endgame

Tom Friedman sounds his note of pessimism

. . . Any lawyer will tell you, if you’re negotiating a contract and the other side thinks you’ll never walk away, you’ve got no leverage. And in Iraq, we’ve never had any leverage. The Iraqis believe that Mr. Bush will never walk away, so they have no incentive to make painful compromises.

That’s why the Iraqi Parliament is on vacation in August and our soldiers are fighting in the heat. Something is wrong with this picture. First, Mr. Bush spends three years denying the reality that we need a surge of more troops to establish security and then, with Iraq spinning totally out of control and militias taking root everywhere, he announces a surge and criticizes others for being impatient.

At the same time, Mr. Bush announces a peace conference for Israelis and Palestinians — but not for Iraqis. He’s like a man trapped in a burning house who calls 911 to put out the brush fire down the street. Hello?

Quitting Iraq would be morally and strategically devastating. But to just drag out the surge, with no road map for a political endgame, with Iraqi lawmakers going on vacation, with no consequences for dithering, would be just as morally and strategically irresponsible.

We owe Iraqis our best military — and diplomatic effort — to avoid the disaster of walking away. But if they won’t take advantage of that, we owe our soldiers a ticket home.

while timothy garton of The Guardian takes it even further

America is just starting to wake up to the awesome scale of its Iraq disaster…

Thursday July 19, 2007
Iraq is over. Iraq has not yet begun. Two conclusions from the American debate about Iraq, which dominates the media in the US to the exclusion of almost any other foreign story. Iraq is over insofar as the American public has decided that most US troops should leave. In a Gallup poll earlier this month, 71% favoured “removing all US troops from Iraq by April 1 of next year, except for a limited number that would be involved in counter-terrorism efforts”. CNN’s veteran political analyst Bill Schneider observes that in the latter years of the Vietnam war, the American public’s basic attitude could be summarised as “either win or get out”. He argues that it’s the same with Iraq. Despite George Bush’s increasingly desperate pleas, most Americans have now concluded that the US is not winning. So get out.

Since this is a democracy, their elected representatives are following where the people lead. Whatever the result of the latest round of Congressional position play – which included an all-night marathon on the floor of the Senate from Tuesday to Wednesday this week as Democrats attempted to outface a Republican filibuster – no one in Washington doubts that this is the way the wind blows. Publicly, there’s still a sharp split along party lines, but leading Republicans are already breaking ranks to float their own phased troop reduction plans, together with proposals for partitioning Iraq between Sunni, Shia and Kurds.

Bush says he’s determined to give the commanding general in Iraq, David Petraeus, exactly the troop levels he asks for when he reports back this September, and the White House may hold the line for now against a Democrat-controlled Congress. Leading Republican contenders for the presidency are still talking tough. However, the most outspoken protagonist of hanging in there to win in Iraq, John McCain, has seen his campaign nosedive.

Even if the next president is a hardline Republican, all the current Washington betting will be confounded if he does not, at the very least, rapidly reduce the number of US troops in Iraq. After all, that’s what the American people plainly say they want – and so, incidentally, did 72% of American troops serving in Iraq, according to a Zogby survey conducted early last year. In fact, the boys themselves said they wanted to come home in the course of 2006.

The American people’s verdict is remarkably sharp on other aspects of the Iraq debacle. Asked who they blamed most for the present situation in Iraq, 40% of those polled for Newsweek said the White House, and another 13% said Congress. In a poll for CNN, 54% said the US’s action in Iraq was not morally justified. In one conducted for CBS, 51% endorsed the assessment – shared by most of the experts – that American involvement in Iraq is creating more terrorists hostile to the US rather than reducing their number. If once Americans were blind, they now can see. For all its plenitude of faith, this is a reality-based nation.

