Does The GOP Need Iraq?

I genuinely hope Joe Klein is right and Iraq's improvements are durable.  And contrary to Joe's implication, I don't think, politically, this is something for Democrats to fear.  The better Iraq is doing, the less of an issue it will be in the election.  The less of an issue it is in the election, the more issues like the health care crisis, the mortgage meltdown, inequality, and global warming will come to the fore.  Indeed, the less Iraq dominates the agenda, the more alternative foreign policy visions can emerge, and be tested, and become the new context for the discussion  All that is good for the Left.

Indeed, I occasionally believe that Republicans know that once American troops leave Iraq, the country's need for the Republican Party, at least temporarily, will cease.  The Iraq War has increasingly come to define the Republican party.  They've sacrificed almot everything else for it, from fiscal discipline to social conservatism (see the Giuliani campaign).  So long as troops remain in Iraq, the Republicans can at least argue that they need to finish the job they've begun, and that the Democrats lack sufficient commitment to victory.  End it, and you end their relevance, at least until they can reinvent themselves as the party of closed borders.  My sense is that, consciously or unconsciously, some of the GOP knows this, and it underpins their unwillingness to even begin drawing the conflict to a close.  At this point, the end of the war would be existentially unmooring for the Party.

Does The Military Matter?

The apparent drop in civilian deaths in Iraq is very good news. And not because it means our Iraq strategy is working. Indeed, the forces behind this have little to nothing to do with American forces. The so-called Anbar Awakening is a Sunni operation, while the unilateral ceasefire of the Mahdi Army was Sadr's decision. The pacification of Baghdad, meanwhile, has a lot to do with the fact that Baghdad's effectively been ethnically cleaned, converting from a majority Sunni city to a 70% Shiite city -- they're running out of people to kill. Our troops aren't terribly involved in this change, and that's a good thing: Any changes brought about by American forces will be temporary. Changes that reflect shifts in the underlying dynamics of the country may endure.

I was talking to an Iraq expert yesterday and asked him whether it was correct to say that the military questions -- how many troops we have deployed, what their strategy is, etc -- are increasingly beside the point. He said yes, and then continued on to say that he forgets how different the conversation in the country is from the conversation among Iraq experts. Among those folks, he said, it was taken for granted that the military issues were largely a distraction, and the only questions worth asking were political and regional in nature. Some think the military's doing harm, others think it's offering a bit of benefit, but no one thinks the troops are making much of a difference one way or the other, or that their strategy has anything to do with the long-term success of Iraq. And the focus on what the military is doing, rather than on a diplomatic surge and Iran's involvement and all the rest, is actually quite harmful.

Is The Surge Working?

Given all the domestic dispute over whether the Surge is working, and whether the measurements are honest, and what "working" really means anyway, it's interesting to actually find out what the Iraqis think. So the BBC and ABC News polled them:

So the overwhelming majority thought the surge made things worse. Then came those who thought it made no difference. And then, hovering around 10 percent, were those who thought they detected some improvements. Given that the Surge is in theory, about Iraqi security rather than American politics, these are disheartening numbers.

Also: Could someone please inform the BBC that blue should fill the bar for things going well and red should should be the color for all that's gone awry? I find this pleasing, powder-blue denoting increases in deadly violence to be a bit confusing.

The Surge's Untrustworthy Numbers

The big factoid in favor of the surge is that violence is down. As Bush put it a few months back, "Within Baghdad, our military reports that despite an upward trend in May, sectarian murders in the capital are significantly down from what they were in January."

Devil, meet details. The Pentagon classifies violence as "sectarian killings," not simple murders. So those numbers don't count, among other things, Shia on Shia violence in the South, Sunni on Sunni violence -- including between al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqis Sunnis -- in the North, carbombings, and much else. But even within this vastly constrained definition, the Pentagon, without letting anyone in on their methodology, is changing the definition from month to month. Ilan Goldberg did the lord's work by graphing the Pentagon's numbers from the last few reports, and watch how the numbers for the very same months change with each successive report:

And we're not just seeing random fluctuations -- they're mainly changing downward, in order to reflect lower sectarian violence. But why would the January 2006 be lower in the June report than in the March report? Were the dead resurrected?

"But wait!" You say (because you're rude, and you interrupt a lot). "In the June report, killings were revised upward! That's true. But the timing matters. As Goldberg explains, "The impact here is that it makes the “pre surge” situation look extraordinarily dire and therefore signals progress thereafter."

The shell game here has to do with the term "sectarian murders," which the Pentagon is apparently defining differently from month to month, albeit without telling anyone what's changed. In other words, you can't trust these numbers. But they're the ones that are being used -- and will be used -- to argue for the Surge's success.

Does the Internet Need Fixing? Sadly, Yes.

By Deborah Newell Tornello a.k.a. litbrit

How could I have missed this bit of lovely on Tuesday?  Oh yeah, it was the first full-day of school.  No matter--is it any less relevant today?  Sadly, No.

Knocking Over The Chessboard

Does Ken Pollack realize quite what he's proposing here?

We did meet with a number of top Iraqi policymakers over there and we found exactly what you said, which was absolutely no progress at that strategic political level. These are people who know that if there were really free and fair elections, they might not win nearly as many seats as they have under the current prevailing conditions of a failed state and a security vacuum. I came away from the trip believing it may be necessary to have new elections in Iraq and maybe even a new electoral system that actually could produce a government that is more representative of the Iraqi people, with leaders who actually would be much more willing to make compromises.

So he's suggesting, essentially, that the Americans unilaterally dissolve the sovereign Iraqi government and demand new elections that would be conducted in some theoretically more proportionate way, and which would be more amenable to compromises that would, in turn, rely on marginalizing the country's most powerful parties and thus angering exactly the groups we need to abide by compromises.

What if General David Petraeus just shot himself in the face instead? Wouldn't that have essentially the same effect?

The Way To Go in Iraq

Peter Galbraith's piece on "The Way To Go" in Iraq is about the best I've seen at digging beneath daily outrages and promises and laying out the underlying tensions tearing apart the society. For instance, the other day, I saw, and recommended highly, the film No End in Sight. The movie spends a lot of time on the tragic mistakes made in the immediate aftermath of the war: Decommissioning the Iraqi army, allowing looting, De-Baathification, etc. But as Galbraith explains, though the American's may have accelerated the civil war through policies like De-Baathification, it's not at all clear that a different way forward could have prevented it:

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim leads the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which is Iraq's leading Shiite party and a critical component of Prime Minister al-Maliki's coalition. He is the sole survivor of eight brothers. During Saddam's rule Baathists executed six of them. On August 29, 2003, a suicide bomber, possibly linked to the Baathists, blew up his last surviving brother, and predecessor as SCIRI leader, at the shrine of Ali in Najaf. Moqtada al-Sadr, Hakim's main rival, comes from Iraq's other prominent Shiite religious family. Saddam's Baath regime murdered his father and two brothers in 1999. Earlier, in April 1980, the regime had arrested Moqtada's father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister—the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. They then set fire to the ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head. De-Baathification is an intensely personal issue for Iraq's two most powerful Shiite political leaders, as it is to hundreds of thousands of their followers who suffered similar atrocities.

This is a society with, shall we say, some baggage. But the Surge was supposed to give them time to work all that out. By flooding the country with American troops and temporarily stabilizing the security situation, the Bush administration hoped to give the Iraqi government time to make progress on political reconciliation. Well, the Iraqi government went on vacation, so that's unlikely. But more to the point, the substance of "reconciliation" -- oil-sharing laws, revising the Constitution to create more centralization, limited re-Baathification -- doesn't quite address the underlying tensions splitting the society:

Sunni insurgents object to Iraq being run by Shiite religious parties, which they see as installed by the Americans, loyal to Iran, and wanting to define Iraq in a way that excludes the Sunnis. Sunni fundamentalists consider the Shiites apostates who deserve death, not power. The Shiites believe that their democratic majority and their historical suffering under the Baathist dictatorship entitle them to rule. They are not inclined to compromise with Sunnis, whom they see as their longstanding oppressors, especially when they believe most Iraqi Sunnis are sympathetic to the suicide bombers that have killed thousands of ordinary Shiites. The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

The war, in other words, is not about anything we can control, or even particularly effect.

