Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

This came out a little while ago, but there hasn’t been a ton of writing about something that is not only very intersting, but also illuminates a lot of historical and policy debates. Basically, Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was a British Army veteran who returned to Kenya after World War II and “became involved in the Mau Mau independence movement and was arrested as early as 1949.” After his arrest,  Obama was “imprisoned and brutally tortured.. subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency…whip[ped] every morning and evening till he confessed.” It gets even worse “they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down.”

The most horrific part of this story is that it functions as a reminder of the one of the worst imperial atrocities committed in the 20th century. Obama’s treatment was hardly unique. Instead, some 320,000 Kikiyu were interned and tortured by the British, one million were held in “enclosed villages,” 100,000 deaths in the camps and thousands of summary executions. The historical signifigance of these events is self-evident. We clearly should remember horrible Western, imperial crimes committed against colonized populations. But the political and current interest of this historical artifact is that the putting down of the Mau Mau rebellion and the whole host of British crimes committed during decolonialization are not only routinely ignored, but are celebrated by historians who have become favorites of neoconservatives. 

I’m thinking particularly of Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, who have both written books celebrating the British Empire and encouraging the United States to more explictily take up the imperial mantle. As Johann Hari has exhaustively documented, these two authors have a huge collective blindspot when it comes to the atrocities necessary for the British to “peacefully” rule the world. What’s worse is how much  these two’s historical accounts have informed the last eight years of policy and punditry from conservative hawks. Andrew Roberts was famously feted by the President, and has done a whole lot of water carrying for Bush by explicitly comparing his policies to British imperial ones. Ferguson has done much the same, by arguing that the reason the war in Iraq was failing circa 2004-2005, or as Ben Wallace Wells put it in a great profile of Ferguson: “problems in Iraq proved that America ought to be more of an empire, not less of one.”

The putting down of the Mau Mau rebellion, in a way, repersents the dark id of conservative hawkish thinking. John Podhoretz once famously asked “What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them. . . ? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?”  Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire are two other right wingers who can’t get enough of British imperialism. 

My hope is that the discussion – if any – of Obama’s personal history doesn’t focus on the rather narrow question of torturing hundreds of thousands of people to maintain an empire is wrong (it obviously is), but on the wisdom of empire in the first place.

Last night, before I went to bed, I checked in at the Washington Monthly to see if my fellow West Coaster Kevin Drum had written anything cool. Well, Drum had written something cool. He linked to a WSJ story claiming that Iraqi and American negotiators had reached an agreement to withdraw all combat troops by 2011. Considering that the Bush administration had insisted on benchmarks and conditions while McCain claimed to have secret knowledge that al-Maliki didn’t really support Obama’s plan, this seemed like a huge deal. And what’s been getting the most play in the political news and the blogosphere today? Rachel Maddow’s TV show and McCain losing track of the number of houses he owns. Important stories both, but even hints of a possible US government committment to withdrawal seems like the biggest story in years. Is there something I’m missing here?

Finally, some bigger news than age of Chinese gymnasts or Evan Bayh’s wife getting her hair done. The Wall Street Journal reports that the US has signed a committment to withdraw from Iraq by 2011:

BAGHDAD — U.S. and Iraqi negotiators reached agreement on a security deal that calls for American military forces to leave Iraq’s cities by next summer as a prelude to a full withdrawal from the country, according to senior American officials.

The draft agreement sets 2011 as the date by which all remaining U.S. troops will leave Iraq, according to Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed al-Haj Humood and other people familiar with the matter.

Teams of American and Iraqi negotiators spent months haggling over the deal, which represents a remarkable turnaround from just a few months ago, when talk of timetables and deadlines was routinely dismissed by the Bush administration and other Republicans in Washington.

Senior officials in Washington said the talks have concluded. The deal will be presented to the Bush administration and the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for formal approval or rejection.

“The talking is done,” one U.S. official said late Wednesday night. “Now the decision makers choose whether to give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.”

Now, it’s by no means certain that this deal will be accepted by the Iraqi government, which needs to seek approval from the parliament and cabinet, or if it will ensure a full pull-out by the agreed upon date. But the fact is that Nouri al-Maliki’s insistence on some sort of timetable for withdrawal convinced American negotiators that a permanent or indefinite presence in Iraq wasn’t viable or acceptable.

The other big news from the deal is that “The administration also dropped its insistence that American contractors remain immune from Iraqi law.” Not surprisingly, unaccountable, foreign contractors running around Iraq with no legal regime to guide their behavior was unpopular among Iraqis.

I imagine that the immediate political effects of the deal will be John McCain claiming credit for the deal by saying the Surge made it possible. However, the medium to long term effect will be the vindication of Obama’s plan and taking the issue of Iraq off the table as an election issue for the GOP. And if Obama wins the election, the GOP won’t be able to make a credible “stabbed-in-the-back” argument against Obama. If this deal is, well, the real deal, then we don’t have to fear a “partisan withdrawal.”