So Iraq is over. But Iraq has not yet begun. Not yet begun in terms of the consequences for Iraq itself, the Middle East, the US’s own foreign policy and its reputation in the world. The most probable consequence of rapid US withdrawal from Iraq in its present condition is a further bloodbath, with even larger refugee flows and the effective dismemberment of the country. Already some 2 million Iraqis have fled across the borders and more than 2 million are internally displaced. Now a pained and painstaking study from the Brookings Institution argues that what its authors call “soft partition”, involving the peaceful, voluntary transfer of an estimated 2 to 5 million Iraqis into distinct Kurdish, Sunni and Shia regions, under close US military supervision, would be the lesser evil. The lesser evil, that is, assuming that all goes according to plan and that the American public is prepared to allow the troops to stay in sufficient numbers to accomplish that thankless job – two implausible assumptions. A greater evil is more likely.

In an article for the web magazine Open Democracy, the Middle East specialist Fred Halliday spells out some regional consequences. Beside the effective destruction of the Iraqi state, these include the revitalising of militant Islamism and enhancement of the international appeal of the al-Qaida brand; the eruption for the first time in modern history of internecine war between Sunni and Shia – “a trend that reverberates in other states of mixed confessional composition”; the alienation of most sectors of Turkish politics from the west, and the stimulation of authoritarian nationalism there; the strengthening of a nuclear-hungry Iran; and a new regional rivalry, pitting the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, including Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, against Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan.

For the US itself, the world is now, as a result of the Iraq war, a more dangerous and hostile place. At the end of 2002, what is sometimes tagged al-Qaida Central in Afghanistan had been virtually destroyed and there was no al-Qaida in Iraq. In 2007, there is an al-Qaida in Iraq; parts of the old al-Qaida are creeping back into Afghanistan; and there are al-Qaida emulator groupuscules spawning elsewhere, notably in Europe. Osama bin Laden’s plan was to get the US to overreact and over-reach itself. With the invasion of Iraq, President Bush fell slap-bang into that trap. The US government’s own latest national intelligence estimate, released earlier this week, suggests that al-Qaida in Iraq is now among the most significant threats to the security of the American homeland.

Americans have probably not yet fully woken up to the appalling fact that, after a long period in which the first motto of their military was “no more Vietnams”, they face another Vietnam. There are many important differences, of course, but the basic result is similar. The mightiest military in the world fails to achieve its strategic goals and is, in the end, politically defeated by an economically and technologically inferior adversary.

Even if there are no scenes of helicopters evacuating Americans from a flat roof of the US embassy in Baghdad, there will surely be totemic photographic images of national humiliation as the US struggles to extract its troops and all the heavy equipment it has poured into the country, perhaps this time an image snapped on a mobile phone and posted on the internet. Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have done terrible damage to America’s reputation for being humane; this defeat will convince more people around the world that it is not even all that powerful. And Bin Laden, still alive, will claim another victory over the death-fearing weaklings of the west.

In history, the most important consequences are often the unintended ones. We do not yet know the longer term unintended consequences of Iraq. Maybe there is a silver lining hidden somewhere in this cloud. But so far as the human eye can see, the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic. Looking back over a quarter-century of writing about international affairs, I can not recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

· Timothy Garton Ash’s column returns in September
www.timothygartonash.com

intelligence report reverses bush ideology

Read It and Weep: Even Bush’s intelligence report says the war in Iraq is making us less safe at home

By Fred Kaplan in Slate

Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2007, at 6:15 PM ET

 

The National Intelligence Estimate that was released today—titled “The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland”—amounts to a devastating critique of the Bush administration’s policies on Iraq, Iran, and the terrorist threat itself.

Its main point is that the threat—after having greatly receded over the past five years—is back in full force. Al-Qaida has “protected or regenerated key elements” of its ability to attack the United States. It has a “safe haven” in Pakistan. Its “top leadership” and “operational lieutenants” are intact. It is cooperating more with “regional terrorist groups.”

As a result, the report concludes, “the U.S. Homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years” and is, even now, “in a heightened threat environment.”