Hackin' and Iraq'n

I mentioned the other day that the Bush administration's tendency to prioritize loyalty over competence has been at least as damaging to the government as their crazed fiscal management.  So I'm glad to see Tom Friedman suggest that his audience read  Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City  "details [as to] the extent to which Americans recruited to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad were chosen, at times, for their loyalty toward Republicanism rather than expertise on Islamism."  Two CPA staffers, for instance, were asked whether they supported Roe v. Wade, assumedly because Iraqis are really concerned over whether the American Constitution includes an implicit right to privacy.

It's tolerance for this sort of politicization of the bureaucracy that I find most enraging about the modern GOP.  I can respect disagreements over abortion, taxes, Iraq, and all the rest.  I'll fight to win them, but I grant that they're often offered in good faith and real conviction.  But part of taking seriously the Republican argument on Iraq is believing that they want our mission their to succeed.  And that desire is utterly incompatible with a tolerance for croneyism and the appointment of politicized hacks.  That the Bush administration's actions with the CPA never elicited a cry -- much less a hue! -- from the Right is truly distressing.

Dispatches From When The Country Went Crazy: Kill 'em All Edition

While writing this post yesterday, I came across this gem from Paul Berman, writing in a January 2004 Slate forum reconsidering the Iraq War.  "[The] largest of facts," he wrote, "is the rise of a certain kind of political movement—movements animated by paranoid hatreds, by apocalyptic fantasies, and by the fanatical desire to kill people en masse. These have been the big totalitarian movements, Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, and a few others—movements whose greatest goal was to destroy liberal civilization...The totalitarian visions live on. Only, instead of being called fascism or some other name from the past, the visions of the present are called radical Islamism and Baathism and suchlike, with doctrines duly descended from their European progenitors—the totalitarianism of the modern Muslim world."

I forget the elegant disingenuousness with which the war was often sold.  Notice how Berman recasts a fight against Saddam Hussein as a war against a unified totalitarian ideology.  This despite the fact that the Baathism, under Saddam's Iraq, and radical Islamism, under Khomeini's Iran, had spent over a decade killing each other (with America arming not one, but both).  Notice how these movements are ripped of positive -- which is different than "good" -- goals and recast as a mindless attack on "liberal civilization."

But that's just the start of the crazy.  Remember, here, that Berman was the author of the hugely influential liberal hawk manifesto Terror and Liberalism, and a main character in George Packer's The Assassin's Gate.  He goes on to write: "Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else's sake, Muslims' especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation."

Iraq and Afghanistan were just places to begin!  We were supposed to take on every country with a whiff of autocracy and a useable set of prayer mats!  It's staggering stuff.

Are The People Interested?

I think Eve's perspective on the Democrats' withdrawal plan is a bit skewed:

Some nasty stuff's on the way for the Democratic deal on Iraq...Here's the bitchy subtitle of today's Post's lead editorial: "It makes perfect sense, if the goal is winning votes in the United States."

Wince. But I don't think it even does make perfect sense as a purely political strategy: The plan faces immense obstacles to get to the House floor, at which point it probably won't pass the Senate, and if it did, it'd be summarily vetoed -- drawing Democrats into a constitutional showdown with Bush. Is that what people are interested in?

Well, yeah. According to the most recent polling, Iraq is the most important single problem facing our country, outpolling the nearest runner-up ("economy/jobs") by 21 percent. 67 percent disapprove of Bush's handling of the issue, 63 percent oppose the surge, and 51% say they're concerned "Congress won't go far enough in pressing the President to reduce troop levels in Iraq." So yes, I think the American people are decidedly interest in the issue.

Moreover, the framing of Eve's post is odd. Americans are, of course, not interested in a bunch of procedural wrangling leading to gridlock. But the bloodless presentation above obscures a fairly astonishing political event: After an election in which Americans overwhelmingly voted in the anti-war party and amidst polls showing 58% think we should withdraw within the next year, the President is blocking all action on the issue, blocking all action on the electorate's top priority. It is, of course, soundly undemocratic. To suggest that Congress should stop pushing for more direct enactment of public preferences because Bush has telegraphed his intent to flout the will of the country is really missing the forest for the trees.

Imperial Groans

Speaking of self esteem retention, the Nitpicker catches prominent military fetishist Lawrence Kaplan cynically concocting troop opinions in order to safeguard his own hawkish outlook. In TNR's big Iraq issue, Kaplan writes:

For the sake of American soldiers...who speak with a sense of ownership about their war and see themselves as a progressive force on the Iraqi landscape--and who, according to surveys by the Military Times and the Pew Research Center, hold opinions on the war that run almost exactly counter to those registered at home--be grateful that the machinery of war overwhelms the din from Washington.

But the Military Times hasn't conducted a survey in over a year and, when they did, rather than troop opinions proving precise counterpoints to public polls, they tracked rather closely. At the time, 60% of the troops supported the war and 50% of the public. But even that overstates. From The Military Times' website:

should not be read as representative of the military as a whole; the survey’s respondents are on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the military population. But the numbers are among the best measures of opinion in a difficult-to-survey population. The professional military seems to be lessening in its certainty about the wisdom of the Iraq intervention and the way it has been handled,” said Richard Kohn, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina who studies civil-military relations. “This seems to be more and more in keeping with changes in public views, and that’s not surprising.”

As for Pew, well, the Nitpicker e-mailed them and they responded that they don't do surveys of soldiers. The closest them came was a survey of retired generals culled from Lexis-Nexis searches. Meanwhile, the most recent actual poll done of the soldiers found:

29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

So 76% of the troops want us out within a year. Funny how that wasn't mentioned in the article. Let's hope the din of Lawrence Kaplan doesn't overwhelm the voices of those he claims to honor.

TNR: Was Wrong, Is Wrong.

I was going to write a response to TNR's breathtakingly bad "We Were Wrong" editorial, but I couldn't possibly better what their former employee Spackerman says:

Please believe me when I say that this makes me want to cry, since I used to love working for TNR. But the magazine is setting itself up for making the same mistake over and over and over again. This is the emptiest of evasions -- a fetishization of "seriousness" without ever actually being serious. In one of my last pieces for them, I wrote that "Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not 'Were we wrong?' but 'Why were we wrong?' and 'How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?'" I begged TNR during my time there to address these last questions. But now it's dawned on me that my former friends never will.

Read the whole thing. For TNR, it should be no surprise that "We Were Wrong" actually equates to "They are wrong." The magazine only admits error as a way to sucker punch those they believe are even wronger than they -- "the realists," whose understanding that "American power may not be capable of transforming ancient cultures or deep hatreds...does not absolve us of the duty to conduct a foreign policy that takes its moral obligations seriously." This comes in an editorial explaining that the magazine's attempt to "take its moral obligations seriously" led it to commit a great and grave misjudgment.

To limn that sentence would be an actual exploration of why the magazine was wrong. To let it languish as platitude, however, is to seek credit for an apology that denies the actual utility of regret: Learning. This is an apology to all "whom might have been offended by the magazine's actions." It is not an admission of wrongdoing, nor evidence of change. And so it is worthless. There is no growth here, only an admission of defeat that denies all implication of systemic error. The magazine wasn't wrong, reality was. And TNR deeply regrets that.

The Trend Is Your Friend

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

At this point, there's no doubting that the Iraq War is an issue that helps Democrats and hurts Republicans in the 2006 elections.  You can see it in the polling on which party people trust to do better on the war -- the last year's polls show people consistently picking the Democrats.  September 2004 was the last time a majority of Americans thought the war was worth fighting.  Probably the neatest piece of polling comes from New Jersey -- when you mention Iraq, the Democratic candidate's advantage goes from one point to eight points!

