J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

When Something Is <= Nothing Cross post

Last year the Democratic Leadership had the bright idea to demand Bush provide a "strategy for success" . My reps Boxer, DiFI and Pelosi were all gung-ho. So I wrote em to explain the facts of life - Bush's answer would be "stay the course".

Well it wasn't quite that. He hired Dr. Feaver and put him on the NSC - a poliitical scientist whose dubiious claim to fame - \talk victory and the sheep will follow. The good doctor set feverishly to work on the strategy for sucess that the Democrats were crying for. Tha National Strategy for Victory in Iraq was released last fall to great fanfare and a six week proipaganda tour.

Is Feaver still on the NSC??

Now what do you think that George Bush is going to do with the latest demand of the marmot leaders???

The pottery barn rule? What kind of horse waste is that? A new military strategy for counterinsurgency? 

Here's your benchmark for sucess. Written in September 2003:

"We cannot leave Iraq before it is stabilized," declared a former CIA officer. But to maintain a prolonged foreign occupation of Iraq is to destabilize it only further. Once the invader departs, there will no doubt be a civil war, which will accelerate the dismemberment of the nation, giving rise to a fundamentalist regime, which will make at least some people miss the era of Saddam.

There's the benchmark. Where are the Pottery Barn's metrics?

WASHINGTON -- Iraq's new so-called unity government has produced not unity, but increased chaos and civil war.

In central Iraq, Sunni insurgents are escalating the sectarian conflict with ever more blatant mass killings of Shiites. In southern Iraq, Shiite militias entirely outside the control of new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's security forces escalate their confrontation and boldness towards British security forces by the day.

In the less than half a month since Maliki's government was appointed, the slaughter of civilians by the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias acting in reprisal has escalated to new levels of scale and ferocity. What went wrong?

The answer is that more than three years after the first violent clashes between U.S. forces and proto-insurgents in Fallujah heralded the still-escalating insurgency, Bush administration policymakers and most pontificators in the U.S. media still fail to grasp the nature and scale of the problems in Iraq that underlie the insurgency and emerging civil war.

Bush administration policymakers remain fixated on their chimera of establishing a working democracy in Iraq and they have gone to great pains to micro-manage the simulacra of democracy -- open parliamentary elections, a parliament and coalition wheeling and dealing. Much effort over the past two years has also gone into building up new Iraqi police and military forces already more than 220,000 strong.

 

The trouble is: None of it is real.

William Lind who wrote the USMC 4GW manual will tell you Pottery Barnchair generals.  You and Bush are in a hurricane spitting into the wind.

edit | reply | write to author | link | Not yet rated.On June 20, 2006 - 10:58am jexster said:

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Meanwhile back on Planet Earth, the US is losing the other war for the very same Pottery Barn reasons:

Perhaps it's time to offer a short refresher course in Guerrilla War 101:

• Air power works against you, not for you. It kills lots of people who weren't your enemy, recruiting their relatives, friends, and fellow tribesmen to become your enemies. In this kind of war, bombers are as useful as 42 cm. siege mortars.
• Big, noisy, offensives, launched with lots of warning, achieve nothing. The enemy just goes to ground while you pass on through, and he's still there when you leave. Big Pushes are the opposite of the "ink blot" strategy, which is the only thing that works, when anything can.
• Putting the Big Push together with lots of bombing in Afghanistan's Pashtun country means we end up fighting most if not all of the Pashtun. In Afghan wars, the Pashtun always win in the end.
• Quisling governments fail because they cannot achieve legitimacy.
• You need closure, but your guerilla enemy doesn't. He not only can fight until Doomsday, he intends to do just that – if not you, then someone else.
• The bigger the operations you have to undertake, the more surely your enemy is winning.

Lind 6/20/06

edit | reply | write to author | link | Not yet rated.On June 20, 2006 - 11:10am jexster said:

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Support the Feingold-Kerry Amendment. Send your Senators a message. They still don't get it.  IF they don't, come November they will.