This is bad enough news for President Bush, who has tried to bank support for his policies on the claim that the terrorist threat has diminished.

Worse news still is the report’s further observation—never stated explicitly but clear nonetheless—that the threat has re-emerged as a result of the war in Iraq.

The report—the unclassified version of a consensus product by the 16 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community—also notes that the threat will grow still larger if we appear to threaten Iran.

One major reason for al-Qaida’s resurgence, according to the report, is its “association with” al-Qaida in Iraq. (Note, by the way, that these two organizations are said to be “associated” or “affiliated” with each other; contrary to what Bush has said in recent speeches, they are not the same entity.) This affiliation “helps al-Qaida to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for Homeland attacks.” (Italics added.)

Al-Qaida in Iraq—or AQI, as the report identifies it—is not merely al-Qaida’s “most visible and capable affiliate.” More significant, it is “the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.” (Italics added.)

Let’s put together the syllogism: Al-Qaida is more inclined to attack the United States because of its affiliation with AQI; AQI is the only affiliate that wants to attack the United States; therefore, if there were no AQI, the danger of an attack would be far less severe, if it existed at all.

Let’s add one more link to the logical chain (which the NIE leaves out but which is self-evident): If there were no U.S. occupation of Iraq, there would be no AQI. (Certainly the organization didn’t exist until well into the occupation. It has gained a foothold in Iraq—energizing “the broader Sunni extremist community”—by playing off their anti-American sentiments.)

Many times, President Bush has said that we’re fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here. It is an absurd argument in many ways. But the NIE reveals that the opposite is the case—that because we’re fighting them in Iraq, we are more likely to face them here.

Does this mean that we should stop fighting AQI or negotiate some separate peace? No, the organization’s presence in Iraq—however exaggerated by some officials—is genuinely dangerous, and there is no negotiating with any al-Qaida affiliate in any event.

But it does mean we should do more to co-opt the Sunnis—even some of the Sunni extremists—that serve as AQI’s base of support. (We have started to do just that, with some success, in Anbar province.)

And it also means—for yet one more reason, beyond the many others—that we should start to get out of Iraq. (The question, as always, remains how to do so without unleashing catastrophic chaos. One reasonable inference of the NIE is that we should seek a regional resolution of the crisis as a matter of great urgency to the security not only of the Middle East but also of the United States.)

It’s worth recalling that, back in the spring of 2003, as the war was getting under way, Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense (and one of the war’s outspoken architects), told Vanity Fair that one reason to invade Iraq was to allow U.S. troops to leave Saudi Arabia. The presence of “infidel” soldiers on holy soil had been “a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida,” Wolfowitz said. (Osama Bin Laden had publicly cited their presence as a rationale for the attack on the World Trade Center.) Yet the troops couldn’t safely leave Saudi Arabia as long as Saddam Hussein was still in Iraq. Hence, Saddam had to be removed first. (Though Wolfowitz didn’t say so, another element of the plan was to relocate the U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to the new, presumably pro-Western Iraq.)

Now, in a horrible irony, the troops in Iraq have become no less “a huge recruiting device for al-Qaida.” (Some of Wolfowitz’s erstwhile comrades insist he never wanted an occupation; perhaps he didn’t grasp that occupations often follow the forced toppling of a government, especially when the entire social structure collapses as a result.)

Some hawks and neocons want to deepen the involvement and attack Iran—either simply to destroy its bourgeoning nuclear program or (in a more fantasy-drenched scenario) to overthrow its unfriendly regime, too.

The NIE warns against this adventurism in only the most slightly veiled terms. While discussing other threats besides al-Qaida, the report states that Lebanon’s Hezbollah—which, till now, has confined its attacks to targets outside the United States—”may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland … if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran.” (Italics added.)

This amounts to a direct warning to the White House: Don’t attack Iran, the entire U.S. intelligence community is saying—and, if you do, you should expect to get hit back.

guardian reporter shares revealing footage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,2125978,00.html