CUT
AND RUN, Part 1 Fleeing
self-destruction is common
sense By Henry C K Liu
Success can sometimes vindicate faulty
policies in the short run. Still, such policies
always foil ultimate success in the long run. The
simple truth is that final victory is only
achievable with sound policies. But when even
short-term success is out of reach with a faulty
policy, a quick and clean disengagement is just
common sense.
The Iraq war proves that the
US administration's "war on terror" has been a
monumental strategic error, with its reliance on
regime-change militarism
creating by the day more danger than security to
the United States and to world peace, with its
geopolitical unilateralism depriving the US of
support from the rest of the world. Wars,
especially one waged against as elusive an enemy
as terrorism, cannot be fought by hitting wrong
targets indiscriminately.
The terrorist
attacks on New York and the Pentagon on September
11, 2001, altered global geopolitics and upset the
established realpolitik agenda. The US response to
those unprecedented attacks on its homeland has
been overwhelmingly militaristic, with a vengeful
declaration of a "war on terror". This is a
strategic overshoot, because terrorism is an
amorphous organism that cannot be eliminated by
military operations, however overwhelming, but
only by social and political justice.
Further, in a world order of sovereign
states, war can only be declared on and fought
between states. Thus the US was compelled to
conjure up the notion of "rogue states" that
gelled into an "axis of evil" allegedly linked to
state-sponsored terrorism. Such evil states could
then be identified as legitimate targets for
regime change.
This was a new approach in
US foreign policy. The United States entered World
War II to resist expansionism of the Axis powers
that upset the existing world order. All through
the Cold War, the US aimed to contain communist
expansion against existing states. In 1990, the
US, in the name of preserving regional and world
order, went to war to reverse a regime change by
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, a "rogue state" in
Iraq's eyes.
To invade another state in a
"war on terror", evidence of a direct link between
the targeted regime and terrorists is required or,
if such evidence is missing, intelligence data
must be manipulated to support the pretext for
predetermined war.
The decision to go to
war against Iraq forced the US administration of
President George W Bush to manipulate intelligence
data otherwise unsupportive of war. Democratic
Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, then
vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, told CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System)
News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson on September
9, 2006: "The absolute cynical manipulation,
deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape
American public opinion and 69% of the people, at
that time, it worked, they said, 'We want to go to
war.' Including me. The difference is after I
began to learn about some of that intelligence I
went down to the Senate floor and I said, 'My vote
was wrong.'"
Rockefeller accused the Bush
administration of manipulating intelligence data
to falsify Iraq's link to al-Qaeda and provide a
disingenuous pretext to invade, thus distorting
the purpose and diminishing the effectiveness of
the "war on terror".
Further, the Iraq war
is showing that terrorism cannot be fought
effectively with state terror because a war on
terrorism provides a hotbed for terrorist groups
to mushroom faster than military operations can
eradicate them. An intransigent prolongation of a
faulty policy to fight terrorism by off-target
unilateral militarism will only lead to
self-destruction of the warmaking nation.
It is clear that the US electorate in this
month's mid-term elections expressed growing
dissatisfaction with the lack of success in the
Iraq war, notwithstanding the Bush
administration's argumentative defense on the
proper definition of "success". Bush defines
success in Iraq as an unflinching will to "stay
the course" and to decry as a moral deficit the
idea of "cut and run" in the face of an evil
enemy.
The war party dismisses the
imperative of not sacrificing in vain the lives of
helpless US soldiers caught up in the random
hazard of a collapsing edifice of state from which
the US field command is unable to provide
effective protection. The destruction of the Iraqi
state was pointlessly set off three years earlier
by an ill-conceived US policy of senseless regime
change. Continuing US occupation of Iraq only
impedes needed nation-building in the shattered
Iraqi political landscape. Foreign occupation will
not bring about sectarian harmony, social
stability or cessation of hostility toward foreign
occupiers and collaborators.
More than
2,800 US soldiers had been killed and more than
20,000 wounded in Iraq by election time on
November 7, and more can be expected with every
passing day, with no end in sight and for no clear
definable purpose.
