U.S. should stay out of bloody Mideast religious wars

Hear, hear!  Before we insert ourselves in a sectarian conflict of Sunni vs. Shia in Syria, Iraq and beyonjd, Hoffman asks us to consider what bloody horrors we "reasonable, rational" Europeans inflicted on ourselves during our sectarian wars [emphasis mine]:

The agreements reached in Westphalia followed 130 years of strife, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, when Protestant Queen Elizabeth I of England beat back Catholic King Philip II of Spain’s rampage across Europe to put down heresy. Other rulers fomented mob violence with incidents such as the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, when the Catholic king targeted well-born Protestants. The king’s assassins murdered nobles in their beds while commoners knifed and strangled Protestant neighbors in the streets.

One-quarter of Europe’s population was killed during the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-48), another bloody phase of the Reformation. Brutal punishments included burning at the stake and pouring excrement down the throats of captives, a torture known as the “Swedish drink.” War spread famine and bubonic plague across Europe. Like now, greed complicated religious conflict, as combatants wrestled over lands and gold.

Exhausted, Protestants and Catholics finally agreed to negotiate. Gathering in separate towns, they sent messengers back and forth to avoid seeing one another’s despised faces. After five years of argument, the Peace of Westphalia concluded the tragic wars of religion. Separation of church and state took hold.

Avoid a classic blunder: Stay out of religious wars in the Middle East

By Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman

September 16, 2014 | Reuters

URL: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS9679781720140916

War Nerd: ISIS conquering empty desert; and bless the Kurds

You gotta love Gary for writing stuff that only he would write, such as this:

Actually, topography has everything to do with what’s gone well or badly for I.S.I.S. in this latest push. If you know the ethnic makeup of the turf they’ve taken, their “shocking gains” don’t seem so shocking, or impressive. After all, we’re talking about a mobile force–mounted on the beloved Toyota Hilux pickup truck, favorite vehicle of every male in the Middle East—advancing over totally flat, dry ground in pursuit of a totally demoralized opponent. In that situation, any force could take a lot of country very quickly. It’s just a matter of putting your foot on the accelerator, moving unopposed on the long stretches of flat desert, then dismounting at the next crossroads town for a small, quick firefight against a few defenders who didn’t get the memo to flee. Once they’re dead, you floor it again until the next little desert town.

So this isn’t the second coming of Erwin Rommel by any means. Everything has conspired to push the Sunni advance, from the lousy opponent they’re up against to the terrain, which is a light mechanized commander’s dream.

Gary has a long-time soft spot for the Kurds, the strongest fighting force in Iraq and a soon-to-be state (one of three) formed from the crucible of Old Iraq:

Something wonderful came out of the horrors of 20th century Iraq, among the Kurds of the Northern hills. They became the only non-sectarian population in Iraq, and perhaps the only such group between Lebanon and India.

[...] Of all the hill tribes, the Sunni Kurds are doing best in this chaos. It’s allowed them to take Kirkuk, which they always needed and wanted, and it also just so happens to put the one and only “supergiant” oilfield in the North (5 billion gallons) totally inside Kurdish territory.

I’m happy as Hell for the Kurds. I love them anyway, and miss Suli a lot—but more than that, it’s simple justice that they get a break for once. The Kurds have paid their dues. Saddam’s murderers in uniform killed nearly 200,000 Kurds, and the man from Tikrit was supposedly very disappointed he hadn’t been able to wipe them out completely.

At the moment, I.S.I.S isn’t even trying to pick a fight with the Pesh Merga—a fight they would lose very quickly if it ever did happen. But then Sunni jihadis have always liked softer targets, the softer the better.

Upshot: Gary's little article should serve to calm some of those Nervous Nellies in Congress, the White House and the U.S. foreign policy establishment about "ISIS overrunning Iraq."  Yeah, they might overrun fellow Sunni areas of Iraq, but that's about it.  The Kurds and Iran (Shiites) will step in and stop them cold elsewhere... but wait, that's what a lot of U.S. fear is really about: letting Iran get even more influence in Iraq, and solving this ISIS problem without our help, making them look strong and us, well, the opposite of strong.  

Beyond that, I still think the real enemy is the Saudis, who prop up all these jihadists all over the world with money, crazy clerics, weapons and asylum. Yet the House of Saud plays nice with Texas oil billionaires and Israel, so we Americans for some reason can't love 'em enough!....

UPDATE (22.07.2014): Here's a continuation at Pando of Gary's coverage of the lame ISIS "invasion" of Iraq: "I.S.I.S. and the Western media: Groping each other in public like a Kardashian Thanksgiving." 

The War Nerd: Like it or not, what’s happening in Iraq right now is part of a rational process

By Gary Brecher

June 23, 2014 | Pando Daily

URL: http://pando.com/2014/06/23/the-war-nerd-like-it-or-not-whats-happening-in-iraq-right-now-is-part-of-a-rational-process/

Zakaria: It was Maliki who lost Iraq (with Dubya's help)

You can check out  Fareed Zakaria repeating his points from the Washington Post on CNN:

This week I heard Rush Limbaugh ranting that Obama "owned" what's happening in Iraq. He kept repeating that word, "owns," like it was a GOP talking point. 

What does that mean though?  It comes from the CEO-managerial culture where the top guy accepts ultimate responsibility for whatever happens on his watch.  Except, of course, the analogy falls short here, because CEOs don't take the blame for stuff that happens in other companies, or indeed, in other countries where the company doesn't even operate. 

So now the GOP wants to recycle the same old "solutions" that didn't work in Iraq before: a small U.S. ground force; training the Iraqi army; more airstrikes; and even regime change (!) of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.  Forget it.

Who lost Iraq? The Iraqis did, with an assist from George W. Bush

By Fareed Zakaria

June 12, 2014 | Washington Post

It is becoming increasingly likely that Iraq has reached a turning point. The forces hostile to the government have grown stronger, better equipped and more organized. And having now secured arms, ammunition and hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from their takeover of Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city — they will build on these strengths. Inevitably, in Washington, the question has surfaced: Who lost Iraq?

