Independent Caucus

Dichotomy on Iraq

Those on polar opposites of the Iraq political divide say the choice is either to win or press for a diplomatic solution, like the two approaches are a dichotomy with nothing in common.

The real political divide is between (A) fighting and beating all extra-governmental militants into submission, then policing all areas where they might otherwise reemerge so that their leaders concede and conclude that only through diplomatic negotiations do they stand any chance of getting what they want from a new Iraq, and, even more importantly, the populace is not terrorized by such groups so that they are free in their democratic numbers to speak-up, demonstrate, organize, lobby, vote and so on for the Iraq they want without fear of persecution or reprisal from a violent and undemocratic minority; and (B) redeploying U.S. troops to the border areas as a buffer against a wider regional war and interference from neighboring countries, and leaving the many armed militant groups with current de facto control of various neighborhoods and regions in Iraq to either fight it out among themselves, including with the Iraqi army, or to negotiate at such time and in such manner as they deem fit.  The case has simply not been made regarding a choice (C) where Syria and Iran can be brought to bring pressure on militant groups in Iraq to negotiate peacefully with one another.  They simply don’t have that much sway, nor do they need their arms to continue to fight, there being more than sufficient munitions in Iraq already to carry on for quite some time.

But A and B truly are a dichotomy.  Yet they have one common element - political negotiation - without which you have strife and instability into infinity.  People tend toward negotiation, ultimately, since the alternative is so unappealing.  The question is under what circumstances are opposing groups compelled to negotiate and how much violence and death is a necessary precursor to those circumstances?

If the circumstance is (1) that folks are negotiating because they lost a long and bloody armed conflict, and are forced to accept a settlement which spares their remaining numbers either at a cost of living under tyranny or significantly reduced and redrawn national boundaries, then that is distinctly different from (2) where all are permitted in relative safety and security to vote democratically among different political options for their future, and to do so iteratively among peoples, provinces and groups throughout Iraq until the result is a political map all are willing to accept and live with.  There is also (3) where a larger and stronger power negotiates with a smaller and weaker power because it’s tired of the prolonged loss of life from being unable to gain a complete military victory, and would rather give in than continue on.  The Soviets did this with Afghanistan, and in fact lots of wars of independence have ended up like (3).  But with (3) as with (1) there is the necessary precursor of considerable loss of life before negotiations occur.  And for this reason, I lump (1) and (3) together as having that common and unhappy characteristic.

In Iraq, between A and B, A hopes to bring about and enforce (2) at the risk of more American lives; while B hopes that (2) will occur, but acknowledges and is willing to accept a reasonable possibility that (1) will occur.  Certainly, if (1) occurs usually you will not have (2), particularly where one group beats another handily.  Rather, (1) only leads to (2) when the various armed groups beat each other into a relative stalemate, where no one group has or is likely to gain additional military advantage, and therefore all are willing to negotiate as equals.

Negotiating as equals is where votes are such a great thing - particularly if they are permitted to take place both regionally and nationally, where the tyranny of the majority is avoided by having regional votes as well, giving minorities the opportunity to vote for self-determination, or at least stand up and be counted as a unified minority which must be duly considered in any wider national negotiation, constitution or plan if peace is to be achieved.  And negotiating as equals, democratically, and free from intimidation is what (2) is all about.

However, political boundaries throughout the history of the world have mostly been drawn due to (1).  Part of the new world order President Bush is trying to advance is to use American troops to enforce that (2) occurs prior to a devolution into (1) or (3), avoiding their tyranny, incumbent violence and loss of life.  It is a grand, philanthropic notion, maybe the grandest imaginable, but the fact is America is simply not that powerful.  No country is.  Only a much more activist U.N. could ever be that powerful.  Only a world body with a strong military enforcement arm contributed to and sustained by many nations around the globe could ever be powerful enough to enforce and fund (2). 

It's a wonderful vision, President Bush, just incredibly unrealistic for one country to do all by itself without substantial international participation and assistance, even a country as great, powerful and wealthy as the United States, and to attempt to will only weaken the United States, indebt her, make her less powerful and less great in the end.

There's No Trusting These Guys, We Have to Go

What the heck is going on here?  It's 9:19am.  I've just finished watching the Iraq segment of the interview with Vice President Cheney on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.  I've done this after listening to testimony for the last two days on Capitol Hill from Defense Secretary Gates and General Peter Pace.  I wrote my previous two posts "What I Don't Want in Iraq" and "The President's Last Plan for Iraq" based on what I heard and reasonably inferred - and of course therein lies my mistake with this President and this administration - from the President's speech and that testimony.

