Analyzing Bush

Or at least analyzing the president's Iraq speech this week. Here’s my latest
L.A. Weekly column just posted.

Comments

[Michael Turner]

There isn't much in Bush's speech that I would feel very uncomfortable saying myself. Sure, there are significant errors of fact, as for example when Bush says that Saddam presided over the decay of Iraq, when in fact much of Iraq's development up until Gulf War I happened under his very long rule. And this isn't the only error. Otherwise - what's to argue with?

The Bush picture may be a fantasy, but it's a fantasy I can at least feel good about.

However, Bush's speechwriters go a little astray here:

"The rise of a free and self-governing Iraq will deny terrorists a base of operation, discredit their narrow ideology, and give momentum to reformers across the region. This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power, and a victory for the security of America and the civilized world."

The pattern in terrorism - especially suicide bomber terrorism - is that it targets liberal democracies that are seen as obstacles to the attackers' political agenda, an agenda that almost always involves (re)claiming contested territory. While Saddam's Iraq featured brutal civil wars, ethnic cleansings, and systematic exterminations of civilians in rebellious populations, Saddam's Iraq also featured very little terrorism in the sense that we're fighting it. Well, of course it didn't have any. It was a police state, a blanket surveillance state, a state employing torture against its enemies and suspected enemies and even innocent people to keep its subjects under control.

Will a Free Iraq have contested territory within its borders, for terrorists to 'liberate'? I simply can't imagine an Iraq without contested territory. Furthermore, the 'contested territory' with which Al Qaeda is most concerned remains the same: Saudi Arabia. If they can do jihadi vetting in a country where it will be easier to operate, like this conjectured Free Iraq, they will. It's part of their pattern.

But will it be easier to have a 'base of operation' in this conjectured Free Iraq? An Iraq with freedom of movement, freedom of association, privacy rights, and without indefinite detention on suspicion alone, or abusive treatment in prisons? Of course it will be. Let's not kid ourselves. The Chechen rebels could never blow up buildings and take hostages in a Moscow under the Communists.

Would a free Iraq 'discredit [militant Islamic terrorists'] narrow ideology'? Please. All the socially phobic reactions of the Muslim militant fundamentalist will come to the fore when they see what freedom means in an Arab society. For most of the faithful, it will be proof positive of their claims. The Saddam-Al Qaeda connection was always suspect on many counts, but one of the more important reasons to discount it is that Saddam was mostly a secularizing force on Iraqi society. A secularizing Arab who paid only lip service to Islam? Worse than America! Traitor! What worse Infidel can there be than the one who poses as a Muslim? Politics makes strange bedfellows, but could bedfellows be that odd?

Finally, would a free Iraq 'give momentum to reformers in the region'? Only if the Arab despotisms don't respond to each loosening in Iraq with a further tightening of their own traditional measures of control. If I were a reformer in the region, I wouldn't take much encouragement from it. In fact, the first smear tactic used against me, if I were an Arab with a reform agenda, would likely take the following form: "You're in favor of what's going in in 'Free' Iraq; those developments - some good, but mostly bad, we feel - could only happen because the Americans invaded; THEREFORE [watch the logic gap!], you're in favor of having the U.S. invade our country! Into the clink with ya!"

Free Iraq. I'll believe it when I see it. And in a funny way, I'll believe in it more if it's a Free Iraq enduring continuing terror attacks. If it were suddenly to go quiet in that respect, I'd wonder if we weren't just seeing a media-managed propaganda show.

In short, a Free Iraq will be "a victory for the security of America and the civilized world" over terror primarily to the extent that Iraq becomes even worse flypaper than it is today. Certainly, with the hatred across the world that we stirred up with the apparent stupidities and high-handedness of the invasion and occupation, America (and the "civilized world" with which jihadis will inevitably group America) will need all the flypaper it can get.

[Marc]

I pretty much agree with your comments.

The real question is what would you do, if anything, that would be different than what we're doing right now?

I'm not trying to bait you, just gathering thoughts.

Thanks.