The size of the US
occupation force of 140,000 is pitifully
inadequate for controlling a country the size of
Iraq, with a population of 27 million and an area
of 450,000 square kilometers. New York City alone,
with a population of just 8 million, has a police
force of more than 40,000. And the police in New
York are not occupiers of a hostile foreign nation
and do not have to face insurgents willing to die
to remove them. Attempts to rebuild an Iraqi
police force and military with reliable loyalty to
the new regime have been thwarted by effective
insurgent targeting of new recruits with lethal
castigation for treason.
The US-installed
puppet government of Prime Minister Nuri Mamal
al-Maliki cannot hope to command any respect from
the Iraqi people as long as US occupation
continues. Yet as soon as US forces withdraw, the
puppet government put in place by foreign
occupation will fall from lack of domestic popular
support. Influential sectarian leaders such as
Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, as they allow
themselves to be co-opted into the evolving
governing circle under US tutelage, face a
predictable loss of support from their core
constituents and desertion by radical members of
the militia they supposedly lead.
Accurate
information on the size and strength of the Iraqi
insurgency is hard to come by, but according to
GlobalSecurity.org, "In January 2005, Iraqi
intelligence-service director General Mohamed
Abdullah Shahwani said that the insurgency
consisted of at least 40,000 hardcore fighters,
out of a total of more than 200,000 part-time
fighters and volunteers who provide intelligence,
logistics and shelter."
This means the
insurgent force is larger than the 130,000-strong
US occupation force. With each passing day, the
size and strength of the insurgency is increasing,
possibly at an accelerating rate. Historical data
suggest that a ratio of 20:1 is necessary for an
occupation force to deal with, let alone
eliminate, an indigenous insurgency. This ratio
would put the needed size of the US occupation
force at 4 million, larger than the entire US
military. At the current troop level of 130,000,
US forces perform only one function: that of a
sitting-duck symbol of foreign occupation targeted
by all sides of the resistance. This is the
strongest argument for immediate withdrawal,
unless the US is prepared to send in its entire
military and risk it on one single hot spot in a
world of numerous hot spots created by the US
policy of unilateral militarism.
GlobalSecurity continued, "Shahwani said
the resistance enjoyed wide backing in the Sunni
provinces of Baghdad, Babel, Salahuddin, Diyala,
Nineveh and Tamim. Shahwani said the Ba'ath, with
a core fighting strength of more than 20,000, had
split into three factions. The main one, still
owing allegiance to jailed dictator Saddam
Hussein, is operating out of Syria. It is led by
Saddam's half-brother Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan."
Hassan was No 36 (six of diamonds) on the
Pentagon's list of 55 most wanted, with the US
government offering a US$1 million bounty on his
head, until his capture on February 27, 2005, by
Syrian authorities who handed him over to Iraq as
a goodwill gesture. The faction is now led by
Saddam's former aide, Mohamed Yunis al-Ahmed, also
with a bounty of $1 million on his head. It
provides funding to its connections in Mosul,
Samarra, Baquba, Kirkuk and Tikrit for
reconstructing the Ba'ath Party.
Izzat
Ibrahim al-Duri, deputy chief of the Revolution
Command Council under Saddam, now heads a new
wanted list with a $10 million bounty on his head.
He was No 6 and the king of clubs on the original
Pentagon list. He is believed to be operating
underground in Iraq as an operational leader of
the insurgents. Two other factions have split from
Saddam, but have yet to mount any attacks. Other
Islamist factions range from that of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, who was killed last June 8, to Ansar
al-Sunna and Ansar al-Islam.
The
London-based International Institute for Strategic
Studies estimates that roughly 1,000 foreign
Islamic jihadis have joined the Iraqi insurgency.
And there is no doubt many of these have had a
dramatic effect on perceptions of the insurgency
through high-profile videotaped kidnappings and
beheadings. However, US occupation commanders
believe that the greatest obstacles to stability
are the native insurgents that predominate in the
Sunni triangle. Significantly, many secular Sunni
leaders were being surpassed in influence by Sunni
militants. This development mirrors the rise of
Muqtada al-Sadr vis-a-vis the more moderate
Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. On
Iraqi domestic political dynamics, continuing US
occupation can contribute no positive or
constructive influence.