Whenever the United States has asked this question — as it did with China in the 1950s or Vietnam in the 1970s — the most important point to remember is: The local rulers did. The Chinese nationalists and the South Vietnamese government were corrupt, inefficient and weak, unable to be inclusive and unwilling to fight with the dedication of their opponents. The same story is true of Iraq, only much more so. The first answer to the question is: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki lost Iraq.

The prime minister and his ruling party have behaved like thugs, excluding the Sunnis from power, using the army, police forces and militias to terrorize their opponents. The insurgency the Maliki government faces today was utterly predictable because, in fact, it happened before. From 2003 onward, Iraq faced a Sunni insurgency that was finally tamped down by Gen. David Petraeus, who said explicitly at the time that the core element of his strategy was political, bringing Sunni tribes and militias into the fold. The surge’s success, he often noted, bought time for a real power-sharing deal in Iraq that would bring the Sunnis into the structure of the government.

A senior official closely involved with Iraq in the Bush administration told me, “Not only did Maliki not try to do broad power-sharing, he reneged on all the deals that had been made, stopped paying the Sunni tribes and militias, and started persecuting key Sunni officials.” Among those targeted were the vice president of Iraq and its finance minister.

But how did Maliki come to be prime minister of Iraq?  He was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert Tom Ricks called “the worst war plan in American history” — the administration needed to find local allies. It quickly decided to destroy Iraq’s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves — to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general — might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.

The turmoil in the Middle East is often called a sectarian war. But really it is better described as “the Sunni revolt.” Across the region, from Iraq to Syria, one sees armed Sunni gangs that have decided to take on the non-Sunni forces that, in their view, oppress them. The Bush administration often justified its actions by pointing out that the Shiites are the majority in Iraq and so they had to rule. But the truth is that the borders of these lands are porous, and while the Shiites are numerous in Iraq — Maliki’s party actually won a plurality, not a majority — they are a tiny minority in the Middle East as a whole. It is outside support — from places as varied as Saudi Arabia and Turkey — that sustains the Sunni revolt.

If the Bush administration deserves a fair share of blame for “losing Iraq,” what about the Obama administration and its decision to withdraw American forces from the country by the end of 2011? I would have preferred to see a small American force in Iraq to try to prevent the country’s collapse. But let’s remember why this force is not there. Maliki refused to provide the guarantees that every other country in the world that hosts U.S. forces offers. Some commentators have blamed the Obama administration for negotiating badly or halfheartedly and perhaps this is true. But here’s what a senior Iraqi politician told me in the days when the U.S. withdrawal was being discussed: “It will not happen. Maliki cannot allow American troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its No. 1 demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq. And Maliki owes them.” He reminded me that Maliki spent 24 years in exile, most of them in Tehran and Damascus, and his party was funded by Iran for most of its existence. And in fact, Maliki’s government has followed policies that have been pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian.

Washington is debating whether airstrikes or training forces would be more effective, but its real problem is much larger and is a decade in the making. In Iraq, it is defending the indefensible.

Zakaria: Blame Bush for today's Iraq violence

Right on. It's totally fair to keep blaming Iraq on Bush.

The escalating violence there isn't something that President Obama can wag away with a dissaproving finger, or "surge" through with thousands of troops. It's too late, the damage was done 10 years ago.

As Zakaria rightly notes, Dubya's policy in 2003 of de-Baathification in Iraq pitted an ousted Sunni elite against a new Shia majority. Their sectarian fight continues to this day. 

It didn't have to be this way. If only some smart, informed people had been in charge, with a little intellectual nuance.

Why Iraq is in turmoil

By Fareed Zakaria

January 11, 2014 | CNN

URL:  http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/11/why-iraq-is-in-turmoil/?hpt=hp_bn2

Is it good the Saudis are mad at Obama?

I meant to post this earlier. But it's not too late because we're still seeing op-eds such as this one on Fox: "Saudis lament, 'we have been stabbed in the back by Obama'".

Just like Christianity is pretty diverse, so is Islam. Most people know there are Shiites (such as in Iran, Lebanon and Syria) and Sunnis (most everywhere else). There are further branches of each of those sects. Perhaps it's a crude analogy, but let's call Wahhabism, a branch of Sunni Islam, the Southern Baptist Church of Islam. 

And Saudi Arabia is the home and sponsor of Wahhabism. It sends billions of petro-dollars around the globe to preach this ultra-conservative brand of Islam in Islamic countries that is entirely compatible with Ismalist and terrorist ideology. And it is engaged in a religious conflict with Iran, the #1 sponsor of Shiite Muslims. As Zakaria points out, Saudi Arabia has a sizable Shiite majority located in oil-rich areas that it wants to keep down.  

Risibly, Saudi Arabia, an absolutist monarchy, calls itself the #1 Arab ally of the United States, which is supposedly engaged in a global war on Islamic terrorism.

See the disconnect?  

So kudos to Fareed Zakaria for calling a spade a spade. And if the Saudis are indeed upset with President Obama, then... maybe he's onto something.

The Saudis Are Mad? Tough!

By Fareed Zakaria

November 11, 2013 | TIME

URL: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2156259,00.html#ixzz2ojBAuFe4

Elite 'liberal' media slants toward war in Syria

Lately, I've been posting op-eds and editorials from the "liberal" Washington Post about Syria because it shows how strong is the consensus of Left-Right elite opinion in America that the U.S. Government must be actively involved and "leading" in every conflict zone in the world, but especially in the Middle East.  

The good news is, 70 percent of Americans oppose the U.S. sending weapons to Syria's "good" rebels.  Only 20 percent favor it.  

Whereas elite U.S. opinion makers believe that President Obama should "lead" on Syria, which is elite-speak for "ignore public opinion." 