That speech, particularly when taken in the context of the follow-up testimony of Gates and Pace to Congress - where they emphasized that this new strategy hinges, literally pivots and depends on the Iraqi army living up to its commitments militarily in taking the fight to the militants and insurgents occupying Baghdad, pushing them out, and bringing security and protection to the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Baghdad, without regard for the ethnicity or sect of the militants they must fight - left me to believe, as those posts indicate, that we give the Iraqis one last chance with our help to accomplish that mission.

The consistency of the administration message, however, lasted two days.  It took - and really, how can I be this stupid at this point? - a 180-degree turn with the appearance and interview of Vice President Cheney on Fox News Sunday.  And everyone knows, that when THIS Vice President talks, he has the backing  of President Bush.

When I heard the President's speech, it included a line which warned al-Maliki that if he and the Iraqis do not follow through with their end of the agreement, their end of the strategy, that they would lose the support of the American people.  Ok, that's hard to misinterpret.  But, I guess, clearly they meant the American people and not the American government, and this, no doubt, from some of those furious at President Clinton for parsing the definition of sex in maintaining he did not perjure himself.

Secretary Gates and General Pace emphasized and reemphasized in sworn testimony to House and Senate committees the very same thing, that this new strategy does not succeed unless the Iraqis do their part, that their part is more key than our part, and gave me every indication, as I heard them answer the key question - what if they fail us? - which I DID NOT parse, but clearly should have, because I heard them answer time and again, that we fail, that the mission has no chance, and so on, in that event.  No chance.  Clearly, no general, no secretary, no president would stand for one more soldier dying in a foreign war which had no chance of success.  So I concluded, as I posted, that the mission was to make this push on Baghdad with Iraqis in the lead, one final push and one final chance for the Iraqi government and army to fight for their country as a whole and not for their race or religion, and if they did not, then we were gone.

Enter Dick Cheney to clarify things.  Chris Wallace first asked him that if winning in Iraq is central to winning the war on terror then why leave anything to the Iraqis, why not send in way more than an additional 21,500 troops and make it simply an all-American effort.  Good question.  Dick Cheney said that ultimately Iraqis must govern and maintain security themselves, so we would rather up our assistance in helping them help themselves, and that the difference now is we have a commitment like we haven't had before from the Iraqis to step up and fight for their country against all who oppose it regardless of ethnicity or sect.  Fine.  So Chris Wallace asked the same question Congress asked time and again to Gates and Pace - what if they don't?  What if they don't?  I was so ready to hear confirmation from one more high-ranking administrative official that this is Iraq's last change.  But what did he say?  Our Vice President refused to answer.  Chris Wallace asked again.  Again he refused, and simply stared at Wallace with a smug stubbornness which said, "You can ask me 50 times; I'm not answering."

Our President, Secretary Gates and General Pace gave every indication in their remarks and testimony that ours is no longer an open commitment, that the Iraqis must perform this time, or the mission, which is our mission in Iraq, has no chance.  And then Dick Cheney changes all that in one interview.  The open commitment is back, and brazenly so, refusing to even offer an answer which could be parsed to the contrary later.  Perhaps, to his credit, he's gotten fed up with being served his own videotape medley of falsehoods and misrepresentations from the past, such as "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction" to where, knowing full well there is no "or else" threat to the Iraqis, decided not to invent one.  Maybe it's the first time he's told us the truth.

Regardless, make no mistake, my dear blog readers, but this is poison, as some of you have already concluded and commented.  This is an open-ended commitment of American service men and women.  This is an administration that cannot get itself on the same page, or else openly misleads in the case of Gates and Pace, and also the President himself in his speech.

And for the people of Iraq I can only be sorry and hope that not too many more lives will be lost while sectarian hatred fills the power vacuum left by Saddam.  But we must leave.  You are left to your own to make of your former country what you will.  But this is not the place for the American soldier, nor was it from the start with too little international support and far, far too few troops to succeed and deter the civil war you now find yourself in.  We forced upon you a trade you did not ask for - poor but safe streets and a dictator for a sectarian civil war.  George Bush must certainly go down as the worst American president so far in our history, and hopefully, for the sake of future Iraqs, the worst ever.