Things have, in their slow and steady way, changed a lot between 2003 and now.  It's reasonable to extrapolate  these trends forward to 2008, because the mechanism that drives them will most likely remain intact.  Iraq is deteriorating and Americans are slowly becoming aware of that.  I'm pretty confident that in two years, whether it was right to go to war in Iraq will be a more divisive issue within the Republican Party than among Democrats.  Already Michael Steele has been talking down the Iraq War under a bizarre veil of faux-anonymity. 

I like how Mark Schmitt said it:

But consider that at the time of the 2004 primaries, the war was less than one year old! By the time of the first primary votes in 2008, it will be almost five years of war. We’re now in the fourth year of the war; does anyone seriously think that by the sixth, absent some enormous change, that “antiwar activists” won’t be the vast majority of people?

There's more to be said about the passage of time.  By the time of the 2008 general election, 9/11 will be more than twice as distant as it was in 2004.  The defining foreign policy experience of the past years won't be the stark terror of planes crashing into the World Trade Center, it'll be the slow horror of watching events fall out of our control in Iraq and the Middle East.  We won't be looking so much for somebody who can lead us into a glorious head-to-head conflict with the terrorists, but for somebody who can salvage a respectable conclusion out of the bloody mess that 8 years of Bush has left us in.  Under these conditions, it's really important that Democrats focus on fighting the next battle and not the last one.  The politics of national security in 2008 are going to be substantially different from 2004. 

This doesn't mean that we should run to some kind of pacifist foreign policy.  But we should recognize that what Americans need to be promised in foreign policy isn't corpses -- it's victory.  The key to finding a pro-withdrawal message that Americans will approve of is fitting it within a larger strategy that comes with a credible promise of victory.  The model for a Democratic position that I'd recommend to anyone was set out in Wesley Clark's 2004 article, Broken Engagement.  America will overcome its  foes in the Middle East the same way we overcame Communism -- not by invading other countries, but through a policy of containment and engagement that remakes the Arab world in our own image over a period of several decades.  We did it, we won, and we should do it again. 

How Much is Blowback Worth?

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Ezra has been engaging with this Tigerhawk fella recently, and I thought I might comment on his latest post.  As he says, it's a good thing that some Iraqi Sunnis are getting angry at al-Qaeda.  But it doesn't do a whole lot to solve the biggest problem facing Iraq -- namely, the ethnic hatreds between Sunnis and Shiites.  Taking al-Qaeda out of the picture would help a little with this problem, since they're interested in stirring up the conflict as much as possible.  But even if you could throw all of al-Qaeda out of Iraq tomorrow, the major factors driving the civil war would still be in place.  Matt Yglesias described the basic problem in his excellent post from August 2004:

We've got a Kurdish minority in the north that has fairly liberal views, some taste for democratic governance, and does not believe in the goal of a stable Iraqi state. In the center, by contrast, we've got our Sunnis who do believe in a stable Iraqi state (otherwise they get cut out of the oil) but very strongly oppose the notion of a majoritarian Iraq, as that would lead to Shiite domination. In the south are the Shia who, like the Sunnis, support the idea of a stable Iraqi state. The Shia seem split between a minority (Sadrists and SCIRI folk) who believe in clerical rule rather than democracy, and a majority (Sistani's folks and al-Dawa) who would like to create an illiberal, Shia-oriented, majoritarian democracy.

We're talking about ethnoreligious groups with centuries of old hatred between them, and plenty of recent slaughter as well.  Native Iraqi death squads from both sides are killing people left and right.  Get rid of the anti-American jihadists, and it still looks like a messier verson of Bosnia. 

Zooming out from Iraq, it's hard to see how anti-al-Qaeda blowback like this is going to have a big effect in our struggle against terrorism.  I can see a small effect if al-Qaeda and associated terrorist icons like Zarqawi and Bin Laden are discredited by their willingness to kill other Muslims.  If these are the only guys available for help with bomb-building and planning, there would be some disruption of terrorism.  But nothing says that a wannabe terrorist would have to join an al-Qaeda-branded group.  If you hate the West, but also hate al-Qaeda for killing Muslims, you might just start up your own terrorist group that just kills only Westerners and is a rival to al-Qaeda.  You just have to find yourself a couple other guys who want to do your kind of thing, including some who have the relevant experience.  I'd be pretty surprised if guys like that weren't out there. 

Reality and its Discontents

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

I recently cast my vote for "Best Conservative Blog" in the 2005 Weblog Awards.  One of the things that inspired my vote was this series of posts by Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom. 

No, I didn't vote for Jeff.  (He's not even on the ballot.)  One thing that fascinated me about his posts, which imagine fictional conversations between Iraqi militants, is that they demonstrate how focused many right-wing bloggers are on the lesser problem facing Iraq -- insurgents concerned with general anti-Western jihad -- and how totally unfocused they are on the greater problem -- the immense difficulty of constructing a stable government of any kind on top of the Bosnia-style ethnic strife that divides the country.  Even more darkly fascinating is the way that right-wing bloggers escape to fiction when the actual facts about Iraq become too politically troubling for them to handle. 

There's approximately no chance that we'll ever see the jihadists running Iraq, even if we leave tomorrow.  This isn't to say that they won't be a problem -- they kill people, temporarily dominate small portions of territory, and cause lots of human misery -- but the fate of the country will never be in their hands.  The Shiite and Kurdish forces are strong enough on their own to keep that from happening.  However, with the profits from unequally distributed oil to be divided, a swirled-together population that will make partition a bloody mess, a long history of ethnoreligious hatred that has occasionally resulted in mass slaughter, and an Iraqi army in large part made of angry Shiite militiamen, it's hard to see what kind of stable government is supposed to emerge.  Any political capital that we could've used to safeguard minority rights, push for genuine democracy, or improve the condition of women is being extracted from us by the Shiite leaders whose continued support our presence depends on. 

This is what I've called the real Iraq problem, and it's a problem that Republicans engage with at the risk of losing their prized sense of superiority over Howard Dean and French people.  Live in a fantasy world where the real threat to Iraq's future is a ragtag military foe that can be destroyed with little more than JDAMs and resolve, and you can happily castigate antiwar forces as weaklings who help the enemy.  But engage with reality, and you'll see that averting civil war depends on a demographic and political situation that lends itself to no sexy solutions and is beyond our power to significantly change. 

So whom did I vote for?  Gregory Djerejian of the Belgravia Dispatch.  I left Jeff's site for Greg's place, and got linked to Kanan Makiya's editorial in the NYT covering the problems with the Iraqi constitution.  Makiya points out that the radically decentralized government proposed in the Constitution would cut the Sunnis out of the oil and tip the country towards civil war.  Rather than making up fictional dialogues between militants and using them to smear Democrats as unwitting supporters of the enemy, Greg studies up on details of the Iraqi Constitution and keeps his eyes open about the situation on the ground. 

This isn't to say that Greg and I agree.  We don't.  Even when he gets mad at Donald Rumsfeld, Greg seems to think that a continued American presence could increase the chance of a stable Iraqi government, and that continued struggle there is justified.  I don't see that another few years of American involvement is going to create any dramatic net benefit, and I'd much rather save the American lives and money and have the military on hand to avert mass slaughter in other parts of the world.  But I like opponents who go out and look at reality, and I'll take this opportunity to reward such an opponent with my vote. 

The Power of Ridicule

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Tony found an old cartoon a few days ago, and I think it's pretty indicative of how most people were thinking in late 2002:

There's a couple things to be said here about how the Bush Administration got Senators to vote for the Iraq War.

I've never worked in a Senator's office before, so I don't know how incoming information is handled there.  But I can't imagine that Senators are significantly insulated from public attitudes.  When an opinion is publicly ridiculed and maligned -- as the opinion that Iraq didn't have WMD was -- I'm sure that the ridicule makes Senators less likely to accept it.  This process need not even involve Senators imagining the ridicule that would be heaped on them, if they accepted it.  It's just a fact about how people think that once everybody says "Oh, it's crazy to think that Iraq doesn't have WMD" you stop giving serious consideration to the contrary hypothesis.  You stop digging for information about that question and start taking "Iraq has WMD" as an assumption. 