Some opinion elites might argue that 80 percent of Americans doesn't really understand what's at stake in Syria.  But the onus is on them -- and President Obama, if he wants to get the U.S. military involved -- to explain to us what's at stake.  Myself I have been following developments there and I cannot say what vital U.S. interests are at stake in Syria.  Sure, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are supporting Assad, but if Assad prevails, then they will have only paid dearly in materiel and diplomatic face to preserve the status quo ante.  As noted CNN/Time's Fareed Zakaria, one of the few "big thinkers" on foreign policy in the mainstream media:

Contrary to much of the media commentary, the fact that Iran and Hezbollah are sending militias, arms, and money into Syria is not a sign of strength. It is a sign that they are worried that the Syrian regime might fall and are desperately seeking to shore it up. Keeping them engaged and pouring resources into Syria weakens them substantially.

Unlike Iran and Hezbollah, Russia might yet enjoy the additional moral satisfaction of having publicly stood up to America and gotten its way, but so what? Let Russia choose its battles; we'll choose ours.  

Even if we believe some of our interests are at stake in Syria, we now understand too well the potential for sectarian war, U.S. escalation, and eventual terrorist blowback in our faces.  So far, the costs of intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan have far outweighed any benefits.  And two years after Gadhafi's death and NATO intervention, Libya is a tribal-sectarian basketcase.  Why should Syria be any different?    

Some pundits are still trying their best to convince us.  For example, WaPo's Jim Hoagland actually warned us, quoting an unnamed French diplomat, "that a loss of U.S. credibility in Syria will encourage Iran to intensify its quest for nuclear weapons."  Really?  If we don't get involved in Syria then Iran will develop nuclear weapons?  Gimme a break!

This argument is the last refuge of neoconservative scoundrels.  Think what he's saying: the U.S. must lead in every instance or forfeit its right to lead in necessary instances.  This is the road to empire, overreach and collapse.

Hoagland's main cheapshot argument is that Obama is worried about his presidential legacy: Obama wants to be known for getting us out of two wars, not starting a third one in Syria.  But even if it's true, what's so wrong with that?  

It's too bad Hoagland and the Washington Post's editorial board don't read the Washington Post's news section:

The difference this time is that the mobilization [of foreign fighters] has been stunningly rapid — what took six years to build in Iraq at the height of the U.S. occupation may have accumulated inside Syria in less than half that.

For Syria's neighbors, the conflict in Syria has become a Sunni-Shia regional war by proxy.  And the U.S. is injecting itself into this sectarian divide, taking the Sunnis' side... that incidentally includes al-Qaeda.

Next, let's take the "liberal" New York Times' Thomas Friedman, America's biggest "big thinker" on foreign policy, (God help us).  In his latest op-ed, Friedman gives two options for U.S. actions in Syria.  Conspicuously, not arming the rebels is not one of those options.  This is how elite opinion-makers do their black magic: they give a sense of inevitability to U.S. military action. 

Friedman actually describes the "idealist approach" to Syria (option #2) as putting U.S. boots on the ground and doing another Iraq debacle, er, occupation.  This is what "idealists" want in Tom Friedman's mind!  Who are these people?!

Next, for the record let's note that the "liberal" Chicago Tribune also supports America's arming Syria's "good" rebels.  But the Tribune holds onto the very slim hope that those arms will force a stalemate and Syria's President Assad to the negotiating table.  (I should note that the Tribune's owner, McClatchy Newspapers, has been doing excellent reporting on Syria.)

Likewise the "liberal" Boston Globe also agrees with President Obama's decision to arm Syria's rebels, although it urges mommy-like "caution" and "care" in doing so: "Now you be careful playing with those guns, rebels!  Don't shoot at anybody who doesn't shoot at your first.  And remember, we're not giving these weapons to you because we hate Shiites; and don't give them to terrorists!"  Pathetic.     

Some of you may say I'm getting too worked up about a few U.S. weapons to Syria.  Maybe so.  Maybe this is a classic Obama maneuver: appearing to do something while actually doing nothing.  According to the New York Times, "Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement."

However, once he involves the U.S. and puts his and our nation's credibility on the line, President Obama will be under immense international pressure and pressure from Congress to turn the tide against Assad's forces.  Then he (we) could be "dragged into an escalating level of support: from light arms to anti-tank weapons to a no-fly zone and so on" ... and so forth, up to putting U.S. boots on the ground -- the "idealist" outcome for the Friedmanites, but the nightmare scenario for Americans.

For admirable lessons on U.S. military restraint vis-a-vis Syria (and Iran), you have to look past the major U.S. newspapers and read stuff like...Daniel Larison at The American Conservative.  

I know, I know, these are strange times....

Vanden Heuvel: Afghanistan, Iraq...Syria?

Vanden Heuvel draws the parallels between Syria and Afghanistan-Iraq:

The lessons of those previous wars are particularly relevant here. Syria has, as Syria specialist Joshua Landis has argued, many parallels to Iraq. It is a nation rife with religious, sectarian and class divisions. A minority — Shiite in Syria — in alliance with urban Sunnis, Christians and other minorities, has used a dictatorship to rule over the Sunni majority. The uprising has quickly turned sectarian — in part because of the outside influences of Turkey and the Gulf monarchies who seek to weaken the Iranian-Shiite alliance.

Despite U.S. efforts to cobble together a united and more secular opposition, the rebels are divided, with Islamists — many espousing open allegiance to al-Qaeda — providing the fiercest fighters. The violence will not end when the brutal regime falls. Already chaos, criminality, local militias and warlords beset “liberated”areas.

There is also that pesky consideration, international law:

Nor does the United States have any legal basis for waging war on Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad does not pose a terrorist or national security threat to the United States, nor a threat to international security. There is no United Nations resolution that can be stretched to provide even a transparent cover for intervention, as there was in Libya.

Finally, let's remember "taking out the bad guy" is the easy part:

The last thing the president should do is commit the United States militarily to the overthrow of the regime. As in Iraq, we can win that war, but we will surely lose in its violent aftermath — and we will bear responsibility for deepening the humanitarian disaster with our “humanitarian” intervention.

Diplomacy is better than military action in Syria

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

May 7, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/10m5WRx

Bergen: How Bush botched the GWOT

Nothing's below that I haven't said a million times already, but it's coming from an "expert," a guy who interviewed bin Laden, so there you go.