What I Don't Want in Iraq

I don't want a perpetual deployment with little change and improvement on the ground.  We've been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II.  So let's get something done, and quickly, if we can, and if it's possible; and if the necessary ingredients for successfully accomplishing something in Iraq quickly don't materialize, then let's not quickly "reassess" our strategy, rather, let's quickly get the heck out.

We never should have gone in.  This is clear.  Further, if the grand vision from early on was to cultivate a democratic government in Mesopotamia, then we needed three or four hundred thousand troops from the start in order to keep the peace while a fragile democracy in a country comprised of historic and rival factions could be nurtured in a relatively safe environment before being asked to defend and sustain itself.  To do otherwise allows - in fact, sentences - an early democracy and its citizenry to fall prey to the most basic of Maslow's hierarchy - the need to survive.  Quite simply, where the institutions of the democratic state are incapable of protecting the people, the people shall side with, aid, enable and otherwise look the other way to groups, gangs, factions and militias who will either kill them or protect them based on their complicity, so long as they are of the right ethnicity or sect, or can reasonably lie and fake it.

This was a hugely tall and grandiose vision. Preposterous, really.  Made all the more preposterous by the arrogance or stupidity - really, I'm trying to be fair, and those are the fairest words I can think of - of preparing so little and so insufficiently for the execution of how such a tall and grandiose vision would be accomplished.

But, my goodness, we are there now.  There are millions of people whose lives have been turned upside down by our invasion, ill-preparedness and arrogance.  No one's home is inviolate, now.  Not at all the case under Saddam, who only reserved for himself the right to disregard any Iraqi citizen's human rights and privacy, and dealt strictly with anyone else who took on that role.  Basically, Saddam insisted that he was the only gun in town.  If you were reasonably anonymous to Saddam, then you, your family and your home were reasonably safe.  This is no longer true.  And I am sure we are hated for it, in many quarters, among many families who have had husbands or brothers or wives, daughters, uncles and aunts killed in the kind of sectarian slaughter which is causing scores of headless bodies to turn up daily in and around Baghdad.

We cannot - this is tautologically the case - protect the Iraqis from themselves. If it's true that most Iraqis do not want this sectarian war and would rather forge some negotiated, cooperative means of living together, and if it's true that until now, right now, the Iraqi central government has not possessed the courage and the resolve to fight for itself, for a unified Iraq, for the majority who want peace against a minority who only want to slaughter and intimidate as a means for installing their own tyrannical, dictatorial and selfish will, and if they have seen clearly the critical juncture that is now, and decided to fight for their country, and for democratic rule over fascism and tyranny, and if we can help, then we are there, and we started it, so let us help.

I honestly wish this President had resigned, though, where the spike now being implemented and feverishly debated on Capitol Hill were some other President's strategy, because this President suffers from an incurable lack of credibility.  The Iraqis could be serious; they could be ready; and six months of intense fighting followed by twelve months of relative calm and law enforcement could provide the drying time the Iraqi democracy needs to become fixed as stone, and the time security forces need to enlarge their numbers, strength, equipment and confidence to where they can sustain the calm after American troops leave.  Yet Maleki suffers from almost as great a lack of credibility. Between the two of them, is it surprising that so many don't believe anything they say?

Maybe it's just guilt on my part, even though I didn't make the decision to go in.  I will say this - this is it, the last straw, and the last chance.  And we abort - abort - this military push and increased American military commitment, and pull our troops out quicker than we landed them there in the first place the MOMENT Maleki and the Iraqi army go back on their new commitments, leave the front, not attack or half-heartedly attack those who are their ethnic or sectarian brothers.

For those who don't believe Maleki, and believe the Iraqi army will quickly demonstrate that it won't stand up, they can look forward to American troops coming home very soon.  And even if they do stand up, and prove all doubters wrong, we still LEAVE IRAQ at the close of 12 to 18 months to chart her own course, as she certainly must, even if they simply elect to kill one another as much, as often and as wantonly as possible after we leave, or, maybe, continue along a productive and cooperative course laid possibly over the last 6 to 12 of those 18 months.

I have no idea which it will be, but can only hope, pray and thank heaven that this administration has less than two years left.