If I may get a tad panglossian about the entire matter, this is a HUGE vindication for war opponents. We were able to win the debate over whether or not it was a good idea to maintain an indefinite presence in Iraq. Even if some were coming around to some sort of withdrawal, this deal appears to set a dreaded “fixed timetable” meaning that even McCain’s recent hedges and machinations couldn’t match up with the quickly evolving consensus.

The other big winner is Nouri al-Maliki, and by extension, the Iraqi people. The occupation was never popular and there was always clear political pressure for al-Maliki to push for the exit of his patrons and protectors, the US military. It’s once again proof that imperial, indefinite occupations of foreign countries will never work – to once again quote John Judis, natives eventually grow restless. And who knows, their restlessness may have forced the most powerful country in the world to leave on their terms.

It’s also worth noting that McCain will look pretty dumb: just a month ago he was insisting that al-Maliki told him that he didn’t support the Obama withdrawal plan. Maybe advance news of this deal lead to McCain soft peddling Iraq as an issue recently. This shouldn’t hit them as a surprise; I imagine that someone in the White House or the military give him a heads up. Even so, the agreement should put McCain in quite the pickle. He said al-Maliki’s support for withdrawal was just due to the upcoming elections, but if the US government is now on board, where does that leave McCain? The argument over fixed vs conditions based seems to have been decided.

Kevin Drum has some more speculation on how all of this will play politically.

It’s unfortunate that I won’t be up till around 1 PM eastern (sorry, it’s summer). I imagine this will get all sorts of play in the blogosphere in the morning. Have fun guys!

UPDATE: I didn’t read the story carefully enough, apparently the deal calls for the withdrawal of all combat troops. There would still be some residual forces after 2011.

UPDATE 2: The Journal seems to have gotten quite the scoop. As of 4:14 EST, neither the Times nor the Post have anything on this deal. Interesting…

Bret Stephens gets counterfactual on Iraq:

Here’s a partial list: Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel. He would almost certainly have broken free from an already crumbling sanctions regime. The U.S. would be faced with not one, but two, major adversaries in the Persian Gulf. Iraqis would be living under a regime that, in an average year, was at least as murderous as the sectarian violence that followed its collapse. And the U.S. would have seemed powerless to shape events.

Obviously, had we simply done nothing and let the sanctions regime peter out, Stephens view of Iraq’ would be pretty accurate. But that’s a horrible way to do counterfactuals. Instead, we should assume what would have happened had be we presumed a different Iraq policy, not one that was magically designed to always terminate in war.

Inspections are a great example. The Bush administration saw the inspectors as a threat; after all, they kept on not finding the weapons. So, had we continued the inspections, we would have eventually figured out that Iraq possessed no serious WMD capacity. This, of course, sounds ridiculous in the context of 2002-2003. Since the entire media and intelligence apparatus just assumed that Hussein had weapons, the inspectors were always going to find them eventually, and if they didn’t, it was because Saddam was hiding them.

Had the approach been different – ie, not pre-determined to go to war – we probably would have concluded that Iraq’s weapons capacity was ambiguous, and certainly not a huge threat. As far as the sanctions regime goes, it seems like we could have thought up something. And since Saddam wasn’t really that big a risk of proliferating weapons, would such a strict sanctions policy that had the effect of killing lots of Iraqi babies had been such a good idea?

Ken Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon and Stephen Biddle have published a massive Foreign Affairs article (and a shorter Times Op-Ed) summarizing their recent trip to Iraq, and calling for (surprise!) maintaining high levels of combat forces in Iraq. I won’t admit to having gotten through the entire piece yet, but this one bit, flagged by Barron YoungSmith seems a tad dodgy:

“It is worth noting that separation resulting from sectarian cleansing was not the chief cause of the reduction in violence, as some have claimed. Much of Iraq remains intermingled but increasingly peaceful. And whereas a cleansing argument implies that casualties should have gone down in Baghdad, for example, as mixed neighborhoods were cleansed, casualties actually went up consistently during the sectarian warfare of 2006. Cleansing may have reduced the violence somewhat in some places, but it was not the main cause.”

Maybe I’m missing some crucial piece of context, but this looks like a piece of evidence for the ethnic cleansing thesis. Violence should have gone up when the ethnic cleansing happened, that is, after all, what ethnic cleansing is. Violence would then go down after “mixed neighborhoods were cleansed.” And if you eyeball the famous charts of violence and causalities, it sure looks like that happened. Also, in their op-ed, they claim that violence dropped from its 2006 peak in part because of a “systematic response to a new strategic landscape created by 2006’s sectarian bloodletting.”

UPDATE: Clearly Matt Yglesias doesn’t read this blog.

Dylan Matthews and young, undisciplined and all together impetuous novice Ezra Klein decided to ask a bunch of think tankers how much the Surge contributed to the decrease in violence in Iraq. And it turns out that nearly all of them place the actual deployment of 30,000 extra troops as below the Anbar Awakening (which happened before the troops got there), ethnic cleansing and balkanization, and the al-Sadr declared truce. And as Daniel Larison points out, the Anbar Awakening actually achieved the contrary objective of the surge. The central tenant of counter-insurgency strategy is to strengthen a centalized authority. What the Awakening did was bribe and arm the very force that holds the greatest long term threat to the central government – the Sunni insurgency. There’s no way we can sure that they’ll ever cut a real deal with the majority Shia or respect their majority rights. In fact, by arming and emboldening them, the Anbar Awakening could well mean that our most basic goal – a stable, self governing Iraq in which a centralized government holds a monopoly on violence – could never be achieved.

