Neocons and The Sinking Ship

Over the weekend, Vanity Fair released excerpts of a series of interviews with prominent neocon architects of the war in Iraq. These excerpts made the rounds on the Sunday news shows and reinforced just how vulnerable Republicans are heading into today's elections. It's hard to defend "stay the course" when even Ken Adelman is saying that the Bush Administration "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era." The first thing that should perhaps be said about the neocon about-face is the sheer need to save their own skins. As Juan Cole comments, "Talk about rats and a sinking ship!" Really, how else can one take Richard Perle's remarkably disingenuous claim to have had nothing to do with formulating Iraq war policy. Absolutely nothing, he tells you! "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad." It almost breaks your heart the extent to which Mr. Perle and his friends were marginalized and disenfranchized by the process. It's as if they were treated with the same contempt as the Iraqis being saved. But beyond this, two points are particularly telling. First, these criticisms are virtually indistinct from what the Democrats are saying, or for that matter what conservative critics like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have said (remember the oft-quoted "pottery barn rule"). They amount to a disagreement not over principle but over competence. The war is bad because it's run by a bunch of knuckleheads. The fact that competence has so driven the debate is troubling for a number of reasons. It means that few are actually questioning the ideology behind the war -- especially the diminished vision of democracy and the commitment to social revolution from above. Perhaps even more importantly, it means that opposition to the war has no real social content today. It is disconnected from both a conception of domestic politics and of the U.S.'s role in the world. It has almost become a free-standing recognition that the Bush Administration is just really bad at fulfilling its goals; a belief that anyone can hold, no matter their political affiliation or commitments. So in Virginia, Webb can be a strong anti-war candidate, even though his actual politics on everything outside the war -- the war on terror, foreign policy generally, social and economic issues at home -- is virtually indistinct from his republican opponent. It is enough to recall that the man himself was Reagan's secretary of the navy. The second point about the neocon turn is ultimately the most tragic. At this point nobody supports the war. Not the democrats. Not the military. Not even the war's intellectual defenders -- the neocons. Certainly not all those Republicans who'd otherwise have happily coasted to victory without the albatross of utter chaos in Baghdad. Yet, despite this fact, the war will continue indefinitely, for who knows how many more years. Clearly, one reason for this is that none of the remaining options is totally palatable, as none seems likely to end the violence in the country (even immediate withdrawal). But the real reason why this war will continue is that it has become a domestic football. It exists in Washington through the prism of electoral politics, and not as an Iraqi tragedy for which we as a nation are responsible. Much has been made of how October 2006 was the turning point akin to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, when American citizens finally realized that the war was bankrupt. In a sense, that suggests that we're stuck in 1968. Everyone knows the war's wrong, bungled, a millstone, whatever. But, the war isn't ending anytime soon. More American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians died under Nixon's watch than under Johnson's, and it would take five more years for the U.S. to withdraw and seven more for Saigon to fall. In other words, the U.S. spent more time figuring out how to have "peace with honor" for politicians, then they did actually fighting the war proper. So, in the aftermath of the elections, it seems necessary to state the sad and the obvious: enough of the gamesmanship, whether it is talk of staying the course, or setting timetables, providing benchmarks, redeploying, etc, etc. End the war now.

What Iraqi Air Force?

The LA Times has come out with an article on one of the most under-reported but important considerations for any meaningful discussion of the future of the occupation: the Iraqi Air Force. It sums up the situation thusly: “The U.S. military has hurriedly tried to turn over square mile after square mile of territory to Iraqi soldiers and police officers, but it has yet to yield control of a single cubic inch of the country's skies.” Further, “[A]ddressing the question of when [the US] will allow the Iraqi air force to acquire combat capabilities is years away. The U.S. Air Force… will retain control of Iraqi airspace for the foreseeable future, regardless of any drawdown of ground troops.”

