"The death of 1989"

It's the not the return of the Cold War, not by a long shot. But the wave of democratization, market opening, and globalization that began at the end of 1970s is definitely over. It reached its peak in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet bloc, but continued until the end of the 1990s, with the fall of Milosevic in 2000. But the last eight years have seen a strong reversal of the trend, which goes to show: positive trends can draw on powerful forces, but positive outcomes are far from inevitable. They require sound policies, leadership, and persistence. They're not part of some automatic unfolding of history.*

There's no ideology or coherent political system that ties these resurgent anti-liberal countries together. They're simply autocracies that learned to adapt and avoid the fate of, say, the Soviet Union, Serbia, or Iraq. (What's happening now in Georgia is best thought of as a cousin of what happened in Yugoslavia in the 1990s -- except the analogue of Serbia, Russia, is winning.) The most sophisticated of these autocracies have learned to smooth-talk their way with skillful twisting of Western concepts and language. Having nuclear weapons helps. But the main common factor among all of them is state monopoly control of increasingly valuable oil and natural gas resources. Already familiar from the corrupt petro-dictatorships of the Middle East, Venezuela, and west Africa, such countries feature the "strong state, weak society" model. The government frees itself from dependency on tax revenue by seizing control of valuable natural resources sold mainly to foreigners. Most other valuable economic activity is controlled by the state as well, not motivated by socialist ideologies, but by simple cronyism and gangsterism. The rest of society and economy go into sharp decline. Russia, in many respects, is the most advanced case of these trends.

We won't be hearing talk of "World War V," I hope. But the common denominator of energy monopoly in a world of sharply rising demand for energy will, I expect, stimulate energy-consuming countries to develop a common strategy to moderate demand and look for alternatives to fossil fuels exported from the petro-dictatorships. Such a strategy is certainly overdue. We also need to step back from our casually reckless adherence to the globalization paradigm and concentrate on repair and defense of existing democracies.

And one more point: the progress and retreat of political democratization, social and economic liberalization, and globalization go hand in hand, contrary to a certain piece of fashionable claptrap now making the rounds on the left.

POSTSCRIPT: Some fine reporting, as always, from Michael Totten. Also, thoughts from Paul Berman, who has rightly declared the "death of 1989."
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* The developments of the last decade have discredited not only the naive arguments of economic determinists (prosperity leads automatically to political liberalization), but the European post-historical fantasy of "soft power." The "end of history" has, well, ended. It didn't die all at once, but in stages: the rise of al Qa'eda and the 9/11 attacks, the return of Russia and China as great powers, the sharp rise in commodity prices, and so on.

Don't ask

That Pentagon policy of "don't ask, don't tell" from the 90s is still in force. By itself, not such a problem, but the military is still discharging servicemen who are "outed" somehow, sometimes through their own inadvertence.

The policy isn't just silly, but since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, actually harmful. Gay service members with critical skills are being discharged when they're needed most. In some cases, the Defense Department rehires them as civilians. But still -

Here's Deroy Murdock in the Boston Herald explaining what's wrong with this policy. The Pentagon has released a new report on this subject. There's no real excuse for this. If serving in a conservative Muslim country means gay soldiers can't be open about it, the solution is a little discretion. Female soldiers have to observe some rules along these lines as well.

Murdock is right: it's a Clinton-era relic, like Monica's kneepads and other talismans of 90s frivolity. "Don't ask, don't tell" can't be defended.

Yet more revisionism and conspiracism about Iraq

Congressional Democrats, in spite of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, are continuing their campaign to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for their decisions and statements in 2002 and 2003 regarding Iraq.

Via Instapundit, read James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, then view this on YouTube. Circle back to Fred Hiatt's piece in last week's Washington Post. It says something - something really revolting - about the current Democratic leadership in Congress and their enslavement to the "permanent campaign" - in this case, permanent fundraising mode with the wealthy and ultraliberal wing of the party.

Meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson is beating off another outburst of ignorant bullying from Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies at the American Conservative. Hanson and I don't agree about the Iraq war, but that's neither here nor there: Buchanan is loaded for bear, recycling mythology stretching back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist right. He's been doing that since the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if we had a White House more communicative and forthright than the current one. Lots of people out here, both allies and critics of the Bush administration, are doing what the White House itself should have spent the last five years doing. But I guess you go to war with the White House you have.

Iraq, five years later

What people, including historians, in the future will think about the Iraq war is anyone's guess. The answer will depend in part on events that have not yet happened and things we cannot now know. But it has been more than five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the operation seems to be coming to a conclusion. US troop levels will start dropping even before the election and drop faster afterwards.

The most important thing about the Iraq war is not how it started, but how it is ending, with the so-called "surge" that started late last summer - essentially, concentrating a large number of the best combat troops in and around Baghdad. It reflects classical counterinsurgency doctrine, with its origins in previous wars (El Salvador, Vietnam, Algeria, Philippines, etc.) only dimly remembered by most today, but carefully studied by the military. However, the "surge" only became a reality after the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections and Bush's relinquishing of operational control of the war. Instead, a civilian, Defense Secretary Gates, and a military officer, General Petraeus, were put in charge, with the civilian as the senior partner, the optimal approach. At the urging of the military and members of Congress (including McCain), Bush was forced to accept the policy, having nowhere else to go. His dogmatism and incompetence had left him in a deadend.

The surge has led to two large positive results: a sharp decline in violence and the decisive defeat of al Qa'eda in Iraq, reflective of its apparent larger disintegration. (See the articles by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic.) Al Qa'eda's mistake was the most obvious one that can be made by any guerrilla movement or insurgency, choosing or being forced to fight an organized professional army in the open. Contrary to widespread myth, no guerrilla movement alone has ever won a war, and such movements cannot survive a direct fight with an army.

But the US has also had a large bit of luck here. To be defeated, an insurgency has to lose its cover among the civilian population, while the civilian population has to feel that casting its lot with the counterinsurgency is the lesser risk. In 2004, 2005, and 2006, al Qa'eda seemed on the way to winning in Iraq, because they had cover among Iraq's suddenly powerless and angry Sunnis. But al Qa'eda made the fatal mistake of imposing its harsh version of Islam on those Sunnis, who then turned on them in 2007 and 2008. Al Qa'eda had nowhere to run. It's a scenario that has played out before in the Arab and Muslim worlds: a population attracted to a radical Islamic movement, only to be totally alienated by it. Al Qa'eda took the lives of about 50,000 of their fellow Muslims to prove this, again.*

All of which demonstrates a perennial truth about war: it often ends in a place far from where it started.

The price of the surge. Like any such sudden turnaround, the success of the surge has come at price. There's the large amount of cash (bribes, essentially) doled out to Sunni tribal chiefs to cement their shaky loyalty to the Baghdad government. The US is now following a policy of no interference in purely internal Iraqi conflicts, which means that such conflicts and the mix of corruption and violence surrounding them evolve in their own way, without American attempts to shape them, so long as they do not become connected with jihadis.

Those changes reflect a larger change in American policy, the de facto abandonment of the democratization strategy. This policy lies in tatters elsewhere in any case, by the very forces that the Bush policy never came to grips with: jihadis from Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; the persistence of powerful tribal-sectarian divisions in the Middle East; and the sharp rise in the price of oil, which provides these forces with more material resources.** Restoration of democratic sovereignty has failed in Lebanon, thanks to Syria and Iran. Where elections do occur, they fragment populations into religious and tribal shards and open the way for jihadist groups. These forces threaten the democratically elected governments currently in charge in both Baghdad and Kabul, which could not survive in their present form without the presence of Western (mainly American) troops.

Military transformation collides with nation building. By making do with the troops available, rather than vainly wishing for the much larger number needed for a traditional occupation and "nation-building" effort, the "surge" has reasserted a more conservative and realist conception of military force and succeeded in making lemonade from lemons.

But why the lemons to begin with? The immediate cause was the push for "military transformation" which began after the Cold War and entered a heightened phase under former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001. The essence of "military transformation" was to continue to shrink US troop levels, while improving their ability to fight hi-tech conventional wars against other states. The idea is to be ready to fight another army - as in Korea or World War II - but with the newest technology, moving the US forces even further in the direction of an agile, light force capable of defeating conventional enemies quickly, but even less able to act as an occupation and nation-building force. The quick defeat of the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003 demonstrated "military transformation" perfectly. It was a faster, cheaper, and less deadly version of the 1991 Gulf war.