Now, this isn't a good thing by any means -- it's the kind of thinking that leads to disastrous wars.  This explanation for Senators' false beliefs isn't one that puts them in a positive light.  But it seems like a pretty plausible explanation, particularly for Senators whose primary focus wasn't Iraq.  I'm guessing that the administration's more official acts of deception -- for example, in withholding contrary evidence from Senators -- wasn't quite as effective in misleading them as its actions in creating an environment in which anybody claiming that Saddam had no WMD would be ridiculed. 

Of course, this wouldn't have been ridicule about some inert issue either.  We had in the previous year been hit by a humongous act of domestic terrorism, and then there was the anthrax coming out of nowhere.  Terrorists can make the world look terrifying, and the public was willing to believe the worst about what Saddam had.  The public simply wasn't ready to believe that the world was so unthreatening as to contain a defanged Saddam.  Anybody who publicly argued for further consideration of the issue would've been disbelieved by the mainstream media and treated as a defender of a murderous and threatening dictator by Fox News.

A good and wise president would've seen this situation, cautioned his aides to refrain from stirring up people's fears in a way that could lead to horribly misguided foreign policy, and shared both sides of the evidence with Senators.  Instead, we had an administration that saw public credulity about foreign threats as a circumstance to exploit in pursuit of war. 

The Real Iraq Problem

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

One big reason Bush won the last election, and why he can maintain any support for the Iraq War, is his ability to misdescribe the war as an us-versus-some-enemy-we-shouldn't-embolden problem.  This is the frame that allows him to present withdrawal as cowardly and foolish, while continued occupation is the only sensible and courageous move.  The criticism of cutting and running (can someone tell me what the 'cutting' refers to in that expression?) and the "We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" nonsense depend on this kind of framing.  The criticism of war critics as enemies of America is probably its most sinister expression. 

As far as the future of Iraq is concerned, what we actually have is a how-do-we-get-everybody-to-play-nice problem.  We need to get a bunch of interspersed ethnoreligious groups to put aside their longstanding grievances and see one another as fellow citizens in a democracy.  Given the extent to which the populations are swirled together and the  bloodiness of poorly supervised partitions (several million were killed when Pakistan split from India, and the countries are still often at each others' throats) dividing the country three ways isn't a great answer.  So we've got to find a way for them to live together. 

There's a bunch of reasons why Bush won't openly present plans to deal with the real issue anytime soon.  One of them is that it would require him to take a big loss on a huge rhetorical investment.  As soon as he starts talking with the American public about the various ethnic groups and his plan for getting them to live peacefully together, it becomes clear that the boldness and firmness that he's cultivated a reputation for is not the quality most essential to success.  What you actually need is somebody who can negotiate a complicated deal that will take everybody's interests into account and give them what they want, so they won't cause trouble.  Bush has never presented himself as the guy to do something like this, at least not since 9/11. 

Once you see the Iraq war as a how-do-we-get-everybody-to-play-nice problem, the emotionally charged reasons that Bush offers for staying in Iraq start to melt away.  Running from a dangerous enemy that you should fight is cowardice, but if silly people are damaging their futures by engaging in irrational and vengeful behavior, it's no great vice to wash your hands of them and leave.  Sure, you try to help them work things out, and you protect innocents from mass slaughter.  But when you see that your efforts are becoming unproductive, you're free to go home and let them fend for themselves. 

There's a path here to a Democratic position that resists being spun as defeatism.  The first step is to make Americans aware of the ethnoreligious situation, and make them see that as what it is -- the real Iraq problem.  I doubt that Americans generally see the war this way at present, but it's more pleasant than seeing it as a war that we're losing, so wishful thinking may dispose them to accept our characterization, even if good reasoning doesn't.  Then we can explain to them how a phased withdrawal plan can be used to
reward Sunnis for peaceful participation in the political process,
and prevent Shiites from thinking we'll be their Sunni-beating-stick
for perpetuity. We'll have a good plan for Iraq, while the very terms of the debate will prevent the Republicans from successfully using the unfair tricks often employed against parties who have to argue that we should pull out of a losing war. 

(I'm getting a weird Lakoff feeling as I write this post.  We have to reframe the war in nurturant mommy terms, so the nurturant mommy party can win.  So let's present the Iraqis as kids in the big Arab sandbox who won't share their toys!  And then the stern father types will support withdrawal, because taking care of kids is women's work!)

A Democrat Actually Wrote This Post

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Some say that the Iraq War was fought for oil, but I find it more likely that it was fought for straw. Domestic reserves of the latter product have been severely depleted by Republican construction of straw men since the War on Terror began. The latest straw man provided by Iraq is Republican leaders' attempt to make people misattribute Duncan Hunter's sham withdrawal resolution to John Murtha, who had submitted a very different resolution to Congress. Republican representatives and Redstate hacks tried to pass off the resolution as a Democratic offering from John Murtha. I'm not clear whether people figured out the truth, but my less politically inclined friends were asking me about the withdrawal vote last night, and I was the first to explain to them what was really going on.

As the party in power, it's a lot easier for Republicans to misrepresent Democratic positions than vice versa. Except during Presidential elections, we don't have any national figures to clearly and firmly present our positions. So when the President opposes those who want to "cut and run", it's easy for non-plugged-in people to simply think that the Democratic plan amounts to no more than this.

Edwards Calls For Withdrawal, Rejoicing Ensues

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Being an enormous John Edwards fan, I've long awaited the day when he would come out and say that his Iraq vote was a mistake. It was one of the things I wanted to ask him about when I met him, but I decided to ask about health care and global poverty instead. So you can imagine that I'm thrilled to see his op-ed expressing exactly that sentiment in the Washington Post.

I'm quite happy with the content of the op-ed itself. It begins with a straightforward "I was wrong" and blames bad WMD intelligence for his vote. I regard his quasi-explanation of why he didn’t speak out against the war before – “It has been hard to say these words because those who didn't make a mistake -- the men and women of our armed forces and their families -- have performed heroically and paid a dear price” – as bullshit, but it’s the kind of sterilized bullshit that doesn’t pollute the rivers and makes decent fertilizer.

Two things in the article were particularly good to see. Edwards makes exactly the point I was hoping for in my old Ask A Werewolf column: The Iraq War has made us more vulnerable to terrorism. (The recent bombings in Jordan, carried out by Zarqawi and Iraqi terrorists, are a perfect example.) Pushing this point, as much as anything else we can do, will destroy the Republican Party's undeserved national security reputation. Edwards gets into the action:

Because of these failures, Iraq is a mess and has become a far greater threat than it ever was. It is now a haven for terrorists, and our presence there is draining the goodwill our country once enjoyed, diminishing our global standing. It has made fighting the global war against terrorist organizations more difficult, not less.

There’s also a bold call for phased withdrawal in there, justified in terms of building a better Iraq – “We've reached the point where the large number of our troops in Iraq hurts, not helps, our goals. Therefore, early next year, after the Iraqi elections, when a new government has been created, we should begin redeployment of a significant number of troops out of Iraq.” Doing the withdrawal after elections is a good move -- we leave from a position of relative strength, and at that point the future of Iraq will be firmly in Iraqis' hands and out of ours. I’d love to see Edwards explain to America how a plan for withdrawal could be used to motivate various Iraqi factions to live together in a stable government. Clearly explaining nitty-gritty foreign policy matters to America would be a great way to make him look stronger on national security and dispel any misperceptions of him as a lightweight.

There's a nice symbiosis between deceived Dems like Edwards and Kerry on the one hand, and people looking into misleading intelligence on the other. When the investigators point to pre-war declassified versions of intelligence documents that made Iraq look much more dangerous than the classified versions which were not widely circulated, it gives deceived Dems a nice opportunity to officially recant their old positions and talk about how they were misled into voting for war. When Senators complain about how they were deceived, this in turn fuels the push for a thorough investigation. Edwards boosterism makes me almost wish that more Senators wouldn’t get caught up in this virtuous cycle – the more candidates fighting over the roughly three dozen pro-war Democrats who will remain in 2008, the more candidates who won’t be able to block his path to victory. But the sheer political dumbness of staying pro-war and the easy opportunities for recantation provided by the WMD investigation will probably crowd the anti-war field by 2008.

