The Strident Centrist Blog

Based on Obama’s message during the recent debate, Pat Lang thinks he’s walking like a duck, talking like a duck and swimming like one too.

. . . Obama must be considered in the light of his words in Chicago. Kagan has a point. Neoconism is a body of ideas as well as loyalties. The ideas expressed by Obama in Chicago are neocon words. The neocons are not conservatives and neither is Obama, but he shares their ideas in foreign policy.

If he meant what he said in Chicago then he embraces interventionism for the purpose of Utopian reform in the world, ARMED intervention.

Josh Marshall brings clarity to what the Iraq policy dispute is all about. He opens his important post by asserting that there were two fundamental assumptions underlying the administration’s decision to invade Iraq:

The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq’s threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves with the US.

Josh doesn’t address what I believe to be the fundamental strategic assumption behind the venture in the first place, namely that the pro-USA post-Saddam government would, in an orgy of gratitude, award long-term oil development concessions to US-based companies at below-market rates.* But whatever. Josh points out that early on those two presumptions blew up, and then he goes on to say:

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment — both toward the occupation and America’s role in the world — has only grown.

I would submit that virtually everything we’ve done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.

It’s often been noted that we’ve had a difficult time explaining or figuring out just who we’re fighting in Iraq. Is it the Sunni irreconcilables? Or is it Iran and its Shi’a proxies? Or is it al Qaida? The confusion is not incidental but fundamental. We can’t explain who we’re fighting because this isn’t a war, like most, where the existence of a particular enemy or specific danger dictates your need to fight. We’re occupying Iraq because continuing to do so allows us to pretend that the initial plan wasn’t completely misguided and a mistake. If we continue to run the place a bit longer, the reasoning goes, we’ll root out this or that problem that is preventing our original predictions from coming to pass. And of course the longer the occupation continues we generate more and more embittered foes to frame this rationalization around, thus creating an perpetual feedback loop of calamity and self-justification.

It’s a huge distortion to say that this means the war was ‘lost’. It just means what the war supporters said would happen didn’t happen. The premise was bogus. Like I said at the outset, the whole exercise is like getting trapped in a brown paper bag. You can keep going into the bag and into the bag and into the bag and never get out or change anything. Or you can just turn around and walk out of the bag.

Of course, the damage that’s been done over the last four years of denial is immense — damage to ourselves, to the Iraqis, damage to Middle Eastern security and our standing in the world. So walking out of the bag isn’t easy and it won’t fix things. But the stakes alleged by the White House are largely illusory. Most of the White House’s argument amounts to the threat that if we walk out of the bag that we’ll have to give up the denial that the White House has had a diminishing percentage of the country in for the last four years. The reality though is that the disaster has already happened. Admitting that isn’t a mistake or something to be feared. It’s the first step to repairing the damage. What the president has had the country in for four years is a very bloody and costly holding action. And the president has forced it on the country to avoid admitting the magnitude of his errors.

* This, of course, assumes that our policy in Iraq, as well as in the Middle East in general, is about oil, which the administration vehemently denies. But it is about oil, as it should be at least in significant part, because that’s where most of the world’s remaining easily producible oil is. Where the Bush administration has gone wrong is in failing to recognize that the emergence of fourth-generation warfare has pushed the world long past the point where people in developing nations assume they have no defense against powerful industrialized nations pursuing neoconservative neocolonialist policies.

I continue to believe that the full story of the national security disasters of the George W. Bush administration will not be understood unless and until the complete proceedings of Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force are released.

I just noticed that the time stamps of posts have been off by an hour, presumably since the change-over to daylight savings time. I just changed the offset from GMT so hopefully the time of this post should be approximately correct.

Economist Brad DeLong weighs in on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to charge a fee for cars and trucks that use the streets of Manhattan during the work week. He’s for it. And he takes to task a spokesman for the American Trucking Association for being unable to see the forest of advantage through the trees of the $21 daily fee for trucks.

. . “What is the biggest problem your industry faces in providing excellent service to lower Manhattan?” Based on what I’ve seen on those streets, my answer would have been “congestion.” So the mayor has proposed to tax the thing that has been encumbering the trucking industry, and its spokesman is complaining because his clients will need to pay the tax in proportion to the congestion they cause. Think of it by the numbers. How many packages are on the typical FedEx truck in Manhattan? If it were 210, then the extra expense would be a dime per package. That’s trivial. How does $21 compare to the total value of each truck’s cargo in a given day? It has to be tiny. And look at what the FedEx truck drivers get in return–fewer passenger cars clogging up the city streets where they need to make pickups and deliveries. They waste less time and less gas. It doesn’t take much abatement of that wasted time and gas to make back the $21 per truck. The trucking industry should be this proposal’s biggest supporters.