But that was merely three or four weeks, of toppling Saddam, out of more than five years, of "now what?" The Rumsfeld doctrine of military transformation has been harshly criticized by both neocons and liberals as sacrificing "boots-on-the-ground" in favor of a shiny, hi-tech military future. Rumsfeld, like Colin Powell, was shaped by the Vietnam era and the rejection by American society in general, and the officer class in particular, of "nation building." Following this powerful prejudice of senior American military officers, its forces are prepared and equipped for wars only, in the narrow sense, like the 1991 war. The failure of preparation for a post-Saddam Iraq led to a spectacular collision of the military transformation doctrine with the reality of occupation and has put unprecedented strain on the American army.† Given that Rumsfeld was completely out of tune with what would be needed in Iraq, it's surprising he stayed as long as he did. He was originally opposed to the war and tried to resign at the end of 2003 and again in the spring of 2004. But Bush leaned hard to keep him from leaving. Here we get to another difficult puzzle, the strange effect of Bush's obsession with loyalty on the people around him.

The failure to foresee what post-Saddam Iraq would look like is at the heart of the depressing story told by the best books on the 2003-07 period. They include George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, Bing West's No True Glory, and Ali Allawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Where a realistic guess of a post-Saddam Iraq should have been was a void, eventually filled by Bush and White House staff with wishful thinking of the neoconservative type.

The neoconservative failure. Fallacious neocon theories about democratization and the Middle East are the core of the failed Bush policy. Similar intelligence was available to both Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002 about Saddam's weapons programs and stockpiles. One difference in 2002 was, obviously, that the 9/11 attacks greatly raised the stakes. Bush determined to prevent future attacks, not just respond to them. But the injection of neocon theorizing also made a decisive difference, because it transformed a narrow debate about terrorism and unconventional weapons into a fuzzier and open-ended fantasy of regional and political transformation. This thinking could have been taken seriously by someone who thought that the Middle East as a whole and Iraq in particular were like eastern Europe or Latin America in the 1980s, or Germany and Japan in 1945. Only conservative and libertarian critics and skeptics strongly objected to this once-liberal, now-neocon "well-intentioned" and "fuzzy-minded" thinking. (See here, here, and here for George Will's corrosive skepticism and steely-eyed, classic foreign policy realism.) But such criticism had little influence: the Republican party, led by Bush, had rearranged itself to exclude precisely such objections. Centrists and liberals took the ideas for granted with no coherent answer to the neocon theories. The far left became consumed with its own kooky counterreality of "American empire" and "Bushitler."

In this verbal snapshot, Bing West described the state of Basra at the start of the invasion:

In March 2003, I accompanied the Marine battalion and British engineers who seized the pumping station just north of Basra that facilitated a multibillion-dollar flow of oil. The engineers were appalled to find open cesspools, rusted valves, sputtering turbines, and other vital equipment deteriorating into junk. Heaps of garbage lay outside the walls of nearby houses. Yet inside the courtyards, tiny patches of grass were as well tended as putting greens. That defined Iraq: a generation of tyrannical greed had taught Iraqis to look out for their own, to enrich their families, and to avoid any communal activity that attracted attention.

It's not the sort of thing that can be changed with the snap of the fingers. This is a larger failure of "intelligence" than just misjudging the scope of Saddam's WMD programs (which were real, if small) and the size of his stockpiles (which were non-existent).

The intelligence failure. The continued obsession with WMD distracts most people from seeing this truth. The fact is, if Saddam had had such weapons or a large weapons program, the long-term results of the Iraq occupation would not have differed except in details. Al Qa'eda would still have itched to turn Iraq into a showdown. The gross inadequacy of the number and type of troops deployed; the almost complete lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq; the radicalization of the Iraqi Sunnis, enraged by their loss of exclusive minority rule over Iraq - none of these would have been any different. The comprehensive failure of the Bush strategy for thinking beyond the first few weeks after the invasion and the apparent fantasy of the administration neocons - that Iraq would just snap into place as a functioning civil society - remain the grand mistakes of the Iraq war. After all, there were good reasons to think that, after ejecting weapons inspectors in August 1998, Saddam had restarted his weapons programs and produced some for use. He had used chemical weapons in the past.††

That's not to say that the intelligence failure isn't important. But its importance is not what Democratic politicians, having supported the war and now running for political cover, want you to believe. If the "Bush lied, people died" trope is a little too familiar as a cliché, consider the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence situation. It mostly confirms what everyone already knows, or should know: not just the CIA, but virtually all foreign intelligence services believed that Iraq had restarted of its advanced weapons programs. There is a very serious problem here, but it's not with "Bush lied" - there's no evidence that he did. In fact, Bush and the people around him fervently believed in what they were saying, and there lies the real failure: they believed too much and too well.

Midnight at the oasis. A long-running deficiency has plagued American intelligence in the Middle East since the late 1970s. We used to be able to collect our own Middle East intelligence, largely thanks to the relatively free country of Lebanon, the Arab world's previous and failed democratic experiment. When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975 and Western diplomats and spies there started being kidnapped in the early 1980s, that venue vanished, and the US began to rely on proxies for intelligence: first the Shah, who fell in 1979; then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.‡ This is not to let the Bushies off the hook - a failure of such long standing, including the failures that let to 9/11 - should have been dragged out front and center in 2002 for thorough scrutiny. The problem is that changing this dependency would require a complete overhaul of US alliances and, even harder, the policies and interests controlling our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

If there is a specific thread that keeps popping up again and again in this history, it is the long-term degeneration and failure of the CIA. This failure is evident from the recent Senate report, the Kay report on Iraq's weapons programs, the 9/11 Commission report, and the CIA's repeated public misjudgments of the Middle East. The "work" (if it can be called that) of former CIA people gone public (Michael Scheuer, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson) makes it clear that the CIA's mindset is so far off base from what's needed that the agency is probably beyond saving. It should just be shut down: if "empty suit syndrome" means anything, the CIA is it.

This large and costly lesson about intelligence should never be forgotten: decisions of war and peace should be made only on public and obvious things. Intelligence has been used, both successfully and unsuccessfully, during wars. But decisions to step from peace to war, and from war to peace, should only be made on something more reliable than guesswork. It doesn't preclude military action in the future; it does preclude the doctrine of pre-emption, unless the threat is sitting on someone's lawn, so to speak. It means the end of the distinctive mix of mistaken neoconservative ideas that went into the Iraq war: connecting secular dictators with jihadi terrorists, "regime change" with poor prospects for functioning replacement governments, pre-emption based on intelligence trusted as more certain than it can ever be, the belief that Middle Eastern democratization improves American security in any but marginal and costly ways.

A moment of silence. It is far from the first time soldiers have died for the strategic mistakes of their leaders, far from the worst instance, and probably won't be the last. I know that's small consolation to those who lost relatives and friends in Iraq. The intervention does have positive achievements: the overthrow of a cruel dictator, and the crushing defeat and apparent dissolution of al Qa'eda outside its home territory.

But these have come at too high a cost and taken much too long. While falling apart elsewhere, al Qa'eda is regenerating on its home turf, the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supposed allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia continue to play a thoroughly ambiguous game with radical Islamic groups in no way in keeping with Bush's famous "you're with us or you're against us." In the wake of the debacle of neoconservatism, the big strategic issues are again up for grabs. In our present hyperpartisan hysteria, there's little hope they will be addressed, at least while we live under the evil sway of the "permanent campaign."

POSTSCRIPT: Listen here for a podcast interview with Douglas Feith, about his book War and Decision, the Iraq war, and more. What Feith says and documents in his book, and also what he does not address, are as important as the books mentioned above.
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* The civil war in Algeria, which led to the same result, ran for a decade after 1992 and took the lives of over 150,000. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990, although it's never really ended) killed between 50,000 and 100,000. Iraq's 2003-08 civil war falls into the same class.

** Of course, it also provides them with more to fight over as well.

† An army of half a million would have been necessary to implement a traditional occupation, rather than the 150,000 deployed. To sustain that over time, with normal troop rotations, would have required a larger base of 2.5 million. Even the larger Cold War military of the 1980s, about 1.6 million and double the size of the post-Cold War military, could not have done it. The American military has not had an army that size since the earlier stages of the Vietnam war, when there was a draft. While most combat troops in Vietnam were volunteers, contrary to myth, draftees did free up volunteers to serve in combat roles.

†† Actually, the evidence is that Saddam thought he restarted his programs and had stockpiles - the people running these programs were evidently doing something else, like stashing money in European bank accounts - and his chemical weapons program ended up in Syria. It's not clear how much Saddam knew about his own regime. That's what dictatorships are like in their final stages. Think of the drug-addled Hitler in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

‡ Not accidentally, every president since Carter has had a misintelligence/misadvice-enabled Middle East folly. Carter had the fall of the Shah, the assassination of Sadat after the Camp David treaty, and the first US security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms. Reagan had the Marines in Lebanon and the Iran part of the Iran-Contra affair. Bush Sr. had American troops in Saudi Arabia for the long term. Clinton had the Oslo process and not taking al Qae'da seriously (except briefly). Bush Jr. had not taking al Qae'da seriously (at first) and the Iraq war. The list of failures over thirty years is long and striking.