How Bush botched war on terror

By Peter Bergen - CNN National Security Analyst

January 8, 2009  |  CNN.com

 

President-elect Barack Obama and his foreign policy advisers and speechwriters are wrestling with one of the most important speeches of his presidency, his inaugural address.

 

One of their toughest conceptual challenges is how to describe and recast what the Bush administration has consistently termed the "war on terror."

 

The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explains the importance of this decision-making in his treatise "On War": "The first, the supreme, the most decisive act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature."

 

Clausewitz's excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which a nation is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous "war on terror" after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.

 

Bush took the nation to war against a tactic, rather than a war against a specific enemy, which was obviously al Qaeda and anyone allied to it. When the United States went to war against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his congressional supporters did not declare war against U-boats and kamikaze pilots, but on the Nazi state and Imperial Japan.

 

The war on terror, sometimes known as the "Global War on Terror" or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

 

The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq. It had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the war on terror and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

 

The theory was that he might give such weapons to terrorists, including al Qaeda to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, turned out to be true.

 

The Bush administration's approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

 

It pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories in which, in early 2006, the more radical Hamas won a resounding victory, propelled to power on a wave of popular revulsion for the incompetence and corruption of the Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s.

 

Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah is not only a terrorist group but is also part of the rickety Lebanese government and runs social welfare services across the country, yet for the Bush administration its involvement in terrorism was all that mattered.

 

As is now widely understood in Israel, the war against Hezbollah was a moral and tactical defeat for the Israeli military and government. Events in the current Israeli incursion in Gaza will determine whether history repeats itself.

 

Under the banner of the war on terror, the Bush administration also tied itself in conceptual knots conflating the threat from al Qaeda with Shiite groups like Hezbollah and the ayatollahs in Iran.

 

In 2006, for instance, President Bush claimed that "the Sunni and Shiite extremist represent different faces of the same threat." In reality, Sunni and Shiite extremists have been killing each other in large numbers for years in countries from Pakistan to Iraq. The groups have differing attitudes toward the United States, which Sunni extremists attacked in 1993 and again on 9/11, while Shiite militants have never done so.

 

So, how to reconceptualize the GWOT?

 

Contrary to a common view among Europeans, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades, al Qaeda is not just another criminal/terrorist group that can be dealt with by police action and law enforcement alone.

 

After all, a terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its single largest massacre killed 29 people. By contrast, al Qaeda has declared war on the United States repeatedly -- as it did for the first time to a Western audience during Osama bin Laden's 1997 interview with CNN.

 

Following that declaration of war, the terror group attacked American embassies, a U.S. warship, the Pentagon and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning; acts of war by any standard.

 

Al Qaeda is obviously at war with the United States and so to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action Against Terrorists, would be foolish and dangerous.

 

What kind of war then should the United States fight against al Qaeda? For that we should learn some lessons from the conceptual errors of the Bush administration.

 

Nine days after 9/11, Bush addressed Congress in a speech watched live by tens of millions of Americans in which he said that al Qaeda followed in the footsteps "of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century...They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism," implying that the fight against al Qaeda would be similar to World War II or the Cold War.

 

For the Bush administration, painting the conflict in such existential terms had the benefit of casting the president as the heroic reincarnation of Winston Churchill and anyone who had the temerity to question him as the reincarnation of Hitler's arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain.

 

But this portrayal of the war on terror was massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And when the United States fought the Nazis, the country spent 40 percent of its gross domestic product to do so and fielded millions of soldiers.

 

In his inaugural address, Obama should say that the United States is indeed at "war against al Qaeda and its allies," but that as Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If Americans are not terrorized by terrorists, then the U.S. has won against them.

 

Al Qaeda and its allies are threats to the United States and Americans living and working overseas, but they are far from all-powerful. Barring an exceptional event like September 11, 2001, in any given year Americans are more likely to die of snake bites or lightning strikes than a terrorist attack.

 

Despite the hyperventilating rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration that we faced during the Cold War. There are relatively few adherents of Binladen-ism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.

 

Obama should also make it clear that instead of the Bush formulation of "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," the Obama administration doctrine will be, "Anyone who is against the terrorists is with us."

 

After all it is only al Qaeda and its several affiliates in countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and allied groups such as the Taliban that kill U.S. soldiers and civilians and attack American interests around the globe.

 

Everyone else in the world is a potential or actual ally in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates, because those organizations threaten almost every category of institution, government and ethnic grouping.

 

This is the first of two commentaries on the war on terror.

Bush backtracks on political goals in Iraq

What do you do when achieving success is too darn hard? That's right: you lower the bar.

We've gone from Bush's Criteria -- an Iraq that can sustain, defend, and govern itself, be an ally in the war on terror, and serve as an example of freedom to the Mideast -- to a bunch of symbolic steps that recalcitrant Iraqis would have taken anyway.

Whatever. If this sets the stage for U.S. withdrawal, so be it. Let's declare "victory" any way we can and get the hell out of there!

U.S. scales back political goals for Iraqi unity

By Steven Lee Myers and Alissa J. Rubin

November 24, 2007 | International Herald Tribune

With American military successes outpacing political gains in Iraq, the Bush administration has lowered its expectation of quickly achieving major steps toward unifying the country, including passage of a long-stymied plan to share oil revenues and holding regional elections.

Instead, administration officials say they are focusing their immediate efforts on several more limited but achievable goals in the hope of convincing Iraqis, foreign governments and Americans that progress is being made toward the political breakthroughs that the military campaign of the past 10 months was supposed to promote.

The short-term American targets include passage of a $48 billion Iraqi budget, something the Iraqis say they are on their way to doing anyway; renewing the United Nations mandate that authorizes an American presence in the country, which the Iraqis have done repeatedly before; and passing legislation to allow thousands of Baath Party members from Saddam Hussein's era to rejoin the government. A senior Bush administration official described that goal as largely symbolic since re-hirings have been quietly taking place already.