Of course, conditions before the Surge were about as bad as possible, and so it should get some credit as, overall, being a good tactical decision. The problem is that, and the consensus of experts seems to agree on this point, the Surge has not improved the situation compared to 2005, when the level of violence was considered to be unacceptably high. Read Steve Chapman and Matt Yglesias on this.

If we look at the Surge this way – no net improvement since 2005 and actually decreasing the chances of a political settlement – then McCain’s strategic judgment doesn’t look too good. The Surge was a tactical
sucess, but it was just part of a broadly failed strategy. So it seems that McCain trying to boost his strategic cred with the surge is just misleading; most people would agree that it was better if we withdrew in 2005, started withdrawing/scaling back our presence a la the Iraq Study Group in 2007 or if we never invaded in the first place.

So when the media tries to say that McCain’s support for the Surge is comparable to Obama’s opposition to the war, as proof of their respective strategic mettle, they are being taken for a ride. Considering that either A. McCain has aped Obama’s withdrawal plan (which means that McCain really doesn’t know what he wants for Iraq) or B. He really wants to stay in Iraq forever, trying to impose an American military presence on a population that doesn’t want it, it seems like Obama is almost de facto the candidate who has shown the best strategic judgment.

UPDATE: Eric Martin has an excellent post about the effects of the Surge. It cites more, you know, actual facts and what not. It’s quite good. Read it.

Marc Ambinder posits that McCain and Obama have both essentially come around to the same view in Iraq: withdrawing the bulk of US troops over 16 months, starting January 2009. Ambinder thinks this changes the debate on Iraq to who has a better strategy to who would be better at implementation. Questions of “judgment” (McCain with the surge, Obama with the war) are now “a matter of pride.” Let’s say that Ambinder is right about where McCain and Obama stand; it’s still ridiculous to say that the Iraq or the foreign policy debate becomes mute. For McCain to credibly support a 16 month timetable, he must explain what the Surge has done to enable a withdrawal and while we couldn’t have withdrawn at some other essentially arbitrary time – like after the first round of elections. He’ll also have to explain what exactly we’ve achieved in Iraq after having withdrawn, and why every American death after another time we could have withdrawn was worth it.

Because once you drop the imperial imerative to stay in Iraq, you’ll quickly realize that the US presence can only buy short-term stability and that the only card the US has to play (we’re already horribly overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan) is a credible withdrawal timeline. So why didn’t McCain support withdrawal after the first round of elections? Why hasn’t McCain denounced the policy of rogue state rollback, or unilateral regime change? After all, once you admit that we should get troops out of Iraq sometime soon, then it becomes obvious that the war was stupid, and that these types of wars wil tend to be completely pointless. The stated rationale for Iraq was bogus (WMDs) and if McCain is serious about setting a time horizon for troop presence, then even the insidious, unstated rationales come to naught (permanent US troop presence in a strategic middle eastern country, securing oil flow, scaring Iran etc).

Sounds like McCain is just desperately flailing following al-Maliki coming out in support of Obama’s plan and has realized that his dream of American troops hanging out in Iraq for 100 years with no violence is not particularly feasible or popular. I guess the real question is whether or not the mainstream commentariat will break out in hives over a much more egregious flip flop than any “refining” Obama has done over the past few months. As Jamelle points out, McCain has now essentially aped the Obama line on Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s pretty Mavericky.

The fact that Nouri Al-Maliki, the political figure who has benefited most from both the surge and a continued US presence in Iraw (besides John McCain, of course) has come out in support of  Obama’s withdrawal plan, probably should deliver the election to Obama:

U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes [...] The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t.

I must admit that I’ve been wavering in recent days over whether or not a relatively quick withdrawal (a la Obama’s plan) was still a good idea. George Packer’s recent New Yorker Comment made a good argument for Colin Kahl’s conditional withdrawal plan, namely that there were real gains that could only be reserved with some sort of US presence, and that a fixed timetable that definitely ended in withdrawal could not achieve the dual goals of putting pressure on the Maliki government to get its act together while keeping violence low. With Maliki himself supporting a definite withdrawal over 16 months, however, the game totally changes. All the small bore gains and goals that Packer describes are totally unsustainable and unattainable in a world where the government we’re trying to support becomes opposed to our presence. And even if the anonymous McCain advisor is right and al-Maliki’s statements are purely motivated by “domestic politics,” it still means that any Iraqi leader will inevitably be forced to call for the end of an unpopular, foreign occupation.

The interesting question is not how McCain and conservative hawks will react – they probably will continue to insist that we have to crush Al Qaeda and stay indefinitely to protect our honor – but instead the George Packers of the world who justify their support for a continued presence largely on the lines of holding up the current central government. If the central government, or more importantly their supporters, don’t want us, shouldn’t we just leave?