There's going to be plenty of parades for Edwards to march in front of over the next couple months, and I really hope he takes the opportunity. The antiwar movement is bottom-heavy, and lots of people are just looking for some Democrat to stand behind. The sooner Edwards becomes that Democrat, or at least one of those Democrats, the better positioned he'll be for 2008.

There's WMD, and Then There's WMD

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot at Electoral Math

Kevin Drum has been trying to score some contrarian points while tracing back through the march to war in Iraq. He points out that as of September 2002, there was widespread agreement that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. This, I suspect, was not a subject of dispute. The Clinton administration had a difficult time forcing Saddam to abide by the terms of the post-Gulf War UN resolutions, going so far as to order bombings on two occasions. House and Senate Democrats who voted for the war weren't doing so out of a desire of democracy promotion, but because they thought, or at least said they thought, that Saddam was a threat. Here's Tom Daschle in 2002: "The threat posed by Saddam Hussein may not be imminent. But it is real. It is growing. And it cannot be ignored." This was the angle most pro-war Democrats took: Saddam would continue to try and rebuild his chemical and biological programs, and we'd just keep trying to knock them out, plus he's a bad guy anyway, so let's stop playing games and take him out now.

There was no doubt about Saddam's continued efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons. Where there was doubt was about Saddam's ability to develop nuclear weapons, and to deliver those weapons to the United States. Now, outside of the "16 words" I don't really remember how hard the Bush administration tried to sell the nuclear threat, but as Matt Yglesias points out, the real selling point of the war was that Saddam's weapons would be used against US civilians. On this point there was good reason to doubt the administration's claims, since inspectors found minimal evidence that Saddam had any capacity to deliver weapons beyond a range of 600 miles. Hans Blix's January 2003 testimony suggested the possible presence of a modest amount of chemical and biological agents, but no means to attack the US directly with them, while this October 2003 testimony on the Iraq Survey Group's work shows little evidence of any WMD and no way of delivering any payload beyond 1000 kilometers. While missles with a range longer than 110 kilometers did violate the terms of Saddam's disarmament, they could easily have been destroyed without invading the country.

I'm all for being honest about history; we should admit that the pro-war Democrats bought into much of the WMD hype. But they didn't buy into all of it, and lumping Saddam's ground-war-ready chemical weapons (which lots of people agreed on) with the hype of mushroom clouds over Saint Louis (where there was considerable public disagreement) conflates too many distinct forms of "weapons of mass destruction".

Incompetence Dodges, Flip-Flops, and Other Political Dance Moves

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Sam and Matt say that it’s wrong to cast the Iraq war as a good idea ruined by Bush administration incompetence. They’re right about this – clear thinking about the deep ethnic divisions in Iraq, our insufficient troop deployment, and the difficulty of instituting democracy at gunpoint should have convinced intelligent observers that invading Iraq would be a very bad idea. I’d add that the opportunity costs of invasion – in terms of the good that could have been done with those hundreds of billions of dollars and the American military (stopping the genocide in Sudan, perhaps?) ought to be reckoned into the calculus as well. I hope their piece forces unrepentant liberal-hawk commentators to drop their bad arguments and face responsibility. However, a whole different set of issues come into play when we talk about the positions that Democratic politicians should adopt.

If it turns out that the incompetence-dodge position is strategically best, I don’t mind Democratic leaders embracing it. Here I imagine that different moves are right for different Democrats. Whether they blame this disaster on incompetent execution or on the complete dumbness of the decision to invade, what’s important is that Democrats will use their power to pull the plug on it once Bush is gone. Those who haven't come around yet are going to, after America spends three more years floundering in Iraq. Until then, there’s nothing to do but try to destroy the Republicans' foreign policy reputation. Bashing Republican incompetence is a fine way to do this, and if it’s what Joe Biden is minded to do, let’s hear him do it loudly.

I worry, though, that the residue of Bush’s flip-flop attacks on Kerry may have made politicians unwilling to change their positions on issues when the facts clearly turn against them. If you’re worried about being called a flip-flopper, the incompetence dodge looks like a nice move. You can maintain that you called the right play, but that Bush threw the interception. You’re still free to take pride in your own pigheadedness and claim that you haven’t made a mistake.

Now, I don’t know how potent the flip-flop attack is in general, and there may be good ways to change your position so that people can’t hit you with it. But if the flip-flop attack has real power, it’s a very bad thing for our political culture. One of the ways to get rid of bad policy is for people to change their minds and cancel the bad policies. A system of norms that prevents people from doing this is something worth bemoaning.

Iraq the Muddle

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

It looks like the Iraqi Constitution is going to barely meet the requirements for passage -- majority support overall, and 1/3 support in at least 15 of the 18 provinces. I wish I could hope that this is a hopeful sign. The Sunnis came out fairly strongly against it, and it's unclear that they'll regard this as an election justly lost. And after reading the article that Kevin Drum linked about Shi'ites entering the Iraqi army for purpose of slaughtering Sunnis, it's hard to feel good about the future of interfaith relations in Iraq.

My guess is that the majority of Americans still see Iraqi Muslims more or less as an cohesive ethnoreligious unit, and not as a strife-torn collection of Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, and Turkomen. I'm pretty confident that this misperception will all-too slowly change, as so many false beliefs about Iraq have. It's this misperception of Iraqi unity that permits the president's "As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" nonsense. What if it's a bunch of Shi'ites who stand up, proudly donning Iraqi Army uniforms, and rushing off to kill some Sunnis? And as for leaving when the elected government tells us to -- what if the elected Shi'ite government encourages us to stay and make sure the Sunnis whom they've cut out of the oil wealth don't cause any trouble?

After botching the early stages of reconstruction and losing whatever chance we had to lead Iraqis in some novel direction, we made the only realistic choice and threw in our lot with the Shi'ite government. Sistani is to be congratulated for maneuvering us into this spot, by encouraging his people not to violently resist the America occupation, and pushing us towards democratic elections that his majority would dominate. Now, in a complete unbalance of power, a Shi'ite-US-Kurdish alliance is facing off against the Sunni minority. The Sunnis resort to asymmetric warfare with car bombs and terrorism, and everyone rides the cycle of revenge.

At the core of the argument for withdrawal is the knowledge that our hands are tied. A lot of bad things are happening and are going to happen in Iraq. From the decaying state of women's rights, to the training of a new generation of international terrorists, to the deaths of our soldiers, to the deaths of so many Iraqis, to the prospects for far greater slaughter in a civil war, there's a lot of really bad stuff on the table. In order to avert some of these problems (people being blown up by Sunni terrorism) we support our Shi'ite allies, allowing them to exacerbate the other problems.

The most important priority now is averting civil war (or, if you prefer, keeping the civil war from going completely out of control). This requires that Shi'ites be willing to make concessions and that Sunnis be willing to engage in the political system. Proposals to withdraw, I think, are among the few effective cards we have in our hands here. Shi'ites need to know that aggressive actions against Sunnis are not actions we'll stand behind. Sunnis need to know that the best path to getting rid of us is not one that involves car bombs. Taking some nominally uplifting occasion -- say, the ratification of a constitution -- as the occasion for announcement of a withdrawal plan would be good domestically, since it would mollify those who worry that we might embolden insurgents by announcing defeat.

Sadly, this is all academic. As the votes are totaled, the Bush Administration is going to proclaim ratification a great success and use it in an argument for "staying the course." Bush is too insulated from criticism and reality to change anything for the rest of his term, and all these things are under executive control. It's hard to see what a 2006 House victory could accomplish here. By 2008, goodness knows what Iraq will look like, and how little control we'll have over the situation. Even if our Democratic nominee is someone who professes to oppose withdrawal (and perhaps if we get a Republican who publicly oppses withdrawal!) I'm guessing that a fairly rapid withdrawal is what we'll actually get.