However much sense this "phased redeployment" plan might or might not make, it ain't gonna happen for a number of reasons (of which the overriding fact that troop deployment policies are in the hand of the President, not Congress is just one).
Besides its vulnerability to charges of "cut-and-run" from the usual supects, committing the US to a withdrawal policy would force the Bush Administration to have to face up to yet another unresolved issue about Iraq: the matter of permanent US bases there. Not so much an "if" at this point (from all account, said bases are already in the process of construction) - but whether or not these facilities will be maintained without the express consent of the "independent" Iraqi government - which, having been officially declared to be a "democratic" one presumably reflects the will of the Iraq people (who may or may not want a bunch of foreign military bases on their territory).
The Administration has begged this issue since the beginning, and a timetabled withdrawal plan will only force them to have to have to decide: either to pressure the Iraqis to accept bases - or go ahead and build/occupy them regardless: sort of Mideast Guantanamo Bays.
Either way, the Bush gang would never stand for any plan which would force them into any situation which cannot be dealt with by deflection and sloganeering.
More's the pity.

This sends the message that the Dems view the situation differently AND have a plan. If the GOP wants to run on "Stay and Pay" as Murtha put it on Meet the Press, let them go ahead and do so. We know what the public thinks about Iraq these days, regardless of the capture of Zarqawi and whatever other monumental achievements the administration wants to tout.

Japan's out. Maybe we should follow their lead?

Japan's face-saving exit from Iraq
Jun 21, 2006
By Hisane Masaki

TOKYO - After several twists and turns, Japan finally made a long-awaited announcement on Tuesday that it will withdraw its troops from Iraq, a decision that will allow the nation to play on its own ground in post-war Iraq: economic cooperation.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced that some 600 Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) troops stationed in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah would return home. ...

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

• The killing of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is truly a positive development, and U.S. forces who accomplished this feat deserve enormous credit and appreciation. Democratic Party "Leaders:" Feinstein and Dodd SUNDAY
• Is the Insurgency on the Rebound? Time Magaizine YESTERDAY

And we should be grateful that they didn't speak of a "sea change" like Lindsay Graham?

I think not.  I may have been born at 11:30 at night, but I didn't fall off the turnip truck LAST NIGHT or Saturday night

The Constitution licenses Congress, not the President, to raise and maintain an army and to wage war. But how many Americans believe that after watching this Congress? Bush has shown more disdain for Congress than any president in history. Even with the most compliant lapdog Congress, he still uses secret executive orders, signing statements, recess appointments, and other quasi-legal means to ignore them. The Unitary Executive never needs the veto because the King rules.

Bush is the decider and he will run this war the way he wants. Any proposals from Congress are strictly political (and Republicans understand this). To see the Republicans kissing his ass, er, I mean "supporting our troops" and "staying the course" is nothing new and doesn’t change the political dynamic. But Democrats are only exposing their impotence when they plead for some half-baked, watered down compromise resolution that will be slapped down by the weeny Republicans. Murtha and Feingold seem to be the only ones standing up and screaming bullshit on Bush.

From the Feinstein/Dodd article:
"Priorities for the new Iraqi government must include:
-- Using the Iraqi military and police to stop the violence;
-- dissolving the sectarian militias and roving death squads...."

...and then--since that shouldn't take them more than a few days if they put their minds to it--maybe they can invent a cure for cancer and a perpetual-motion machine. Senator Feinstein, Senator Dodd, listen closely: stopping the insurgency is not within the means of the Iraqi government, now or anytime soon. We started this war on the basis of blatant lies and schoolyard-bully attitude, but if we pull out all our troops anytime in the forseeable future, the situation in Iraq is likely to get get far worse.

Both the Levin-Reed and Kerry-Feingold bills seem entirely political, and as out of touch with the facts of the situation as the Republican mindless-stay-the-course approach is. This should be about solving the problem, not scoring political points. And neither party, in my opinion, seems to want to deal with that.

Both the Levin-Reed and Kerry-Feingold bills seem entirely political, and as out of touch with the facts of the situation as the Republican mindless-stay-the-course approach is. This should be about solving the problem, not scoring political points.

I think there is a very simple reason why no one has a realistic plan to "deal with the situation" and that is there is no solution.  Unless you want to put in 500,000 troops, assumign you can miraculously create them, there is no way to militarily accomplish anything in Iraq.