For the sake of thoroughness (and because the risk of long-windedness on this issue is so slight), here is the current status of the Iraqi Air Force, taken from the Department of Defense’s May 2006 report "Iraq: Measuring Stability and Security" (which can be found here):

Iraqi “reconnaissance aircraft consist of single-engine airplanes used in civilian and commercial markets.” In other words, the reconnaissance force is not, strictly speaking, composed of military equipment. It numbers no more than a handful of aircraft. There are three helicopter squadrons: 2nd, 4th & 12th. The 2nd Squadron consists of 16 UH-1H helicopters, all of which will be in the United States for upgrades at least until January of next year. Eight of a planned ten Mi-17 helicopters have been delivered to the 4th Squadron, but are awaiting armor upgrades as well as further pilot training. The 12th Squadron is equipped with five Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopters, all of which are used for training purposes. The 23rd Transport Squadron has three C-130E planes. This plus 600 personnel (only 14 of whom are actual pilots) represents the length and breadth of the Iraqi Air Force.

There are several points to be made from this. The first regards what effect US control over Iraqi air space will have on Iraqi sovereignty. The second is the stunning lack of clarity about the Iraqi air force as the question of troop withdrawal is batted around the domestic sphere. The third is the longer-term relevance that such control has for the geopolitical interests of the US.

The point about Iraqi sovereignty is the easiest of the three to make. Simply put, there can be no sovereignty so long as a country’s air space is under the complete control of a foreign power. The foreign power acts as a permanent veto on all policies - military and governmental. This particular plank in the overall US strategy is perhaps the most consistent element of the past fifteen years. The 1991 policy of "No-Fly Zones" has been removed from the current lexicon only because the "zone" and the entire country are now indistinguishable.

The second point is murkier, for it involves the misleading rhetoric of withdrawal and the domestic political disconnect with any real commitment to Iraqi sovereignty and self-determination. The problem with calls to “bring home the troops” is not that it is premature or defeatist, but that it is disingenuous. For example, the debate today in the Senate over the Defense Appropriations Bill for 2007 is focused around “redeployment” in Iraq rather than “withdrawal”. (As the New York Times notes, the latter word is not even used in the Democrat's proposal.) Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), explains “redeployment”: the US would retain a force in Iraq capable of “direct participation in counter-terrorism activities, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting United States infrastructure and personnel.” Beyond police check-point duty, what else is there? The crucial point is that the cited activities can all be accomplished from one of the US’s massive, permanent air bases. The Democratic Party is calling not for withdrawal from Iraq, but for withdrawal to the permanent footprint. This is but the latest in the long line of America's empty gestures toward Iraqi sovereignty.

The geopolitical advantages of a permanent military control over Iraq are too numerous to be handled in detail here. They range from containment of China to bulwark against Iran to support for Israel to encirclement of Russia and beyond. Each of these (and many others) requires separate treatment, not only to emphasize the advantages, but to explore the dangers involved and the ever-present possibility of overstretch. Suffice to say for the moment that wielding ultimate control over Iraq through air power achieves the trifecta of allowing incremental troop withdrawal for US domestic consumption, the absence of major US military presence in Iraqi urban centers and Washington's ultimate authority over the government in Baghdad.

As with any other country, Iraq is incapable of defending itself without an air force. Internally, the central government is incapable of asserting its authority without the air power of the occupier. In short, without an independent air force Iraq as a military power is untenable. Under these circumstances, total US withdrawal would amount to national suicide. If foreign powers (Israel in the Kurdish north or Iran in the Shi’ite south) did not fill the vacuum, then the warring fault lines within the country would rip it apart in short order.

The point to be digested is not that the United States should, therefore, continue to stay in Iraq. Rather it is that the efforts made up to this point (and even on this day) demonstrate clearly that there has never been any intention of leaving. As President Bush recently told the troops in Baghdad, Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror" and, presumably, operates by the laws of that larger conflict on which all parties agree. To truly withdrawal from the former, we shall, it seems, have to end the latter.