Masoud Shafaee goes over six reasons why a continued troop presence is a bad idea, even if causalities can be reduced as McCain wishes

Max Boot complains that the natives aren’t being grateful enough:

Sticking points include whether the U.S. will continue to control Iraqi airspace, whether U.S. soldiers and private security contractors will maintain immunity from Iraqi prosecution, and whether the U.S. will continue to have the freedom to carry out combat operations and to detain terrorist suspects without Iraqi approval.

From Washington’s perspective, these are measures necessary to ensure the safety of U.S. troops as long as a substantial number of them remain in the war zone. U.S. commanders could not in good conscience continue to fight with too many restrictions on their ability to protect their soldiers and accomplish their mission.

So why are Iraqi leaders trying to hinder the very military operations that have been making their country safer and thus strengthening their own authority?

One factor is the approach of Iraqi elections — provincial elections this fall, national elections next year. In the competition for votes, Iraqi politicians want to flaunt their nationalist credentials, and one of the surest ways to do that is to make a public show of not being patsies for the Americans.

Let’s translate that for a domestic Iraqi audience. Maliki is supposed to tell his supporters and the people of Iraq that not only does he support a foreign military occupation of his country, but that the occupiers should control their country’s airspace, allow mercenaries to be immune from local prosecution for the crimes they commit and allowing the military to run around the country without approval from the supposedely sovereign government. And although Maliki very much needs American troops to stay in Iraq, he can’t very well maintain domestic support by letting the US gets everything they want.

Boot is right, for the US to engage in an occupation/low intensity counter-insurgency, they probably need full flexibility in the theater, protection from local law and total control of the air. But it’s obvious that any self-respecting sovereign government or sovereign populace wouldn’t want to give all that up under just about any circumstances. But Boot (and the Bush administration, for that matter) will have to continually insist to get everything because they want an essentially permanent foothold in Iraq. The problem is that even the most pro-American factions in the government know that allowing that to happen would be political suicide. For all the US military’s coercive power, the only way to achieve “sucess” in Iraq (if anyone can even define what that means) is for their to be a legitimate, sovereign, popular government we can work with. But if the way to achieving the type of security environment where that’s possible involves asking the current government to make all sorts of concessions they don’t want to make, then that presents a pretty big problem for any hopes for “sucess” in Iraq.

A constant refrain of the Eustonite Left is that, despite the mistake the invasion initailly was, we’re obligated to stay in Iraq because otherwise, Iraqi trade unionists would be slaughtered by religious fascists. Although, on face, it’s a highly admirable position reminiscent of the Spanish Civil War or some other great, principled stand in left-wing history, it’s also a highly odd position to take. After all, there are a huge number of factors and costs involved in the war besides the well-being of trade unionists, and despite their overall goodness, it makes little sense to elevate their interests above all others.

It’s also representative of the somewhat myopic view that many British Eustonites take about Iraq. After all, it’s in England where the soi-disant anti-totalitarian left is the strongest and people like Nick Cohen or Oliver Kamm think that the Iraq War is the most important liberationist struggle of our time. I’d chalk this up to two things. In England, much of the “mainstream” left – or at least the type that has a strong voice in the public sphere – is much more anti-American, anti-West, soft-on-Islamism etc than anything comparable in the United States. And so Nick Cohen et al actually have a coherent, strongly represented worldview to argue against. But it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that England doesn’t bear the great costs of the Iraq War. It’s not England that’s spending 1 trillion dollars on the war, that’s lost 4,000 men and women, that’s had its international reputation trashed, in short, advocating for continued war carries considerably fewer costs across the pond.

But what’s even odder about the almost-deontological stance that Eustonites take with respect to trade unions and the war is that it isn’t at all clear that Iraqi unions support the occupation. This Sami Ramadani piece references some trade union opposition to the occupation, and this May Day declaration against the occupation by trade unionists seems to indicate that, at the very least, it’s hardly a unanimous opinion among the Iraqi labor movement that the occupation is right and just.

Via Spackerman

Spencer Ackerman steals another great idea of mine:

And the U.S. thinks it can outplay this guy on his own turf? Could Dick Cheney have survived Saddam Hussein’s goons? Moqtada Sadr is the new Che Guevara. Bring on the t-shirts for every sophomoric lefty college student.

I have no proof to back this claim up, but I’m pretty sure that my brother and I thought up the idea of putting Moqtada on t-shirts n late 2005 or so. We also though that the “Mahdi Army” sounded like a great name for a rap crew. One problem though: Moqtada, despite being a certified anti-American badass (I’m not saying that what he does is good, just that he’s one bad SOB, as evidenced by Patrick Cockburn’s book), doesn’t really look that cool on a shirt. He kinda looks like a very chubby, very angry baby. But he could still be adopted by rappers. There’s very solid precedent for terroristic, anti-American figures being seen as badasses by rappers. In 2Pac’s hatikva-sampling some Jewish-liturgical-music-I-can’t-identify sampling classic “Troublesome 96″, he name checks a series of murderous, anti-American world leaders including Qadaffi, Castro, Idi Amin, Mussolini, “Hussein Fatal” and “my nigga Napoleon.” So who wants to join my crew, Ayatollah MZ and the Mahdi Army?