Iraq war really not about oil

Proof. (If the link doesn't work, just Google "rumsfeld vespa examiner".)

From the frat house to the White House

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: For a different take on these books, harder on McClellan and more attentive to Feith, see this by Christopher Hitchens.

He is right about one thing: on substantive policy, Feith's book is much more important than McClellan's. The Feith memoir is massively well documented, including embarrassing tidbits from people once in favor of the Iraq war and now opposed to it - and a document-rich web site too.

But I can't help feeling that Hitch has missed something important, about how everyone outside the White House (including the neocons themselves) has been manipulated and jerked around by the "permanent campaign." Even now, some of them are still not awake.
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As the Bush presidency mercifully enters its final months, it's time to take stock and make some preliminary evaluation of a wrenching period in American politics. No one can know now what future historians will think of Bush. If they're not all not liberal Democrats and warped by the hysterical hyperpartisanship of our era (itself worth a long look from future historians), Bush Jr. will probably be seen as "Nixon lite" - not as consequentially bad as Nixon, but still bad enough. His foreign policy adds up to a very mixed bag; his domestic policy, to simply and gratuitously awful.

The fire has been stoked by the publication this week of Scott McClellan's new, would-be tell-all memoir of his role as White House press secretary, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. The Bush people are of course harsh in their criticism of McClellan and his tale of manipulation and disillusionment. But pillars of establishment liberal journalism, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New Republic, are also piling on McClellan for simply being opportunistic and weakly rehashing themes heard many times before. They have weighty arguments on their side. There's not a lot in McClellan's memoir that's truly new, and he raises issues (like the Wilson-Plame affair) that are now definitively settled.*

But, as Peggy Noonan says, McClellan still needs to be listened to. His book does fill in a lot more about the mentality of the Bush administration. Even this isn't completely new: Paul O'Neill's 2004 memoir, The Price of Loyalty, written by Ron Suskind, presented the themes back when they were new and still had the power to shock. They include Bush and his aides' obsession with personal and partisan loyalty, Cheney's 35-year fixation with secrecy and executive privilege (stemming from the Nixon era), the mutual passivity of Bush and the Congressional Republicans, and the noxious results of the Republicans and Bush's style of "permanent campaigning."

If elected, I promise to ... get re-elected. Traditionally, politicians campaign and get elected in order to govern and set policy. Voters still expect that, bless their hearts. But American politics, since the early 90s, has been moving in a different direction: governing for the sake of campaigning and getting re-elected, not vice versa. This style was part of the reason for the lack of substantive results from the so-called Republican revolution of 1994. Although they did get Clinton to accept welfare reform (a stunning success, by the way) and even managed, incredibly, to phase out agricultural subsidies for a couple years, their fear of being voted out eventually overcame their original goals. By the late 90s, spending discipline broke down. Then with a Republican president unwilling to act as a check on a Republican Congress, things really started to get out of control. Even shockers like the McCain-Feingold bill, Leave No Child's Behind, Sarbox, and Medicare Part D got through - and got Bush's signature.

Such is Bush's obsession with loyalty. The outsized role of Karl Rove, Bush's campaign strategist, in shaping policy was a prime indicator of where American political culture is today. Even the Iraq war was, in part, packaged as re-election extravaganza. McClellan should have subtitled his book, "Washington's culture of permanent campaigning."

With perfect faith. But the Bush fraternity house culture isn't the whole story. Running through the Bush presidency is a bright streak of the "true believer" mentality, no more strikingly and tragically obvious than with Bush's fixation on Iraq. After languishing at the margins of the administration for its first nine months, administration neoconservatives found an opportunity to inject their misguided theorizing about the Middle East into the administration's response to the 9/11 attacks. Bush did not run or win on such issues in 2000. Before the 9/11 attacks, the neocons and the increasingly populist conservative media outlets were agitated, if anything, by China.** But in looking for a larger and more ambitious response to those and earlier al Qa'eda attacks, the administration, instead of focusing on the theocratic and jihadist element of Middle East politics rooted in Saudi Arabia and Iran, zeroed in on the unfinished business of Iraq. Defeated in the 1991 Gulf War and subject to containment and sanctions afterwards, Iraq posed no obvious threat to anyone.† But Saddam did expel UN weapons inspectors in 1998 and acted in a way that strongly suggested he had restarted his advanced weapons program.

To this uncertain if understandable motive (understandable after 9/11) was added something much loopier, the strategic fantasy of neoconservative theorists, making the Middle East democratic. Since the Iraq war started in March 2003, many have criticized the Bush administration for supposedly hiding this, its larger strategic motive. But the critics are wrong: Bush did mention it, in a number of major speeches, before the actual invasion of Iraq. In the media hysteria surrounding the weapons inspections, the issue was never properly framed and probed. Instead, its legitimacy and feasibility were mostly taken for granted, if anyone really thought about it at all. The neocon failure to understand the Middle East is most glaring here. If some fraction of the weapons hysteria had been focused instead on this point and the related issue of what to do with Iraq after invading it, the war either might not have happened or happened very differently.

That is why, for all the bruhaha surrounding McClellan's book, the other recent book about the Iraq war, that of Douglas Feith, one of its main architects, deserves more attention and response. Unfortunately, the establishment liberal media won't get off its high horse and actually review it: it's been embargoed apparently. It's critically important, because one of the most extraordinary things about the Bush presidency is the crossing of wires between two very distinct political forces, the obsessed-with-loyalty, frat-boy culture of Bush and Rove and the strategic theorizing of the neocons. Bush's weakness for "road to Damascus" conversion experiences seems to be a starting point. But we really need to understand it. Frat house, revival tent, and the neoconservative academy all collided in Bush's first term. The Iraq war was the result.

Once more into the breach. McClellan is not looking at the Bush frat house culture from the outside, of course. He's a disillusioned frat brother himself. For an outsider's look at the Bush White House, one should consider the best book on the Bush presidency to appear so far, Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy. Weisberg uses an analogy (not original with him) of Bush Jr. and Prince Harry as portrayed in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2. After the riotous and misspent youth depicted in the earlier play, Harry undergoes a dramatic change. The later Henry V portrays a serious, transformed, and deeply religious Harry as king, determined to reclaim the French throne, reviving the Hundred Years War between England and France that his father had put on hold.

Weisberg's analogy is strained in places, but it's still a striking parallel, especially the Oedipal angle. In Bush's case, it helps to understand why the rest of Bush's foreign policy has been more conventional: when it comes to foreign trade, Yugoslavia, North Korea, or any other foreign issue you care to name, it's hard to find such distorted and delusional thinking in the Bush policies. In the genesis and first few years of the Iraq war, we're getting to the heart of something unusual in democratic politics, an intense bout of blind belief. For Bush, the neoconservative theories became objects, not of thought, but faith.

The American weakness for moralistic crusades. Such episodes are not new in American politics: its soul is still that of a Protestant church. In the Civil War, we had a president who had mastered these forces to the point where he was not dominated by them, even as they animated millions of Americans in the crusade to crush the South. The disillusioned generation that fought World War One is better case for us today to look to. In the last extended presidential episode of blind belief, Woodrow Wilson the crusader rallied Americans to launch "making the world safe for democracy." With cooler heads and more detached eyes, he and his aides might have steered the peace in the direction of successful new alliances to rebuild Europe and contain Germany. Instead, Wilson overpersonalized the issues, thought of himself as a messianic figure, and failed to give Americans a stake in the long-term success of his policy. As a result, Americans became jaded in the 1920s and, later in the 1930s, turned xenophobic. It took another, much larger, war to resolve what remained unresolved.

Worst president ever? Wars of choice are especially dangerous for any political leader. Wars of necessity, even though they also provoke dissent, tend to focus the mind and keep people from drifting off into strange ideas. In American history, these include the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War II, and the Korean and Afghan Wars. Wars of choice include the Mexican war, the Spanish-American war, World War I, and the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The latter form a very mixed bag: brilliantly successful (Mexican war), success-almost-disaster-success (Spanish-American war, including its Philippine sequel), ambiguous success with ultimately very bad consequences (World War I), and just plain bad (Vietnam and Iraq).

