and its imitators more as opportunistic parasites that seek to attach themselves to what are essentially nationalist conflicts (much as al Qaeda has attached itself to a Sunni resistance movement in Iraq).
In the case of parasitic relationships, supporting rather than opposing the insurgency can, on occasion, be the best way to marginalize the extremists. This is the approach the United States followed in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s, where it supported Muslim insurgencies against Soviet and Serbian domination, respectively. Staying aloof, as the United States did with respect to the Algerian insurgency in the 1990s, is another option. In cases where U.S. national interests dictate some level of involvement against the insurgents, limiting the U.S. role to training, equipping, and advising the counterinsurgents is normally preferable to direct military intervention. In rare circumstances, such as in Afghanistan, that option may not be immediately available, and the burden may fall to U.S. soldiers.
With the unexpected early retirement of John Abizaid as head of U.S. Central Command and the replacement of General George Casey by General David Petraeus as the top commander in Iraq, one of these approaches to counterinsurgency has given way to another. Abizaid and Casey, feeling that the large U.S. military presence in Iraq provoked more resistance than it suppressed, advocated turning combat operations over to Iraqi forces as quickly as possible. They thus concentrated on training and equipping the Iraqi security forces. Petraeus, for his part, believes that U.S. forces employing classic counterinsurgency tactics still have an opportunity to gain the cooperation of the population and give Iraqi politicians the time and space they need to reconcile their differences. The Pentagon's top brass reportedly backed Abizaid and Casey's preference but were overruled by President Bush.
Iraq is, after all, a comparatively small country, yet countering the insurgency there has engaged most of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps. If future terrorist-linked insurgencies are to be similarly confronted by U.S. forces, then very large numbers will be needed. Alternatively, if the United States chooses in the future to combat insurgencies via local proxies, as it did throughout the Cold War (Vietnam being the sole exception), then a renewed emphasis on training, equipping, and advising foreign forces is in order. In that case, the need is less for a larger army than for one reorganized to better handle these new tasks.
It would be a mistake to employ Iraq as the yardstick by which to gauge the future necessary size and shape of the U.S. military, given that the war was probably unnecessary and the occupation mishandled from the outset. Afghanistan offers a better and somewhat less demanding guide to future requirements. The U.S. effort there has broad (if diminishing) local support, full international legitimacy, and substantial multinational participation. Yet Afghanistan, for all these advantages, is a test the United States is not currently passing. Improvements in the United States' capacity for nation building and counterinsurgency are thus in order.
The Bush administration's rhetoric since 9/11 has accentuated the warlike character of the terrorist threat and the martial nature of the required response. Yet most of the tangible successes in the "war on terror" have come as a result of police, intelligence, and diplomatic activity. Not until U.S. leaders rebalance their rhetoric will it be possible to redirect the government's funding priorities toward the nonmilitary instruments on which the suppression of violent extremist movements is most likely to depend.
THE POLICIES
Preemption, democracy promotion, and nation building have all been sullied by association with the war in Iraq. All three policies deserve reexamination, but none should be jettisoned entirely.
Over more than two centuries, the United States has conducted dozens of military campaigns, only two of which were in response to attacks on U.S. soil. This record should leave few in doubt that the United States will employ force to protect itself, its friends, and its interests without necessarily waiting to be struck first. To enshrine this principle in publicly proclaimed national doctrine, however, only makes any subsequent resort to force more controversial and hinders the process of attracting allies and securing international sanction for such actions; other nations will never be prepared to exempt the United States from the internationally recognized restraints on the unprovoked use of force. This international resistance to declared U.S. policy was clearly on display when the decision was made to attack Iraq soon after the Bush administration formally adopted preemption as the cornerstone of its new national security strategy. Washington therefore needs to drop "preemption" from the lexicon of its declared national security policy (as the Bush administration has already begun to do) while leaving an appropriate degree of uncertainty in the minds of any potential foes about how the United States might respond to a mounting threat.
Like preemption, democracy promotion has been a component of U.S. foreign policy almost since the country's birth. Beginning in the eighteenth century, most other nations in the Western Hemisphere have adopted political systems modeled, however imperfectly, on the United States' system. After World War II, the United States established strong democracies in Japan and Germany and supported democratization throughout Western Europe, employing a combination of military power, economic assistance, strategic communications (that is, propaganda), and direct, if surreptitious, support to democratic parties. In more recent decades, all of central and most of eastern Europe, nearly all of Latin America, much of East Asia, and some of Africa have become democratic with active U.S. encouragement.
