Afghanistan

“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it w  read more »

Now that everyone except Dick Cheney agrees that Iraq has dissolved into civil war, I grabbed a couple of neocons' (and neolibs') books off my shelf last night to see how they treated the issue of Sunnis and Shi'ites killing one another, back when these brains were pushing for the U.S. to invade Iraq.

Here are Bill Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan (in The War Over Iraq, 2003):

"That things might be worse without [Saddam] is of course a possibility. But... it is difficult to imagine how... Nevertheless, Powell and others have argued that if the United States alienates central Iraq's Sunnis, say by overthrowing Saddam, Iraq could be plunged into chaos... But predictions of ethnic turmoil in Iraq are even more questionable than they were in the case of Afghanistan... Saddam has little support among any ethnic group, Sunnis included, and the Iraqi opposition [!] is itself a multiethnic force... Iraq was a multiethnic, multisectarian state before Saddam came to power... [T]he executive director of the Iraq Foundation, Rend Rahim Francke, says, 'we will not have a civil war in Iraq. This is contrary to Iraqi history, and Iraq has not had a history of communal conflict as there has been in the Balkans or in Afghanistan... Iraq will not fall apart and will not be dismembered...'"

Then there's Kenneth Pollack, in The Threatening Storm (the liberals' manifesto for invasion), arguing that urban Iraq is way past such differences:

The Shi'ite clergy could represent the small percentage of Shi'ites who favor an Islamic form of government, but they probably constitute less than 15 percent of the Shi'ite population... [T]ribal Iraqis living in tribal circumstances (Sunni or Shi'ah) now comprise a fraction of the population, probably less than 15 percent. On the other hand, 70 percent of the population is urban, and evne those city dwellers who retain some links to their tribes probably would not want to be represented by shaykhs who know nothing about life in Iraq's cities....[T]he mostly secular urban lower and middle classes... constitute the bulk of Iraq's population..."

Then there's David Wurmser, Cheney's brainy adviser, arguing (in Tyranny's Ally, 1999, published by the visionary American Enterprise Institute with support by Irving Moskowitz, who backs expansion of settlements in the West Bank) that liberating the Shi'ites would bring a modern, liberalizing spirit to the whole region, notably Iran:

"With totalitarian [Sunni] Ba'athism's subjugation of the Iraqi Shi'ite centers... not just Iraq but the entire Arab and Islamic worlds have lost one of their most important models of civil society. These independent [Shi'ite] institutions could have served much as Protestantism did in the Anglo-Saxon world, as a levee against the inundating absolutism of the state and as a foundation of liberalism and civil society...With no clerical freedom in Iraq... no Shi'ite entity has the freedom to challenge the narrow, controversial, and revolutionary form of Shi'ite politics practiced by Ayatollah Khomeini [in Iran]... Liberating the Shi'ite centers in Najaf and Karbala... could allow Iraqi Shi'ites to challenge and perhaps fatally derail the Iranian revolution. Comparably, in the Soviet Union, communism was undermined when the people's courts, the Politburo, and the cult of personality were abolished; without these weapons, power can again be diffused, civil society reestablished..."

I can offer only one comment on all this. Genius!

I noted yesterday that, given Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Iraq and Afghanistan and her detailed statements about troop levels, Barack Obama's recent articulation of his Iraq policy was starting to look a little vague by comparison.

But I was interested to find that among their Democratic colleagues in the Senate, there was a sharp difference of opinion as to whether Obama, and Clinton for that matter, should feel compelled to come up with a comprehensive position at all.

Russ Feingold, an outspoken war critic who advocates the immediate withdrawal of American troops, thinks they should.

"I would say somebody who says they are going to run for president and be president probably has to be more expansive about what they would do as president," he told me. "Because being president is one thing and the role of congress is another." "My party until just now, and we'll see what happens, has been way too slow to get this right," he added. "No one should have voted for the war in the first place and they should have known better, it's not hard to know better, they should have jumped on a timetable, we could have been out of this thing by now and they shouldn't be squeamish about using the power of the purse."

But Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia held the opposite view, arguing instead that it's not only permissible but advisable for Obama and Clinton to keep their developing plans under wraps as long as possible.

"I think in both cases, you don't want to lay out your ideas right away. Remember that our job is oversight, our job is authorizing and appropriating, we are not the commanders in chief," he said. "There will be a period of time where they are gauging things, gauging each other, gauging the public. Everyone wants an immediate answer and reaction to everything that arises. It is not always the best policy."

Sen. Dick Durbin, Obama's colleague from Illinois, took a historical approach to make the point that voters did not expect a comprehensive alternative from candidates so far out from the actual election.

"That is not what people expect. The closest anyone came is Dwight Eisenhower, 'I'll bring the troops home at such and such a date.' You look back at Vietnam, unless you were McGovern who was just resolute about ending it, by and large there was a disagreement about approach."

But with concern building over the war in Iraq, shouldn't a presidential candidate have a detailed plan? "I don't think the voters expect that of a candidate. Plus, we are two years away from any new president having the power to do anything. Each one of those proposals is a clear break from where the president is today. So that represents change and a movement in a different direction. Each one of those candidates, though they have a variation, is really speaking to the national sentiment, which is the current policy is unacceptable."

-- Jason Horowitz

KABUL—In some ways, being an “international” in Kabul is one of the last great col  read more »

KABUL—In some ways, being an “international” in Kabul is one of the last great colonial advent  read more »

George W.  read more »

In the latest New Republic, Israeli scholar Benny Morris is given many pages to expound his view that "the West" is now engaged in a battle with Islamists on three fronts: "Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine." He goes on, "For many or most Islamists, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are merely Stage 1."

This is the blanket identification of U.S. and Israeli interests that The New Republic and other salients of the Israel lobby have insisted upon since 9/11. No one is helped by this sort of imprecision.  read more »

I'm developing sudden sympathy for Rumsfeld. When Richard Holbrooke comes out for his resignation, as he did on Hardball tonight, it means the conventional wisdom has completely come around to that position. Rummy must go. Holbrooke is the biggest wind-sniffer in Washington. He's charging Rumsfeld with having mismanaged the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq too. Get him out now, before more young people die, he intones piously.

The problem isn't Rumsfeld, it's the policy, stupid. Invading Iraq was a bad idea. It would have been bad with 500,000 troops or a million. The reason it's bad had nothing to do with troop levels. It had to do with the whole idea of forcing democracy on a country that isn't ready. Forcing anything on a country that didn't attack us. If you'd had a million troops in there, the people would have laid low and then started picking them off.

The incompetents responsible for the decision to invade were, chiefly, Bush and Cheney (and Rummy and the neocons down the hall). With the Democratic leadership folding. Scapegoating Rumsfeld is a way of avoiding the hard political and intellectual work of changing the mission.

Neil Young's got the right idea. He's now called for Bush's impeachment. Obviously, the politicians are going to be the last ones to get on this train. They're afraid of the word censure. No reason the rest of us can't get it moving.

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