Pottery Barn Rule: Iraq's isn't the only government the war has broken.

For their current cover story Mother Jones Magazine has invited 50 experts from generals to antiwar activists to comment on questions of when and how to exit Iraq. The results are interesting largely because there is no clear consensus. The people asked had opinions ranging from 'get out now' to 'we can never leave'. Predictions about what would happen when we exited ranged from 'they'll work it out somehow' to 'apocalypse now'. What is clear, however, is that there are no clear answers. Anyone looking for an easy out or an easy solution is looking for something that just doesn't exist. For anyone paying attention the reason should be self-evident. It may be the case that if we 'broke it' we 'bought it', but is also the case that we broke it. That is, actions have consequences. The fact that the Bush administration launched this ill-advised and illegal war and the fact that they handled it sold poorly over the past five years simply can't be undone by a few thousand extra troops or any period of time or any amount of money.

But it's just as wrong to imagine that withdrawing all the troops immediately will have the salutary effects that staying the course hasn't. It simply isn't true that merely doing the opposite of what's failing will succeed. Yes, of course, it is the case with the continued American occupation is in itself fueling the insurgency. But to go from that to saying that withdrawing all troops immediately will remove the only impetus for the conflicts within Iraq relies on new less simple a model of Iraq and then the 'they hate us for our freedoms' analysis or the idea that the Iraqis will naturally strive towards something like American-style democracy if only we given the breathing space to do so. However damaging the hopes for the future of the Iraqi people that the sense of being occupied by a foreign occupier may be having, other dynamics have been released by the fall of Saddam Hussein that have nothing whatsoever to do with America or the occupation. Simply put, there is no way to simply put the dynamics at play in Iraq today or to easily say what the best way to withdraw is or what will likely happen in any of those scenarios.

This hasn't stopped any of our politicians on either side of the aisle from falling into the same familiar traps and lazy intellectual shorthand that has characterized what passes for debate over our Iraq policy from its misbegotten inception. Witness this morning the performance of John McCain on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I counted about three times, but there may have been more, than McCain repeated what is sure to be the new Republican talking point. "Six months ago the Democrats were saying the surge could not work militarily." McCain didn't name the these miscreant Democrats. And I'm not sure exactly who was saying that it wasn't possible for the military to establish some greater amount of security in Iraq. To my knowledge, most of the critics of The Surge™ acknowledged that, with enough people, enough time, enough violence, enough force and enough money, some measure of greater security could be achieved in Iraq. But then what? The argument for the beginning has been not that the military couldn't succeed in military objectives, but rather that there isn't a military solution to the complex set of problems facing the Iraqi people today. Even the President acknowledged when he introduced The Surge™ that increased security was merely the precondition for the real work that needed to be done in Iraq. That work is political and social and economic in nature. And it's exactly that work that has never been attempted by the current administration.

This is not, however, stop John McCain from using 'progress' on the military front to launch a new round of right-wing triumphalism and launch a new round of partisan attacks against the Democrats. For their own part, the Democrats demonstrated their continued tone deafness to the launching of right-wing talking points in the form of a lackluster performance by New Mexico Governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson. Richardson demonstrated once again why it is, despite being one of the most antiwar of the presidential candidates, that his campaign just can't seem to catch fire. Rather than picking up on and directly challenging McCain's assertion that the Democrats predicted that the surge could not possibly succeed militarily and turning the table on McCain by pointing out how wrong he was in supporting the war in the first place, Richardson played into McCain's framing. This allowed the talking heads in the following segment to repeat the charge that the Democrats just don't seem to be able to welcome good news in Iraq.

To be fair, the box of the Democrats find themselves in is not entirely of their own creation. The American people are of two minds when it comes to getting out of Iraq. They want out. But at the same time they also don't want to lose. In fact, they want out because of their sense that we are currently losing. This opens the door for someone to come along to promise a plausible path to victory. Not that the America people aren't skeptical at this moment about such promises, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that they aren't persuadable. When it comes to withdrawing, they do want to start bringing our troops home sooner rather than later. But they want to do so in an orderly fashion. In 2006 they elected a Congress with a mandate to do the one thing that Congress can't do, and that is the planned, phased withdrawal coupled with an internationalizing of the peacekeeping operations in Iraq. Congress is the left with very few bows in their quiver. This is not the least the case because of the power grab of the Bush administration over the past six years. It turns out that those Checks and Balances that those whiny liberals have been bellyaching about actually matter. And now that they've eroded Congress has considerably less power to do the things that the American people now find they want them to. It also turns out that ending a war is a lot more difficult than starting one. Which is another point that those whiny liberals tried to make before we started it.