Kathy G suggests that had the American military been told to read Orientalism by Edward Said, as opposed to the anti-Arab filth that is The Arab Mind, perhaps things would have been different:

Yet at the same time, as Foucault noted, knowledge itself constitutes power relations. Books and ideas can have a profound impact. I don’t think it would have been quite as easy for the Bush administration to do what they did if racist, imperialist attitudes were not so prevalent amongst the military and foreign policy elites. And if those same elites had read Orientalism instead of The Arab Mind, I’m not so sure that said elites would have been quite so comfortable in their racism and imperialism. A powerful book, which Orientalism (which I have read) certainly is, and which The Arab Mind (which I haven’t read) apparently is as well, can change minds. It can persuade readers who have no fixed views on the subject, and strengthen the views of those who are already inclined to agree with the author.

If Orientalism had been widely read among the military and foreign affairs folks, perhaps the attitudes of some highly influential people would not have been quite so smug. Perhaps they would have entertained a few more doubts. Perhaps the thought of torturing their fellow human beings might have made them a bit queasy.

Although I have an quasi ironic respect for Edward Said and hold the view that the last few years have tragically vindicated Orientalism’s thesis (trust me, it’s very complicated) I think Kathy is ignoring how a more straightforward discussion of knowledge and power could explain why The Arab Mind found its way onto military reading lists. That’s because it’s a whole lot easier to launch a war against utter savages, as opposed to rather normal human beings whose reactions are very similiar to ours. I mean, anyone would know that breaking into people’s homes, taking the men out of the houses, humiliating them and forcing black hoods on their heads would anger your average European, but for Arabs, it would make them fear and respect us.

The Iraq War was what social scientists like to call “overdetermined” – it had a whole lot of caues, one of which was the Fouad Ajami-style depictions of Arabs as simplistic brutes who could be cowered into submission and parliamentary democracy. But I don’t think you needed that intellectual substructure for the war to happen, it was just one of many causes.

And on the subject of Orientalism more broadly, it’s odd how it’s come under such fearsome assault, as it’s thesis was being so decisively proven. That thesis, being “that when it came to “the East” scholarship itself had become a means of serving and legitimating imperial dominance over the Oriental “other.”” And so, more than 30 years after Said’s book we are in the midst of an imperial war in the Middle East, which was partially justified on the back of depictions of middle easterners as alien, other and totally opposed to the “West.”

And so, is Said being recognized as a prescient, far seeing public intellectual? Sure, those who originally read the book and subscribe to The Nation think he’s the shit, but in more conventional liberal circles, he’s the avatar of anti-American intellectuals that one can look really good loudly bashing. The Eustonite Left, Marty Peretz and that whole gang are only upping the ante in Said bashing. In the past few years, we’ve seen a a proliferation of anti-Said tracks. At least 1/3 of the issues of Democratiya - the Eustonite British politcal journal – have included some sort of denunciation of Edward Said. Many of his critics, who aren’t scholars of the Middle East but instead political opponents, point to Roger Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge. While Dangerous Knowledge itself is a legitimate scholarly work that takes issue with Said’s treatment of specific Orientalists, especially those Germans who were actively opposed to Imperialism, it largely misses the forest for the trees. Although Irwin is certainly right that Said plays a tad fast and loose with the facts in order for them to fit his thesis, the basic thrust of Orientalism is undeniable: Western imperialism and Orientalist scholarship were “co-productive” in producing the conditions to subjugate the East. Daniel Varisco and Ibn Warraq  have also both written book length criticisms of Orientalism. Although Varisco is broadly sympathetic with Said’s political agenda and Warraq is incredibly hostile, it’s no surprise that Democratiya is trumpeting them as weapons to wield against the Saidite menace. Said’s ghost haunts more than just discussions of his own book. All of the hysteria we see surrounding Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies Department and abominable treatment of Nadia Abu El-Haj can be explained as the expression of the endless frustration that “pro-Israel” types and conservatives felt at never being able to take Said off his pedestal.

This is not to say that I endorse all of Said’s political stands. On Israel, Kosovo and the first Gulf War, I think he was profoundly wrong. But on his main scholarly point, he was unfortunately correct.

Dana Goldstein captures a particularly inane bit of the hearings:

Sen. Lindsay Graham just asked Gen. Petraeus, “Why did they [Al Qaeda in Iraq] come to Iraq?”

Petraeus responded, “To establish a base in the heart of the Middle East.”

Okay, right. But why was that possible? Because we destabilized the region through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, giving terrorist groups a new foothold.

Dana’s obviously right – the key variable in Al Qaeda setting up shop in Iraq was not anything intrinsic to AQ, but instead the fact that we created a near perfect environment for them. Not only did we, as she said, destabilize the country and create a lawless zone in which they could fester – and even this isn’t entirely accurate as much of AQ wasn’t/isn’t foreign – we also gave Al Qaeda a chance to do their favorite thing: shoot at Americans and their allies! Graham’s logic, whereby Al Qaeda does what it wants and then we respond, is backwards: we enact policies and then Al Qaeda is able to act in our wake.