Liberation, Take Two

According to the British Sunday Times, the U.S. is planning a "new liberation of Baghdad" as soon as Iraqi politicians can form a viable government. With the Iraqi military as cover, the U.S. would attempt to retake the city neighborhood by neighborhood. What's interesting about the rumored initiative is that while the U.S. may be designing plans for such an attack, at this point it is in nobody's interest to support one. Iraqi politicians, after months of fruitless and embarrassing wrangling, have no desire to waste what little credibility they still have on a massive U.S. offensive. And the Bush Administration will find it hard to justify the casualties, let alone the fact that three years on "liberation" needs a make over. This of course doesn't mean that we won't see such an offensive. When you have no vision, policy, or discernible tactics, sometimes you just role the die. But it does mean that any attempt to "liberate" Baghdad would have to overcome what seems to be the central characteristic of American presence in Iraq at the moment -- keeping our soldiers out of harm's way and stationed in massive military bases. It also tells us exactly what state the war in Iraq has reached. The options being pursued by the Administration are a) re-invasion or b) watch from the sidelines and hope for the best. In other words, without direction or ideas, Bush and company are swaying between stasis and overwhelming violence. Which tactic will predominate is impossible to predict.

The Negotiation Workshop Goes to Iraq

In last week’s New Yorker, George Packer added his own voice to the growing calls for a proper counterinsurgency strategy. Packer's "Letter from Iraq" details the “Lesson of Tal Afar,” an Iraqi city near the Syrian border, which has been a center of insurgency since the beginning of the American occupation. Packer investigates this “notable success” of the new counterinsurgency strategy, painting a now-familiar picture of administrative incompetence and a total lack of vision or guidance from the heads of the American campaign. Packer essentially blames the current quagmire in Iraq on the Administration’s early refusal to admit the existence of an insurgency. This, it seems, was the strategic error. As Colonel McMaster, whose regiment had been stationed in Tal Afar nine months last year, explained, “Militarily, you’ve got to call it an insurgency…because we have a counterinsurgency doctrine and theory that you want to access.” That doctrine is, of course, the famed British Malaya doctrine, and Packer joins the bandwagon cheering on its efficacy and civility (minimum amount of force necessary, 20% military, 80% political), and asserting the American military’s peculiar unsuitability to such military operations. The glowing reports of the Tal Afar success provide some interesting insight into the wishful thinking of the current political climate. Packer’s account of counterinsurgency in Tal Afar reads like a negotiation handbook. It is as if all of Iraq’s problems can be resolved by proper communication—between US forces and local groups, between Shia and Sunni populations, and between Iraqi forces and town residents. McMaster trained his officers for Tal Afar in Colorado. But the preparation did not involve tank battle drills; it was something more akin to role-play exercises, acting out “realistic scenarios, with soldiers and Arab-Americans playing the role of Iraqis,” right down to the filming of exercises and subsequent break-down of the film to analyze tone and body language. McMaster drew up what Packer calls a “counterinsurgency reading list” including such insightful texts as T.E. Lawrence’s 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom.' One officer “described it as a kind of training in empathy. ‘If I was in a situation where my neighbor had gotten his head cut off, how would I react? If it was my kid that had gotten killed by mortars, how would I react?’” Packer’s celebration of this counterinsurgency preparation and its supposed results seems to say that all the US forces need is to put themselves in Iraqis shoes, and then they’ll know how to deal with the situation empathetically and appropriately. This search for a technical fix invades almost all discussions of what to do next in Iraq. Even arguments for withdrawal are made from the perspective of what will “work best.” As Barry Posen characterized it in his article, “Exit Strategy,” in the Boston Review, such pragmatist thinking is sensible, saving scarce time and energy by not addressing questions of principle. To argue for withdrawal on the basis that we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place is thought to stem from an unconstructive righteousness or to have little utility. Better to be “forward looking” and “based on American national interests.” The degree to which these pragmatist approaches psychologize the situation is laid bare by the closing segment of Packer’s article. There he visits an Iraqi psychiatrist who sounds like Packer’s symbol of the flickering hope for Iraq’s future. The psychiatrist has been pursuing “with great persistence and idea that had first come to him after the fall of Saddam: he wanted to open a ‘psycho-social rehabilitation clinic’ that would rebuild the humanity of his countrymen.” The reason, “Iraqis need to learn to talk, to think, to tolerate,” as if the problems for Iraq are to be found at a personal, individual, and communicational level. For the negotiations specialist, as for the pragmatist, there are no irreconcilable interests, there are just misunderstandings and problems of technique or process. These theories come across as the utmost in naiveté, and almost as a willful denial of the one clear issue: the competing interests between an occupying force that has totally destroyed the existing political order and the society to which it remains an external intervener.