[too many steves]

So, if we have stirred up all this hatred around the world by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam - that is: stupidities and high handedness - and all this hatred has resulted in the Western World being a big target for militant Islam and their sympathizers, then what, in your opinion, were the stupidities and handhandednesses that resulted in 9/11/01?

Bonus question: if we had not gone into Iraq, would the terror campaign against the West be more or less of a threat today?

[steve]

Al-Qaeda Boosted By Iraq War, Warns [Pro-war]Think-Tank

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0525-10.htm

[Marc]

too many steves wrote: "Bonus question: if we had not gone into Iraq, would the terror campaign against the West be more or less of a threat today?"

I believe it was the Bush administration who ignored several reports pointing to our susceptability to this kind of attack. Apparently they were all busy planning for the invasion of Iraq which started the minute Bush took office.

If we had not gone into Iraq:

We would still have Saddam and his #3 dictatorial regime.
The U.N. would continue to have weapons inspectors running through the country,.
There would still be trade embargos and strict scrutiny of oil traffic.
A no-fly zone.
The secular government of Saddam would pretty much keep Al-Qaeda out.

I think dismantling Al-Qaeda would be easier under these conditions because we would have:

135,000 troops available for places like Afghanistan.
At least 100 billion dollars to spend on going after Al-Qaeda.
Far more respect and help from our allies in Europe and elsewhere.
Far less hatred for Americans in the middle east.
Almost 800 killed American troops would most likely be alive to see their families.
Thousands of Iraqis and others would be alive.
Saddam would be free to follow the lead of countries like Libya.

I think you get the point.

[steve]

The U.N. would continue to have weapons inspectors running through the country,.
There would still be trade embargos and strict scrutiny of oil traffic.
A no-fly zone.

--if the inspectors declared Iraq WMD free (an inevitability), the trade embargoes would be over and likely the justification for the no-fly zones too, which is the argument the hawks make for the need for war against Iraq.

[Marc]

Steve: Precisely why we went to war above the objections of the U.N., the weapons inspectors, our allies and most of the middle eastern countries. The Bush administration, worried that the justification(however flawed) for war would not be around forever, pushed and pushed and pushed until here we are...

[steve]

I agree.

[too many steves]

Marc, I have to respectfully disagree with a few of your points of conjecture.

Had we not gone into Iraq and deposed Saddam he would still be in power today. The inspections would have ended, at the latest, in the summer of 2003 with perhaps a declaration on procedural grounds that Iraq hadn't complied with the letter of the UN demand that they identify what had happened to their weapons, but with assurances that those weapons were not found (we still haven't found them in any quantity). At that stage there would have been pressure on the UN to accept Iraq back into the fold.

The Oil for Food program would still be in force and would still be funding not food, but Saddam's treasury. This would enable him to continue his pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

Having found no WMD, the no fly zones would be abolished leaving the Kurds in the north and the folks in the south to the mercy of Saddam's whim.

The estimated 3000 - 5000 monthly civilian deaths would have continued as would Saddam's murdering of his opponents. The abuse of prisoners by the Coalition at Abu Ghraib never would have happened, but Saddam's use of that place for torture and murder would still be going on.

As for Saddam and Al Qaeda, well, to me the jury is still out on that one. The WSJ has an editorial today discussing some additional information about pre-war links between the two. Not definitive proof yet, but certainly worth examining.

The other things that you cite have happened since the invasion and occupation, so I cannot argue with those - of course they would not have happened. But I will quibble with one point: you said 135,000 troops would be available to Afghanistan and other places. Certainly true but to what effect?

An International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) report says there are 18,000 Al Qaeda terrorists at large. Despite the numbers advantage (135000/18000) I doubt we would be able to fight them in the way that the majority of our military is trained (traditional combat) nor would we have the opportunity to fight them where they live (US, Western Europe, Pakistan, Syria, etc). That fighting must be done with Special Forces and Intelligence, which is not hindered by our 135,000 troops being in Iraq.