Al Qaeda and such are almost like parasites or viruses in the international system. They have very little agency and can’t just do what they want, when they want, in the same way that a state can. They instead depend on all sorts of conditions and circumstances to be right to implement their agenda. Look at, for example, the occupation of Saudi Arabia or the US funding of guerrillas in Afghanistan. Before that, plenty of people wanted to fight the Soviets with big guns, but couldn’t until we gave them said large guns. And while Bin Laden wasn’t a big fan of the US before the Gulf War, when we had troops in Saudi Arabia, he could make a convincing case that Americans were occupying the Arab world. Also, if you look at terrorist attacks in Europe, they probably wouldn’t have happened (Spain certainly) without the invasion of Iraq.

I think it’s more useful to look at the threat of transnational terror as an emergent property of the world order rather than some sort of exogenous force that is entirely independent of outside influence and is entirely self-directed. To use a comic books reference, transnational Islamic terrorism is not like the Phoenix Force - it’s not the “immortal and mutable manifestation of the prime universal force of life. Born of the void between states of being, a child of the universe…the nexus of all psionic energy which does, has, and ever will exist in all realities of the omniverse“

The problem with making this type of argument these days is that when you do, people claim you’re “blaming America first” or that you’re saying there’s “moral equivalence” between the West and Al Qaeda. To be very clear , I don’t “blame” the US for terrorism, clearly terrorists are responsible , I just want to point out how many of our policies and actions certainly don’t help reduce the threat of terrorism, and how many of them exacerbate it.

The first thing I’ll say about the hearings is that everyone should reading Dana Goldstein et al at TAPPED and Spencer Ackerman at The Independent Streak for Petraeus-Crocker liveblogging, and also should watch Juan Cole’s and Daniel Drezner’s Iraq-themed bloggingheads. Speaking of which, this one bit brings up a very important point vis a vis Iran:

from bloggingheads.tv posted with vodpod

Surely, Iranian influence and increased power in the region isn’t something we should feel great about. One of the huge strategic errors of the war was giving this huge geopolitical gift to Iran. And even more worrying is that the two biggest centers of power – Maliki, ISCI and the Badr Group AND Sadr and his minions – both draw upon significant Iranian support. So, when we eventually withdraw, it’s basically assured that Iran will have significant leverage in Iraq. So who do we want in charge when we leave? Sadr or Maliki, ISCI or Mahdi?

As far as constraining Iranian influence, it seems like Sadr would be the best choice. For starters many leaders of ISCI were clerics who hid out in Iran while Saddam was in power, and Badr was started by the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and some Bard members are even drawing Iranian pensions. Sadr, on the other hand, has significant tactical and logistical support from Iran, but that’s largely because we’ve decided that we’re friends with ISCI and enemies of Sadr, and so he’s been able to get Iranian support. What makes this weird is that Sadr is the nationalist and if he were in power when we left, he would be marginally more likely to resist Iranian influence. Cole also makes the point that Sadr was worried about Iranian “special groups” gaining within the Mahdi Army, and part of the reason for his cease fire was that he wanted to isolate those Iranian loyalists. Maliki and his minions, however, don’t seem to be so worried about Iranian influence per se, just that Iranian influence which hurts them.

But the important thing to remember is that neither Maliki nor Sadr nor anyone who could possibly come to power in Iraq will just be acquiescent to Iranian “colonization” or anything resembling outsize Iranian influence. There’s the basic thing that no one likes foreigners running their nation, not to mention the huge amount of bad blood from Iran-Iraq War and the fact that Persians and Arabs tend not to be best buddy. In many ways, US troops are the glue that binds Iran and Iraqi Shia’s together, without a common enemy or source of tension (US, Saddam) there’s no exogenous motivation for them to be especially close.

PS – For the definitive look at Iranian connections with the current ruling party in Iraq, check out Matt Duss.

Abe Greenwald, in the course of excoriating the Times for writing a sympathetic profile of the person who first thought up the much-lauded Anbar Awakening strategy and is now languishing in jail, just says something that is not true:

But Mr. al-Kharbit’s policy on tribes is to extend “tribal hospitality” to even the most despicable criminal co-member of one’s sect, as he did in the case of Saddam Hussein. Is this not the exact opposite of the policy the U.S. is enforcing amongst tribes in Iraq today? The Sunni Awakening and various efforts among the Shiites are geared towards getting Iraqis to look past sectarian affiliation and towards statehood. The Sunni Awakening is Sunnis turning on Sunnis; last week’s Basra battle was, in some sense, Shiite on Shiite. Only if members of both sects turn on the problem elements within each group can stability be achieved.