Cross Your Purple Fingers

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper Today's vote on the Iraqi constitution happened with minimal violence. At least one critical day has passed without crowds of people dying. Even though the counting just started, we're likely going to see waves of Purple Finger Photos as the administration trumpets the referendum's success.

But Just Another Bump in the Beltway points to the WaPo:

The document they will ratify or reject shifts crucial decisions about government, the judiciary and human rights to a future national assembly, and it may itself be rewritten in the first half of next year. Though planned as a landmark in Iraq's postwar reconstruction -- and still described that way by the Bush administration -- the referendum has been stripped of much of its substance.

What are the Iraqis voting for anyway? On this blog, I have stated my serious issues with the constitution, and the constitution will soon be molded like a lump of clay whether people vote yes or no. It seems slightly odd that an administration with such a determination to place strict readers of the constitution on the high court is endorsing a constitutional process that essentially leaves everything up in the air.

On PBS' "NewsHour," Juan Cole was there to critique the constitution, but others on the panel endorsed it, not because of the constitution itself but because it was important to get the Iraqis used to the democratic process. Is the referendum damaged goods? Or is the act of voting more important than what's being voted on? I feel conflicted in this regard, especially after an American election in which "Vote or Die!" was a major slogan. Americans often don't get off their cans to vote, but isn't the subject matter of the voting just as important?

Strategic Redeployment

Over at CAP, Larry Korb and Brian Katulis have released a new plan for withdrawal from Iraq, what they call Strategic Redeployment. The plan itself is well presented, fairly intuitive stuff. During Bush's tenure terror attacks have increased, Iraq has gotten worse, our allies have been bombed, and all the rest. From there, it should be clear that the current strategy isn't working, a new approach is needed. Hence, redeployment rather than withdrawal. Korb's plan is presented as a way to enhance our effectiveness in the War on Terror by changing our troop focus and mission priorities, an approach that strikes me as a smart cooption of Bush's conflation of Iraq with the War on Terror. The redeployment itself would:

• Take 80,000 troops out of Iraq during 2006;

• Demobilize all Guard and Reserve troops so they could focus on Homeland Security;

• Take two active brigades (which means up to 20,000 troops) and use them as reinforcements for Afghanistan and African/Asian counterterrorism operations;

• And put the remaining 14,000 troops in Kuwait and nearby marine bases to strike at terrorist camps in the area and guard against further destabilizing threats to the region.

There's a bit more about communication strategies and reconstruction efforts and better diplomatic initiatives, but that's the nut. What I like about this plan, though, comes in the title. The emphasis on redeployment strikes me as a very savvy resolution to the prime conundrum of those advocating for withdrawal. The American people don't much like losing, retreat, defeat. And withdrawal, while they might agree with it in theory, can easily be spun as one of those nastier heuristics. Redeployment, however, grabs Bush's merging of Iraq and the War on Terror to argue that we need a focus shift, which is exactly the sort of thing you're supposed to do while enmeshed in enduring warfare. That Iraq had made us less safe is an easy case to argue, but when the alternative is a simple return home the discussion gets trickier. When the alternative, as it is here, is a redeployment into formations and positions that'll better protect against terrorism and let us back off from this fruitless war in Iraq, well, Democrats are on stronger ground.

Ask a Werewolf: Iraq and Terrorism

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Sometimes werewolves get letters from Democratic Senators. Other times, they don't. The following is a letter I didn't get, but the answer, below the fold, is something I did write.

Dear Werewolf,
I'd like to earn some respect from the Democratic base for criticizing Bush's war in a way that other Senators haven't. However, I don't have the guts to call for withdrawal from Iraq, and I want my criticism to be something that most Americans already agree with. What should I say?

--No Guts, Some Glory (D-Somewhere)

Dear NGSG (D-S),

Why don't you attack Bush for putting us at a greater risk of terrorist attack in the future? Back in June, a 52-47 majority agreed that the Iraq War hadn't made us safer. Given the way that the American public has disconnected from Bush over the last month -- driven in large part by Bush's abysmal Katrina response -- the numbers might be even better now. For the first time, a 51-43 majority disapproves of how Bush is handling terrorism. It's time for Senators to start piling on.

Of course, the facts are entirely on your side. According to separate studies by Saudi intelligence and an Israeli think tank, the vast majority of foreign terrorists in Iraq were radicalized by the Iraq War itself, and weren't militants previously. The burgeoning alliance between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the Sunni minority will allow him to train a large number of potential terrorists. Every suicide bombing is testament to the fact that Iraq has become a university of terrorism, where young men can study and learn for a few years before they go out into the world to blow up bigger and better things.

Remember how Kerry's poll numbers shot up after the foreign policy debate? It wasn't just the fact that Bush was always grimacing and smirking -- it was the fact that Kerry finally got up and squarely addressed some foreign policy issues in front of everyone. It's time for you to do the same. With luck, you'll win some cred for being smart about fighting terrorism. More gutsy people calling for withdrawal will benefit too, since your criticism of the war benefits their cause. You don't have to present anything as big as a plan for Iraq -- the average American really doesn't know what to do about things, and at this distance from the next election, a Senator is allowed to earnestly say that he's still trying to figure out what the best option is. So go out and fight hard, in your own gutless little way!

Arrrooooo,
--Werewolf

No Good Options

A suicide bomber detonated himself in a crowd of Shiites today, shredding more 80 people and wounding 150 others. Elsewhere, gunmen dragged 17 people out of their homes in Taji, killing them on their stoops. All this on top a few mortar blasts, some shootings, carjackings ending in gunshot deaths, and all the rest of the Hobbesian chaos "freedom" has brought.

We can't win if we can't stop this. And we can't, it seems, stop this. So long as our forces fail to secure the country, we will be failed occupiers, not heralds of civic utopia. And so long as we can't secure this country, the men and woman within it will want us out, if for no other reason than because a change might, might calm the random killings. And even if our absence didn't bring peace in its vacuum, the shiites, freed from our direction, could launch war against the Sunnis, a response that'd at least erase the feeling of powerlessness in the face of constant assaults. And so President Talabani, while grinning and promising he'd never accept a timetable, widens his grin and happily says the US can withdraw 40,000 or 50,000 troops by the end of the year. It's time for you to go. We have to deal with this.

Iraq's in a bad way now. And I don't know what to do about it. I don't believe our presence there is making anything better. Indeed, I think we're making it worse. But I don't believe withdrawal will sprinkle fairy dust on Baghdad and turn the place into an Arab "It's a Small World" either. We've fucked up, we've fucked this country up, and while we can slowly tiptoe away, they can't.

Slashing America's Tires

By Ezra

Matt's post on asymmetric warfare in Iraq should really be read, maybe not so much by all of you, but by any strong supporters of the war who happen along this site. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but the knowledge that the insurgency fights differently has not quite connected to the idea that we're not fighting well, that our tactics need to change, that this is a fight we can't militarily win.

Asymmetric warfare, for those who don't know, is a military term for conflicts in which the antagonists have hugely mismatched combat capabilities. Therefore, the whole game of it, particularly for the weaker belligerent, is to not have their weaknesses match up with our strengths. That would be symmetrical warfare and they'd be crushed. That's what the insurgency isn't doing and it's why, when we try and fight them, as with the invasion of Baghdad, the overrun of Fallujah, or the assault on Tal Afar, they "melt away", refusing to fight and instead regrouping to hit later. Think of it like this: imagine you have the fastest car on the planet. Imagine you like to race people. Is anyone going to race you? No. But let's say your winning races would still be a negative outcome for them. So instead, every time you're in class or have your back turned, they slash your tires, poor sand in your tank, cut your brakes.

That's asymmetric warfare, you can beat them in a race, but they can disable your car. And that's what we're dealing with in Iraq. Because the enemy knows our strength, they refuse to face us, because they refuse to face us, we can't kill them, because we can't kill them, they can keep launching attacks on us, and because they can keep launching attacks on us, we keep trying to find ground where we can face them, but because the enemy knows our strength, they refuse to face us...