Bush administration officials have not abandoned their larger goals and still emphasize the vital importance of reaching them eventually. They say that even modest steps, if taken soon, could set the stage for more progress, in the same manner that this year's so-called surge of troops opened the way, unexpectedly, for the realignment of Sunni tribesmen to the American side.

A senior official said the administration was intensifying its pressure on the Iraqi government to produce some concrete signs of political progress.

"If we can show progress outside of the security sector alone, that will go a long way to demonstrate that we are in fact on a sustainable path to stability in Iraq," the senior official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's planning.

[This senior official's statement worries me. It tells me that our "lowering the bar" in Iraq is all about PR spin back home, and shoring up domestic support for the Iraq occupation. Read between the lines: They want to keep this thing going for years to come! -- J ]

On Saturday, Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad, said the military had created an opportunity for progress, but warned, "This is going to be a long, hard slog."

"It is going to be one thing at a time, maybe two things at a time, we hope with increasing momentum," he said. "It is a long-term process."

The White House has clearly been elated by the decline in violence that followed the increase in American forces, now totaling 162,000 troops. Public comments by President George W. Bush and his aides, however, have been muted, reflecting a frustration at the lack of political progress, a continuation of a pattern in which intense American efforts to promote broader reconciliation have proved largely fruitless.

There have been some signs that American influence over Iraqi politics is dwindling, not growing, after the recent improvements in security — which remain incomplete, as shown by a deadly bombing on Friday in Baghdad. While Bush administration officials once said they aimed to secure "reconciliation" among Iraq's deeply divided religious, ethnic and sectarian groups, some officials now refer to their goal as "accommodation."

"We can't pass their legislation," a senior American official in Baghdad said. "We can't make them like each other. We can't even make them talk to each other. Well, sometimes we can. But we can help them execute their budget."

Ambassador Crocker drew a distinction between the effectiveness of the American military buildup in quelling violence and the influence the United States could bring to bear at a political level, where the Iraqis must play the decisive role.

"The political stuff does not lend itself to sending out a couple of battalions to help the Iraqi's pass legislation," he said.

Officials in Washington and in Baghdad share the view that military gains alone are not enough to overcome the deep distrust among Iraqi factions caused by nearly five decades of dictatorship and war. And in both capitals there are leaders who continue to hold out hope for broad political gains, eventually.

"We need a grand bargain among all the groups," said one senior member of Iraq's government, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

But with that not yet in sight, Bush administration officials said that they hoped that securing approval of a few initial steps might lead to more substantive agreements next year, including provincial elections, which the White House wants to see held before Bush leaves office less than 14 months from now. The prospect of such elections has been politically delicate because of the fear that some regions, like Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, are most likely to vote for leaders who support stronger regional governments at the expense of the Baghdad administration.

While one Bush administration official called the renewed pressure on Baghdad a "political surge" after the increase in troop levels this year, most of what Washington is seeking appears to reflect a diminished and more realistic set of expectations after months of little political progress.

The troop increase at the beginning of the year was intended to create the conditions for an improvement in Iraq's political stability measured by so-called benchmarks, including a broad agreement on sharing oil revenues.

But those benchmarks remain largely unfulfilled despite a significant drop in attacks recorded by the American military from a peak in June. The administration's critics in Congress have cited the lack of progress toward those benchmarks as evidence that the White House is on the wrong track in Iraq and ought to begin a rapid drawdown of American combat forces.

Perhaps the most achievable of the administration's short-term targets, American and Iraqi officials said, is legislation that would allow thousands of members of the Saddam-era Baath Party, most of them Sunnis, to return to government positions. A senior administration official described that legislation as largely symbolic — since the Shiite-dominated government had begun to accommodate some Sunni officials in practice — but important in that it would at last signal some progress, capitalizing on the relative lull in violence.

Other immediate steps the Bush administration is pressing the Iraqi government to take include passing a budget, $48 billion for the coming year, and again renewing the United Nations mandate for the American troop presence before it expires at the end of the year.

In Baghdad, Iraqi officials indicated that the various parties, which like much of the country are defined largely by sect or ethnicity, remained far apart on the more difficult issues of sharing power and revenues. Some seemed surprised by the idea that the Bush administration would apply more pressure.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's political adviser, Sadiq al-Rikabi, said that it would not take any pressure from the Americans to persuade the Iraqi leaders and Parliament to approve a budget. "Every state needs a budget," he said. "It's impossible to function without a budget. It does not need any push from anyone."

At the same time, though, he expressed an appreciation for the Bush administration's effort to keep all sides talking.

Although the White House no longer faces the immediate prospect of losing crucial political support for the war effort in Iraq — because the war's opponents lack the necessary votes in Congress to force a change in policy — the imperative for political progress remains, if only because of the American elections in less than a year.

Despite the reduction in violence, with attacks now down to levels last seen in early 2006, some Democrats in Congress have continued to press for a timeline for a withdrawal. Most recently, the House tried to tie a deadline to a $50 billion war spending bill, although that proposal died in the Senate.

When Congress debated the war earlier this year, the administration pushed hard for the Iraqis to approve some of the same pieces of legislation that have yet to materialize. Several times, for example, the law on dispensing oil revenues, which are now surging because of world oil prices nearing $100 a barrel, appeared on the brink of adoption, only to stall.

One of the immediate American concerns is getting Iraq to request an extended United Nations mandate, which authorizes the American-led military presence. In Baghdad, a senior Iraqi government official said that the extension of the mandate for the American-led multinational forces would not be a problem, but that there was little progress in negotiating the longer-term agreements on a "strategic partnership" between the United States and Iraq.

"It's the status of forces agreement that we have to start on," the official said. That agreement, although not an issue until 2009 or later, is a far more delicate matter because it will frame the future military relationship between the countries.

The most important thing the Americans can do is keep the political blocs in Iraq — Shiite and Sunni Arab and Kurds — talking to each other and to help them understand legislation now being debated, several Iraqi politicians said. Only with concrete information, they said, could rumors be dispelled that specific legislation might help or hurt certain groups.