What more can be said?

There’s a rambling, but disturbing piece up at the National Journa about the confrontation between Bush and the Democratic leaders of Congress over the bill for the supplemental funding of the War in Iraq. After a wide-ranging discussion of the politics of the conflict, the author turns to the military issues:

“This will be a much harder exercise than the actual invasion,” said retired Col. Richard Sinnreich, a noted SAMS graduate who served on both the Joint Staff and the National Security Council. “During an invasion, the curve representing your capabilities and relative strength goes steadily up, and the situation becomes safer and safer as the operation progresses. As you pull forces out, it reverses, and your strength curve goes down, and the situation becomes steadily more dangerous. It’s most dangerous for the very last squad that leaves the country. That’s why you saw helicopters on the rooftops of the Saigon embassy in 1975.”

The military could take a host of steps to help mitigate the risks of a U.S. troop drawdown, including staging a carefully phased and deliberate withdrawal; continuing U.S. support, and accelerated training and equipping, for the Iraqi forces that must fill the security vacuum; and keeping a residual, albeit smaller, U.S. military presence inside Iraq or around its periphery. But all of those options require the careful planning and hard decision-making that Sinnreich fears are being stymied by the deadlock in Washington. “The downside of this political theater in Washington, and the disingenuous refusal to admit that we’ve lost the political will to keep American troops heavily engaged in Iraq indefinitely,” he said, “is that it keeps military planners from developing a timetable and a deliberate plan for withdrawal.”

It’s almost impossible for the military to seriously plan for a contingency — withdrawal — that the commander-in-chief won’t even discuss, Sinnreich noted. “The probability that it would leak to the press is too high, and no one in uniform wants to take that chance,” he said. “Yet only with deliberate planning will we be able to take some of the sting out of what will surely be seen as a U.S. retreat. My point is, there are defeats — and then there are defeats.”

Bush’s stance exposes not only the strategic muddle in which his administration still wallows, but it also reveals for all to see the utter bankruptcy of his moral character and unfitness for the office he holds. Whatever possible beneficial strategic outcome the war might have had for American interests was pushed out of reach before the troops crossed the line of departure in Kuwait in March, 2003, by the fantasy-based plan for the occupation. So now, instead of facing up to the task of cleaning up his own mess, all he wants to do is push that unpleasant task off past January,2009, into the lap of his successor, and the additional hundreds, and more likely thousands of American lives (not to mentionn Iraqi lives) be damned. If he thinks that somehow this will salvage his reputation in history, he is deeply mistaken.

The Democrats in Congress must stand firm in forcing Bush and his Republican patsies in Congress to cut our losses on his watch.

Phil Carter, the proprietor of the blog Intel Dump, recent UCLA Law School graduate, and Army Reserve junior officer who returned from Iraq about a year ago, calls the chickenhawks on their billing of the “Surge” as “Plan B”. In a piece on Slate Carter points out that at least five plans have gone by the boards already, and we’re now up to “F”, which in his view is doomed to ultimately reside on the same ash heap of history as its predecessors. At which point it will be succeeded by Plan G, as in “Get Out”.

To sum up, it’s more than a bit disingenuous to cast today’s debate as one of Plan A versus Plan B. In fact, we’ve seen at least five major strategies implemented in Iraq, and all have failed, creating a legacy of bad blood that undermines our continuing efforts. Much of this failure owes to the naive belief that we can impose our will on the Iraqi people through our strategies, or win their support with a combination of security and reconstruction.

Gen. Petraeus and his brain trust have devised the best possible Plan F, given the resources available to the Pentagon and declining patience for the war at home. But the Achilles heel of this latest effort is the Maliki government. It is becoming increasingly clear to all in Baghdad that its interests—seeking power and treasure for its Shiite backers—diverge sharply from those of the U.S.-led coalition. Even if Gen. Petraeus’ plan succeeds on the streets of the city, it will fail in the gilded palaces of the Green Zone. Maliki and his supporters desire no rapprochement with the Sunnis and no meaningful power-sharing arrangement with the Sunnis and the Kurds. Indeed, Maliki can barely hold his own governing coalition together, as evidenced by the Sadr bloc’s resignation from the government this week and the fighting in Basra over oil and power.