 I've been saying forever that Iraq is now an internal political problem.  Either they want a single multi-ethnic/multi religion country that protects minority rights or they don't.  They will either work it out, split into 3 countries, or one group will dominate the others, before or after a civil war.

 All the US military is doing is treading water because Bush won't admit failure.  His stay the course plan is in reality a stalling tactic so his sucessor gets blamed for failing in Iraq rather than him; or if the Dems win either the house or Senate they can withdraw and blame them.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Either, Mr. Rove, the US is a Republic among independent nations, or it is a Colonial Power intent on subjecting other peoples. If it is a Republic, it should be leaving Iraq to the Iraqis. If it is a Colonial Power, then it is doomed. Because no instance of successful foreign colonialism on the nineteenth-century model has been implemented in the past 50 years, for the simple reason that the peoples of the global south are socially and politically mobilized-- literate, urban, industrial, skilled, networked-- in a way they never were before in history. And no mobilized people can be successfully occupied.

The US military presence in Iraq is retarding a political settlement. It makes the Shiites and Kurds cocky and unwilling to compromise with the Sunni Arabs. It keeps the Iraqi army weak and ineffective, lacking proper armor or an air force. And US military tactics of search and destroy are turning progressively more Iraqis against us over time. The longer the US stays in Iraq, the more likely it is that one day one of our cities will be attacked by Iraqi terrorists bearing a grudge for Fallujah or Tal Afar or whatever other Iraqi cities we plan to destroy.

And, about that $5 billion a month. I live in the Detroit area. This is what my city looks like....

Juan Cole 6/20/06

From the perspective of a"Pottern Barn" Democrats, the "plan" is palatable.  From the perspective of policy, anything that avoids the two poles of Bush's mindless "stay the course" and doves "bring 'em all home now" is worth considering.  No one denies that the Bush strategy isn't working, but a precipitous withdrawal would lead to chaos that makes the current situation look positively rosy.  Contrary to the cries of the doves, there are certainly worse things than a prolonged American involvement - and a Iraqi version of the Khmer Rouge coming to power would be one of them.  A signigicantly reduced American footprint but a long-term commitment gives Iraq the best chance of a semi-decent outcome.

From the perspective of politics, the "plan" takes the debate away from the false choices of "cut and run" and "stay the course" and forces it back on to where it should be - accountability for the Bush administration.  The Dems are not going to win by running for any of the various bad policy options on Iraq, but they can run against the worst policy option of auto-pilot until 2009 offerred by Bush.

Dissolve the "roving death squads"? No more $55,000 white Toyota Land Cruisers? No more Glocks and bullet proof vests?

What would our valiant special forces trainers have left to do?

"if we pull out all our troops anytime in the forseeable future, the situation in Iraq is likely to get get far worse."

So what? For whom?

If you don't know what you are doing, stop what you're doing. No action is better than wrong action (there are exceptions, but this isn't one of them.)

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Contrary to the cries of the doves, there are certainly worse things than a prolonged American involvement

 

I submit it is not a matter of "hawks and doves" nor "liberals and conservatives".  I submit that Brent Scowcroft, John Batiste, Anthony Zinni, William Odom et.al. are neither dove-like nor leftists. I submit that it is a matter common sense of the sentient sane that there is nothing worse than prolonging the Greatest Strategic Disaster in the history of the United States

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Scheer here

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

The Intifada rages. This just in from Boxer's PAC for a Change

Tell your Senators you support the Kerry/Feingold/Boxer effort to redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq within the next 6 months, or sooner -- email your Senators today!

If your priority is to support an inspiring female candidate to break America's ultimate glass ceiling, why not draft Barbara Boxer? Not electable? Nonsense: The California senator thrashed her conservative GOP opponent in a reelection campaign that shunned the failed strategy of Democratic hacks and instead emphasized principle over opportunism. She proved her political integrity again this past week by voting alongside Kerry and Feingold to set a date for getting out of Iraq.  Robert Scheer

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Would somebody give her something useful to do?

Sen.  Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., countered by saying, "It is time to choose what is more important, a strategy to win in Iraq or a strategy for Republicans to win elections here at home." She accused Republicans in charge of Congress of "blindly following"

 

Morally wrong, politically stupid, a national security nincompoop