As of yesterday the Bush administration has definitively moved from the phase of “let’s pretend to explore all our options honestly, given how badly things have gone” to the phase of “let’s do everything we can to change the game with reckless expansion of the war that we now realize we’ve pretty much lost, so we don’t have to admit that we’ve lost it.”

This phase is deeply and painfully familiar to those of us who remember the arc of Vietnam. Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger arrived at it in 1970, when they decided to invade Cambodia. It was a slap in the face to Americans who’d elected Nixon because he promised he had a secret plan to end the war; instead of peace, they got escalation. Protests erupted across the United States; during them, unarmed American students were fired upon and died at Kent State.

Today’s talk of a “surge” now looks like only a small part of a larger picture that involves expanding American operations in the Middle East with moves against Syria and Iran. As William Arkin puts it in the Washington Post, “Clearly the Vice President’s office and the hardliners scored a major victory.” Or, as Josh Marshall puts it, “The Veep’s office and the nutjobs are still running the show.”

With Kissinger whispering in the president’s ear today, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at this nightmarish historical loop. The theory, then and now, was that the problems inside the country (South Vietnam or Iraq) stemmed from the influx of supplies and troublemakers from neighboring countries; cut those supply lines and the insurgency will dry up. It was a disastrous failure in Southeast Asia, and there isn’t the slightest indication that it will be any different in Iraq.

Things look like they’ll get a lot worse before they get any better. And this administration seems to be positively eager to wash its hands in more blood.

Tonight President Bush will tell us about his plan for a “New Way Forward” in Iraq.

This White House is not well-versed in history, so I don’t suppose the people who fashioned the slogan thought much about its similarity to the verbiage the totalitarian leaders of the 20th century hung over their policies. But the choice is in keeping with Bush administration iconographic bombast of the past: check out this photo from November, 2005, when Bush was touting one of the “New Way Forward”‘s many predecessor blueprints for success in Iraq.

Whether you call it a “New Way Forward” or a “Great Leap Forward,” the idea that sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq is going to transform the reality of U.S. defeat reflects the self-delusion of a dictatorial mind. Bush’s approach to Iraq is as out of touch with reality as the command-economy follies of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong: the resemblance lies in the determination to force a theory down reality’s throat no matter what the cost in human suffering or damage to national interest.

The particular peculiarity of Bush’s fiasco is that he is wrecking the American military, and prolonging a doomed fight, on behalf of the abstract notion of Iraq’s in potentio democracy — while flagrantly and petulantly ignoring the thunderous outcome of America’s own democratic process last November, which delivered a clear verdict on Bush’s war. (And that verdict was not “Escalate now!”)

No matter. Our Maximum Leader knows better than his generals and better than the people. Tonight he will address us from the royal balcony. A few toadies will applaud, but the rest of us will be counting the days till we can throw him out of office.
[tags]president bush, iraq, new way forward, totalitarianism[/tags]

The hanging of Saddam Hussein proceeded more like an act of sectarian vengeance than an orderly process of law, with guards chanting “Moktada! Moktada!”, heralding the name of the militia leader who backs the current Iraqi president — and whose forces the forthcoming U.S. “surge” will attempt to disband.

The only way we know this is because of the leak of a cameraphone recording of the clandestine event.

So what does the Iraqi government do? Arrest the guy accused of taking the pictures! (Who may well be a fall guy for the Iraqi national security adviser, anyway — see Josh Marshall’s parsing of the evidence.)

In this, the Baghdad government is simply taking cues from its American sponsor, the Bush administration — which has always treated the release of embarrassing information as an opportunity not to right the wrong but rather to shoot the messenger and crack down on leaks. As one correspondent over at Talking Points Memo argues, the Maliki government’s high-handed contempt for the legal process mirrors that of the American administration that brought it into being.

But I think the key to understanding this strange saga lies in how differently the video plays to different crowds. If you’re Prime Minister Maliki and your power-base and lifelong allegiance is to the Shiite side, you might figure that a record of the final humiliation of the oppressor Saddam would be a valuable bit of propaganda to show your people. You might not mind a little leak; you might even encourage your officials to record the proceedings. But the proceedings get a little more unruly and uglier than you expected — and suddenly the images that your in-country partisans savor are turning stomachs around the world (and driving the last remaining moderate Sunnis into the insurgent camp). So you disavow any responsibility and find some low-level scapegoat to blame.