Given this list, it's hard to justify to condemning Bush as the worst president in American history. Nonetheless, my guess is that Bush will end up on the short list of the worst ten, and not just because of the Iraq war. There is also the mistaken domestic policy change, into new, large, and gratuitous spending commitments and regulations that have undone the healthier evolution American politics had been following in the 80s and 90s.††

Pace the neocons, Bush is not Truman. The 9/11 attacks were handed to Bush, as the Korean war was handed to Truman. But the Iraq war was a war of choice, dubious in conception and profoundly botched in execution. Personal character is the real difference: while reasonably intelligent, Bush is lazy and dogmatic, hyperactive yet strangely passive, insecure and uncertain about taking responsibility for anything. Thankfully, his character flaws are not in Nixon territory; he lacks Nixon's paranoia and cynicism.

But Bush, in spite of his attempt to fashion a populist self-image, is not a hayseed, ordinary folks, or even a cowboy. He's the dried-out, eldest son of wealthy parents, a rich kid - not a self-taught and self-made, essentially 19th century, figure like Truman. Even if his bank accounts have done well, Bush is a spiritual slacker, a downwardly mobile figure of the Baby Boom, who reinvented himself as a populist chieftan, sounding on good days like a cartoon superhero in his own comic book. Looking to the future, we must, if nothing else, avoid electing as presidents half-formed politicians who wrestle with serious personal and political deficiencies while they occupy the world's most powerful office.
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* Unfortunately, there are still people in the media still trying to flog this dead horse, holding out for some substantive role by "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove in the outing of Plame. We've known for a year that it was Richard Armitage of the State Department who did that, probably inadvertently. As for Joe Wilson, he outed himself. There's really nothing left to this story. But its continued life shows how much of our "news" now consists of manufactured pseudo-events and pseudo-scandals, salacious pseudo-crimes parlayed into lucrative book contracts. Counterfactual "reporting" - even contradicting what the news media itself reported last year - is now the norm on this, like so many other, non-stories.

Such is the biased and incorrigible stupidity of America's media culture.

** A few prescient exceptions apart, like Steve Emerson, Michael Ledeen, and Daniel Pipes. And then there was Gary Condit - remember him from those hot, dry summer days just before 9/11?

† So much so that, after 1991, Israel's main security focus became Iran, quite rightly. Apparently, no one told Wolfowitz or Feith.

Another important question about the Bush presidency is, why did people with previously reasonable public careers (Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, even Cheney) behave as strangely as they did under Bush? The 9/11 attacks clearly had something to do with it, but they're not the whole story.

†† Someday, once the partisan hysteria dies down, people will view the 80s and 90s correctly, from Carter's last year through the last year of Clinton's second term, as a single political era. Between 1998 and 2001, something changed.

A culture is a terrible thing to waste

Here's a lesson in cultural decline. Consider one of the greatest natural scientists ("natural philosophers") of the Arabic-Persian golden age, Alhacen of Basra, who lived in the later 900s (see here and here). Then contrast with this flat-earth theorist of present-day Iraq (video clip requires WMP).

What a difference a millennium makes.


This may seem like just shooting fish in a barrel. But here's a serious point: in the West, we're used to progress - the future is better than the past. In our conceited arrogance, we even think progress is automatic, like getting on an UP escalator.

In fact, progress is anything but automatic. It needs the right conditions. We've had those in the West since the late Middle Ages, with some occasional, if terrible, interruptions. The right conditions are always under threat from ideologues, fanatics, and people with obsessive fixed ideas.

Now imagine you live in a land of regress: the past is better than the future. The regress may have been going on for so long - say, seven or eight centuries - that it seems automatic. Of course, that's not right either. But in your land of regress, there are people - including some important and powerful people - with a vested interest in decline. Turning things around seems threatening to them. To make their point, they even get violent.

More on resurgent conspiracism

PRE-POSTSCIPT: Follow the saga of the Saudi-sponsored school in northern Virginia by starting here. The Washington Post, normally sensible on such questions, has inexplicably gotten lost on this one. They ask, what about parochial schools? Indeed: what if Catholic schools didn't just teach Catholic doctrine, but advocated religious war against Protestants or forcible conversion of Jews? Or if Protestant schools taught that Catholics should lose all of their civil and political rights?
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First, a follow-up to the earlier posting on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which reviewers have mostly panned. What's amazing is that the book fails to even mention the Saudi lobby or the effect of oil money in buying influence in Washington. Having now looked at the book myself, I also cannot believe how much it uses recycled mythology about Israel and its supporters pushing for the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer themselves register these facts in their book, but it strangely leaves their argument unchanged, showing how disconnected from reality they are (and from Israel's real concern, Iran). Clearly, they're in the obsessive "Jews-on-the-brain" zone, à la Pat Buchanan. Whether you want to call that "antisemitism" is a fine semantic point up to you.

Remember: the 9/11 and other al Qaeda attacks - from 1990's assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City through the two attacks on the WTC, and on down the list, including the present mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq - could and would not have happened without Saudi money, Saudi pressure for accelerated normalization of travel and visa requirements, and Saudi wacko ideology. Saudi Arabia is the cause of those attacks in two senses, for you Aristotelians out there: "first" cause (the basic driving ideology) and "efficient" cause (enabling the means).

For a book to seriously discuss these effects without mentioning their cause is a farce.

A book-length counter to the myth-spinning of Walt and Mearsheimer is Abe Foxman's new book, The Deadliest Lies. (Foxman is the head of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith.) The ADL is a problematic organization and routinely misses the mark in their strategy by not understanding the real purposes of antisemitism, wrongly thinking that it's fundamentally about the Jews. (The ADL's serious flaws are a topic for another day.) Nonetheless, the book is on target with its analysis of the archetypical antisemitic fantasy: secret cabals, the secret cause of wars and financial panics, etc. The patterns of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and its cruder cousins are striking and, to any student of classical antisemitic theorizing, very familiar. Yale University's Charles Hill blurbs Foxman's book this way: "Conspiracy theories are a measure of a society’s mental health; when on the rise, trouble lies ahead. In The Deadliest Lies, Abraham Foxman diagnoses the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theory and reveals how sick it is." Even in the 1930s, people had a vague sense of conspiracism as a mental disorder, but we're more sharply aware of this now and have fewer excuses for tolerating it.

Finally, the new issue of Foreign Affairs contains an important review by Walter Russell Mead. He points to one of the realities that Walt and Mearsheimer keep colliding with but never understand: the ways in which foreign policy elites intersect with broad democratic norms and the assumption, natural to American political culture, that broad democratic norms should influence foreign policy - an concept alien in most other countries, even other democracies. And Mead perceptively identifies the way in which Walt and Mearsheimer use classical antisemitic tactics, including the attempt to put American Jews in a bind over criticizing their book - so they can appear outraged that American Jews should be provoked by what is so clearly intended as a provocation. As Mead says, Jimmy Carter is the past master of this tactic, but Walt and Mearsheimer give Carter stiff competition.

But Mead also lets his fellow academics off the hook too easily, in my view. It's hard to believe they're unaware that most American Jews voted against Bush both times and that most American Jews (and most American Jewish organizations) were neutral on or opposed to the Iraq war. The recycling of discredited mythology is only superficially about pseudo-facts; such myth-spinning always serves some other and normally unstated purpose. And while they might be naive about American politics, they are not naive about the Middle East. Like many so-called experts, they hide much of what they really know, even from themselves, and peddle oil-realism as a higher morality. Walt and Mearsheimer cannot not know the truth about the Middle East, its oil regimes, Islam, etc. They also cannot not know the truth about the Arabs of Palestine, an important topic to consider next.

POSTSCRIPT: Regional cooperation in the Middle East is possible, once you get outside the context of the UN and spectacles like the ridiculous Ahmadinejad. Israel and Oman just marked 10 years of cooperation on regional water conservation.

Update on the Iraq war

So how goes it?

Better, but still not great. The "surge" has worked as advertised, in a limited sense. But it remains a temporary solution and cannot be sustained beyond next spring. Chatter about the "surge" deflects attention from the fact that the US needs a longer-term strategy, and it's fairly clear what that is.

That strategy is reducing the troop level to something much lower (30,000 say) and reshaped for pure counterinsurgency, without the typically long and massive American logistical trail - the one that winds through the fast food joints in Kuwait and ends in a military warehouse back here in the States. The keys to successful counterinsurgency are:

• Using the minimal force necessary, not the maximum force possible
• Keeping the politics to the fore and the military aspect to the rear

The political constraints should be the following. It's not in American interests to intervene military in purely internal Iraqi conflicts. That's not to say the US can't do conflict resolution here; it just shouldn't involve military intervention. The reason is simple: get involved militarily in the Middle East and, no matter how hard you try, you'll end up being viewed as "taking sides" and "dishonoring" or "shaming" someone (viz. Lebanon in 1982-83).* OTOH, if something in Iraq involves al-Qa'eda, its affiliates, or their Iranian-Shi'ite counterparts, then indeed the US has a real stake in the regional and global implications and military involvement is absolutely justified - like in Afghanistan, in the same way and for the same reasons.