"So far the activities of the American Embassy are a bit limited in this regard," said Qassim Daoud, an independent Shiite in Parliament, who served as a minister for security in the government of Ayad Allawi before Iraq regain its own sovereignty.

Earlier this month, the White House dispatched several senior aides to Baghdad to work with the Iraqis on specific legislative areas. They include the under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs, Reuben Jeffery III, who is working on the budget and oil law; the State Department's senior Iraq adviser, David Satterfield, who is focused on the elections and de-Baathification law; and Brett McGurk, the National Security Council's Iraq director, who is pressing for the United Nations mandate and a longer security agreement. All have been meeting with a variety of officials and party leaders across Iraq, a senior administration official said.

American officials in Baghdad appear to understand the limitations they face and are focusing on pragmatic goals like helping the Iraqi government spend the money in its budget. That, officials in both countries said, could do more than anything else to ease tensions and build support for the national government.

"I think reconciliation will eventually come," a senior Bush administration official said, but adding, "That's a long way down the path."

Baghdad: A Tale of Two Cities

IRAQ: A Tale of One City, Now Two

by Ali al-Fadhily*

BAGHDAD, Nov 12 (IPS) - The separation of religious groups in the face of sectarian violence has brought some semblance of relative calm to Baghdad. But many Iraqis see this as the uncertain consequence of a divide and rule policy.

Claims are going the rounds that sectarian violence in Iraq has fallen, and that the U.S. military "surge" has succeeded in reducing attacks against civilians. Baghdad residents speak of the other side of the coin – that they live now in a largely divided city that has brought this uneasy calm.

"I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has decreased and that everything is fine," retired general Waleed al-Ubaidy told IPS in Baghdad. "But the truth is far more bitter. All that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq."

And as with Baquba and other violence-hit areas of Iraq, he says a part of the story in Baghdad is that there is nobody left to tell it. "Most of the honest journalists have left."

"Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and neighbourhoods," Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad's municipalities told IPS. "There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni Baghdad to start with. Then, each is divided into little town-like pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes."

Many Baghdad residents say that the claims of reduced violence can be tested only when refugees go back home.

Many areas of Baghdad that were previously mixed are now totally Shia or totally Sunni. This follows the sectarian cleansing in mixed neighbourhoods by militias and death squads.

On the Russafa side of Tigris River, al-Adhamiya is now fully Sunni; the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya and small strips of Aamil which are dominated by Shia militias.

"If the situation is good, why are five million Iraqis living in exile," says 55- year-old Abu Mohammad who was evicted from Shula in West Baghdad to become a refugee in Amiriya, a few miles from his lost home.

"Americans and Iranians have succeeded in realising their old dream of dividing the Iraqi people into sects. That is the only success they can talk about."

Violence is no more hitting the headlines, but it clearly continues. Bodies of Iraqis killed after being tortured are still found in garbage dumps, although fewer than a few months ago.

"Iraqi and American officials should be ashamed of talking of 'unidentified bodies'," Haja Fadhila from the Ghazaliya area of western Baghdad told IPS. "These are the bodies of Iraqis who had families to support, and names to be proud of. But nobody talks about them, there is no media. It is as if it is all taking place on Mars."

The Iraqi ministries for health and interior have said that they are finding on average five to ten "unidentified bodies" on the streets of Baghdad every day.

"Those Americans and their Iraqi collaborators in the Green Zone talk of five or ten bodies being found everyday as if they were talking of insects," Thamir Aziz, a teacher in Adhamiya told IPS. "We know they are lying about the real number of martyrs, but even if it's true, is it not a disaster that so many innocent Iraqis are found dead every day?"

Most people blame the Iraqi police for the sectarian assassinations, and the U.S. military for doing little to stop them.

"The Americans ask (Prime Minister Nouri al) Maliki to stop the sectarian assassinations when they know very well that his ministers are ordering the sectarian cleansing," Mahmood Farhan from the Muslim Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group, told IPS.

A UN report released September 2005 held interior ministry forces responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and killings. It said special police commando units accused of carrying out the killings were recruited from the Shia Badr and Mehdi militias.

Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor to Iraqi security forces under former U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, supervised the training of these forces.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisors group in El Salvador in 1984-86; Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighbouring Honduras 1981-85. Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994. The Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political workers.

The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.

The CIA records document that "special intelligence units", better known as "death squads", comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas.

Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.

(*Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)

'Window of opportunity' to exit Iraq with honor

Dreyfuss' analysis doesn't fit pro- or anti-war positions, but his facts are straight. He argues reasonably that the U.S. has a small window of opportunity to end its involvement in Iraq and save face.

However, I don't agree 100% with Dreyfuss. My comments are embedded herein.


Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, Fighting Whom in Iraq?
posted 2007-11-11 20:31:31

Think for a moment of what has happened in Iraq since the Bush administration's shock-and-awe invasion in March 2003. There are, by now, perhaps a million dead Iraqis, give or take a few hundred thousand. If a typical wounded-to-dead ratio of 3:1 holds, then you're talking about up to 4 million war, occupation, and civil-war casualties. Now, add in the estimated 2-2.5 million who went into exile, fleeing the country, and another estimated 2.3 million who have had to leave their homes and go into internal exile as Iraqi communities and neighborhoods were "cleansed." Despite a growing number of recent returnees, these internal refugee figures increased significantly in 2007, quadrupling between the beginning of the "surge" in February and the end of September, according to the Red Crescent Society, with up to 83% of them being women and children (with, in turn, most of those children being 12 or under). The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, in a recent report to Congress, estimated that 14% of the population, or one out of every seven Iraqis, has been "displaced by war." So perhaps you have 6-8 million Iraqis put out of action in one way or another from of a pre-invasion population that was only an estimated 26 million to begin with. A striking percentage of those who remain are children and conditions remain grim. This is certainly one way to pacify a country -- by setting off one of the true disasters of our time.

It's within this context that new figures on what is clearly a real decrease in violence for the first time in years in Iraq -- whether against Americans or Iraqis -- are coming in. Various partial explanations have been offered for this (or sometimes none at all), but no one has put this changing moment together better, or more provocatively, than Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Tom

Who's the Enemy?