A couple of days ago it was hard to imagine how the fallout from the botched Saddam Hussein execution could get any worse. But Maliki and his crew keep pushing the envelope.
[tags]saddam hussein, iraq, leaks[/tags]

Let’s consider the coming escalation of the war in Iraq. Most reports from inside that strange Green Zone known as the Beltway suggest that President Bush, having heard the electorate’s verdict last November and having reviewed the many recommendations of the Baker commission he appointed, is going to ignore them all — and instead send 20,000 to 40,000 more American troops to Iraq. This escalation has been officially dubbed “the surge,” since that noun implies a comforting temporary quality to the escalation, like a wave that will wash forward only to roll back at some near-future date.

During the long months of 2004 and 2005, as the situation in Iraq deteriorated and the Bush team tried to keep up appearances, the White House brushed aside all suggestions that we might need to reinforce our contingent in Iraq. Before the invasion, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld essentially cashiered General Eric Shinseki for daring to suggest that the occupation would require twice as many troops as the SecDef was deploying. Having brought the military brass to heel, the White House then insisted that, in not bolstering the Iraq force, it was only doing exactly what the generals wanted! Responsibility-shirking kabuki has rarely been performed with such bravura skill.

Still, today I think most Americans outside the Beltway understand what’s happened: When additional troops might have made a difference, Bush wouldn’t supply them. Now, when the generals are saying we can’t possibly support an escalated commitment, Bush is saying, send in the surge!

My first impulse here is to tear my hair out. My second is to think back to Richard Nixon’s ill-fated invasion of Cambodia — a similar “double-down” gamble late in a losing war, in a vain effort to “change the dynamic” and “get at the root of the problem.” No “surge” in Iraq is likely to have any more long-term value than Nixon’s folly. But like that antecedent — which destabilized Cambodia’s government, opening the door to the Khmer Rouge and its genocidal horrors — this escalation is quite likely to cause havoc in ways we can’t even imagine today.

Today’s Wall Street Journal details one likely area of collateral damage from a surge: Some Pentagon leaders seem to feel that it could “break the force,” pushing the overstretched U.S. military to the snapping point. The only way to make the “surge” happen is, essentially, to borrow against the future — to deploy forces now that might have been the replacements for U.S. forces in Iraq a year or two in the future. Field them today and there’s less for tomorrow. (If this carries echoes of the Bush administration’s “Cut taxes now, make our kids pay” economic policy, well, what a surprise!)

Senior military commanders believe the extra forces can be sustained in Iraq for only six to 12 months before logistical and manpower strains become untenable. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, has told associates that 12 months is needed to ensure a substantive effect.
Echoing Gen. Schoomaker’s concerns that Iraq’s militias would simply wait out a three- or six-month surge and then resume their violence, a report by military historian Frederick Kagan argues that the troops should be in Iraq for at least 18 months. The U.S. has about 140,000 troops in Iraq, and the additional forces could total as many as 20,000.

It’s hard to know what’s more ludicrous: the idea that boosting U.S. forces by roughly 15 percent could change the hopeless dynamic in Iraq at this late date; the desperation of the Bush administration’s ever-deeper retreat from reality; or the pretzel-logic calculations necessary to dress up the “surge” in the trappings of a reasonable policy: “Well, men, we can only keep the extra troops for 6 to 12 months, but we need them for 12 to 18 months, so I guess it’s a one-year deployment, and cross your fingers that the job gets done!”

But what job, exactly? Tame the Shiite militias? That would mean dismantling the democratically elected government of Iraq, which just happens to be led by a die-hard partisan of one side in an increasingly murderous civil war. “Restore order”? How, exactly?

The time is long past when we might rationally expect to achieve any goal in Iraq other than getting our troops out safely. Even that is looking less certain. Today, we’re throwing more troops at the problem without defining the problem. What is the mission of the “surge” reinforcements? Is there a “success condition”? And when, a year from now — just as the Bush administration today is admitting that last year’s war plan was a bust — we admit that the “surge” was a failure, how do we scale back? Is it even possible, given the chaos in Iraq today, for U.S. forces to accomplish a gradual, orderly withdrawal? When we’re down to the last brigade, how do we stop the retreat from turning into a rout?

These are the sorts of questions the Bush administration ought to be asking itself today, and trying to answer now. If it waits to ask them till a year from now, it will end up with even more blood on its hands.
[tags]bush administration, iraq, surge[/tags]

It seems the Baker report’s dire portrait of the state of the war effort in Iraq — and lukewarm compromise proposals for how to wind down the U.S.’s disastrous commitment there — upset the diehards (dare we call them “dead-enders”?) on the right who led the charge to invade.