By their votes,
the US public showed that they measured success in
Iraq very differently from the way the Bush
administration did. More precisely, voters
measured the lack success in Iraq by the rising
number of US soldiers and Iraqi police and
civilians killed and wounded every day for three
long years for no achievable purpose or
discernable progress. The public saw only failure
in the worsening political fragmentation, social
instability and general chaos exacerbated by an
unwanted and unhelpful US presence. They were
disgusted with the incessant, shockingly graphic
news reports of atrocious tactics forced into
routine practice by a desperate occupation force
in distress and consumed by fatigue, which betray
otherwise laudable US moral values.
Also,
reports of widespread corruption associated with
reconstruction contracts and war profiteering
insult the US sense of business ethics. In the
meantime, civil liberty and personal freedom are
visibly curtailed at home in the name of homeland
security, the threat to which does not seem to
have been reduced by three years of a mismanaged
"war on terror".
Even the
neo-conservatives who were early vocal proponents
of the US-led invasion of Iraq have abandoned the
Bush administration, complaining that while the
war aims remain valid and policies correct, the
implementation has been wanting. They now say a
dysfunctional administration has turned sound US
policy into an unmitigated disaster.
Card-carrying neo-con Richard Perle, an
assistant secretary of defense under the late
president Ronald Reagan and former chairman of a
committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the
current administration, reportedly told Vanity
Fair magazine for its upcoming January issue that
"had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where
it would go, he probably would not have advocated
an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein". Perle added
that he would have advocated instead "other
strategies for dealing with the thing that
concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying
weapons of mass destruction to terrorists".
Yet Perle must know by now that no weapons
of mass destruction were found in Iraq after the
invasion. It is not possible for Iraq to supply
terrorists with something it does not have. So the
pre-war phobia was only a neo-con fantasy.
Apparently neo-conservatives do not make policy
based on facts, nor will they learn from facts.
Still, Perle unwittingly confessed that there were
"other strategies" available but war was the
neo-cons' strategy of choice. By extension, there
must also be other strategies than "stay the
course" now that war has proved to be a disaster
of self-destruction.
Three days before the
mid-term elections, White House National Security
Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe was reported to
have said, responding to the upcoming Perle
article, "We appreciate the Monday-morning
quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to
succeed in Iraq, and we are going forward with
it." The morning after the election returns that
showed the Republicans suffering, in Bush's own
words, "a thumping", a drastic reversal of fortune
from the "Road to Victory" engineered by White
House adviser Karl Rove only two years ago in the
2004 presidential election, the old "plan to
succeed" in Iraq was history, with the forced
resignation of Perle's former boss, defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld, symbol of the bankrupt
Iraq-invasion policy. Logic would suggest that any
new plan to succeed cannot preclude quick
disengagement.
Kenneth Adelman, a former
Defense Policy Board member, reportedly told
Vanity Fair he is now "crushed" by the dismal
performance of Rumsfeld. A year before the war,
Adelman predicted that demolishing Saddam's
military power and liberating Iraq would be a
"cakewalk". But he told the magazine he was
mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's
national-security team. Having declared in the
Washington Post on March 23, 2003, that he had "no
doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of
mass destruction" in Iraq after the war, Adelman
now laments that neo-conservatism, "the idea of
using our power for moral good in the world", has
been undeservedly discredited with the public by
the Bush team's incompetence and "it's not going
to sell" after Iraq.
While the
incompetence charge may have some validity, the
assertion on the validity of neo-conservatism does
not. Moral good cannot come from the misuse of
power.
Failure is an orphan. There is now
much backbiting among those associated with the
Bush administration who had pushed for the
ill-fated invasion of Iraq. Perle told Vanity Fair
that "you have to hold the president responsible"
because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some
in the administration. He said the White House's
National Security Council, then run by
now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, did not
serve Bush properly. What he meant was that the
NSC presented for presidential decision a balanced
and complete range of views from within the
administration, including those of the State
Department that Perle considered "disloyal",
rather than promoting only the neo-con-dominated
Department of Defense. Yet anyone familiar with
the official mandate of the NSC knows that to
present a comprehensive range of views is
precisely its official function.
