Condoleeza Rice, United States Secretary of State:
“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work.”
Some days I think they’re actually trying to give Greg Djerejian an aneurysm.
by Tim F| 76 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
Condoleeza Rice, United States Secretary of State:
“It’s bad policy to speculate on what you’ll do if a plan fails when you’re trying to make a plan work.”
Some days I think they’re actually trying to give Greg Djerejian an aneurysm.
by Tim F| 18 Comments
This post is in: War
Coming from the President’s favorite intel shop, this is not encouraging news.
One day after Bush unveiled a plan to send more than 21,000 additional troops to work alongside Iraqi troops in an increasingly violent war, the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said Iraqi forces could not combat the insurgency there.
Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples said Iraqi security forces have been thoroughly infiltrated by Shiite militias and “are presently unable to stand alone against Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq” or the militias themselves. Negroponte, who was ambassador to Iraq in 2004-05, said sectarian violence had become the greatest problem inside the country.
All you needed to see was the Sadrist chants at Saddam’s hanging. After that display, this recognition that violent militias and the Iraqi security forces are essentially one and the same strikes me as a belated acknowledgment of the obvious. Separating the two is about as productive as splitting the Hydrogen atom. Pointless. Correct me if I’m wrong about this, but doesn’t that make the idea of fighting alongside, and being led by, the same bloodthirsty savages who we want to uproot sound a bit schizophrenic?
***
Also note this from our current intel czar:
Negroponte said stability in Iraq will depend in part on persuading Iran and Syria “to stop the flow of militants and munitions across their borders.”
Unless ‘persuading’ picked up a new meaning since the last time I checked, the President’s intel chief and future deputy Secretary of State is basically saying that our refusal to meet Iran in good faith is wrecking Iraq. That era of lockstep message discipline seems like just yesterday…
***Update***
I was being a bit cute with that last part. Regarding diplomacy I think that this is literally the only form of “persuasion” that George Bush knows or understands. Sadly it seems to me that the idea of violent subjugation as the singular means of imposing our will internationally, the Neoconservative Doctrine if you will, is a defining character point for the President’s dwindling base.
by Tim F| 32 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Mister Furious just hit me up, so here goes:
1. Name a book that you want to share so much that you keep giving away copies: Lady With A Spear by Dr. Eugenie Clark. Dr. Clark (imagine a mix of Indiana Jones and Jacques Cousteau) started her career exploring the remote coral atolls of post-WWII South Pacific and moved on to lab work, world travel and a dazzling stint as the world’s first serious shark researcher. Amazingly enough she hasn’t stopped yet. I found her long out-of-print autobiography in the library when I was twelve, and it left me with the singular goal of following Dr. Clark’s example and studying sharks when I grew up. That lasted until college when I heard that shark researchers have the most miserable grad students on Earth. Oh well. Because of her writing as much as anything I stayed science-bound, and while my field hasn’t fixed itself yet (so far I’ve published six papers on four wildly different topics) the journey has been a blast. I dig up copies on Abebooks for friends’ kids who show the slightest interest in science or the ocean.
2. Name a piece of music that changed the way you listen to music: Hm. At the risk of sounding like a dork, Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd pulled me out of the classic-rock rut in high school. Now I listen to pretty much anything. Thanks, Sondheim.
3. Name a film you can watch again and again without fatigue: I would say Raiders or Airplane! for pure popcorn fun, Rififi to burnish my cineaste credentials, Contact and Real Genius for capturing of what science feels like. Also Spirited Away by Hiyao Miyazaki. Miyazaki basically makes the same film over and over again, but at least it’s a pretty fun film. IMO he got it best with this one.
4. Name a performer for whom you suspend of all disbelief: Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd. I get shivers.
5. Name a work of art you’d like to live with: When it comes to painting, in my view John Singer Sargent stands out among the Americans. Something to do with the way that he straddles the boundary between realism and impressionism. Not sure exactly. As for photography, which is more my thing, out of dozens of excellent artists Galen Rowell (RIP, sadly) consistently leaves me speechless. It almost seemed like he could bend light to his will. Choosing one, a print like this in a living room designed around it would make me a very happy camper. Plan B would be a grand bedroom overlooking a southwest desertscape, adobe walls and Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.
6. Name a work of fiction which has penetrated your real life: Speaking as a lifelong eco-head who has run several organizations, The Monkey Wrench Gang by Ed Abbey finally helped me realize why I detest a sizable subset of environmentalists. Don’t ask me to put up with self-righteous ideologues who only care about tearing things down which displease them, even if they’re supposedly on my “side.” That sort of attitude is a gift to the other team.
7. Name a punch line that always makes you laugh: More of a subtle guffaw line than a real punchline, I would pick he moment in Firefly when a local mob boss struggles to come up with a word to describe Mal. After a long pause Mal’s sidekick Jayne pipes in, “Pretentious?” Not a big deal but I always chuckle.
***
John also got tagged, so he can update with his own answers when the class burden lightens up a bit.