So it seems likely that we will continue our occupation of Iraq more or less at its present level, minus the drawdown that was part of the plan for The Surge™ from the very start. The Bush administration simply is not equipped to do anything differently. If by some miracle the common sense faerie sprinkled wisdom and insight over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the Bush administration also doesn't possess the political capital to pull off the thing the American people would like them to. In Iraq and internationally the Bushies are spent. And the one thing that Congress can do to start to bring the troops home, which is to cut off funding, is the one thing the American people don't want them to do. Just like in Iraq, actions have consequences and dynamics have been unleashed that can't be easily and done. Just like in Iraq, our current political situation does not allow for the easy answers that partisans on both sides seem to think are available to them.

Yes, Iraq is broken. But so too is the American political system. And sadly, nothing short of regime change will be able to fix that.

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Fundamentals of Micro-Management - Or, How to Lose the War by Not Really Trying

Next week, the House will begin debate on an emergency war spending bill. Some in the Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micro-manage our military commanders, or to force a precipitous withdrawal in Iraq, or threaten vital funding for Iraqi security forces, and fund projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror. I believe the members of Congress are sincere when they support our troops. And now is the time for them to show that support. Our men and women in uniform are risking their lives and they need the firm support of the United States Congress.
George W Bush

Where to begin? Perhaps that the Iraq War is a project that has nothing to do with the war on terror? Too easy.

I think instead we should start with the new talking point about "micro-managing" the war and what it says about the Bush administration. It says that the Bush administration thinks of the troops like they do tanks or bombs, as tools in a global game of Risk.

Let's take time to review. After a disastrous execution of a poorly conceived war, President Bush was finally forced to admit that "The situation in Iraq is unacceptable". A new plan is needed. So he proposed last January a "surge" of approximately 20,000 more troops in a plan nearly identical to the one that just failed the previous summer. And the fall of the year before that. And really a bunch more times. Faced with the fact that Bush has correctly noted that "the consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable", yet he preparing to follow a plan almost certain to deepen that failure, Congress decided to rediscover their Constitutional authority "to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces".

But the efforts were rather disingenuous. While Senate Democrats criticized their Republican counterparts for filibustering the debate on the debate on a non-binding resolution, Bush went ahead with the surge as planned.

Surprisingly, no one has really called Bush on this immoral game of Chicken. Knowing, of course, that the Democrats would never deny funding for troops already there, Bush decided to send them anyway - or at least start to - without first securing the equipment or funds they need.

Few people noted that the troops wouldn't be adequately equipped.

The thousands of troops that President Bush is expected to order to Iraq will join the fight largely without the protection of the latest armored vehicles that withstand bomb blasts far better than the Humvees in wide use, military officers said.

Vehicles such as the Cougar and the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle have proven ability to save lives, but production started late and relatively small numbers are in use in Iraq, mostly because of money shortages, industry officials said.
...
Under a $125 million contract, the Marines are buying 100 Cougar and 44 Buffalo armored trucks, known collectively as MRAP, for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, made by Force Protection Inc., a small company in Ladson, S.C. The firm is producing 40 vehicles a month, said its vice president, Mike Aldrich, a retired Army officer educated at West Point.
...
The military services said last month that they need 4,060 of the MRAP vehicles, with 2,500 for the Army, 538 for the Navy and 1,022 for the Marines. The delivery schedule is uncertain. Meanwhile, a permanent replacement for the Humvee, incorporating the latest design and armor improvements, is years away, Pentagon officials said, and mired in technical and cost disputes.

This is hardly surprising though considering that more than two years after Rumsfeld was called on the carpet by a soldier for lack of adequate armor, it's still the case that the troops already in Iraq face persistant equipment shortages.

Excepting that belatedly, thanks to Jack Murtha, the Democrats finally decided to stand up well enough for the troops to insist that they be rested, trained and equipped before we send them over to risk their lives.

The President is not pleased. And he has threatened to, for the second time, veto an emergency spending bill with money for the war (and the troops) if it had any "strings". This is essentially saying that Bush himself would rather cut off funds for the troops rather than accept any check on his authority.

Considering that the 109th Congress held exactly five hearings in the House and the Senate held three, and considering the results, I will go out on a limb and say that a 'hands off' approach by Congress has not been a great success. The Republican controlled Congress gave Bush all the rope he needed - and he hung himself with it. Whether he knows it or not, the Democrats are doing Bush a solid.