Plan F will fail if (or when) the Maliki government fails, even if it improves security. At that point, we will have run out of options, having tried every conceivable strategy for Iraq. It will then be time for Plan G: Get out.

Several news outlets today have had stories about a wall being built around one of the Sunni enclaves in Baghdad. Pat Lang points out that this is in effect recreating a Mahalle, an Arabic word for the kind of enclaves Middle Eastern cities were divided into until around the turn of the 20th century. Similar enclaves dominated many European cities until their dismantlement began during the renaissance. Here is the link to Pat’s quotes and commentary on them.

Baghdad was a lot like that before 2003. There were still places in the city that were inhabited by all one thing or another but the trend was towards integration in housing and in marriage.

We are successfuly re-medievalizing Baghdad, so it would be a good idea to become familiar with the old terms. They are lurking in the back of the collective mind of the city and will be back.

John Dean, writing from his regular perch at FindLaw, finds that the most important revelation of the day came from rookie Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who defeated moderate Republican Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island last November:

. . Senator Whitehouse said he had found correspondence in the files of the Senate Judiciary Committee from the days when Orrin Hatch was chairman relating to an investigation of the relationship between the Clinton White House and the Justice Department (under Attorney General Janet Reno). Hatch was concerned about the independence of the Department of Justice, so he wanted to know who in the White House could speak with whom in the Justice Department. The correspondence showed that four people in the White House (the President, Vice President, chief of staff, and White House counsel) could speak with three people in the Justice Department (the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney and the Associate Attorney General) - period.

Senator Whitehouse discovered - and created a chart to make the point - that in the Bush White House, a shocking 417 people could speak with 30 different people in the Justice Department. It was a jaw-dropper. As Chairman Leahy said, when he asked Senator Whitehouse to continue when his time expired, in his thirty years on the Judiciary Committee, he had never seen anything like the open contacts from the White House to the Justice Department that had occurred in the Bush Administration.

Gonzales really had no response when asked about this subject. But this information shows that, in this Administration, the Department of Justice has become a mere political appendage of the White House. (I have a number of friends who are career professionals at the Department of Justice, and since Gonzales arrived, they have said that morale at the department has tanked, for they all feel the politicization of the place, and they do not like it. Many of these gifted, experienced professionals are leaving, which will hurt the Department, the government, and ultimately all of us.)

Dean goes on to explain why Gonzales will neither resign nor be fired:

Notwithstanding the lack of support Gonzales has in the Congress, and the damage he is causing the Bush Administration, he is not going to resign, and Bush is not going to fire him. Rather, Bush is going to, in effect, create a new, and far lower, standard for acceptable conduct by attorneys general. Bush is openly embracing the “Peter Principle” - the management theory that says that, as people within an organization advance to their highest level of competence, they will then be further promoted to, and remain at, a level at which they are incompetent. This has clearly occurred with Alberto Gonzales.

Former CIA officer Ray McGovern suggests that the Democrats in Congress, and especially the likes of Sen. Carl Levin, need a backbone transplant regarding the Iraq war funding bill.

While some Democrats in Congress have shown backbone since becoming the majority, key members like Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin of Michigan seem willing to acquiesce in giving Cheney and Bush funding to continue the war, no matter what. On April 8, right after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he would cosponsor legislation cutting off all funding for combat troops next March, Levin undercut Reid by telling ABC’s “This Week, “We’re not going to vote to cut the funding, period…. We’re not going to cut off funding for the troops. We shouldn’t cut off funding for the troops…. We’re going to vote for a bill that funds the troops, period. We’re going to fund the troops. We always have.”

. . .

What would prompt Levin to pre-empt his own majority leader? One possible explanation might be found in the chutzpah-laden admonitions coming from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) cheerleaders for Cheney, who do not disguise their fervor for the US continuing the war in Iraq. Their gratuitous warnings at last month’s AIPAC meeting in Washington that US politicians not show “weakness” on Iraq spring from their conviction that withdrawal of US troops would make the neighborhood more dangerous for Israel. (Israeli politicians should have thought of that before goading Bush and Cheney into attacking Iraq in the first place.)