Al-Qa'eda's military and political fortunes in Iraq have plunged in the last year and a half. Whether this reversal will stick depends heavily on whether al-Qa'eda can regroup and regenerate itself, like in Afghanistan. That in turn depends on the presence of outside sponsors and sanctuaries - like the case of Pakistan vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

Supporters of the Iraq operation also need to face a by-now fairly obvious American political reality. Many of them have wrongly fused support for the Iraq war with support for Bush (or vice versa). In the last year, that fusion has become no longer tenable. It's not "Bush and Iraq," but "Bush or Iraq." The combination of Bush's "true believer" stubbornness and incompetence, his now-almost complete reliance on military people who understand things better than he does, and the remains of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) among liberals and Democrats makes separating Bush from his Mess-o-potamia essential, if we're ever to straighten the latter out.** Bush will no longer be president after January 2009. The Iraq mess, and even more, the Iranian threat hanging over it all like a dark cloud, will still be there.

POSTSCRIPT: A politically- and militarily-savvy synopsis, and a somewhat different point of view, from the San Antonio Express-News.
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* Thus, under no circumstances should the US intervene militarily in a Kurdish-Turkish conflict. There's a lot of other things we can do to help stop or contain such a conflict; military intervention isn't one of them.

** This has a powerful added bonus for the 2008 Republican candidates. As Bush and Iraq are peeled apart, the powerful anti-Bush obsession among Democrats dissipates. There's little else to the Dems these days except BDS. They're still as bankrupt now as they were in 2004.

Shanah tovah in Baghdad

Yochi Dreazen is the Wall Street Journal's occasional Baghdad reporter. He spent Rosh Hashanah 2007 at a US army base near Baghdad and wrote this moving account. This version is published by Point of No Return, a very interesting blog about the forgotten Jews and Jewish refugees of the Middle East.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is an interesting article on that Iranian fictionalized television drama of the Holocaust, loosely based on the life of the Iranian diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari. Several analysts reviewing the Farsi original have traced out clear anti-Zionist themes and several standard tropes of anti-Israel propaganda, and a disturbing implication of Jews as corrupt.

You might wonder where that "Zionism is racism" garbage, as well as the more subtle attempts to divide Jews from Jewish nationalism, come from. The first is a legacy of three+ decades of Soviet propaganda, unabashedly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. The second is a standard theme of both far Left and Islamic-oriented propaganda. An upcoming posting will explore the origins of these and other antisemitic concepts in the long, unique, and now defunct experiment of the Jewish diaspora, which created a distorted and untenable combination of simultaneous achievement and survival with exceptional powerlessness. Antisemitism and Jewish powerlessness coexist in symbiosis. But attempts to end that powerlessness and normalize Jewish life also provoke frenzied resistance from certain quarters, including some Jewish ones.

Look on the Sunni side

And a belated happy Fourth!
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Outside the narrow orbit of neoconservatism, the conservative debate over Iraq continues. The June issue of the American Spectator presents a perfect - if perfectly depressing - article by William Tucker, with the perfect image for Bush's current situation:

Right now President Bush is lurching around like a drunk in a barroom, ready to fight anyone who comes along but with no clear recollection of how he got here or how he intends to get home.

Perfect - except for one thing. Tucker recommends the Baker-Hamilton idiocy as a Nixon-Kissinger-type "realist" move, like opening up to China.* What feel-good diplomacy with Iran and its sidekick Syria is supposed to do remains a mystery. Even from a crude power-play point of view, it makes no sense.

1. Iran and Syria have nothing to offer in Iraq.

The current mayhem in Iraq is largely a Sunni problem, not a Shi'ite one. The insurgency is mainly local Sunnis (Iraqi Arabs), but with a significant minority of Sunni al-Qa'eda-style jihadists - suicide bombers and the like. To the extent that foreigners are driving the insurgency, it is driven by money and ideology exported from the conservative Persian Gulf states and Pakistan, not Iran or Syria. To the extent that it's local, it's simply due to the Iraqi Sunnis' rejection of their now-marginal position in the post-Saddam Iraq. After all, they're 16-17% of the population and dropping.

2. Iran is the looming big problem in the larger Middle East, not Iraq.

One of the main reasons for reducing our overstretch in Iraq is precisely the better to be able to do something about Iran. More generally the point is to sideline the democracy obsession and move to the top the issue of stopping jihadism, which is in full control of a Middle Eastern state only in Iran. Ilan Berman's article on Iran in the same issue of the American Spectator does get it right - it gives a typical Israeli and very sound view of the issue.

Readers should also be reminded of past disasters directly traceable to the Baker-Scowcroft axis. The first was the Lebanon debacle of 1982-84. At the behest of Baker and the Saudis, Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon to interpose between the Israeli army and the PLO. The Marines should have been pulled out as soon as the PLO left. Instead they remained as sitting ducks and were attacked by an Iranian-backed truck bomber, killing over 240 of them. Shortly thereafter the US and French embassies in Beirut were blown up and a large number of American, French, and other Western personnel were taken hostage by Iranian- and Syrian-backed groups - leading in turn to the Iran-Contra scandal. As Secretary of State, Baker gave the green light to Syria in 1990 to complete its takeover of Lebanon, in exchange for Syria's completely useless support during the Persian Gulf war. Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait happened in part because the same "realist" clowns (Baker, Hagel et al.) were telling us what a wonderful guy Saddam was to work with. Only an ignorant, amnesiac, and braindead press corps - mindless flunkies really - could treat the Baker-Hamilton diplomatic advice seriously.

Throwing in the towel on Iran would destroy America's fragile credibility as an opponent of Islamic radicalism - this after much effort has gone into getting the Europeans to see the threat - and it's more of a direct threat to them than it is to us. We have a disturbing long-term track record of treating allies and friends worse than we do enemies. And people rightly criticize America's incoherent reaction to the support for Sunni jihadism coming from its Persian Gulf "allies"; can you imagine what the reaction would be if we embraced the present regime in Tehran? It would be less Nixon-Kissinger and more Chamberlin-Daladier giving Hitler a warm bear hug. It's completely daft.

The correct analogy is right under Tucker's nose. A diplomatic "opening" should be extended to the Sunni governments currently alienated from America. Saudi Arabia aside - it has to be treated as sui generis - the Sunni Gulf States support through private money much of the violence now transpiring in Iraq. Only they are in a serious position to stop it. Meanwhile, Egypt and Algeria, corrupt and repressive as they are, have done an excellent job of suppressing jihadi groups in their countries. After all, it is the Sunni countries which have already gone through the disillusioning wringer of pan-Arabism and Islamic radicalism. They are like China after the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao. The problem is that these Sunni governments, once they've quashed the jihadists at home, are happy to let them operate elsewhere.

Which raises another important point. Democracy cannot be at the top of the agenda right now; the most pressing need is stopping religious fanatics. After that, encouraging the development of non-political personal liberty and civil society; only then, democracy in the sense of elections and political competition. The Middle East, above all, is the one region of the world where having democracy now probably means the triumph of jihadist parties. Not because they're all that popular, but because they're well-funded, well-organized, and well-motivated.** Certainly, the experience of Algeria and Turkey in the early 1990s and more recently of the Palestinian Territories has proven this. Iraq hasn't seen the triumph of a single Islamist party only because the country is so fractured. It's more like Lebanon, the Arab world's last attempt at multisectarian, multitribal democracy. The weak civil society of the Arab world at present cannot support electoral democracy; it will lead to either theocracy or civil war. The best bet right now for decent government in most Arab countries is semi-liberal tribal monarchy, like Morocco or Jordan.

And Baker-Scowcroft-Hagel-etc., with their excellent oil-money connections in the Sunni countries, can put their skills and experience to better use there.

Iran should be theocratic but non-nuclear, or nuclear but non-theocratic - but it shouldn't be allowed to be both. Of course, Iran in many ways is the most important country in the Middle East, and it has legitimate national interests and aspirations to be a regional power. What cannot be accommodated at present is those interests and hopes entangled with Shi'ite theocracy and fanaticism. Iran is an ancient country and civilization; it won't cease to be an important country. What can and should cease is its theocracy.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for Saudi Arabia, that other great font of jihadi ideology, influence, and money. It can't be treated the same way as the other Sunni countries, because it is so much part of the problem - the same with Pakistan.