I agree with you when you say "the Bush administration ... ignored several reports pointing to our susceptability to this kind of attack. Apparently they were all busy planning for the invasion of Iraq which started the minute Bush took office". But to my way of thinking, 9/11 came not simply at the end Bush's eight months in office, but rather at the end of 20+ years of appeasement of Islamic Militants.

The estimated 3000 - 5000 monthly civilian deaths would have continued as would Saddam's murdering of his opponents.

--very unlikely, no serious mideast experts agree with that. if anything the saddam regime was weakening from within and only looked to continue to do so, with or without international trade.

[too many steves]

If so, fair enough. I was citing UNICEF numbers that were used prior to the war to argue in favor of lifting the economic sanctions that were in force on Iraq.

[Marc]

too many steves: Your scenario seems reasonable. I would hope that we along with our allies(all of them) would not have let Saddam get off the hook just for lack of WMDs but who knows?

We are hearing how our troops are stretched pretty thinly right now and it's obvious that the president is reluctant to ask for large amounts of funding. Much of the resources already spent would largely be available now if not for the war in Iraq. It's also clear that much of the damage that Bush has done in the area of international relations has weakened our ability to deal with Al-Qaeda and others.

Yes, the 135,000 troops may not be as useful as special forces but they do drain resources that could otherwise be used more effectively. Al-Qaeda was by no means crushed when we jumped into Iraq. We're still looking for the mass-murderer Bin-Laden. We got Saddam but it doesn't seem to have bought us much.

[steve]

I would hope that we along with our allies(all of them) would not have let Saddam get off the hook just for lack of WMDs but who knows?

--the declaration of no wmds by the inspectors would have given any country the green light to trade with or invest in Iraq, coercion from the US to not do so notwithstanding. Ally or not would be in the position to reasonably declare they would stop trading with Iraq when the US stopped trade with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

[Michael Turner]

Marc Cooper: "I pretty much agree with your comments [about how Iraq will hardly be a terrorist-free zone, much less a democracy contagion vector in the Arab world]. The real question is what would you do, if anything, that would be different than what we're doing right now?"

Oh, go and ask the easy questions, why doncha!

My desperate hacks are as follows.

First: I think we need to dispense with this ridiculous June 30 faux-handover date. The timing was always about Bush-Cheney being able to go to the GOP convention with another triumphalist Mission Accomplished declaration. At this point, they're reduced to just slapping something together and calling it sovereignty. Notice how Brahimi's favorite for top Iraqi leader, a nuclear scientist Saddam imprisoned for refusing to work on WMD, has just declined the de facto nomination? He doesn't want to be compromised, he doesn't want to be assassinated, and he sure doesn't want to be compromised and then assassinated! Take it as some indication of the mess that's shaping up.

Second: As I hinted in a comment on elsewhere on your blog, I think the best possible leadership scenario we can hope for in Iraq is looks like the following.

Three strongmen, one for each major grouping. All three seemingly independent, but actually cooperating. All three seemingly opposed to American occupation, but actually working hand-in-glove where it matters. All three seemingly high-handed military dictators, but actually preparing the ground for better rule of law, the standard liberties (a free press, freedom of association, freedom from search and seizure, etc., with increasing privatization but with an adequate safety net). Then elections, eventually, that these dictators themselves might run in, and lose in. And you have have the above more or less in the above order. General Jarulzeski, publicly reviled (but secretly admired) in Poland, played this game brilliantly. What I think Iraq needs right is three Iraqi equivalents. Finding them might not be easy.

Third: recognize that any such strategy for stabilizing Iraq toward either peaceful unification or peaceful partition is going to take a leadership in the U.S. that Americans can trust, that the world can trust, and maybe that Iraqis wouldn't distrust too much. Give me a Powell-Giuliani GOP rescue ticket. Or a Powell-McCain GOP rescue ticket. If it has to be Kerry-McCain, so be it. But reelecting the Bush administration for my proposed Iraq stabilization strategy is dangling far too much moral hazard in front of people who clearly can't handle it, and who are being vilified for their lapses by much of the world community right now.