In Iraq, It's Getting Harder to Find Any Bad Guys
By Robert Dreyfuss

Who is the enemy? Who, exactly, are we fighting in Iraq? Why are we there? And what's our objective?

Nearly five years into the war, the answers to basic questions like these ought to be obvious. In the Alice in Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is Iraq, though, they're anything but.

We aren't fighting the Sunnis. Not any more, anyway. Virtually the entire Sunni establishment, from the moderate Muslim Brotherhood-linked Iraqi Islamic Party (which has been part of every Iraqi government since 2003) to the Anbar tribal alliance (which has been begging for U.S. support since 2004 and only recently got it) is either actively cooperating with the American military or sullenly tolerating what it hopes will be a receding occupation. Across Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, the United States is helping to build army and police units as well as neighborhood patrols -- the Pentagon calls them "concerned citizens" -- out of former resistance fighters, with the blessing of tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala, and Salahuddin provinces, parts of Baghdad, and areas to the south of the capital. We have met the enemy, and -- surprise! -- they are friends or, if not that, at least not active enemies. Attacks on U.S. forces in Sunni-dominated areas, including the once-violent hot-bed city of Ramadi, Anbar's capital, have fallen dramatically.

Among the hard-core Sunni resistance, there is also significant movement toward a political accord -- if the United States were willing to accept it. Twenty-two Iraqi insurgent groups announced the creation of a united front, under the leadership of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former top Baath party official of the Saddam era, and they have opened talks with Iyad Allawi, a secular Shia who was Iraq's first post-Saddam prime minister.

We aren't fighting the Shia. The Shia merchant class and elite, organized into the mostly pro-Iranian Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council and the Islamic Dawa party, are part of the Iraqi government that the United States created and supports -- and whose army and police are armed and trained by the United States. The far more popular forces of Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army aren't the enemy either. In late August, Sadr declared a ceasefire, ordering his militia to stand down; and, since then, attacks on U.S. forces in Shia-dominated areas of Iraq have fallen off very sharply, too. Though recent, provocative attacks by U.S. troops, in conjunction with Iraqi forces, on Sadr strongholds in Baghdad, Diwaniya, and Karbala have caused Sadr to threaten to cancel the ceasefire order, and though intra-Shia fighting is still occurring in many parts of southern Iraq, there is no Shia enemy that justifies a continued American presence in Iraq, either.

And we certainly aren't fighting the Kurds. For decades, the Kurds have been America's (and Israel's) closest allies in Iraq. Since 2003, the three Kurdish-dominated provinces have been relatively peaceful.

We're not exactly fighting Al Qaeda any more either. Despite President Bush's near-frantic efforts to portray the war in Iraq as a last-ditch, Alamo-like stand against Osama bin Laden's army, U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq are having a hard time finding pockets of Al Qaeda to attack these days, though the group still has the power to conduct deadly attacks now and then. In recent weeks, General David Petraeus, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and other authorities have pretty much declared Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) dead and buried. That happy funeral is the result not of brilliant U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, but of the determination of our newfound Sunni allies to exterminate the group. [For the record, last April I predicted that Iraq's Sunnis would chase out al Qaeda if the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, because al Qaeda's foreign fighters would be just another foreign occupier with no useful purpose to Iraqis. Plus, al Qaeda has always been brutal and holier-than-thou in its dealings with Iraq's Sunnis. -- J] No lesser authority than General Petraeus himself now admits that Al Qaeda has been expelled from every single one of its strongholds in Baghdad. In Anbar Province, according to Crocker, "People do feel the weight's off. Al Qaeda is simply gone."

And, nearly a year after President Bush proclaimed Iran to be Public Enemy No. 1 in Iraq, blaming Tehran for supporting both Al Qaeda and Shia militias, things are even getting better on that front. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared that Iran had quietly promised to halt the smuggling of weapons and advanced roadside bombs into Iraq. "I don't know whether to believe them. I'll wait and see," he said, in what was a rather dramatic downgrading of the White House's warnings about Iran.

Confirming Gates' comments, General Ray Odierno, the commanding general of the multinational forces in Iraq, noted a sharp decline in the use of EFP's (explosively formed penetrators), the sort of IED that the United States blames Iran for supplying. In July, Odierno said, there were 99 EFP's used against U.S. forces; in August, 78; in September, 52; and in October, 53. Partly as a result, Crocker announced that he is resuming a dialogue with his Iranian counterpart, Ambassador Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, soon. At the same time, the United States announced its intention to release a number of Iranians detained in Iraq, a move seen as a good-will gesture toward Tehran.

Surge or Not, Things Are Getting Better

All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer. With Al Qaeda declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi Army lying low, killings in Iraq are way down. The security situation in Iraq is far better than it's been at any time since 2005. Many American antiwar critics, who are invested in the notion that no good news can come out of Iraq and who (secretly or openly) revel in the Bush administration's Iraqi failures, are reluctant to admit that things are getting better.

Perhaps they worry that, if the situation in Iraq improves, the prospect of Democratic gains at the polls next November will diminish. Perhaps they've convinced themselves that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divide is so enormous that partition is the only solution, and that Iraq doesn't deserve to be a country anyway. Perhaps their distaste for President Bush (which I share) is so all-consuming that they fear any improvement in the situation will be credited to the President -- something they can't tolerate.

If so, that's perverse. The fact is: There is a critical window of opportunity opening for the United States to withdraw and for Iraq to hold itself together and rebuild. To the extent that things are getting better, that's good news. The majority of Americans -- from the left to conservative realists -- who want the United States to get out of Iraq quickly ought to seize this news and push for an acceleration of the momentum for withdrawal. Certainly, as the polls all indicate, this is the course Americans generally want their politicians to follow.