POSTSCRIPT: The same issue of the American Spectator also presents an article by Michael Novak on the global ebb and flow of liberty and the fate of the Wilsonian project in the 20th century. Novak too easily confuses "liberty" with "electoral democracy" and doesn't grasp how much the Middle East violates the globalization-democratization paradigm. He needs to read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom. It's amusing to read a Harvard-educated Indian Muslim explaining to an American audience something their great-great-grandparents (and their British cousins) would have understood without a second thought: some countries aren't ready for democracy, and some countries should never have been countries in the first place.†
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* At least Nixon's opening to China is the good historical model, and not détente with the Soviets. The latter was a questionable episode obsoleted by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and then Gorbachev. Opening to China was a smart move, although since the end of the Cold War, it has lost its strategic rationale. Of course, today's China is utterly different from 1973.

Tucker also wastes space and attention on misplaced Vietnam analogies, which American political elites cannot seem to let go of, no matter how irrelevant or misleading. The Sunni insurgency is not winning in Iraq; in spite of all the death and destruction it has wrought, they're losing. A full-scale civil war in Iraq would lead to Shi'ite triumph (although not without a lot of bloodshed first) and Sunni refugees - in fact, the current mini-civil war has already led to almost a million Sunnis leaving Iraq. If Tucker is looking for an analogy to the Vietnamese boat people fleeing the triumphant North Vietnamese army, he's got it bassackwards.

** A good analogy is the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), which immediately followed the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. Of all the Russian parties of the time, the Bolsheviks were the smallest (contrary to their absurd name, which means "majority"). But they were the best-organized, the best-funded (by Germany, whose secret funding continued through 1920), and the most ruthless. Their much more numerous opponents, on the other hand, ranging from Anarchists to czarist generals, were badly fractured and poorly organized. The biggest battalions don't always win.

† The title of a translated Spanish interview with Zakaria gets to the point even more quickly: La Democracia No Es Sólo Elecciones, or "democracy isn't just elections." Iraq provides a textbook case: the Sunni insurgency-cum-civil war there accelerated only after the January 2005 elections made it clear how large the Iraqi Shi'ite majority is (63-65%).

Between Iraq and a hard place

Dedicated to the memory of Andrew Bacevich, Jr.

There's little to say about Iraq that hasn't already been said, although a lot of what has been said so far is nonsense. It's depressing to think about what's left to try and what might happen when US troops leave. Iraq is now experiencing a limited civil war - war with the emergency brake on. Without outside troops to serve as peacekeepers and deterrents, that civil war is almost certain to get much nastier before it ends. Stop thinking Vietnam; start thinking Lebanon, only bigger and badder. Already civil conflict in Iraq has stimulated one of the largest movements of Middle East refugees in the last century; only the Iran-Iraq and Soviet-Afghan wars of the 1980s were larger.

The essential practical problem is summarized by the words, "Too few troops." There have never been more than 150,000 coalition troops total, in a country of about 24 million - about four times too few by reasonable historical measures. Even excluding the fairly peaceful Kurdish north, that's one soldier per 130,000 population, still more than three times too few. And the Kurdish north is peaceful only because it has its own unified semi-professional militia to police it. A proper occupation of Iraq would require half a million soldiers. Such an army was available in 1990, but not today. Almost every problem from April 2003 on - the Sunni insurgency, the overuse of the National Guard and reserves, the misuse of non-uniformed contractors (the root cause of the Abu Ghraib scandal), etc., - is a result of "too few troops."

"Too few troops" means that the troops now there are just enough to serve as targets, but not enough to provide a consistently successful counterforce. The so-called "surge" cannot mitigate that outcome except in a limited and temporary way - "here and there for a while." The cruel irony of this situation is that, while Iraq has too few troops for a classical occupation of overwhelming force (like Yugoslavia in the 1990s or Germany and Japan in the 1940s), it has too many for a classical counterinsurgency. The latter strategy would need about 20 to 30,000 troops, with few support troops, no Green Zone or "force protection" (Pentagonese for "build a fort and stay inside"), no typically American long logistical tail, and so on.* Americans have used this strategy before - in the Philippines and in Vietnam - and, to the extent it was tried, it worked. The British did it even more successfully in Malaysia in the 1950s, a positive contrast to the contemporary French mess in Indochina and Algeria.**

If you're expecting me to complain about WMDs, I won't, because the issue is entirely irrelevant. If Saddam had restarted his advanced weapons programs, and the coalition had bulldozed them into the Euphrates in April 2003, the situation a few months later would not have differed in the slightest from what it's actually become. The core problem of the Bush thinking was not WMDs, but magical thinking: the fantasy that Iraq would instantly snap into functioning as a modern state after Saddam was deposed. In fact, Iraq is an artificial country assembled, like Yugoslavia, after World War One and held together only by strongmen and intimidation. Remove the intimidation and, surprise, surprise, you get a civil war.

What's happening now in and around Baghdad (where virtually all of the violence occurs) is the long-postponed, final disintegration of another piece of the Ottoman empire. The process started long ago in the early 19th century, when Greece and Serbia became independent. The European part of the disintegration didn't finally end until the war in Kosovo in 1999. As historian Niall Ferguson points out in his recent, depressing tome, War of the World, virtually all of the massive violence of the last century has been concentrated in and around the world's long-lasting empires, as they underwent collapse or internal revolution. The first, European wave of violence ran from the late 19th century to the 1950s; the second ran from the late 1950s through the 1990s and, in the Middle East and Africa at least, hasn't ended yet.

In and around Baghdad, the practical result is the influx of Shi'ites and the outflux of Sunnis. The Sunnis were about 18% of Iraq's population in 2003, although they had virtually all of the power; now they're down to 16% and dropping. Such ethnic cleansing is one of the most regular features of the familiar and dreary script of empire-disintegration covered in mind-numbing detail by Ferguson. The 2003 invasion enabled the return of the Shi'ites (mainly from Iran). The 2005 Iraqi elections made it clear just how large the Shi'ite population is and that the Sunnis would never regain their control of the country; the Sunni exodus ensued.

There are many lessons to take away from this debacle. Some of them have already been preached by others, so I'll mention a few of my own here.

• Don't put soldiers in impossible situations. Soldiers will take big risks and die for feasible goals. It's criminal to put them in a bottomless tunnel with no exit.
  
• If another military action should prove necessary in the near future - for example, against Iran - it must be, like the wars in Yugoslavia and the bulk of the Persian Gulf war, an air-naval war, involving no ground troops. Ground troops should be sent in only on condition of an organized and complete surrender of enemy forces, with some continuity of government.
• Think long and hard before "uncorking" another bottle under high pressure. For example, Iran is only about half Persian; the rest is Azeri Turk and Arab.
• Resist the temptation to play favorites. The goal of peacemaking, if and when it becomes possible, should be that no one side wins outright. For example, the Iraqi Sunnis will never again control Iraq and dominate the Shi'ites the way they did between 1931 and 2003; but that doesn't give the Shi'ites license to trample all over the Sunnis. No place in the world is more prone to endless and often pointless payback than the Middle East; no need to stimulate more.
  
• Avoid being used by and taking information from only one faction in someone else's civil war without having a larger, independent picture. Develop your own sources and analysis of intelligence. Otherwise, you're flying blind in a dark cloud.

And it would help to have an administration not permeated by the frat boy spirit. At the frat house, you can get by cheating on homework and exams and calling home for more money; in the real world, Daddy's not always there to bail you out.
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* Such a counterinsurgency proposal was contained in an important Atlantic article by Bing West, journalist, Vietnam veteran, and author of No True Glory, one of the best books to emerge from the current Iraq war.

** Part of the reason the British decolonization strategy worked was because the British were clear that their post-1945 goal was indeed successful decolonization, not holding on indefinitely as the French tried to. Since the Treaty of Versailles changed the equation of empires versus nations in 1919 with Wilson's principle of "self-determination," every empire has acquired a built-in time limit. Only China's is left.

More about Iran versus Iraq

A friend took me to task for being too pessimistic in a recent posting about the prospects in Iraq, and for implying something not true about the neoconservatives.

My point about the neocons is not that they were clueless about radical Islam before the Iraq war. A few were even conscious of it before 9/11 (many were overly obsessed with China back in those days). My point was the misguided attempt to connect the new post-1991 trend of radicalism in the Middle East to Saddam. The fact that Saddam was making nice with some Islamic radicals only proves my point - he was cozying up to them because they (not he) were in the drivers' seat. It's like when he put Allahu `Akbar on the Iraqi flag after the Guf War. It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and he was trying to keep up with the latest. He was a trend-follower, not a trend-setter.