Unfortunately, there's almost no time left to pull off any of this. The risk being taken on the current course is harrowing: Iraqi civil war, which might kill more Iraqis than Saddam ever did in his whole blood-drenched career. Iraq's civil wars under Saddam were bad enough - the need for national unity was enough to keep him from embarking on total extermination of any group that rose up against him. An Iraq without a Saddam, without a center, could go far worse than it ever did under Saddam. And that's just the risk within Iraq. I'm sure there are mullahs in Iran closely watching Iraq, and grinning broadly, thinking, "it won't be long now!"

[Michael Turner]

I'd like to add one more thing that I think would help Iraq in its current predicament, and that is to fully enfranchise Iraqis in the transition from petroleum economies to whatever our energy future will be.

Step 1: fix the Kyoto Protocol, and ram it through. There's a lot wrong with it, but even if it's a feeble, wandering step, it's a step in the right direction. Fix it, and implement it. Even if global warming is not significantly man-made, carbon emissions trading is a great way to incentivize the innovation it will take to make the transition to a world with much less, and much more expensive oil. Some such framework may even reduce armed conflict over resources during that transition. The U.S. has the clout to do this.

Step 2: under some kind of Federal eminent domain move on the relevant intellectual property, declare all alternative energy patents in the U.S. to be royalty-free for Iraqi companies. Iraqis may patent whatever improvements on these that they wish, and extract whatever royalties they want. Are you an alternative-energy business in America? Look upon it as a blessing: you'll be able to offshore your engineering work to Iraq and reduce your costs dramatically.

Economies based on extraction and export of only a handful of primary resources have a great deal of trouble moving toward liberal democracy. Many are despotic welfare states. Many are simply despotic. A poorly diversified economy is a major obstacle to democracy. Possession is 9/10ths of the law, and he who has the gold makes the rules. Iraq has perhaps $1.5 trillion of oil in confirmed and estimated reserves at today's prices. That's a big moral hazard in the way of good government.

Iraq needs a more diversified economy. What are they going to sell when they run out of oil? Palm dates? Give Iraq a free hand with alternative energy intellectual property, and help create a market for its innovations by framing and signing an international carbon emissions trading framework that could really work.

The moral basis? How about 'reverse war reparations'? Think of it as saying this: "we're sorry, Iraq, that we tolerated Arab despots for their oil. In particular, we're sorry that we tolerated your despot. Many of you suffered and many of you died and many of you have been left bereaved as a result of our unslakeable thirst for your oil. We're going to help you help us toward a world where this doesn't happen anymore, and to help you, we'll give you the basis for profitable businesses based on a reducing the need for a resource that you're going to run out of, someday."

Last week's jobless, despairing young Arab is this week's jihadi. We all want to feel important. Iraqis feel impotent. How do we turn "I want to shoot American soldiers (or my own, to the extent that they are seen as collaborators)" not into something unrealistic, like "Americans are my friends," but into something that offers real hope, like "I want to go to college and earn an engineering degree," or "I want to take my education and make some money, working hard every day, and put my kids through school too."

Global Jihad is best fought by hacking at its roots. In the final analysis, the taproots of Jihad thirstily drink oil under Arab sands. Small wonder that the fruit is so ugly, rank, and poisonous.

[Michael Turner]

Marc, you asked me What Is To Be Done? Here's yet another answer.

Too many steves contributes this: Al-Qaeda Boosted By Iraq War, Warns [Pro-war]Think-Tank
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0525-10.htm

A useful report. In IISS Director John Chipman's introductory remarks to their annual report, which downplays the likelihood of civil war in the near and medium-term, he points up the long-term militia threat in Iraq. This threat dovetails with the terror threat in obvious ways, and could send Iraq over the precipice that it seems to be sliding toward by the day: civil war, and worse, a civil in which America - with advanced airpower combined with an overriding policy of 'force protection' - may inadvertently supply only Guernicas.

In the context of the militia threat, let me suggest yet another way in which the current situation is shaping up badly: drafts of the Iraqi constitution contain provisions for requiring gun registration.