Douglas
Feith, former under-secretary of defense for
policy and a charter member of Rumsfeld's gang of
neo-cons at the Pentagon, loyally wrote in the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard a defensive
his-dog-loves-him political eulogy for Rumsfeld,
his dismissed boss. According to the Nelson
Report, Feith, standing in for the defense
secretary at a 2003 interagency "principals
meeting" on the Middle East, gave his summary of
the position of the Pentagon, after which
then-national security adviser Rice reportedly
quipped, "Thanks, Doug, but when we want the
Israeli position we'll invite the ambassador." The
ruinous role Feith played in shaping catastrophic
US policy on the Mideast and in Iraq has been
amply covered by Pulitzer-deserving journalist Jim
Lobe in Asia Times Online (see Loss of Feith in Douglas,
November 7, 2003).
But the voice that
really hurt came from the military rank and file.
The Military Times Media Group, a Gannett
subsidiary that publishes Army Times and other
military-oriented periodicals, the voice of the
men and women doing the actual fighting, announced
three days before the mid-term elections it would
run an editorial on election eve again calling for
Bush to fire Rumsfeld. The first such call had
been in May 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prison
torture and abuse scandal broke.
The
Military Times Media Group editorial, published
the day before the elections in four periodicals,
said active-duty military leaders were beginning
to voice misgivings about the war's planning,
execution and dimming prospects for success.
"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the
uniformed leadership, with the troops, with
Congress and with the public at large," the
editorial said. "His strategy has failed, and his
ability to lead is compromised. And although the
blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the
secretary, it will be the troops who bear its
brunt." The editorial concluded: "Regardless of
which party wins November 7, the time has come, Mr
President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald
Rumsfeld must go."
Army Times editor
Robert Hodierne insisted the timing was not
prompted by the elections. Rather, it was inspired
by Bush's statement earlier in the month that he
wanted Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in
their posts through the end of his presidential
term. What the editor did not know was that Bush,
by his own admission to the press the day after
the elections, had already been working behind the
scenes to replace Rumsfeld with former Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Robert Gates.
It was another occasion that the president did not
tell the country the truth.
Conservatives
have opposed the neo-con war from its beginning.
After three disastrous years, even Republican
leaders in Congress began to criticize Bush's
policies on Iraq. Senator John Warner of Virginia,
Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, returning from a trip to Iraq in early
October, described the situation in Iraq as
"drifting sideways" and suggested that the US
should consider "a change of course" if the
violence there did not diminish soon. The failure
of the Bush White House to respond to this timely
opportunity to announce a policy review as its
"October surprise" relating to a key campaign
issue allowed the Democrats to turn the Warner
description into their own "October surprise" in
elections. Many Republicans have since been
furious at the hugely inopportune timing of the
White House's Iraq-policy shift, delaying it until
after the thumping at the voting booths, which was
anticipated given that Iraq was a key issue in the
elections. It was a classic case of closing the
barn door after the horse had bolted.
The
"coalition of the willing" is also dissolving.
Last month, General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head
of the British army, said Britain's presence was
contributing to violence in Iraq. British Prime
Minister Tony Blair conceded on the new
English-language channel of Al-Jazeera TV - with
40 million viewers worldwide, though still
unavailable in the US - that the invasion of Iraq
by the US and Britain had been a "disaster" and
offered his frank assessment of the prospect that
the country could descend into civil war. British
Minister for Industry Margaret Hodge, a
long-standing political ally, described the
conflict as Blair's "big mistake in foreign
affairs", accusing him of "moral imperialism".