State of Iraq

The NY Times has released their new State of Iraq chart and oh what little difference a year makes. This one compares across Augusts (so August 03, August 04, August 05) on a variety of markers. Some of the findings:

• Of the three Augusts, 05 was the deadliest for US troops. Last month had 90 fatalities, 25 more than August 04, which in turn had 29 more than August 03. Major combat operations might be over on our side, but the insurgency is ramping right up.

• Happily, the number of troops wounded dropped significantly, 283 fewer than in August 2004, but August 2004 had 710 more than August 2003, so we're nowhere near post-war levels.

• Things are, as expected, getting worse for Iraqi civilians. August 05 had 600 being killed, a year before the number was 550, a year before that only 225.

• Estimated foreign jihadists is shooting up -- 100 in 03, 500 in 04, 900 now.

• Oil production is still 300,000 barrels below pre-war levels, but the GDP has increased above 2002's number. I'd like to know more about why that is, though -- how much of that is American-based reconstruction and how much is sustainable?

• The unemployment rate has dropped to 33%, though another way to say that is the unemployment rate is at 33%. If we want stability in Iraq, we're going to have to push that way down.

• About half the country's sewage is being treated (a marked improvement over past years), but significantly less electricity is available compared to 2004.

• There are more trained judges and Iraqi security forces than we've seen before.

Our delivery of basic services is, in some areas, marginally better, and in many others, a bit worse. More Americans are dying, more Iraqis are dying, there's less confidence in the government, less confidence in the country, more effective insurgent attacks, and a serious uptick in foreign jihadists. We're making some progress on training Iraqis to take over, but the country they're inheriting looks to be a mess. And for those who say we should remain until it's no longer a mess, I have to wonder why the steady deterioration with each extra year we remain there doesn't dishearten you some. While it looks like we're doing some good work on training/infrastructure issues, our security forces have been totally incapable of keeping the situation from degenerating.

Knocking Down Domino Theory

By Ezra

Robert Farley does a bang-up job of, well, banging up domino theory today, and I'm glad to see him doing it.  From Ben Stein's insane editorials after Deep Throat revealed himself to Peggy Noonan's odd pivot at the end of the first chapter of her memoirs, the essential rightness of domino theory keeps popping up among right-wing "intellectuals" as proof of the left's basic naiveté and idiocy.  It shouldn't.  Domino theory is the sort of supratheory used as trump card by those who want to justify war when the conflict itself is unjustified.  It also, helpfully, lets them argue for indefinite warfare, even when our continued presence would render our immediate objectives harder to attain and do enormous damage to us, our enemies, and all civilians unlucky enough to become collateral.  That's the sort of theory that deserves extra-super-special scrutiny and domino theory, as it stands, doesn't hold up.

The threat in domino theory, of course, was that American weakness anywhere would embolden our enemies everywhere.  Proponents of it think that's what happened in Vietnam.  It isn't.  But now, those same, completely incorrect folks folks have gotten us into the domino theory downside in Iraq.  Well done!

If you were an Islamic terrorist, our retaliation post-9/11 could end in one of three outcomes, two of them good for you, one bad.  The bad outcome, which was largely achieved in Afghanistan, would be American victory with relatively little trouble that segued into a basically peaceful reconstruction.  The good outcomes would be American withdrawal after only a few casualties (paper tiger outcome) or some scenario where the Americans commit their forces but, despite their best efforts and willingness to expend treasure and life, lose, proving their much-vaunted might powerless before Allah.

In Iraq, we got that last outcome.  We attempted an aggressive conquest of a Muslim land and found ourselves essentially powerless before a rag tag insurgency.  It's like getting beat by the Bad News Bears, only this time, they think themselves holy warriors.  Kind of a pity.  Domino theory was wrong on the facts, but psychologically, it made sense.  Particularly when the enemy is a group of religious extremists looking for divine confirmation of their mission.  So for the few people who still believe in it to put us in a situation that does exactly what the theory feared, well, history sure likes its jokes.

Nice Country You Have Here...Shame If Anything Should Happen To It

So how's that Iraqi Constitution going? Well, glad you asked...

Sunni Arab political leaders condemned a draft of Iraq's proposed constitution handed to them on Saturday, saying it was unlikely that they would approve the document and that it could provoke even more violence. And they scrambled to arrange meetings to revise the document even as Shiite and Kurdish leaders insisted that it would be published without substantial changes.
...
"We still have some hope that we could reach something," said Saleh Mutlak, a leading Sunni member of the constitutional committee, referring to the ongoing struggles to reach agreement with his Shiite and Kurdish colleagues. "If we reach it, fair enough. If we don't, then they have to take responsibility for what happens if this constitution is passed."

Asked what the consequences of such a rupture might be, Mr. Mutlak said: "The violence will go up, the hope among the people will go down. And the extremists will be the ones who are in control of the country."

The italics, of course, are mine. What's interesting here, aside from the roadmap to oblivion that's being laid out, is the Sunni's frank admission that the cost of an unwelcome constitution will be a lot of lives. We're not dealing, at least publicly, with a Sunni establishment that wants peaceful compromise and a Sunni insurgency that wants to detonate the country, we're dealing with a scared minority entirely willing to launch a long-term, low-grade guerrilla war to eventually achieve the outcomes they seek. And since neither the Kurds nor the Shi'ites are willing to write the constitution that the Sunnis want, I don't really see how you prevent a nationalist Sunni insurgency from existing well into the future.

A week or two ago, I compared Iraq's drafting of the constitution to the Founding Fathers attempting the same thing, except with newly freed and politically empowered Blacks and Native-Americans fielding representatives in the room. I think I was mostly right, save for one thing. I forgot to mention that the Blacks are heavily, heavily armed.

The Politics of Withdrawal

Armando and Jerome are talking about the politics of withdrawal, which is about where my mind has settled recently. For all the reasons I've laid out, and for all the better reasons others have laid out, I'm firmly convinced that our continued, indefinite presence in the country achieves absolutely nothing. On the other hand, I'm similarly certain that an inept or overly fatalist call for withdrawal will be marketed to the American people as retreat, and retreat is not the sort of sentiment that wins elections.

Yeah, that's craven, but once you know what you want to do, you have to think about how it sells. Americans aren't particularly pleased with the war, but nor are they ever willing to vote for a loss. If Democrats stand on one side of the stage and talk about our unwinnable quagmire and Republicans stand on the other and explain how, yes, mistakes were made, but we can still finish the job, and General Know-Nothing says we're just a few months from completion and can't turn away now, I think the Republican will win. Not everywhere, but in the close districts where we need to pickup support. And I think that because we've seen this before. We've seen it in Vietnam, but hell, the dynamic goes back to the war of 1812. The antiwar position has never been an electoral winner and I see no reason to believe it's become one now.

That's why our model -- and I'm going to get so flamed for saying this -- shouldn't be McGovern in 1972, it should be Nixon. If McGovern agreed with the left side of the spectrum, Nixon courted the vaguely antiwar middle with a "secret plan to end the war" that would secure "peace with honor". He promised a win even if we were going to lose, and in doing so occupied a lot of political territory that left McGovern on the fringe.

Right now, the polls suggest a similar move. 13% want us to send more troops (the McCain position), 28% want us to muddle on as we are now, 23% want us to withdraw some of our boys, and 33% want a full pullout. For those keeping score at home, that means 41% want to continue this fight and 56% want to end it. But the "withdraw some" folks are weak, they don't have a very set belief in what we should be doing there, so they're groping for a midway point between retreat and the status quo. They're soft and, in a campaign, could break either way.

Starting from the supposition that Democrats should call for a structured withdrawal because it's the right thing to do, how do you sell it? Which is to say, how can you call for withdrawal without appearing to codify an American loss?

Now, I'm no pollster, no strategist, and no campaign consultant but, come to think of it, I've not lost many elections, either, so this is my opinion, and take it for what it's worth. Withdrawal, despite the frame it's currently in, doesn't have to be presented as recognition of a quagmire or ass-kicking. It doesn't have to be a loss. The case can be made that Bush's mistake, aside from his fatal mismanagement, was massive overreach. He wanted to do much more than America should. Our "job", our aim, was to depose a tyrant, halt his (fictitious) weapons programs, free the Iraqi people, get them back on their feet, and get the fuck out.