Bear in mind that I'm no NRA gun-nut. My views are pretty middle-of-the-road by American standards - I favor firepower limitations and can even see the sense of handgun control. I've done target shooting recreationally, but I've never been a gun-owner, and the only kind of gun anyone is ever likely to pry from my cold dead fingers is a medium caliber rifle. However, any feeling of foreboding that my country wouldn't allow me to wrap my warm, living fingers around any such rifle would make me go out and buy one immediately.

Iraq is an exceedingly well-armed society, more so than America. It was well-armed even under Saddam. A people armed have a bulwark against tyranny - not a good one, and as Saddam's long rule should indicate, not enough by itself to serve as encouragement to overthrow tyranny. At this point, however, with what freedoms they have (especially press freedoms) Iraqis need every bulwark they can get.

An Iraq in which militia power is potentially overwhelming would be a dangerous Iraq indeed. A fractious, disloyal army under weak central government command may ultimately lose out to local militia power. Chipman points out that the militias aren't yet well-linked with their host communities, for the most part (perhaps they are in Virtual Kurdistan; I don't know) but that the links may strengthen, the more that militia power comes into play in a community defense role. Militias may become dominant political forces in their localities, much as they did in Lebanon during its long civil war.

In certain key ways, the situation resembles the conditions under which the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was adopted: weak central government, strong state-level militias. So I think we would all do well to understand what that amendment was really about.

I've long felt that a proper reading of the Second Amendment does not equate the militia with the people, as Hamilton might have had it, but rather positions an armed people in a triangular relationship with federal armed power and state militia power. That is, a people armed is a people armed against the potential depredations of a militia that might get a just a wee bit too full of itself, a militia that might be tempted usurp legitimate state-level government and thumb its nose against central government. In this armed-force triangle, the people, in being granted a right to arms by a central government, can feel some solidarity with, and security from, the central government - even though that center may not be able to come to their rescue in a timely manner, leaving them to fend for themselves. And how else to fend for themselves except by DEfending themselves?

Militias can become bullies, bullies are usually cowards, and anything that deters bullies from busting down doors - especially the doors of editors and reporters - is good. It doesn't really take much to deter a bully. It follows that militias not knowing how much firepower is behind those doors is a good thing. Gun registration in Iraq defeats that purpose, criminalizing Iraqis who don't want to make a declaration, and putting any Iraqis who do make any such declaration on the police station map.

So there it is, yet another way (one small way among many, to be sure) that Iraq might muddle through to liberal democracy: drop this potentially catastrophic notion of gun registration from the proposed Iraq constitution.

[Nonayobizwax]

"Susceptibility," not "susceptability". Thanks

As for Iraq, I'll throw these out:

1)Stop offensive and repressive operations that cause unconscionable civil losses and stick to defensive mode. Stop using Sharon-inspired tactics.

3) Send the farcical provisional government packing and stop the pretense of power transfer.

2) Convene international conference with representatives of all components of Iraqi society, including "extremist fundamentalists," chosen by these components by whatever method they prefer (which couldn't be any less democratic than the CPR's).

3) Get all advanced nations to join in a real effort at reconstruction, including training of police and military forces, and set up a fair (as far as that's possible) system of awarding contracts. Return all funds and assets misappropriated in violation of international law to the Iraqi people.

4) Stop using Israel as the neighborhood pitbull, bring it to heel, kick out the the illegal settlers after richly compensating them (admittedly, a lot of them -- especially the Americans -- would jump on that opportunity) and pave the way to a real end to the Palestinian tragedy.

[NeoDude]

George Bush Jr. is a Punk!

[Chairman Mao]

It is time for you to reread my essay "On Contradiction" in which I describe the phenomenon of "left in form but right in essence." Do no go there, Mr. Cooper. Time goes forward. Pinochet was evil and should be punished. Now face the reality of present days. Your comparisons to Iraq are fallacious. Mort Kondrakce is not a "bully." He was pointing out the obvious--that the horrors of Abu Ghraib are being used for other purposes than to correct them. In fact, by calling him a "bully," you are exposing the fact that you don't really think he is.

[Marc Cooper]

That's all very profound, Mister Chairman. I'm contemplating having it laminated to carry around in my wallet.