A New York Times Sunday piece collected their comments. Lame-duck Sen. Rick Santorum: “A prescription for surrender.” Richard Perle: “Absurd.” And, of course, mad Rush Limbaugh: “There’s nothing in this about winning, there’s nothing in this about victory. There isn’t anything in this about moving forward in a positive way. This is cut and run, surrender without the words.”

The few neocons still standing are supporting Sen. John McCain’s call for escalation. McCain wants to send 20,000 more American troops to Iraq — as though we had them to spare, and as though such a relatively small force boost could turn the tide. But here’s what William Kristol thinks: “In the real world, the Baker report is now the vehicle for those Republicans who want to extricate themselves from Iraq, while McCain is articulating the strategy for victory in Iraq.”

All this talk of “victory”! I keep hearing the voice of Robert Duvall’s surfing-mad U.S. Colonel Kilgore from “Apocalypse Now,” loving the smell of napalm in the morning, rhapsodizing that it “smells like…victory.”

Our conservative friends, desperate as their entire movement circles a drain of corruption and defeat, are as detached from reality as Duvall’s commander. There is no victory in Iraq. The war has been lost. Past tense. Invading was the greatest strategic mistake the U.S. has made in our lifetime. We will be paying the price, and cleaning up the mess, for a generation.

“Moving forward in a positive way” today means accepting this reality and figuring out what to do next. Pretending that “victory” is still possible is insane. There is no sense in throwing more money and lives down the hole that President Bush dug for the country. The only question is how many more U.S. soldiers must die so that Bush and his dwindling cadre of diehard supporters don’t have to admit defeat.
[tags]iraq war, neoconservatives[/tags]

Jeane Kirkpatrick, President Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, died today.

In this era when American foreign policy has once again been driven into a ditch by neoconservatives, her name is a reminder of another time when the U.S. made colossal errors based on fallacious theories.

Kirkpatrick’s Big Idea, known eventually as the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, was that it was OK for the U.S. to support repressive dictatorships because “authoritarian regimes” (like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet or, for that matter, Iraq’s strongman Saddam Hussein) were capable of evolving peacefully toward democracy, whereas “totalitarian states” — evil entities like the Soviet Union, Nicaragua or Cuba — were incapable of such change. We could talk to right-wing dictators; we could only fight the Commies to the death.

It’s hard to think of another case where a public intellectual has had his or her ideas so swiftly and definitively repudiated by the march of events. Within less than a decade of Kirkpatrick’s formulation of her doctrine, the Soviet Union and its satellite states had peacefully thrown off their Communist leadership. Subsequent events there have hardly been without problems and dangers. But no one could take Kirkpatrick’s idea seriously after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In its own era, the Kirkpatrick Doctrine looked like a nakedly obvious fig-leaf for the ideological preferences of the Reagan team, who could relate easily enough to the Pinochets and Saddams of the world but who’d spent their lives winning elections by thundering against the Reds. Today, Kirkpatrick’s legacy is a sad reminder to take all grand theoretical frameworks of global policy with multiple handfuls of salt.
[tags]jeane kirkpatrick, kirkpatrick doctrine, foreign policy[/tags]

Remember that election we just had, where the country voted overwhelmingly against President Bush’s Iraq war and the party that made it happen?

Forget vox populi, because it looks like, rather than beginning to wind down American involvement in Iraq, we are headed for escalation. That’s why Robert Gates is out there saying we “aren’t winning” the war. That’s what John McCain has been urging for some time. That’s what President Bush will welcome, as a way of making sure that the war drags its miserableness out long enough for him to pass the buck to his successor. And now it seems the escalation crowd has some Democratic support, in the person of the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Silvestre Reyes.

Reyes is saying he supports sending an additional 20,000 to 30,000 troops to Iraq because he wants to “take out the militias.” I think he needs to go back and look at the intelligence again, because, as far as I’ve been able to tell, those “militias” pretty much are the current Iraqi government. Bush recently welcomed the de facto leader of one of the largest of the Shiite militia factions to the White House.

The presence of 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for close to four years now has done little to curtail the power and influence of these militias. Why would Reyes or anyone else think that adding 20-30,000 more would make any difference at this late stage of the game? You might be able to talk about “taking out the militias” if you were willing to, say, consider doubling the size of the American force in Iraq — a purely theoretical exercise, since we don’t have the troops. But modest increases in troop commitment are all about domestic U.S. politics; they’re not going to change the course of events.