There's really no disputing the improvement since August. According to the careful compilers at the website icasualties.org, both U.S. and Iraqi deaths have fallen dramatically. In May, June, and July, more than a hundred Americans were killed each month; for August, September, and October the totals were 84, 65, and 38. For Iraqis, the numbers have been even more dramatic, with Iraqi military and civilian deaths falling from 3,000 per month earlier this year to 848 and 679 in September and October. There are, of course, other counts, and reliable statistics are hard to come by in Iraq, but there's no doubt that the numbers represent something real, that the violence is down in Baghdad and most of the rest of the country.

There is other, anecdotal news to support the notion that security is better these days. Last week, Iraqi officials announced that, since the summer, 46,000 Iraqis have returned to the war-torn capital. Hundreds of shops are reopening; taxi drivers say the streets are far safer; and Christian Berthelsen and Said Rifai the Los Angeles Times report that "the booze business has rebounded" after years of puritanical suppression by Islamists, another sign that Al Qaeda has been driven from the premises. On November 3, the Associated Press reported that an entire day passed in Baghdad without a single bombing or shooting. That same day, according to Agence France Press, the U.S. Air Force, for the first time in memory, declared that it had carried out not a single bombing raid or combat mission anywhere in Iraq, due to an "improved security situation."

[There goes that damn lib'rul media again! See, they're totally invested in America's defeat, that's why they refuse to report on "all the good news" coming out of Iraq! -- J ]

In Anbar Province, including its capital, Ramadi, the news is rather remarkable. In January, attacks on U.S. forces in Ramadi came at the rate of 30 per day; today, there is less than one a day. During the recent month-long Ramadan holiday, there were only four attacks on U.S. forces; during Ramadan 2006, there were 442.

None of this means that Iraq has become Sweden. It's still a violent place. There is no real government; the economy is in shambles; basic services --- electricity, water, trash collection -- are nonexistent; and most areas of the country are ruled by militias, gangs, criminal elements, or local warlords. But for the first time since the invasion in March 2003, there is a real opportunity for the two main blocs of Iraqi Arabs, the Sunni and Shia communities, to strike a deal. If such a deal were indeed struck, the Kurds would have little choice but to buy into it. Problem is, the United States cannot broker the deal. Having spent five years boosting sectarianism in Iraq, killing innocent Iraqis, busting down doors in small villages, and trying to turn Iraq into an American colony, the United States simply has no credibility left.

Any deal we broker, any leader we promote, any government we sponsor has just gotten the kiss of death. What unites Iraqi Arabs, from the Sunni resistance to the Mahdi Army, is opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, as well as opposition to Al Qaeda and to Iran's heavy-handed interference in Iraqi affairs.

[I'm not so sure I agree with this analysis. Iraq's minority Sunnis may hate the U.S. occupation, but they also acknowledge that U.S. troops are shielding them from a potential Shia onslaught. Hence they have an interest in prolonging the U.S. occupation while they gear up for civil war once the U.S. withdraws. -- J]

Next Step: A New Iraqi Accord?

A new, nationalist Iraq is emerging underneath the presence of 160,000 U.S. troops. That nationalism extends from the current and former Sunni resistance fighters to Sadr's Mahdi Army to a range of moderate, secular Sunni and Shia politicians, all of whom -- albeit under exceedingly difficult circumstances -- are talking to each other about a new political framework for a new Iraqi government.

Two urgent steps are needed in order capitalize on the reemergence of Iraqi nationalism. First, the broad-based majorities among Sunni and Shia Arabs must be reconciled under a new Iraqi constitution, with new Iraqi elections creating a new Iraqi government untainted by American oversight. Second, Iraq's neighbors -- all of them, including Iran and Syria -- have to underwrite the new Iraqi nationalism. With its track record, the Bush administration is utterly incapable of accomplishing either of these tasks. It's a job for the United Nations, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and other parties. And all of this, in turn, depends on the United States announcing a timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq.

As noted by countless observers, including official ones, the United States has so far been unable to translate the decline in violence into political gains. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) made exactly that point, accusing the administration of failing to take advantage of the improved security situation. With a great deal of understatement, the GAO said: "U.S. efforts lack strategies with clear purpose, scope, roles, and performance measures." (In other words, the United States doesn't know what it's doing.)

Similarly, the Center for American Progress, a thinktank that has truly distinguished itself from other establishment bodies by unequivocally calling for the total and rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, picks up on this in an astute memorandum called "Strategic Drift in Iraq." It notes (accurately in my reading): "The United States' current Iraq debate has three key dynamics: a lame duck president looking to hand Iraq off to his successor, a conservative movement promoting fear over reason for perceived political gain, and a progressive movement frustrated by a lack of change in Iraq policy and vague positions about what to do."

In fact, the "strategic drift" that the Center for American Progress refers to is beginning to look more and more like a Washington establishment with every intention to stay put in Iraq for decades to come. Even if the more rabid neoconservative calls for escalating the war into Iran and Syria are left aside, it's still clear that many centrist Republicans and moderate Democrats expect a long occupation followed by an even longer period in which the presence of U.S. forces will remain significant. Former Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, a realist-minded, anti-neocon officer, recently predicted that U.S. forces would have to stay in the Middle East "for the next 25 to 50 years," and he was pretty blunt about the importance of oil. "I'm not saying this is a war for oil, but I am saying that oil fuels an awful lot of geopolitical moves that political powers may take there." Notably, it was recently reported that U.S. legal advisers to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil helped Iraq to cancel an enormous Russian oil deal with Iraq to develop its West Qurna oil field, which the New York Times called "one of a dozen or so supergiant oil fields in the world." Not that the war had anything to do with oil, mind you.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), in a glum forecast, put forth two scenarios for Iraqi war costs. The first -- envisioning 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2017 -- would cost an additional $570 billion over 10 years. The second -- involving a slow decline to 75,000 U.S. troops by 2013 and then the maintenance of that force through 2017 -- would cost an additional $1,055 billion, bringing the war's cost to a conservatively estimated $1.7 trillion. CBO didn't project beyond 2017, so feel free to take out your calculator.

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia. He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone, The Nation, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. He is also the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan, 2005). His web site is RobertDreyfuss.com.

Copyright 2007 Robert Dreyfuss