The President's Last Plan for Iraq

I'm going to dismay many people who read this blog by suggesting we give the President's plan a small chance for success before we throw it out.  Wow, can't believe I just typed that, because I feel the President has bungled Iraq so completely from the start.  And there is an old adage cautioning against having the person who created the mess clean it up.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't have confidence in this president.  I never did.  I wish there were someone else making the decisions, the executive and military decisions in our country.  I wish we were operating under someone else's presidential vision and leadership.

But there are a few reasons why a last ditch attempt to diminish the strength of militias while American troops and military might are still there, and providing a check on their size, strength and territorial influence, is worth trying before retreating out of Iraq entirely.  Here they are:

• Polls say that it is a minority of Shia and Sunnis which constitute the insurgency and perpetration of the violence we see in and around Baghdad, that the majority want to live together and form a workable pluralistic Iraq of Sunni, Shia and Kurd.
• Experts predict an ethnic and sectarian blood bath not unlike what occurred in Rwanda and Bosnia if that single, pluralistic state cannot be created, and if American and allied troops retreat at this time.

The latter bullet violates the Pottery Barn Rule, which says that if you break it you own it, and we certainly broke it.  And herein lies the difficulty for me in this post, that it's a shame we broke it, because we didn't have a plan for owning it.  But we did break it.  We should have left Saddam in place until we had a plan for Iraq and for his removal which was not a death sentence to potentially hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.  Now, we didn't cause Rwanda, but we can't and won't be able to say the same thing if we pull out and Iraq begins to devour itself in graphic and horrific ways repugnant to all civilized societies.

For those who agree - probably few - with the President's approach, they have to acknowledge the following things:

• That Colin Powell and General Shinseki were right.
• That the additional 20,000 troops the President has dedicated to Iraq will not be enough to clear and hold Baghdad and vicinity - that estimates are it would require 100,000 or more additional troops.
• And that, following from the previous bullet, the President's plan succeeds only if he is correct in his assessment of the commitment now by the Iraqi army and security forces to clear, forcibly if necessary - and make no mistake, force will be required - areas of sectarian militia occupation and influence regardless of whether such militiamen represent their sectarian brothers or not.

I believe Shinseki said it would require about 400,000 troops to occupy and police Iraq.  The Iraqi army I believe numbers now around 300,000.  The President's increase will put American troop levels around 150,000.  That should be enough - if indeed those opposing the current government represent a minority of Iraqis as is reported, and if the Iraqi army is now willing to fight as an Iraqi army, loyal to Iraq, and not to their tribe or sect - to bring calm to the streets, clear the thugs and protect thousands of Iraqis whose lives will be in immediate jeopardy should the allies pull out, the Iraqi military break and fragment along sectarian lines and the current central government fall.

That third bullet is the key.  But then it's been the key for some time, and yet it hasn't happened.  The Iraqi military has not stepped up.  Why should it work now?  That's the $100,000 question.  Well, it only works now, things only change now if there has been a fundamental epiphany within Prime Minister Maleki, the central government, and the military, that their government fails, they fail and Iraq goes up in smoke, blood and lives unless they change now, challenge and attack if necessary the militias, and succeed on the ground where heretofore they have failed largely from lack of trying.

But then why add 20,000 American troops?  Will they matter fundamentally to success of this new strategy?  Nope.  They won't.  Everyone says it's not enough to affect military outcomes given all other things staying the same.  I think President Bush did that out of good faith to show PM Maleki one last measure of support if he makes the hard decision which apparently, according to the President's speech, he has made, and possibly to give Maleki and the Iraqi generals one last boost of confidence that they can succeed against the well-armed militias through the additional embedding of American forces within their units as they head into battle.

This I know, and the President knows, and PM Maleki must know, that this troop spike cannot be maintained.  That the clock is ticking.  They have but a few months to post some dramatic military successes and concessions among these sectarian militias, and bring their leaders either to justice or willingly into the political process.  After that, and this the President said in his speech, the American effort will have reached its conclusion.  Americans will come home.  America will convene diplomatic talks with neighboring countries to encourage them to let Iraq implode and to contain it to within Iraq.  And we will be treated over the next couple years, from those intrepid and daring international journalists who go there to cover it, to photos and video footage of some incredible atrocities and ethnic cleansing along the lines of that which the U.N., many countries, and President Clinton said the world could not allow to occur again following the tragedy in Rwanda.

And yet, that is EXACTLY what we must do, and quickly, if this fails, if Prime Minister Maleki's promises and assurances, and those of his military generals and troops prove hollow again.