Reyes seems to be engaging in the same sort of dangerous combination of wishful thinking and strategic confusion that got us into the Iraq mess in the first place. We thought we’d voted for change a month ago, but who’d have guessed Washington would interpret “change” to mean “send in more troops”?
[tags]iraq, militias, silvestre reyes[/tags]

So now we have news from the New York Times that, right before he was fired, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld (not former yet!) wrote a terse memo to the president that basically said, “Oops, this war isn’t working out, let’s look at our escape hatch options.”

It’s hard to imagine that this leak came from anywhere else but Rumsfeld’s camp, who presumably felt it would demonstrate either (a) that Rummy isn’t such an idiot after all, and has some awareness of how badly the Iraq adventure has gone awry, or, (b) that Rummy got fired precisely for suggesting that “stay the course” was no longer an idea that anyone but a moron could embrace.

Of course, if Rummy really wanted to prove that he’s no dummy he’d have to dial up the Wayback Machine and find a copy of such a memo a year or two further in the past. No such memo exists; Rumsfeld remained a loyal stay-the-courser — indeed, he was the primary architect of the course-to-be-stayed — till the last possible moment, by which time the gesture was far too little, far too late. Yet even that gesture, it appears, was too much for the blinkered, bunkered man in the Oval Office, who read his defense secretary’s grim prognosis and promptly decided to hang the messenger.

These men belong to an administration that wove a golden-hued myth of loyalty around itself. But it seems that, in fact, each of them found a way to double cross the other — Rumsfeld by belatedly telling the president the truth about the war; Bush responding with a “Now you tell me? Off with your head!”; and now Rumsfeld returning fire with this knife-twisting leak. These guys truly deserve each other, though the nation deserves better.

Our household recently watched The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s amazing documentary about Robert McNamara, and it offers some instructive parallels. (The entire film, in fact, is eye-opening today, and worth watching again even if you saw it back in late 2003 when it came out; the echoes that were only ominous then are deafening in light of the downward spiral of events in Iraq.) McNamara, who in many though not all ways was Lyndon Johnson’s Rumsfeld, offered Johnson a similar memo in fall of 1967, telling his president that it was time to “cut and run” from the Vietnam debacle. Johnson promptly gave him the axe.

The nation was blessed by better timing in that conflict; primary elections were only months away, and the voters delivered such a resounding thumbs down to Johnson’s war that the president stunned the nation with an announcement that he wouldn’t run for reelection. Today we’ve got 15 months before the primaries. That’s a long time to weather the collapse of a government we’re propping up and a murderous civil war our irresponsibility helped start.

I wrote earlier this week about the prospect of a Bush/Cheney resignation, and I realize that remains the unlikeliest of scenarios. But consider how unlikely Johnson’s choice was: He’d won in 1964 in a colossal landslide (a victory on a scale that puts Bush’s two ostensibly “mandate”-delivering squeakers into perspective); he’d engineered passage of some of the most important civil rights and social-welfare legislation in American history; he presided over an era of expansive, if unsettled, prosperity. The idea that he could be essentially forced from office must have seemed absurd.

There’s probably no force that can dislodge Bush from the White House between now and 2008. But consider: we will soon experience a flood of revelations from Congressional investigations into administration corruption and law-breaking. We may well see a revolt in the Republican ranks by party leaders and voters who see how badly Bush’s blind policies can cripple their future. The Beltway media’s slavish willingness to look the other way at the administration’s lies and stupidities appears to be eroding (though at a surprisingly slow pace!).

Right now Bush looks like he’s resuming the policy, if not the rhetoric, of “stay the course”: The Gates choice for defense actually supports that view, as Thomas Powers argued, and the president’s statements are becoming more and more petulantly defiant, as with his declaration that talk of a “graceful exit” displayed “no realism at all”. But if, in the face of the opposition that is beginning to assemble, Bush keeps his heels dug in, the damage will be extraordinary: not only to the GOP but to the office of the president, the U.S.’s international position, and, finally, to the one legacy Bush apparently believes he’s building — his own place in history. If things get to that point, it’s not impossible to imagine someone picking up the phone and telling the president what he must do for the good of the country. I don’t know exactly who that would be — Henry Kissinger? James Baker? Billy Graham? dad? all of the above?

It’s a way long shot, to be sure. But, as Frank Rich writes today, Bush is “slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra.” The president, in other words, is entering a “Final Days”-like phase of utter detachment not only from reality but also from the forces that have hitherto insulated him. That’s dangerous for us all, certainly; but it could be the beginning of the end of the nightmare, too.
[tags]bush administration, iraq, rumsfeld memo[/tags]