I’m sorry, but no. It’s easy to look at Iraq as simply Shia v Sunni v Kurd and to think that all can be explained by looking at those three groups, and I’ll admit that I fall into this comfortable schema too much.  But the events of that last few months, starting with the Awakening, prove that it’s not that people are shedding their sectarian committments for a national Iraqi one, but instead that their committments are too smaller groups than merely “Shia” or “Sunni.” So when the Sunnis in Anbar go after al Qaeda in Iraq, they aren’t doing at as “sunnis” or “iraqis” but instead as members of their own tribe.  Similarly when al-Maliki tried to conquer Basra, while the army was the official Iraqi one, it was really just a conflict between two Shia, Iranian-backed militias.   This is not to say that the Sunnia/Shia divide doesn’t exist, and  even assuming that it does, Greenwald is still wrong.  That’s because the people in the Anbar Awakening have no intention of working on behalf of “iraq” – which to them is just another Shia militia – in fact, the government has steadfastly refused to integrate the Awakening forces, but has easily been able to hire some 10,000 Badr brigade and Dawa fighters.  Hawks need to get around that Iraq’s state capicity, authority and monopoly of legitimate violence has only decreased recently, and largely as part of the security strategy that they have lauded.

Mark Lynch has a very thoughtful and thorough look at the political consequences for the major factions in Iraq – green zone politicians, Sunni insurgents, Sadrites and Shiites and Al Qaeda.  There’s not a whole lot to add, except to note his strong opinion that what the Surge has accomplished – the weakening of the central government and the further factionalization of Iraq – does not make the prospects for withdrawal any rosier:

The single most important question shaping the possibility of US withdrawal is whether it takes place in the context of a relatively strong, competent and effectively sovereign Iraqi state.  US strategy should be oriented towards producing that core condition. The strategic failure of the “surge” has been that it has eroded the capacity and sovereignty of the Iraqi state by building up mutually hostile armed groups outside national institutions.  The US must work to strengthen state institutions, and to force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.  Despite the current American fashion in favor of decentralization, Iraqi support for a centralized Iraqi state remains strong: in last month’s BBC survey, 66% of Iraqis preferred a unified Iraq with a strong central government, while only 23% favored the federation of strong regional governments.

A withdrawal will be more likely to produce positive effects if it is preceded by building Iraqi national institutions and mobilizing regional support.  The  most vulnerable remaining populations should be protected as long as possible. Intra-communal power struggles will likely be increasingly significant flashpoints with or without a US withdrawal, but will likely intensify in anticipation of a withdrawal which would likely significantly weaken the current ruling elite.   I do not expect a withdrawal to proceed smoothly, given the legacy of five years of wrong paths, mismanagement, and sectarian violence.  But it is also not impossible, especially if steps are taken now to improve the odds, and it is made more likely by a  credible commitment to withdrawal.

This brings up the real question for a Democratic administration.  Are we too far down the road of a degraded Iraqi state and set of political institutions to hope that a change in US policy could every actually get us to a place where we our withdrawal would have fewer negative effects than it would now?  And, would it be worth the strategic oppurtunity costs and the loss of American life and treasure to try and reach this point?

While Lynch is hopeful that we could push towards centralization because large numbers of Iraqis support a strong centralized state, it’s worth noting that 34% don’t – much higher numbers than you’ll find in any well-ordered country. Also, Lynch’s conditions for a strong state that we could properly withdraw from with minimal negative consequences may be slightly fantastical.  For instance, he says that we have to “force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.”  At the moment, there seems to be little reason that the Shiites who largely dominate the police and army would want to accept the Sunni Awakening Councils or why the Councils would want to lose their autonomy and support by entering into an Army that is staffed by their enemies.  If this really is the “lynchpin” (haha) for achieving a “successful” withdrawal, then I think we should just withdraw now.  Our policies have gone too far in encouraging the dissolution of any sucessful Iraqi state and the only large enough shock to the system would actually be a credible plan for withdrawal, as Lynch himself says:

No Iraqi actor would scream more loudly or offer more dire warnings of impending doom than the current Green Zone elite – and, not coincidentally, these are the voices most often heard in Washington and by politicians on short visits to Baghdad.   But their warnings should be understood at least in part as expressions of their own political self-interest.   No Iraqi actor is more likely to quickly readjust its behavior and calculations should such a withdrawal be announced.  With the US set to depart, the whole range of national reconciliation initiatives which are currently seen as at best luxuries and at worst mortal threats would suddenly become a much more intense matter of self-interest.  The integration of the Sunni Awakenings, for instance, would move from a challenge to Shia hegemony over the security forces into the best possible way to pre-empt their military challenge.  The credible commitment to withdrawal would give the US much-needed leverage over the Green Zone leadership.

From reading this paragraph, it looks like planning for, and then executing, a withdrawal would hit two birds with one stone. For one, it would probably be the only move extreme enough to reverse the poor strategy of the surge and supporting the Anbar Awakening at the expense of centralization, and it would also get us out of Iraq.  This may seem tautalogical, but I think it’s still useful:  only a withdrawal can create the conditions that would allow for withdrawal.