What Actually Happened in Malaysia?

Since the first stirrings of the Iraq insurgency, the chattering classes have been preoccupied by a peculiar myth. It is widely thought that, in the 1950s, the British performed a successful counter-insurgency strategy in Malaysia. For example, in November, 2003 the National Review published an article approving of the British campaign. In October 2005, Bill Clinton said ‘the only major foreign power that succeeded in putting down an insurgency was the British putting down the Malay insurgency.’

This piece of political common wisdom started to influence actual policy when Vietnam veteran Andrew Krepinevich published an article in Foreign Affairs last Fall suggesting Bush could solve the occupation of Iraq through an ‘oil-spot strategy’ that ‘focuses on establishing security for the population precisely for the sake of winning hearts and minds. In the 1950s, the British used it successfully in Malaya.’ Major opinion makers, like David Brooks, quickly sounded their approval, and by the end of December President Bush ‘formally endorsed’ a version of the British colonial model as his new counter-insurgency strategy.

So what exactly happened in the ‘successful’ suppression of the Malaya insurgency? As this superb New Republic rebuttal by Caroline Elkins points out, the ‘campaign was riddled with abuses.’ The effort against the Malayan Races’ Liberation Army, and to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Malay, included public display of corpses, decapitations, the resettlement of the entire half million Chinese into ‘heavily guarded barbed-wire villages,’ and sheer massacres. Achieved under the declaration of a colonial emergency, the legacy of the British counter-insurgency is as bad as its immediate effects.

Before leaving Malaya, the British wrote a constitution that inscribed the worst aspects of imperialism. Under colonialism, the British divided the various races against each other, nominally to protect ‘indigenous’ races from immigrant Chinese and Indian workers, but really as part of a strategy of divide and rule that reflected their own racial prejudices. Article 153 institutionalizes British racism, by creating various affirmative action policies as well as creating discretionary powers necessary to safeguard the ‘Bumiputra’ or ‘real Malays,’ and which has left Malaysia with continued racial tensions. On top of an ethnic constitution that fragmented the country, the British also bequeathed a legacy of emergency rule. As Elkins notes

‘The Malaysian government's crackdown on dissent--including the suspension of due process and freedom of the press--is arguably the legacy of British repression. Today, Malaysians continue to live under an Internal Security Act that was adapted from Britain's emergency regulations of the late '40s. Allowing for detention without trial, this act has helped put thousands of people behind bars since independence, including the former deputy prime minister.’

The British colonial model enjoys a false impression of success. There is no such thing as a good counter-insurgency, and Iraq has little to gain by importing the lessons of imperialism past. This isn't the first time the administration, or some of its opportunistic critics, have reached back into the past for some inspiration in the present. Recall the administration's bizarre search for inspiration in Gillo Pontecorvo's anti-colonial epic Battle of Algiers, in whose scenes of French counter-insurgency the Defense Department thought it might discover some pertinent lessons. The British have been rehabilitated as 'good occupiers' and the French as skilled counter-insurgency tacticians not because they did any favors for local populations but because they at least seemed to have a strategy for pursuing defined interests. What gives their view of the past a rosy glow is that apparent sense of purpose and claritfy of intentions motivating the French and British, which so eludes this administration, and its opportunistic critics. The administration will not find a sense of direction by rummaging around in the dustbin of history.