Bipartisan doubt about the war had not
been absent in the US Congress. The Iraq Study
Group (ISG), also known as the Baker-Hamilton
Commission, is a 10-person bipartisan panel
appointed on March 15 by the Republican-controlled
Congress, charged with delivering an independent
assessment of the situation in Iraq in the US-led
Iraq war and occupation. The idea of a panel was
first proposed by Virginia Republican Congressman
Frank Wolf, who, being in tune with the public on
the war, easily beat Democratic challenger Judy
Feder with 57% vs 41% of votes cast. Gates, who
served as CIA director under president George H W
Bush, was a member of the panel until he was
replaced by Lawrence Eagleburger on November 10
when Bush nominated Gates to replace Rumsfeld. The
move from Rumsfeld to Gates is widely interpreted
as a policy shift on Iraq from ideology-driven to
pragmatism-driven.
Although the final ISG
report will not be released for months, media
reports have hinted at anticipated recommendations
of a phased withdrawal of US combat forces from
Iraq and direct US dialogue with Syria and Iran
over Iraq and the Middle East in a regional
context. President Bush and his national-security
team met on November 13 with members of the
bipartisan commission to devise a new course for
the unpopular war in Iraq. The group had a
closed-door joint conference at the White House
with Bush, Cheney and National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley, and individual meetings with
Secretary of State Rice, Rumsfeld, National
Intelligence Director John Negroponte, and CIA
Director Michael Hayden. They also talked with
Zalmay Khalizad, US ambassador in Baghdad.
During a visit to Iraq earlier, ISG
members met with key players across the Iraqi
political spectrum, reportedly including a
representative of Muqtada; President Jalal
Talabani; Prime Minister Maliki; and Abdul-Aziz
Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, a large, influential, and
moderate Shi'ite political organization formerly
based in Iran.
Commission members met also
with other secular leaders, including even leaders
of the Iraq Communist Party. The exploitation of
the Iraqi communists to neutralize the influence
of Iranian Islamic theocracy appears to be part of
the new game plan, a reversal of US Cold War
strategy of promoting Islamic fundamentalism to
contain communism in the Middle East.
Attempts to include Sunnis in the new
government, seen as key to establishing law and
order and neutralizing insurgency, whose
supporters are largely Sunnis, have not been
successful. Yet the Shi'ite bloc, known as the
United Iraqi Alliance, failed to win an absolute
majority in the December 15, 2005 election,
despite the fact that Shi'ites constitute more
than 60% of the population. The Alliance took 128
of the 275 seats, Kurdish parties 53 and the main
Sunni Arab bloc 44 seats. Sunnis still allege poll
fraud and continue to challenge the result. Thus
the Alliance must govern with a coalition and has
been forced to set up committees to hold talks
with Kurdish and Sunni groups in the new
parliament, trying to form a coalition with Sunni
factions but on condition that they do more to
calm the insurgency. It is a demand that moderate
Sunni politicians cannot meet because their
cooperation with the coalition government will set
them up as treasonous targets for insurgents.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi'ite cleric,
was given the Ministry of Health portfolio in the
coalition government on the condition that he
would disband his militia after clashing with US
forces in April 2005. Muqtada cannot afford an
image of having been co-opted into the
US-controlled evolving governing establishment,
lest he face a loss of support from his core
constituents and desertion by radical members of
the militia he supposedly controls. The Sadr
militia continues to be a potent and potential
threat to both occupational troops and Iraq's
fledgling government. The Mehdi Army controls Sadr
City, a Shi'ite stronghold in northeast Baghdad,
flouting government-imposed curfews in the area.
US troops remain largely outside Sadr City, and
the anemic Iraqi police and security forces dare
not challenge Muqtada's forces there.
A
rumored proposal by the Baker Commission is a coup
in Baghdad by the new US-trained Iraqi military,
reconstituted from scattered elements of Saddam
Hussein's Ba'athist army, to oust the ineffective
Maliki coalition government and replace it with
one led by a more effective figure, former
Ba'athist Iyad Allawi, along with a presidential
pardon and political rehabilitation for Saddam. In
preparation for the parliamentary elections that
took place in Iraq last December, Allawi formed an
alliance of diverse political groups, including
secular Sunni and Shi'ites and the Iraq Communist
Party under the Iraqi National List, which did not
score well at the polls because of CIA
obstruction. Allawi is a blood relative and
political rival of Ahmad Chalabi, a prominent
anti-Saddam exile who was hailed by neo-cons as
the "George Washington of Iraq". Chalabi, now
disgraced and abandoned by his US handlers, was
the person who convinced Rumsfeld that US invasion
troops would be welcomed with flowers and kisses
by the Iraqis and that establishing democracy
would be a "cakewalk" in Iraq.