Nonetheless, the Republicans and their anointed noise makers are making plenty of noise about the dangers of "micro-managing" the war. "How would you like it if Congress made a decision that you really only needed one destroyer in your task force, or you get along without the submarine or maybe you only needed half the supplies on your supply ship?" - Steve King (R-IA)

King's remarks are typical of the strawman arguments being used by the Republicans. No Democratic proposal gets into the fine granularity of the determining the specific number of destroyers or submarines. (Although I'm not sure how many subs are being used in the Iraq war.) But these strawman arguments aren't meant to be persuasive - or even heard. The idea is to label any sort of management by Congress of the war as "micromanagement" and to leave a rhetorical trail of plausible deniability if anyone ever called upon them to say why demanding adequate equipment is Congressional overreach.

Not that they need to worry about that much. There seems to be no signs at the moment that anyone in the press will be pressing them on that question any time soon.

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Iraq WMDs Revisited: Absence of Evidence Offered as Evidence of Existence

Expect the Right to be agog about this interview in Frontpage entitled Where the WMDs Went with “Bill Tierney, a former military intelligence officer and Arabic speaker who worked at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and as a counter-infiltration operator in Baghdad in 2004.”

I read it, so you don’t have to. Although, you’re certainly free to.

Tierney clearly has an axe to grind.

This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. The Democrats understand the difference between the two concepts, but have no qualms about blurring the distinction for political gain. This is despicable. This has brought great harm to our nation’s credibility with our allies.

But that doesn’t make what he says wrong. He was there, after all, and I was not.

He makes a strong case for an outrageous lack of cooperation by the Iraqis with the inspectors before the war. And I am certainly willing to take him at his word for that. But that is not what the Right is seizing on. It’s stuff like this:

One of the security officers at Tarmiya told him that he had just recovered from a sickness he incurred while guarding technicians working in an underground facility nearby. The security officer stated that the technicians left for a break every half hour, but he stayed in the underground chamber all day and got sick. The security officer didn’t mention what they were doing, but I would say uranium enrichment is the most logical pick.

The implication is a lack of cooperation is a sign of guilt. The argument is that those expecting actual evidence of WMDs are not being reasonable. And you won’t find any evidence here. What Tierney offers is a collection of incidents and observations that could be interpreted to indicate that the Iraqis were hiding WMDs from the inspectors. They could also be interpreted to mean that the secretive Iraqi regime resented the inspections - something to hide or not.

Ultimately, Tierney is doing exactly what Bush is being accused of: combing the available information for support of a premise rather than using all of the available information to test the premise. Neither Tierney nor the interviewer actually make the case that Tierney’s observations are sufficient to base a war on. Yet, the target audience doesn’t need that connection made for them. We cannot allow the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, is the subtext.

So, if there were WMDs after all, the big question is where did they all go?

“In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door,” Tierney theorizes.

I believe Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President Bush’s speech at West Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to prepare the younger generation of the security services with English so they could infiltrate our ranks, another was either to destroy or move WMDs to other countries, principally Syria.

On the post-war weapons hunt, the arrogance and hubris of the intelligence community is such that they can’t entertain the possibility that they just failed to find the weapons because the Iraqis did a good job cleaning up prior to their arrival.

The interviewer does not ask nor does Tierney offer any thoughts on what became of the remains of the recently destroyed weapons or if it would be worth our while to search those lakes and rivers for evidence of his theory. Apparently the Iraqis did a really really good job of cleaning up those massive stockpiles and now are doing a really really good job of keeping that activity secret. It is worth noting that the thoughts and observations of one inspector are not the sole source of information we have to go on while assessing if there actually were WMDs. We have occupied the nation for over two years now - with none of Hussein’s armed guards to block our access. Yet for Tierney, Frontpage and Frontpage’s readers, conjecture based on one person’s ambiguous observations trump all actual experience of thousands of troops on the ground for over two years.

Interestingly, Tierney is forced to be mildly critical of the management of the post war weapons hunt.

I could speak at length about the problems with the weapons hunt. Mr. Hanson has an excellent article in “The American Thinker,” and Judith Miller, one of the few bright lights at the New York Times, did an article on the problems with the weapons hunt that I can corroborate from other sources.

I was shocked to learn recently that members of the Iraqi Survey Group believed their Iraqi sources when they said they don’t fear a return of the Baath Party.

(Implying by that last comment that the reason no one has yet come forward with the information about recent WMD programs is that they still fear the return of Hussein.)

But ultimately he blames the inspections themselves for allowing time for the removal of WMDs, even though all he can offer is just his opinions, hunches and theories. Nevertheless, look for a conservative blog near you to take this up as real proof that the WMDs were there all along.

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