A Million Little Colin Powells

On March 22, during a speech on Iraq in West Virginia, the President fielded a question about how "we" can balance the media's grim treatment of the war. He responded thusly: "I just got to keep talking. And one of the -- there's word of mouth, there's blogs, there's Internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate which is literally changing the way people are getting their information. And so if you're concerned, I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that have got Internet sites, and just keep the word -- keep the word moving.”

Bush's suggestion coincides with Congressman Pete Hoekstra's (R-MI) successful bid to release onto the internet thousands of documents captured in Iraq. As Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Hoekstra had been trying for weeks to get Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte to release the documents. Negroponte, not wanting a horde of recreational lay-persons drawing inappropriate conclusions, relented only after Hoekstra introduced a bill to force the release.

The documents themselves are from Operations Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. They include 48,000 boxes and span over 3,000 hours of recorded conversation. Although everything received at least a cursory analysis from intelligence officials, the vast bulk has not been classified in any particular way and remains untranslated.

Coming from Bush and Hoekstra, such boundless faith in the power of the people to properly interpret Arabic documents from the Iraqi regime is stirring, but we ought to remember the context in which this web-based populism is set. Iraq is already in the midst of something like a civil war (though Donald Rumsfeld will no doubt refrain from calling it one until a rival republic declares itself). The Administration, unable to prevent civil war, knows that the only thing forestalling the complete collapse of public support is their ability to hide the fact. That’s where pro-war blogs and an avalanche of random paperwork come in. Tenuous links made by anonymous bloggers can remind people why the United States invaded Iraq, and why it must see the mission through to completion. And with no oversight, the all-important will-to-believe and Bush’s endorsement of the medium, information bleeding from mainstream sources may be safely ignored.

As the New York Times noted, Ray Robinson has already declared: “Saddam's W.M.D. and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!” And bear in mind that only 600 of the million or so documents have yet to be released. By the time Robinson has translated everything, who knows what tidbits will be found.

An increase in transparency and greater access to information is a good thing, but nothing is without context. Discharging tons of information onto the internet will provide neither a retroactive justification for the occupation of Iraq nor a surrogate for genuine public engagement. It will, however, offer shrill dissonance to the news coming out of Iraq. By dumping thousands and thousands of documents into the ether, the Administration explicitly seeks to dilute the debate through an avalanche of paperwork – a debate already darkened through a fog of fear. No longer a single, discredited voice holding up a vial, but a million.

Kos's Heart of Darkness

The New York Times on Tuesday reported Shia claims that the US is pressuring Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to step down. According to the Times report, US Ambassador Khalilzad passed on a “personal message from President Bush” that Bush “doesn’t want, doesn’t support, doesn’t accept” Jaafari’s remaining prime minister when the new government is formed.

The reaction to this news at Daily Kos reveals prejudices common to much of Western thinking about the Third World. Kos rightly points out the hypocrisy of this initiative: pressuring the Iraqi government to select a prime minister that the US “supports” all the while declaring a new era of “self-determination” for Iraq. But the post proceeds with this, ‘observation’: “Perhaps we should have done a wee bit of homework about Iraq's bloody sectarian history before we threw all our weight behind the Shi'a, who have been operating death squads from the Interior Ministry.”

The casual reference to “Iraq’s bloody sectarian history” is indicative of current attitudes toward the uncivilized non-Western world. The implication appears to be that we should have known Iraqis couldn’t handle self-determination, given their propensity to slit one another’s throats. But this history is more imagined than real. Sectarianism in Iraq is highly complex and dynamic but was never simply conflictual. Of course, one might have predicted eventual sectarian violence (although even now it is not clear that the country is engaged in a civil war), not because of Iraq’s supposed bloody sectarian history, but because it was clear from the start that the US occupation would treat the Iraqi population as sectarian blocs, and begin to establish a political system based on this sectarian conception. In ignoring this, Kos imputes the current crisis to some inherent aspect of Iraqi culture. Quite apart from the disdain this shows towards Iraqis, it also does Bush the service of writing America out of the Third World’s “age-old ethnic hatreds.”