Michael Young’s most recent Reason column celebrates Samantha Power’s fall from grace, because apparently she’s a hypocrite for writing about America’s silence in the face of genocide and yet still advocating a withdrawal from Iraq:

Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

What Young, and he’s hardly alone, gets wrong is his notion that sectarian conflict will just magically spring up as the US leaves. The problem with Iraq is that despite increased troop levels, all the ingredients for a bloody civil war are still there. Even as we’ve put in more troops, gotten Sadr to declare a ceasefire and bribed the Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, we have a weaker central government, more distrust between Sunnis and Shiites, no effective national army and generally, no steps towards political reconciliation. What this means is that when a troop draw down happens, as it inevitably will, a huge blow up is all but inevitable. There have already been hints that the (relative) respite in violence may be ending, like the car bomb that killed more than 40 people in Karbala. So it’s wrong for Young and his ilk to say that withdrawing from Iraq will inevitably lead to ethnic conflict and then just assuming that there’s anything current or any propose US policy can do to stop it. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that the US presence hasn’t done much to resolve the root causes of violence in Iraq, if anything, it has and will continually exasperate it.

What makes Young’s lame game of gotcha even less convincing is this quote he dregs up from Obama, which apparently proves that the “truth” of the War is that no one actually supports a quick withdrawal:

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died…It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Young assumes that the exact same analysis could be made today. And, superficially, he’s correct. But notice one major difference. In 2004, there were 900-plus American war dead, today, there are over 4,000. What Obama has come to realize – and what Young hasn’t – is that our strategy there is futile. If another 3,000 dead has gotten us nowhere close to eventually being able to leave behind a stable Iraq, why are we to assume that the next 3000 dead will be able to accomplish anything more? What we’ve seen since 2004 is continual assurances from people like Young that the situation in Iraq is improving and that there will be horrible violence if we withdraw. What instead has happened is that the violence has remained and the underlying causes of the sectarian violence remain. To call Power and Obama hypocrites for trying to resolve our greatest strategic failure in generations is just galling. The hypocrites are those who, after five years of futile war and brutal occupation, think that the only answer is more war.

Slate has a very good feature entitled “Why Did We Get It Wrong” in which three liberal hawks – Kenan Makiya, Fred Kaplanand Chris Hitchens- all appraise their stance on the war.  Kaplan, of course,  turned against the war before it even began and Makiya is still convinced that it was noble to “knock down the walls of the great concentration camp that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq” but is now indecisive about whether the war itself was a good idea.  Both Kaplan and Makiya demonstrate admirable introspection about why they supported the war and how evidence accumulated to make them change their minds, or at least rethink.  And then there’s Hitchens.

Hitchens is, of course, unapologetic and thinks that he can separate his support for the war from the horrible execution of it, which he takes no responsibility for.  And here’s his conclusion:

And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

The past years have seen us both shamed and threatened by the implications of the Berkeleyan attitude, from Burma to Rwanda to Darfur. Had we decided to attempt the right thing in those cases (you will notice that I say “attempt” rather than “do,” which cannot be known in advance), we could as glibly have been accused of embarking on “a war of choice.” But the thing to remember about Iraq is that all or most choice had already been forfeited. We were already deeply involved in the life-and-death struggle of that country, and March 2003 happens to mark the only time that we ever decided to intervene, after a protracted and open public debate, on the right side and for the right reasons. This must, and still does, count for something.

You’ll notice something interesting.  As far as Hitchens sees it, it’s not our responsibility to look at the consequences of advocating for an invasion.  Instead, all that matters is that we intervened on the “right side for the right reasons.”  The problem with looking at a decision this way is that it discourages the exact type of analysis that everyone admits needed to happen before Iraq.  Namely, what would the consequences of the invasion be besides removing Hussein from power? Kaplan says that part of the reason he turned against the war was that he determined that “in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or intellectually to wage [this war] or at least to settle its aftermath.”  Questions of whether of Hussein’s Iraq was “a concentration camp” or whether we were on the “right side” necessarily bracket off the types of considerations that even Hitchens and Makiya think that we ought to have made.  Hitchens is also being incredibly glib when he says that we intervened after an “open and public debate.”  Last time I checked, when advocates for a policy are presenting skewed intelligence in support of their war, no debate will be “open and public.” Also, constantly accusing ones opponents as being soft on genocide/fascism for opposing a preemptive war is hardly fulfilling the Habermasian ideal.

I’ll also note some noteworthy abscences – really just one – from the Slate symposium. Jeffrey Goldberg.

After World War I, when entire generations of young men had died in trench warfare for nothing, many Europeans developed a strong, instinctive reaction against war and militarism.  While it’s easy to say with historical hindsight that those who didn’t want to militarily engage Hitler earlier were naive appeasers, we have to remember that in the battle of Somme, for instance, 19,000 British soldiers died – in one day. That’s almost five times the number of American dead in the five years of the Iraq War. One wonders if the American aversion to ground war, which we developed after Vietnam, will return when we finally entangle ourselves from Iraq.  Can we imagine, in 30 or 40 years, conservative politicians hectoring us about getting over the Iraq syndrome?

The reason I want to talk about World War I is because the last French soldier who actually fought in the trenches is now dead.  Lazare Ponticelliwas 110,  lied to get into the French and fought in the trenches.  When he was in his 30s, he joined the resistance. By 1947, he was fourty years old and had fought in two world wars.  I fear that with the passing of the World War I generation, our societal memory of just how awful war is will be eroded.

Below the fold is Wilfred Owen’s poem about trench warfare, Dulce et Decorum Est.

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