Ironically,
Chalabi told The New York Times Magazine in a
November 5 front-cover profile, two days before
the mid-term elections, that "America's big
mistake was failing to step out of the way after
the fall of Saddam and let the Iraqis take
charge". Chalabi maintained that a new Iraqi
government would have acted even more harshly than
Saddam's government, "even brutally, to regain
control of the country", and the Iraqis would have
been without foreigners to blame. They would have
"appreciated a firm hand". There would be no
guerrilla insurgency and if there were, it would
be a small one that the new Iraqi government would
quickly ferret out and crush on its own before it
had a chance to spread. An Iraqi government would
have brought Muqtada into the regime and
house-trained him, and the US soldiers would have
been gone long before now.
Chalabi's
formula was a reintroduction of a tougher version
of Saddam's ruling style, which he asserted most
Iraqis recognize as fitting for Iraq's political
culture. Iraqi domestic politics and Arabic
geopolitics are Byzantine in complexity, and
beyond the comprehension of most Western
"experts", be they neo-liberals or
neo-conservatives, ideologues or pragmatists. As
Colin Powell said after the first Gulf War in
explaining why the George H W Bush administration
did not topple Saddam: "You get rid of Saddam, you
get another Saddam worse than the first Saddam,"
or words to that effect.
While the Baker
Commission's final report is not expected to be
released before the end of the year, preemptive
criticism has already been launched by Michael
Rubin, neo-conservative editor of the Middle East
Quarterly and a resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute. In an article in the
neo-conservative Weekly Standard on October 30
titled "Conclusion first, debate afterward", Rubin
attacks the Baker Commission as "tilted",
resurrecting failed old approaches of geopolitical
pragmatism as new promising approaches devoid of
"moral clarity". Rubin pointed out that in May
2001, ISG co-head Lee Hamilton co-chaired an
Atlantic Council study group that called on
Washington to adopt a "new approach" to Iran
centered on engagement with Tehran. And, in 2004,
former commission member Gates co-chaired another
study group that called for a "new approach" of
engagement toward Iran.
The problem,
according to Rubin, is that "this 'new approach'
hasn't been good for US national security",
implying that the neo-con-inspired invasion has
been good for US national security, a claim
publicly challenged by Jay Rockefeller. "The world
would be better off today if the US had never
invaded Iraq, even if it means Saddam Hussein
would still be running Iraq," Rockefeller told CBS
News in September.
Rubin disclosed that in
the weeks prior to the Iraq war, Washington once
again allegedly naively engaged Tehran in a move
of confused moral clarity. Zalmay Khalilzad, the
current US ambassador to Baghdad, who at the time
was the president's chief Iraq adviser on the NSC,
solicited a non-interference pledge in postwar
Iraqi politics from Iran's United Nations
ambassador in New York, in exchange for a US bomb
attack on and blockade of the Mujahedeen al-Khalq
camp, an Iranian opposition group inside Iraq. In
February 2000 the head of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard, General Rahim Safavi, had
called on Iraq to take action to curtail the
group's activities, warning that if Baghdad did
not take action, Iran's armed forces would respond
strongly. Iranian conservative cleric Ayatollah
Mohammed-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi had suggested during
the 2000 election that the CIA had infiltrated
Iran's reformist government and bribed moderate
journalists as well as supported Iranian
opposition groups in Iraq. These Iranian
opposition groups in Iraq, former US allies
against Iran, became priority military targets of
the US invasion force.