But democratization is no panacea for terrorism and no shortcut to a more pro-U.S. (or pro-Israel) Middle East. Established democracies may not make war on one another, but studies have shown that democratizing nations are highly prone to both internal and external conflicts. Furthermore, democratic governments in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia would be more hostile to Israel and less aligned with the United States than the authoritarian regimes they replaced, since public opinion in those countries is more opposed to Israeli and U.S. policy than are their current leaders.
It may well have been a mistake to exempt the Middle East from over 60 years of largely successful U.S. efforts to promote democracy, but it is unrealistic to expect this deficiency to be remedied within a few years. Recent efforts to accelerate political reform in the region have already backfired. Elections are polarizing events, particularly in societies already marked by sectarian conflict, as has been demonstrated recently in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Rather than seeking dramatic electoral breakthroughs, let alone imposing reforms, U.S. efforts to advance democracy in the Middle East should focus on building its foundations, including the rule of law, civil society, larger middle classes, and more effective and less corrupt governments.
Nation building also deserves to survive its failure in Iraq. The Bush administration, like the U.S. public, now recognizes that the occupation of that country was mismanaged. As a result, it has embraced the nation-building mission in all but name with the fervor of a new convert. Unfortunately, although the Bush administration's reaction to setbacks in Iraq has been a determination to do better next time, Americans seem more inclined to avoid any such future enterprises.
In fact, both conclusions are valid. The United States should certainly avoid invading large hostile countries on the basis of faulty intelligence and with the support of narrow, unrepresentative coalitions. But not all conflicts are avoidable. Iraq may have been a war of choice, but Afghanistan was not. Both conflicts left the United States with a heavy burden of nation building. Through the 1990s, the Clinton administration slowly learned how costly and time-consuming such missions could be. In Somalia, the United States turned tail at the first sign of opposition. In Haiti, it set an early departure deadline, thereby ensuring that any improvements it introduced would be short-lived. In Bosnia, Clinton set an even shorter timeline, promising to have all U.S. troops out of the country within 12 months. But if Clinton had not learned to avoid setting deadlines, he had at least learned to avoid keeping them. Only late in his second term did he finally acknowledge the open-ended nature of U.S. commitments in both Bosnia and Kosovo.
It has taken the Bush administration a similar amount of time to learn that nation building cannot be done on the cheap. The "surge" of troops into Baghdad is a belated acknowledgment that rebuilding a failed state takes an enormous commitment of manpower, money, and time. This realization may have come too late to rescue the U.S. venture in Iraq. It should, nevertheless, serve as a cautionary guide to such endeavors in the future.
THE FAULT IS NOT IN OUR STARS
By January 2009, nearly everyone responsible for launching and directing the war in Iraq will have left office. Sorting out who did what will then become a job for historians. In choosing successors, however, Americans should insist on leaders who will foster debate and welcome disciplined dissent. These leaders should be surrounded by advisers chosen primarily for their relevant experience and demonstrated competence, not their ideological purity and partisan loyalty.
Leaders of this caliber, supported by more competent and professional staffs, will make better use of existing structures for policy formulation and implementation. These structures can be strengthened by the establishment of an enduring division of labor for postconflict stabilization and reconstruction among the national security agencies and by the building of a cadre of senior career officials with experience across the national security establishment.
The "war on terror" should be reconceived and renamed to place greater emphasis on its police, intelligence, and diplomatic components. The U.S. Army should continue to improve its counterinsurgency skills, with a particular emphasis on training, equipping, and advising others to conduct such campaigns. The United States should avoid allowing al Qaeda and its ilk to dictate its alignment in any particular dispute, should take sides when necessary based on an objective calculation of national interests, and should directly engage U.S. troops in local civil wars only in the rarest of circumstances. "Preemption" should be retired from the lexicon of declared policy, democratization should be pursued everywhere as a long-term objective in full recognition of its short-term costs and risks, and nation building should be embarked on only where the United States and its partners are ready for a long, hard, and expensive effort. Above all, Americans should accept that the entire nation has, to one degree or another, failed in Iraq. Facing up to this fact and drawing the necessary lessons is the only way to ensure that it does not similarly fail again.
James Dobbins directs the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation and served as Assistant Secretary of State under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He was the Clinton administration's special envoy to Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, and Somalia and the Bush administration's first envoy to Afghanistan.

