Shoe on the Other Foot Department?

This just in from Bill Christensen of Technovelgy.com: Joe Scarborough, one of the 268 Representatives who voted to begin impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, has apparently finally noticed the disparity between Clinton's record and Bush's.

Scarborough quoted:

Well, this is uncharted territory. And Josh Green, I want you,
if you will, to imagine, how would Republicans have responded if
President Bill Clinton had ignored the advice of all of his Joint
Chiefs, his top general in the war zone, his former secretary of
state, and 80 percent of Americans? Is it not a stretch to say that many Republicans would have considered impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton if this situation were identical?

This is something I wonder about constantly; imagine what the Republicans--who crucified Bill Clinton for firing some White House Staff or getting a blowjob and lying about it or losing $200,000 in a land deal BEFORE he was President--would do if Clinton had done one of a zillion things George W. Bush has done (usually with virtual impunity). You'd have been able to hear them screaming in Timbuktu!

Mark Danner Article a 'Must Read'

Mark Danner has written an excellent article for The New York Review of Books on the decision-making background to the Iraq War. The article starts slowly but gets to some real meat in Part 4 and 5.

Anyone wanting to answer the question of "how we began" in Iraq has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.

This is indeed the question I have asked myself again and again, how could we have gone into this without a postwar plan? I have often been most tempted to blame Rumsfeld because he was given so much control over the whole effort, war and postwar. However, Danner writes:

Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing.... Ron Suskind, who has been closely studying the inner workings of the Bush administration since his revealing piece about Karl Rove and John Dilulio in 2003 and his book on Paul O'Neill the following year, observes that "the interagency" not only serves to convey information and decisions but also is intended to perform a more basic function: "Sober due diligence, with an eye for the way previous administrations have thought through a standard array of challenges facing the United States, creates, in fact, a kind of check on executive power and prerogative." This is precisely what the President didn't want, particularly after September 11; deeply distrustful of the bureaucracy, desirous of quick, decisive action, impatient with bureaucrats and policy intellectuals, the President wanted to act....

Suskind... argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason."

To me this has the ring of truth. During the 2000 election the press was thoroughly preoccupied with 'who you'd rather have a beer with', Bush or Gore. Well, we got the guy the press would rather have a beer with and we got a singularly incompetent president who will likely go down in history as close to our worst. I really suspect Bush has immeasurably increased the 'decline' of America as a 'Great Power'. Read Danner's article, there's a lot more. This article focuses upon what I think are the key questions in understanding the Iraq War: 1) why was there no postwar plan? 2) who decided to order de-baathification and disband the Iraqi military and why? The article provides some of the best thinking I've seen on these key questions.

What True Conservatism Would Dictate in Foreign Policy

Two posts ago, in A Cogent View of Why Iraq Is So Divided I wrote:

How much evidence do our policymakers need that intervening in a foreign culture is an extremely difficult thing to do with any success; there are just too many unintended consequences and unforeseen outcomes.

Any truly conservative government could never have lost sight of this idea. John Adams is almost universally celebrated as one of America's most distinguished conservatives and he fully understood this. Writing about taking the step of declaring independence from England he wrote:

All great Changes are irksome to the human Mind, especially those which are attended with great Dangers and uncertain Effects. No Man living can foresee the Consequences of such a Measure [independence], and therefore I think it ought not to have been undertaken until the Design of Providence by a Series of great Events had so plainly marked out the Necessity of it that he who runs might read (quoted in Y. Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 1964, p. 70).

But the radical pseudo-conservative government of George W. Bush of course showed no such caution, patience or acute understanding of the difficulties of their Iraq adventure; Bush, opposite to his father in 1990, rammed his war resolution through Congress less than one month prior to a Congressional election and couldn't have seemed more anxious to invade Iraq and turn it into a "beacon of democracy" in the Middle East. How absolutely opposite of conservative do radical rightists like Bush have to be before Americans recognize the con game being run on them when these radicals cloth themselves in the garments of 'conservatism?'

And Now a 'Leaked' Rumsfeld Memo

The New York Times obtained a leaked memo Rumsfeld wrote about possible 'new' directions in Iraq; the memo was written two days before Rummy resigned. Here is NYT analysis of the memo. Here is Washington Post analysis. Finally, here's Juan Cole's interesting analysis.

Here are some thoughts of mine: Rumsfeld, the brilliant beureaucratic manager, former CEO of major drug companies, presumably a fellow who knows how to make strategic plans and determine methods to judge whether those plans are producing desired results, is apparently endorsing, after 3 years and 9 months of an unimaginably expensive war, some ideas that others have been calling for since nearly the beginning of the war:

1) "Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made)."