Of course, the
prospect of Iranian non-interference in Shi'ite
politics in Iraq after the fall of Saddam or
anywhere else in the region is only neo-con
utopian fantasy. Yet Rubin had the chutzpah to
write: "Effective realism requires abandoning the
utopian conviction that engagement always works
and partners are always sincere." Rubin warned
that in Iraq, "perception trumps reality".
Actually, in neo-con-dominated Washington, more
respect for reality would be an improvement.
Rubin attacked Baker for his role in
Operation Desert Storm in 1991 in failing to
support rebellious Kurds and Shi'ites who
responded to Bush Sr's called upon Iraqis to "take
matters into their own hands and force Saddam
Hussein the dictator to step aside". But had the
US intervened militarily in Iraqi domestic
politics in 1991, it would have landed in the same
trap in which the US finds itself in 2006. In
1991, the US wisely allowed Saddam to retain
control of Iraq to avoid a collapse of balance of
power in the region, to contain the rise of Iran
through the Shi'ite connection, and to avoid risk
of destabilizing Turkey, which has a large Kurdish
minority. Baker's pragmatic regional geopolitical
approach in the State Department served US
security interests infinitely better than the
ideological "moral clarity" fantasy of the neo-con
gang in the Defense Department under Rumsfeld.
Neo-con spinners, now out of government,
accused Baker of bringing "the left" back into US
foreign policy after "the left" had been purged by
the Bush Jr administration. To the neo-con
extremists, the "left" is centrist-right
Republican. It is a familiar charge from the likes
of Douglas Feith, the notorious former Pentagon
official who was investigated by the Senate
Intelligence Committee for allegedly distorting
prewar intelligence on Iraq to support invasion.
Feith was also questioned by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in relation to the passing of
confidential Pentagon documents by one of his
Defense Department underlings to the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee, which in turn
passed them to the Israeli Embassy.
The
neo-conservative agenda is promoted by a
well-oiled propaganda machine manned by a team of
intellectuals that includes David Wurmser, former
adviser to Vice President Cheney and aide to the
former under secretary of state for arms control
and international security, now unconfirmed
Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. Others in the
neo-con team include William Luti of the Office of
Special Plans (OSP), a secretive Pentagon outfit
whose players included Feith and Abram Shulsky, a
Leo Strauss scholar and intelligence expert
associated with the neo-conservative Project for
the New American Century (PNAC). In 2002, Shulsky
co-authored with Gary Schmitt, the director of the
PNAC, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World
of Intelligence, which argued that "truth is
not the goal" of intelligence operations, but
"victory" is. It is a step beyond Dr Joseph
Goebbels, who at least only applied that perverse
principle to propaganda, but had the sanity to
stop before applying it to intelligence.
The neo-conservative view on bureaucratic
interagency infighting over policy turf is that
the State Department, supported by the analysis
section of the CIA, is basically a seditious
center of resistance to the "global war on
terrorism" (GWOT), lately reframed as the "global
war on extremism" (GWOE). The State Department's
multilateral diplomacy is opposed by the hawks in
the Department of Defense, supported by the
covert-operation section of the CIA, who promote
US "exceptionalism" through unilateral militarism.
While Joseph McCarthy saw communists infesting the
State Department of the 1950s, neo-cons see
multilateral pragmatists in the State Department
of the 21st century aiding and abetting the
enemies of democracy by negotiating with them,
jeopardizing a foreign policy based on "moral
clarity".
According to investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh, Luti and his OSP cohorts
were charged with assembling intelligence on Iraq
that would support the Defense Department's case
for invasion. The OSP, conceived by Paul
Wolfowitz, began its work soon after the September
11 terrorist attacks, bringing "a crucial change
of direction" in US intelligence from objective
information gathering to supporting a
predetermined agenda, relying on predisposed data
provided by the Iraqi National Congress, the
anti-Saddam exile group headed by Chalabi.