Excerpts From Intel Report on Iraq : Excerpts from the declassified summary of a National Intelligence Estimate released Thursday on the prospects for stability in Iraq. The report represents the collaborative judgment of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...6871506,00.html

Maliki the convenient scapegoat for frustrated US: Bush is facing problems domestically and if the Iraqis have not delivered on the benchmarks set out by Congress, the president has to find someone to blame and try to lower expectations. Bush has to be seen to put more pressure on Maliki to satisfy his domestic audience."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2154013,00.html

Free Iraq' Is Within Reach, Bush Declares : President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that "a free Iraq" is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to "the allure of retreat," they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/washingt....html?ref=world

Bolton: I 'Absolutely' Hope The U.S. Will Attack Iran : "I hope Iran understands that we are very serious, that we are determined they are not going to get a nuclear weapon capability, and unless they change the strategic decision they've been pursuing for close to 20 years, that that's something they better factor into their calculations."
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/22/bolton-iran-six-months

Army Secretary Says "No Possibility" Of Longer Tours In Iraq
Posted on August 23, 2007 at 6:11 PM.

The Army's top civilian leader said Thursday he sees "no possibility" of extending soldiers' 15-month Iraq tours, reflecting concern about mounting strains on soldiers and their families as well as an emerging expectation that the troop buildup in Iraq can be reversed next year.

In an Associated Press interview, Army Secretary Pete Geren said that regardless of near-term changes in Iraq, the Army must find new ways to adjust to the pressures of engaging in a global war against extremism, which he described as a "persistent conflict" that could last two decades.

Read the full story »

Dangerous Delusions
by Leon Hadar A television adaptation of Nebula Award-winning author John Kessel's short story "A Clean Escape," which aired on ABC's new sci-fi anthology series titled Masters of Science Fiction, is set in a post-Apocalypse future, but it reminded me of current events. Psychiatrist Deanna Evans interrogates a distinguished but disoriented man who appears to be suffering from a memory lapse. After a climactic buildup, it is revealed – and this is a spoiler alert, if you don't want the story ruined – that he is the U.S. president, responsible for a global nuclear holocaust. They are two of a few hundred survivors of a nuclear war that resulted from the president's decision to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against a "rogue nation." Yet, not remembering what happened, he is unable to acknowledge his role or to take responsibility.

Kessel's president lives in a world of make believe, in which he is a patriotic American, committed to serving his country and ensuring that democracy reigns supreme worldwide. No, he says again and again, there was no nuclear holocaust! No, America is prospering and his family is alive and well! No, he isn't the president, just a hard-working citizen! But Dr. Evans forces him to overcome what could be a form of short-term memory loss and face reality. She shows him photographs of the destroyed White House, of the dead bodies of his wife and daughter, of devastated cities. "Mission accomplished, president?" she asks.

Sound vaguely familiar? Indeed, at times it seems to me that President George W. Bush and his advisers, not unlike the fictional president in "A Clean Escape," reside in a world of make believe of their own creation – let's call it the "Neocon World."

In their alternate reality, the ouster of Saddam Hussein was part of the war on the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks. In the real world, Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda, whose leaders and members are now hiding in Pakistan (which in the Neocon World is an ally of the United States in the war against al-Qaeda). In the Neocon World, there were WMDs in Iraq. In the real world, such Iraqi WMDs do not exist. In the Neocon World, the United States has liberated Iraq. In the real world, U.S. troops are facing a powerful insurgency, and most Iraqis want them out. In the Neocon World, the United States has turned Mesopotamia into a model of political and economic freedom. In the real world, Iraq is ruled by a Shi'ite government committed to narrow ethnic interests and religious values, its economy is ruined, and it is disintegrating into a bloody civil war. In the Neocon World, the United States is now spreading democracy in the Middle East. In the real world, the United States is providing huge arms packages to help strengthen the power of the theocracy of Saudi Arabia and the military regime of Egypt. In the Neocon World, the Iraq War is strengthening the position of the United States and its allies in the Middle East. In the real world, the Iraq War strengthened the hands of anti-American Iran and its allies in the Middle East, including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Remember Hezbollah and Hamas? Well, in the Neocon World, the Cedar Revolution and free elections in Lebanon helped empower the pro-Western forces in Lebanon. In reality, they helped empower the pro-Iran Hezbollah movement that represents the Shi'ite community. In the Neocon World, Israel's attacks on Hezbollah and other targets in Lebanon were going to destroy the military and political infrastructure of that movement, and by extension weaken Iran. In the real world, the Israeli military operation in Lebanon turned Hezbollah and its leader into the most popular players in the Arab world and played into the hands of Iran. In the Neocon World, the free elections in Palestine were going to lead to the emergence of a moderate Palestinian government that would make peace with Israel. In the real world, the free election brought into power the radical Islamic Hamas that refused to recognize and make peace with Israel. In the Neocon World, economic sanctions against the Palestinians were expected to weaken the political and military power of the elected Hamas government. In the real world, Hamas overpowered the militias affiliated with the more secular and moderate (and corrupt) Fatah and forced them out of the Gaza Strip.

According to those in the Neocon World, we have arrived at a place and time when the Israelis and the Palestinians are close to reaching a peace deal. Which recalls another scene in the Neocon World, the one in which the Road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad – the assumption being that the rise of Iraq-the-Democratic-Model and the strengthening of the influence of U.S. power and values would encourage the Palestinians, backed by the entire Arab world, to make peace with Israel. In the real world, that clearly didn't happen.

In the real world, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, presiding over a very unpopular government, opposes the terms that Israel offered Yasser Arafat and the Fatah leadership at Camp David in 2000 and which were then rejected by the Palestinians, while Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas continues to support the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees to Israel, which the majority of Israelis oppose. Also in the real world, the Israelis have bee