It's taken this brilliant manager 3 years and 9 months to recommend the setting of benchmarks with which to judge whether we are succeeding or not!! Joe Biden and Richard Lugar were calling for those years ago.

2) Put "one or more Iraqi soldiers with every U.S. and possibly Coalition squad, to improve our units’ language capabilities and cultural awareness."

Frankly, I am simply appalled. How in the world could it possibly take nearly 4 years to suggest that our troops need to be able to have Arabic speakers with them and be more culturally aware of Iraqi beliefs and customs. This is so amazing I am left speechless; how do you explain this monumental blindness?

3) "Initiate an approach where U.S. forces provide security only for those provinces or cities that openly request U.S. help."

As I've pointed out in several previous posts, this seems like a fairly obvious idea when you are being seen as an occupier and want to change that and be seen as an invited helper. Brzezinski has been suggesting something like this for at least a year.

4) "Withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions — cities, patrolling, etc. — and move U.S. forces to a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) status, operating from within Iraq and Kuwait, to be available when Iraqi security forces need assistance."

Hmmmmm. John Murtha? Who's John Murtha?

5) "Begin modest withdrawals of U.S. and Coalition forces (start “taking our hand off the bicycle seat”), so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country."

Aren't Republicans the ones who are always FIRST to tell us that placing responsibility upon those who benefit most from action is the golden path to fostering "individual initiative"? Aren't they the FIRST to warn of 'moral hazard' and 'perverse incentives' when people are provided too easily with aid? (See Jacob Hacker's marvelous new book, "The Great Risk Shift", for more on these topics.)

I've thought a good deal about how a smart guy like Rumsfeld could make so many stupid mistakes and, so far, the main cause I've been able to come up with is arrogance. This guy is perhaps one of the most arrogant of a notably arrogant group: politicians. He seemed to feel his judgment was close to infallible and thus if he thought it up it must be great; there was no real reason to respect anyone else's opinion. And, surrounded as he was by true believers like Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Wurmser, Rove, et al., there certainly was no stimulus to press him to come up with alternative ideas.

How Bad a President is George W Bush?

Today's Washinton Post Outlook Section features a discussion of how bad a president George W Bush will be judged by history and historians: first, second, third and fourth.

Whether he's fifth worst or, as Eric Foner argues, worst ever, I suspect he'll definitely be down in the basement somewhere. And to think he did not even win the popular vote in 2000 and only became President through a series of accidents (butterfly ballots, Katherine Harris) plus a politically divided Supreme Court.

Tilting Toward SOME of the Shia

Here are two excellent articles on the latest in Iraq War strategy: one from Robin Wright of the Washington Post, and another from Laura Rozen at American Prospect. I think the Laura Rozen piece is perhaps the best summary of the options under consideration by the administration.

I want to raise one question about the ‘tilting toward the Shia [plus Kurds]’ strategy. Wright said that “some insiders call the proposal the ’80 percent’ solution” because the Sunnis only number 20% of Iraq’s population. Wright’s article doesn’t mention the significant minority of Shia committed to Moktada al Sadr. Sadr controls 30 seats in the Iraqi 275 seat parliament and the support of these was necessary for al Maliki’s success in becoming Prime Minister. But many articles have recently made it clear that the ‘tilt’ strategy involves SPLITTING the Shia into al Maliki’s government plus followers of Abdel Aziz al Hakim’s Shia followers in SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) on the one hand, and Sadr’s followers and his Mahdi Militia on the other. I’m not sure how to estimate Sadr’s following but Newsweek’s latest alarmist coverage of Sadr suggests he has wide support.

How would tilting toward SOME Shia actually work? Even if al Maliki and al Hakim’s groups could get together (and they have competed in the past), what would come of pitting some Shia against other Shia while the Sunni insurgency was free to roam? One of al Sadr’s consistent and central demands has been for the U.S. to withdraw; this demand is shared by “91 percent of Sunnis”. There was some temporary cooperation between Sunnis and Sadrists in the first battle over Falluja. Might Sadrists and Sunni insurgents not join against the U.S., at least temporarily?

Juan Cole recently wrote:

The al-Maliki government would be given "another chance" to crack down on Shiite militias such as the Mahdi Army and would be given greater freedom of movement in confronting them militarily. In other words, Bush is trying to set al-Maliki up for a confrontation with the Sadr Movement…. If Bush gets his way, we could see substantial Shiite on Shiite violence in the coming months, of which it is likely the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement will take advantage.

The notion that somehow siding with the al Maliki government plus al Hakim's SCIRI followers against Sadr and his Mahdi militia raises the question of what the actual likely consequences of such a tactic would be. It is important to think about this because I think it's clear from the recent US media bashing of al Sadr that something like this is afoot.