Who’s next? Don’t know how many I need to choose so I’ll grab the first three who come to mind. Fester (because I owe him a beer), Michael Stickings and Steve Benen.
by Tim F| 114 Comments
This post is in: War
Was just ruminating about a history of the Iran-Iraq war that I perused the other day. Convinced that the student revolution left Iran’s oil fields undefended, Saddam Hussein tried and failed to make a quick grab for the border provinces. After some skirmishing Hussein essentially pulled back and hoped that the Mullahs would let bygones be bygones. They didn’t. Iran sent everything it had after Iraq, with or without equipment and training, over and over again. They used waves of teenagers to clear minefields, losing the good part of a generation in the process. The Iranians would have taken a chunk out of Iraq if Hussein had not brought nerve gas weapons to bear. The apparent superiority of Iraq’s forces, the violence of its attacks and the practically genocidal loss of civilian volunteers didn’t seem to discourage them at all.
Anyhow, just a random thought on a Thursday afternoon. I’m sure that Iran will prove perfectly pliable to American intimidation, especially if we throw in a bombing raid or two. If that doesn’t work, well, bygones.
by John Cole| 30 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Because I am in over my head.
by Tim F| 71 Comments
Let’s take a quick recap through last night’s speech, and then wrap up with what struck me as his one big idea.
First, the things that don’t matter:
* More troops. 20,000 more troops is a drop in the bucket. Unless we also change how our army operates (more on that below) I doubt that insurgents will even notice. The people who will notice, however, are the military managers who are trying to a strained force from collapsing entirely. Plus the poor saps trying to win in Afghanistan.
* A larger military. Fine idea considering our current readiness levels, but it won’t mean much for Iraq. How long will it take to transform policy into boots on the ground? Years, at best. Our time in Iraq won’t last that long, now even less long thanks to added strain from the President’s “surge.”
* Mandates. What are the consequences for Maliki blowing off our demands? As far as I can tell, nothing. The extra troops will go in anyway.
* “Diplomacy.” The only two regional partners who matter are Syria and Iran. As always the President will only talk to them if they agree to give up everything in advance. The best explanation that I have heard for such obvious bad faith involves fears by the administration about having a weak bargaining position vis a vis Iran. We don’t have any leverage, of course, because we removed Iran’s regional competitor, installed an Iran-friendly regime in his place and ground our fighting forces to dust in the process.
That leaves one point which could have an impact. Like Noah Shachtman I think that moving troops out of the insular FOBs and changing the rules of engagement will change life both for us and for the insurgents. Without a doubt this move comes from the Petraeus playbook and in 2003, with sufficient number of men, I think that we would have a chance of a positive result.
Sadly this isn’t 2003. Too much poisoned Euphrates wter has passed under the bridge for embittered Iraqis to give Americans the benefit of the doubt again. The sectarian mobs have had years to equip, train and exchange bloody shirts. Insurgents have years of hard training at our hands and porous borders to endlessly replenish their numbers, which will swell each time our new engagement rules accidentally makes another taxi full of civilians into a statistic. That has nothing to do with malicious intent on the part of our soldiers, it is simply the inevitable result of loosening the rules in a maddeningly complex urban environment. Good people will do bad things by accident and for perfectly understandable reasons, but none of that is visible to the local public. Only the bad things. And then you have idiotic stories like this which have the same war-losing value as a division of insurgents.
Of course the move out of FOBs is only a half-assed implementation of the Petraeus Doctrine . Fred Kaplan recently observed that Baghdad alone would need about twice as many combat troops as we have in all of Iraq. Instead of that America can spare 20,000. There is good reason to think we can’t even spare that. So if America’s best informed counterinsurgency strategist thinks that we have nowhere near the number of men needed to win, what exactly is the point of putting more men in harm’s way? Unless Petraeus’s own manual is comically off-base the change won’t win the war. As near as I can tell it will just put more Americans in convenient AK-47 range.
It helps to recall why American commanders pulled troops into secure FOBs in the first place. Insurgents became very good at picking off unprotected troops, to the point that casualty levels became politically dangerous. Barring a compelling reason to go out (say, an overarching war strategy) it makes sense to keep troops inside and in armored convoys until we can get out of Dodge altogether. So what has changed? The President has moved past reelection and isn’t grooming anybody to replace him, which means that casualties aren’t politically dangerous anymore. Democrats won’t impeach him and it seems vanishingly unlikely that they will cut off the war funds, leaving the President free to do more or less whatever he wants.
Democrats of course have nothing to lose by protesting. The more the public sours on this GOP war the more they stand to win. Obviously the GOP, who did everything possible to own this war when ownership looked like a good thing, has more of a dilemma on its hands. You have to wonder what they plan to do about it.
***Update***
Some extra points:
* Other than moving troops out of the FOBs there really is no there there.
* Now that’s interesting. Instead of pulling the funds, attach so many strings that Bush vetoes the money himself. I hope the President likes that GOP-brand medicine.
by Tim F| 125 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
What else is up?