We did depose the tyrant, we did ensure he had no weapons programs, we did "free" the Iraqi people, we helped them hold elections, helped them form a government, and soon, hopefully, they'll have a constitution. Once their army is largely trained, that's the end of America's job. What's happening, now, is the expected result of us continuing a project that is already completed. Eventually, freedom means independence. It means taking responsibility for your own future and working things out. Our job in Iraq is complete. Hovering over it like a worried parent accompanying their kid to college is just making the country lash out at us.

Americans, so far as I can tell, don't like to lose wars. It screws up the mystique, is bad for the complexion. And they don't want to lose this one. The danger in calling for withdrawal isn't that they'll disagree with the policy, but that the Republicans will reframe it into a certain loss vs. a potential win. That's why, when we speak of it, it shouldn't be a loss, it doesn't have to be a win, it just has to be the end. Completion. Our country, contrary to what Bush thought, can't do more than this, we can't force another nation to grow up as we wish. The Iraqis have to do that themselves. And we need to leave simply because that's the next step in the process. After we've created a 100,000 man standing army, there's nothing more we can do there, and leaving is simply the next step in the process.

In 1972, Nixon promised to end the war, but he did so in such a way that the only space left on the political spectrum was for someone to promise a troop buildup that the country wouldn't support or an immediate withdrawal. McGovern did the latter. And whatever post-Wallace realignment you want to ascribe to him, he got stomped. The country is firmly in favor of some sort of withdrawal. But only 33% want a complete pullout. If we offer a structured, deliberate drawdown and frame it so our appeal doesn't sound antiwar, but simply logical, we'll squeeze off much of the Republican's room for movement. At that point, they can either become peaceniks, promise no changes, or call for a draft. And you know what? I'm willing to take on any of those.

Freedom Marching Backwards -- Quickly

Sez Logan:

It’d be as if massive stockpiles of WMD were found being loaded onto bombers the day we invaded, and then Iraq spontaneously erupted into a libertarian utopia and I were standing here waving my finger in the air, shouting, “It still wasn’t worth it!”

Who is he talking about? What is he referring to? Go here. Why, whenever I read the latest pronouncements from these hacks, can I only think of Iraq's former information minister promising that our armies were retreating as Baghdad fell? Why indeed...

Russ Makes Sense

I think this exchange between [host] David Gregory and Russ Feingold on this week's Meet the Press does a very good job of exposing the basic incoherence of the withdrawal-means-the-terrorists-have-already-won position:

MR. GREGORY: Not only has the president said that any kind of deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops is a mistake, but so have prominent members of your own party... Senator Hillary Clinton this February, the headline: "Hillary Rejects Deadline." "I don't think we should be setting a deadline. ...That just gives a green light to the insurgents and the terrorists, that if they just wait us out they can basically have the country. It's not in our interest, given the sacrifices we have made."

SEN. FEINGOLD: Well, of course, I haven't proposed a deadline. But, you know, the Democrats are making the same mistake they made in 2002, to let the administration intimidate them into not opposing this war, when so many of us knew it wasn't a good idea. And same thing with this taboo on talking about a timeline. It doesn't make sense. If the terrorists and the insurgents really thought that, why wouldn't they just stop blowing us up right now? Why wouldn't they just let us leave and then take over?

Russ is absolutely right. If the insurgency's aim was to eject us from Iraq so they could take over in our absence (though I've yet to see how they plan to do that), they wouldn't be hardening the Pharaoh's heart through bombings and IED's, they'd be laying quiet, letting things go smoothly so we'd pack up and go home and they could suit up and conquer their home.

I'd love to hear Hillary Clinton explain how the insurgents are going to go about having the country after our departure. The Iraqi constitution is being bogged down because Sunnis want access to the oil-rich areas within the Shi'ite territory. Do the math: the country is overwhelmingly Shi'ite, the oil is deep within the region they control, and the Sunnis need some of those profits to survive. So exactly how is this insurgency, which is being carried out by a fraction of a minority, going to overrun the country? And if their actions simply enrage the Shi'ites, as they will, doesn't it make sense that the rest of the Sunnis, who hold no demographic or economic cards, will be desperate for rapprochement and begin quelling the extremists in their own ranks?

So long as we're there, there's a buffer between the Iraqi people and those trying to destroy them. The insurgents may not be liked, but their actions can be rationalized as anti-imperialist warfare. Once we leave, they can't. Once we leave, the Sunnis need to figure out what strategies will put them in a sustainable position. Considering their percentage of the population and their geographic location, a rupture with the Shi'ites isn't going to survive that analysis.

Points of Contention

By Ezra

I've not been terribly pleased with the press's coverage of the Iraqi constitution delays, so tonight I did a think tank trawl trying to find something better. Best article? Nathan Brown's, over at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. According to him, It seems to be widely acknowledged, at least in the Iraqi press, that there are 18 points of contention. These are:

1. The name of Iraq [whether to describe it as federal and/or Islamic]
2. Religion [the precise formula by which the Islamic shari‘a will be described as a
source of law]
3. The constituent elements of the Iraqi people [whether various groups in Iraqi
society should be named and, if so, which ones]
4. Language [whether Kurdish should be co-equal with Arabic or official only in the
Kurdish region; the status of other languages]
5. Identity of Iraq [whether and how Iraq is described as Arab and Islamic]
6. The marja‘iyya [Shi‘i religious authority and whether it should be mentioned in
the constitution]
7. Holy places [The word used (‘atabat) generally refers to Shi‘i holy places]
8. The president of the republic [whether to make the position purely ceremonial or
allow it to have some executive responsibilities; the number of vice-presidents]
9. Ministers [whether ministers can or must also serve as members of parliament]
10. Matters related to natural resources [the distribution of oil revenues among
various levels of government]
11. Personal status [family law—whether it will be governed by a single legislated
code or whether it will be applied according to the sect of the litigants]
12. Voluntary union and the right of self-determination [a reference to a Kurdish
demand that the federation be described as voluntary and that the Kurdish right of
self-determination be affirmed]
13. [omitted from list; other versions of this list include the division of executive
authorities between the president and the prime minister on this point]
14. Dual citizenship [Whether it should be allowed for ordinary citizens and for high
officials]
15. The city of Kirkuk [Kurdish parties wish to have the procedure mentioned in
Article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law affirmed and implementation
to begin immediately]
16. The borders of the Kurdistan region
17. Parliament [whether an upper house should be constructed with representation by
province and/or region]
18. The Transitional Administrative Law [whether its validity will be explicitly—if
somewhat retroactively—affirmed]

That's a fairly extensive list. On the bright side, various issues are at various stages of completion -- they're not all intractable conflicts stuck at the first step. Some of them, like whether MP's must be ministers, are fairly technical problems, while others, like the division of oil revenues and the articulated nature of the country, are quite a bit trickier. In the end, it comes down to federalism and power-sharing. The Kurds are happy with their current, semi-autonomous region, the Sunnis are afraid the Shi'ites will subject them to the same oppressive treatment that they they spent the last few decades imposing on the country, and the Shi'ites don't want their long-delayed return to power weakened by niceties and loopholes demanded by a deposed, fearful minority. All in all, an agreement isn't impossible, but neither is it looking likely. Brown's article, at least, helps explain why.

Withdrawal-lite

By Ezra

Brad Plumer, in answer to last week's question du jour, makes a fairly convincing case against timed withdrawal. Read it. It remains my position, though, that there's a softer form withdrawal can take, one that I think would carry most of its assumed benefits and few of a timetable's weaknesses. If we publicly disavowed bases, loudly proclaimed our intention to leave as soon as the Iraqi government and security forces was complete, and created a timed drawdown in troop strength, much of what we want withdrawal to prove might actually get across without a full abandonment of the project.

We should, at this point, have a general idea of how quickly the Iraqi army is coming online. If we tagged the withdrawal of the first, say, 10,000 troops to the date when we thought there'd be 20,000 (or whatever) Iraqi troops to replace them, we could create the