The major countries incubating Sunni radical Islam are clear: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and (to an extent) Egypt. A few other countries (like Algeria) playing a tag-along role under the influence of the more important ones. It's rather unfair to lump Egypt and Algeria together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on this score, because the Egyptian and Algerian governments have been tireless in their efforts to squash the radical movements. (In Egypt, there has been some compromise between the government and the radicals.) But the Saudi and Pakistani governments have a long-standing role in promoting radical Islam - on the world stage, since the 1970s, even before the fall of the Shah. Pakistan in particular suffers from an identity and legitimacy crisis, and that makes radical Islamic movements attractive because they're politically useful. Countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan have ended up as test laboratories for the Sunni radical movements to try out theocracy and take in jihadis, all with Saudi and Pakistani sponsorship.

The other axis of jihad is Iran, with its little brother, Syria, and its Shi'ite laboratory in Lebanon. Like its Sunni sibling, the Shi'ite version of radicalism took off in the late 70s, after the decline of secular ideologies in the Arab world set in and the fall of the Shah.

Iraq is not on either list.

At a high level, the neocon goal of promoting constructive political change in the ME is a good idea - no, better than good - necessary. Carried through consistently and subtracting out their obsession with Iraq, it would involve cooling relations with Egypt somewhat, sharply cooling them with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (even to the point of issuing them ultimatums), and engaging Iran with peaceful but unceasing pressure towards serious political change. The model should be Reagan in the 1980s, with Iran taking the place of the Soviet Union, and America's erstwhile "allies" - right-wing authoritarian governments then, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt now - subject to a serious push towards reform and opening up. Even a liberal revision of American policy - thought through its logical conclusions - wouldn't look that different. The stylistics and atmospherics might feel otherwise, but not the substance or goals.

It's a mistake to think of the Bush foreign policy as being neoconservative, because much of this agenda has not been translated into policy, only the obsession with Iraq - the one neocon idea that remains the flimsiest. Much of that can be attributed to personnel and history, not ideology. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith were all central in the Persian Gulf war, and Bush Jr.'s fixation on Iraq is obviously mixed up with Oedipal father-son issues. The Iraq obsession got translated into reality by Bush because it resonated the most strongly on a personal level with key administration figures. There's been no coherent reconsideration of policy towards Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Egypt. Iran has been faced as a problem only very recently.

The course of policy in Iraq has been on the whole poor in design and execution since the summer of 2003, with some bright spots here and there, especially in the Kurdish north. It's also been politically costly. But my earlier posting is really about Iran - Iraq is a secondary point. My pessimism about the Middle East might not be justified in the long run. There are positive trends, like the bloggers. But an overall positive direction of change is a hope and an assumption, not a proven fact.

Middle East blog ferment

Some of my previous posts on the Middle East have emitted an unmistakeable aroma of pessimism about the place, leaving me wondering if I'm just too damn negative. Are there any positive trends? Yes, there are. I don't know how significant they are, but they are. One of those trends is bloggers and their sometimes-brazen challenge to both authoritarian governments and authoritarian cultures.

The bloggers in question are often brave, in ways that bored and pampered Americans can't even begin to understand. Many must use pseudonyms or noms de blog. Here's a partial list (partial in multiple senses), a taste of what the Middle East has to offer. Whatever my serious doubts about the future of the Middle East, I hope these bloggers prove me wrong!

I've organized the list by country/region and picked the ones I know the best. But that's just my experience and bias. Many of these sites have links to other bloggers, who shouldn't be missed. Be adventurous. Notice also that many of them, like Kavanna, are housed by Blogspot/Blogger. It's Google's mitzvah, whatever else they might do right.

North Africa: I couldn't find many here. These are two I've looked at a few times.
* The Moor Next Door (Algeria)
* Winds of Change in Algeria (Algeria, mostly in French, some English)

Egypt: Largest and most important Arab country, with small but active blogging culture, not as conservative as the Gulf countries (see below). Nonetheless, the Egyptian government can move slowly but effectively against bloggers it doesn't like.
* Big Pharaoh
* Mona Eltahawy (blog by a well-known professional journalist)
* Sandmonkey (Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman - now the best-known Egyptian blogger, because he was recently sentenced by the Egyptian government for his blogging)

Lebanon: Very active and varied blogging culture. Played an important role in covering the March 2005 protest movement against Syria and the Hizbollah war last summer. Israeli bloggers (see below) and Lebanese bloggers communicated via blogs even as the missiles and bombs were dropping.
* Lebanese Political Journal (important multi-blogger site)
* Lebanese Bloggers (clearinghouse for many individual blogs)
* Daily Star (Lebanon's most important newspaper, in English)

Iraq: In spite of all the violence in and around Baghdad, Iraq has a significant and very informative blog culture. It's a useful corrective to the inevitably misleading conventional media coverage of Iraq.
* Salam Pax (the famous pseudonymous "Raed" of pre-2003 fame, who went off the air in 2004 - he has a book out)
* Iraq the Model (best-known and most important Iraqi blog)
* The Messopotamian (Alaa is the pseudonym - life in Baghdad)
* Iraq Pundit (an Iraqi exile comments from afar)

Perisan Gulf: The most conservative part of the Middle East, outside of Talibanland, dominated by the Salafi (Wahhabi) school. These bloggers have to tiptoe.
* Silly Bahraini Girl
* Saudi Jeans
* Arab News (the most important English-language Saudi newspaper)

Iran: The largest and most active of Middle Eastern blogging cultures, apart from Israel. Bloggers there play a complicated cat-and-mouse game with the Iranian government. There are too many blogs for me keep track of. Here's a partial list. If you look at only one, look at this one:
* Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan - he has a Persian blog too)

Israel: Israeli has a large number of blogs, some more active than others; some highly political, others mostly personal. Ones I look at:
* Israpundit (multi-blogger, with an excellent linked list of other blogs)
* IsraellyCool (Australian and Israeli - check it out)
* An Unsealed Room (Allison Sommer's sharp-witted diary from a Tel Aviv suburb)

Another newspaper I should mention is Al Hayat, the London-based independent, Arabic-language publication. They have an English edition. And all serious students of the Middle East must keep up with MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which bridges the language gap between Arabic-, Farsi-, and Turkish-language media and English.

Finally, anyone who thinks or writes about the Middle East these days is indebted to the indefatigable Michael Totten, who has without question the best English-language blog on the region. In a just world, his lengthy postings would be articles in the New Yorker or Atlantic. When you visit his site, consider donating via PayPal. I don't think he has any other regular source of income right now.

The strange case of Scooter Libby

The bizarre Libby trial is over, a good time to take a hard look at this strange case. There's been a lot of commentary on the essentially empty nature of the trial, and even from quarters not sympathetic to Libby or the administration, a sense that the whole thing should never have been allowed to go this far. Like many such prosecutions, once the substance of the case (the supposed leak of Valerie Plame's name as a covert CIA agent) had evaporated, all that was left was to prosecute for "resisting investigation." Even the Washington Post, while accepting the verdict that Libby had lied to investigators, was harsh on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his media-enabled obsession with taking down anyone he could:

Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame's name. In fact, he learned early on that [the] primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame's identity .... It would have been sensible for Mr. Fitzgerald to end his investigation after learning about Mr. Armitage. Instead, like many Washington special prosecutors before him, he pressed on, pursuing every tangent in the case. In so doing he unnecessarily subjected numerous journalists to the ordeal of having to disclose confidential sources or face imprisonment. One, Judith Miller of the New York Times, lost several court appeals and spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify. The damage done to journalists' ability to obtain information from confidential government sources has yet to be measured.

Similarly, the New Republic, even before the Libby verdict came down, expressed serious forebodings about the prosecution and jailing of Miller, essentially for inaccurate reporting and (eventually) unpopular opinions on Iraq (article requires subscription). This may be the most serious damage the trial does, since Libby's conviction is likely to be overturned on appeal. Jailing Miller for refusing to divulge journalistic sources has opened a large breach in the protections that once sheltered reporters from being railroaded for covering controversial topics. The same army of pundits on the left who supported Miller's jailing will soon be regretting it, if they aren't already. The New York Times' Anthony Lewis forsees an impending crisis for the press in the US (requires registration).

Of course, journalists are not a priesthood or a fourth branch of government. The superficial professionalization of journalism in the last 50 years has fed such delusions. Freedom of speech and communication are basic and universal civil rights - not corporate or guild privileges of the press. Unfortunately, the line between media and government has become so blurred that reporters - who are, after all, not constitutionally elected or appointed by anyone - are in real danger of becoming routine legal targets in future political battles. It's an open question whether the continuing, dramatic decline in the general public's respect for journalists weakens society's overall respect for First Amendment rights. See here and here for further thoughts.