The OSP neo-con agenda was echoed by salon
intellectuals outside of government, such as
Christopher Hitchens, whose aim in life is to be
the living celebrity who proves that if you go far
enough toward the left you would end up a neo-con,
and William Kristol, editor of The Weekly
Standard, home and incubator of neo-conservatism
and owned by media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Hitchens, a former Oxford Trotskyite who
morphed opportunistically into a noisy
neo-conservative after September 11 to earn from
British anti-war member of parliament George
Galloway the label of "drink-sodden former
Troskyist popinjay", now acts as a fervent
evangelical for his new-found pro-war cause. In a
Slate piece titled "Losing the Iraq war - can the
left really want us to?" Hitchens presented a
post-modernist deconstruction of the case for war:
There is a sort of unspoken feeling,
underlying the entire debate on the war, that if
you favored it or favor it, you stress the good
news, and if you opposed or oppose it you stress
the bad. I do not find myself on either side of
this false dichotomy. I think that those who
supported regime change should confront the idea
of defeat, and what it would mean for Iraq and
America and the world, every day. It is a combat
defined very much by the nature of the enemy,
which one might think was so obviously and
palpably evil that the very thought of its
victory would make any decent person shudder. It
is, moreover, a critical front in a much wider
struggle against a vicious and totalitarian
ideology.
It never seemed to me that
there was any alternative to confronting the
reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge
of implosion and might, if left to rot and
crash, have become to the region what the Congo
is to Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and
misery that would draw in opportunistic
interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi
Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing
to what it would have become without the
steadying influence of coalition forces. None of
the many blunders in postwar planning make any
essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed,
by drawing attention to the ruined condition of
the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they
serve to reinforce the
point.
Hitchens' is a cafe-society
argument for moral imperialism that relies on the
alleged evil nature of the enemy. Aside from the
dubious usurpation of the godly prerogative to
decide what is evil, the argument promotes a
rationalization for eliminating evil with more
evil. In essence, when one gets past the
convoluted Oxford prose, it is a tiresome rehash
of the old "domino theory" of the Vietnam War era.
The US "lost" China to evil communism, as it did
in Vietnam after French imperialism, having lost
Algeria to national independence, cut and ran from
evil Vietnamese communism after the disaster at
Dien Bien Phu. Yet none of these countries nor the
region turned into a "vortex of chaos and misery"
following the expulsion of Western imperialism.
This very weekend, the president of the United
States was in Hanoi to attend an Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation summit amid talk of an "Asian
century".
In a September 2005 article
titled "A war to be proud of", Hitchens wrote with
a straight face: "Prison conditions at Abu Ghraib
have improved markedly and dramatically since the
arrival of coalition troops in Baghdad." The
remark has since become a late-night TV comedy
line.
Notwithstanding the brash assertions
of the likes of Hitchens, the disastrous war in
Iraq was a key factor in the Republican defeat in
the mid-term elections. The replacement of
Rumsfeld was in motion even before election day.
After the elections, victorious Democrats
immediately called for a phased pullout of US
troops. "We have to tell Iraqis that the
open-ended commitment is over," said Carl Levin,
the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, adding that he wanted phased troop
withdrawals to begin in a few months and that some
Republican senators were preparing to back him.
The Baker Commission reportedly thinks
that "staying the course" is an untenable
long-term strategy, and is looking at two options,
both of which amount to a reversal of the current
Bush administration stance. One is the phased
withdrawal of US troops, and the other is to seek
the help of Syria and Iran to stop the fighting.
Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger,
whose views have been sought by the Baker
Commission, told the British Broadcasting Corp on
Sunday that military victory is no longer possible
in Iraq. Presenting a bleak prognosis on Iraq,
Kissinger said the US must enter dialogue with
Iraq's regional neighbors, including Iran, if
progress is to be made in the region. But
Kissinger warned against a rapid withdrawal of
coalition troops, saying it could destabilize
Iraq's neighbors and cause a long-lasting
conflict.
History shows that in Vietnam,
more than four years would pass from the time the
need to withdraw was recognized by US president
Lyndon Johnson to the time his successor, Richard
Nixon, was actually able to withdraw honorably. It
is hard to see how the US can afford that kind of
time in Iraq.
Next: Looking to
Syria and Iran for help
Henry C K
Liu is chairman of a New York-based private
investment group. His website is at
www.henryckliu.com.
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