Once the underlying facts had become fully public (last summer, at the latest), the Libby case should have been dismissed. We know who identified Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, as a CIA agent. Plame was not a covert agent to begin with, and Plame and Wilson are the only people we know for sure lied during this entire story. And Miller never had any connection with Libby at all. In the end, the case amounted to, at most, a cover-up without a crime; a deranged left-liberal commentariat looking for someone's blood, somewhere, no matter how absurd their vendetta; and a figure now familiar in America, the out-of-control prosecutor. This last fact argues strongly for ending the indefensible and mischief-causing special prosecutor law - as if previous cases, like the overkill of the Clinton impeachment, didn't already make that case.*

The more basic problem is the misuse of the legal system to carry out what are really political or policy fights. Liberals pioneered this misuse of the law a generation ago. Occasionally, as in the Clinton impeachment, conservatives have gotten in on it, but the diversion of liberal politics into media spectacle and the courtroom remains a striking reminder of the decline of liberalism - why liberals no longer command a majority: they abandoned politics and persuading people to vote for them and, instead, decided to misuse the courts, the media, and academia as alternatives. And it has done them no good. All it's done is to bring those once-respected institutions into disrepute.
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* Don't expect it any time soon, though - the media loves special prosecutors, since they promise an unending series of scandals and pseudo-scandals and will launch a smear campaign against any politician who tries to stop this madness.

Reality and unreality in the Middle East

UPDATE: Maybe the ISG is just a decoy blowing smoke in our faces and the real action is elsewhere. Everybody who's somebody in the Middle East has a sponsor. The Kurds have us, in effect, as their sponsors. Willingly or not, the Iraqi Shi'ites have Iran as their sponsor.

That leaves only the Iraqi Sunnis without a sponsor. Hmmm ... I wonder who could fill that role (hat tip to Reynolds). And there's more ... and this ....
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Tom Donnelly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts it better than I can:

It just hasn't worked out the way the punditocracy planned: The "adults" of the Bush 41 administration were supposed to talk Bush 43 off the ledge, get him to give up his dream of democracy in Iraq and return to reality. But the main recommendation of the Baker- Hamilton "Iraq Study Group" - withdrawal by early 2008, covered by negotiations with Iran and Syria - has little value outside Washington, and none in Baghdad or the region.

The ISG report (the Hamilton part) actually has valuable advice, similar to the 9/11 Commission Report, on changing how the US government works. But the diplomatic part (the Baker part) is mostly a fantasy of misguided and/or obsolete ideas. (The funny thing is the early 2008 withdrawal date was the original Pentagon plan - that's how Washington works: you present your original plan as a bold breakthrough and radical departure. :-) The Washington Post's editorial board weighs in cogently on this aspect, and former Reagan-Bush-Clinton diplomat Dennis Ross discusses the Iran-Syria axis at length here in the New Republic (requires subscription). And read this as well. Or, if you prefer your politics in the form of cartoons, US News obliges with this priceless offering: a grim situation can't be made cuter than that.

Iran and Syria aren't friendly or ready to help - they're only ready to deal if they're afraid of us or want something we can give them, as Max Boot explains (requires registration). What happens months or a year or two hence, when we no longer have anything to bargain with, and they're no longer afraid of us? Chaos, that's what - a full-blown proxy war in Iraq, Lebanon, and maybe elsewhere. Lebanon is already feeling the intense Syrian pressure again, as Hezbollah prepares to destroy what's left of the Cedar Revolution.

The ISG report did reach its real audience, the news media, incessantly asking, "Will Bush listen?", never asking the right question: "Will the media listen?" Of course, the media has largely given up on reporting from Iraq. Most of its reporting is from Washington, which makes sense: that's where the main quagmire is.

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The tragedy of the neoconservative democracy crusade is that it's pre-empted real conservative policy possibilities, a "really real" realism based on correct understanding of the Middle East and the conflict were now in, instead of the ever-misleading and now-obsolete Baker-Scowcroft "realism," or the well-intentioned but now-fading-into- history liberal-internationalism.

What we need to recognize is that the policy paradigms of the Cold War era are exhausted and obsolete. "Realism" is dead. The old standbys (it's Israel's fault! start up the "peace process" again! suck up to the Saudis!) will no longer work. (For one thing, the designated fall guys for the US-Iraq mess - Israel and the Kurds - are not lining up to be sacrificed - why should they? That era is over.) What we need is new ME policies reconsidered from scratch with the oil factor and Israel playing no fundamental role. The ME's basic problems have to do with a toxic mix of Islam, political illegitimacy, and religious reaction. The region's dominant and long-indulged groups (Arabs, Sunni Arabs in particular) are largely unwilling to face their own problems and instead obsessively blame outsiders or "deviants." The oil money hugely exacerbates these problems, fueling an extreme fantasy of grievance and entitlement, while flooding the region with the by-products of modern civilization: electronic media, modern weapons, etc., that reinforce the Islamic world's growing reaction and intolerance.

The resulting conflict is a clash between civilizations, but also a clash within a civilization, giving rise to a series of wars (Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) that are not "civil" in the strict sense - they do not respect national boundaries, because Islam denies the legitimacy of the nation-state. The conflict is a composite of smaller conflicts, between Sunnis and Shi'ites, between moderate and extremist Muslims, between Arabs and non-Arabs, and between Muslims and non-Muslims, all simultaneously. Superficially, these wars are just internal tribal and sectarian conflicts. But when you look closer, you discover that in Iraq, as in Lebanon, local conflicts are blown up and made much more difficult by the sponsored-proxyship phenomenon, a classic feature of the modern ME "dark ages", inflamed by the honor-shame system. The sponsors here: Iran and Syria (sponsoring the Shiites and even helping the Sunnis) and private parties in the Gulf sponsoring the Sunni jihadists allied with al Qaeda. As with Israel and the Palestinians in the 90s, attempts like the Oslo "peace process" to move towards conflict resolution are defeated when the most extreme parties can look towards hardline rejectionist states like Iran and Syria for support. Local conflicts become swept up in global jihad and are transformed from difficult to impossible.

Meeting these challenges means breaking with classical American and Western policy, largely driven by the need for oil, protecting oil supplies and oil regimes, and recycling petrodollars through contracts. (The resulting corruption-for-oil-$$ needs to be seen for what it is and so often isn't. See here, for example. Unlike the ludricrous "blood-for-oil" lies of a few years ago, the oil-$$-realism-sucking-up-to-the-Saudis/ Iranians/whatever phenomenon is very real.) In the case of Europe, important additional factors include a non-fatal but persistent anti-semitism and the weird combination of prejudice against Muslim immigrants while pandering to the worst elements of the Islamic world, especially a factor in France.

This kind of cynical "realism" seems, well, "realistic" - workable at least in the short run. But we've outlived the short run and today live with the consequences, like al Qaeda. "Realistic" policies like this are myopic and destructive in the long run. And remember: we're living in that long run now.

The wrong-headed thing called "realism" today (the Saudi-Egypt-Kissinger-Baker- Scowcroft axis) is superficially like the real 19th century thing, but at a deeper level, has little connection with reality. Today, we're faced with a clash of civililzations even farther from 19th-century balance-of-power realism than the 20th-century clash of ideologies.

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There are real barriers to implementing better ME policies. The oil-$$-corruption factor plays a large and insidious role here, as it is not only in play among Washington power brokers, but also fuels "radical" "Middle East studies" in academia. It is rarely reported in the American news media, unless a catastrophe like 9/11 happens. Notice how the issue came up after 9/11, but then faded away. The news media returned to "the" ME conflict, which is supposedly just Israel and the Palestinians. The news media almost never register the truth: there is one big meta-conflict (jihad, or violent political Islam), made of up lots of smaller conflicts, of which Israel is a piece.

The news media itself is a major barrier to better thinking. It endlessly recycles obsolete and wrong ideas and policies, if they fit its dimwitted and warped view of the world. And since there is so little shame in public life any more, people associated with policy and intellectual failures get to peddle their wares endlessly too, long after they've overstayed their welcome. They're never kicked out of the public square and can clog it with no end of distractions and junk. Only the better-educated editorial writers and experienced commentators can act as a counterweight to the flow of political detritus through the "news" and "news analysis" (read: BS) columns.

POSTSCRIPT: A remarkable and prescient essay (in French) "Towards a New Foreign Policy" appeared in 1992 that (fourteen years ago!) predicted the decline of traditional realism in the post-Cold War period with a startling clarity that elites all over the Western world haven't yet caught up with. The anonymous essay in particular dwelled on the obsolete and destructive Arabist policies that de Gaulle inaugurated in the mid-1960s. The pseudonymous author is reportedly now a highly-placed French diplomat. His essay is discussed and quoted at length (in English) here.