Attackerman

Another Example Of My Prescience

"The Obama Doctrine," March 2008:

"When Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama met in California for the Jan. 31 debate, their back-and-forth resembled their many previous encounters, with the Democratic presidential hopefuls scrambling for the small policy yardage between them. And then Obama said something about the Iraq War that wasn't incremental at all. "I don't want to just end the war," he said, "but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."

"Just Kidding! Obama Flip-Flops on Ending Iraq War," today:

According to Maliki, whose public (and parliament) doesn’t want U.S. troops in Iraq any longer, there’s “no doubt the U.S. forces have a role in providing training of Iraqi forces.” That’s a big change, since it’shis government that’s the obstacle to a residual U.S. troop presence. Biden seized on that, and went further. Not only will the U.S. and Iraq maintain a “robust security relationship,” but they’ll head back to the negotiating table to work out a post-2011 role for U.S. troops, “including areas of training, intelligence and counterterrorism,” Biden declared.

Pause on that for a moment. If Biden gets his way, then U.S. troops returning to Iraq next year won’t just be training their Iraqi counterparts, even if that’s how Maliki sells it to a skeptical Iraqi populace. They’ll continue to wage a war against Iraq’s lingering terrorists. (Maybe Iranian forces in Iraq, too.) It’ll be lower-key than before, but the U.S. will still be at war in Mesopotamia.

Update, 2:30: Or maybe I am brilliant! Tommy Vietor from the White House says I got the whole story wrong, misunderstood Biden & Maliki. Here's my rewritten piece:

The White House says it’s on track to remove the remaining 15,000 U.S. troops from Iraq by December 31, despite some apparent misreporting from Baghdad  – which, um, we breathlessly repeated.

In a joint press appearance on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seemed to suggest that U.S. troops might return to Iraq in 2012. Maliki, whose government has balked at a continued presence, said that there’s “no doubt the U.S. forces have a role in providing training of Iraqi forces.” Biden seemed to go farther, talking about a “robust security relationship,” including on subjects like “training, intelligence and counterterrorism.”

But National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor tells Danger Room that the U.S. role in the war really, really will end with the New Year.

“There is no change in administration policy. All troops will be out at the end of the year,” Vietor says. There is “no resumption of negotiations” with the Iraqis about a possible residual force. ...

 

 

Elegy For A War

Another ungrateful Iraqi:

“Our generation has seen enough,” said Baghdad resident Mustafa Hamza el-Ebadi, 21, who will graduate this spring with a degree in communication and engineering and wants to move to the United States. “When we were kids, there were economic sanctions. When we were teenagers, there were bodies in the street. And now there is no space to live.”

Someone forgot to tell Mustafa that those corpses he saw were actually Freedom Nappers. He should probably also know that the United States will not grant him a visa, since it considers him a terrorism risk.

The GOP On Libya 2011 = The Dems On Iraq 2004

Bloomberg:

The contenders in the Republican presidential primary field have attacked President Barack Obama’s foreign policies. They say Obama showed weakness by not leading the allied air campaign in Libya, where the U.K and France played prominent roles, and not being tough enough on Iran to stop its nuclear-weapons efforts.

Welcome back to 2004. The Democrats knew they did not like George W. Bush. What they couldn't quite decide on was... why. Since so many of them supported the Iraq war -- mostly out of political cowardice, a few out of conviction -- it wasn't easy to fault Bush for it. But it was a political necessity in an election occuring in the shadow of 9/11. So the critique became: sure, Bush was right to invade, but he massively botched the job; I wouldn't have.

Voters saw this for what it was: a muddied non-contrast that sounded like sideline carping. John Kerry lost an election he probably should have won. (He didn't just lost because of Iraq, but Iraq didn't help.)

And so now the GOP's critique of the Libya war is: Obama shouldn't have let the U.K. and France take the lead. Welcome to the latest Incompetence Dodge -- except this time around, the GOP doesn't have the political luxury of a war waged incompetently. First the GOP called for a no-fly zone and then bashed Obama for answering the call. Obama then waged a discomfiting open-ended war that blurred the difference between stopping Gadhafi's aggression and overthrowing Gadhafi; all while limiting the U.S. commitment. It was weird. But then it worked! It worked in eight months and then it really ended. The cost to the U.S. was $1.1 billion, a wrecked Fire Scout and no human casualties.

After a decade of confusing, disastrous, inconclusive wars, it might be hard to remember what a successful war looks like. As it turns out, it looks like Libya. And the GOP is saying that it "showed weakness"? Because the U.S. didn't have to do too much? Their problem is with a... cost-effective war? Ask Moammar Gadhafi's rotting corpse if the U.S. looks weak. The average voter, if he cares about foreign policy at all, might not have wanted to get the U.S. involved in Libya. But he's going to hear that critique and think it's pathetic -- the sort of petulant tantrum a child throws when he can't figure out what's bothering him. 

Bush in 2004 must have lit a cigar when he heard what Kerry was going to throw at him on Iraq. Obama might want to call him up so they can share an improbable chuckle. 

A Little Public Introspection Wouldn't Kill David Frum

Frum, today, explaining why he wouldn't have voted for the Iraq war in 2002:

For Americans, the issue was not Saddam's badness, but his nuclear weapons program. Knowing that the nuclear program was not a real threat, the invasion was too large a commitment. The world is a better place without Saddam, but as with everything, the question is one of costs and benefits. The costs to the U.S. were too high, the benefits to the U.S. too few.

Frum, eight years ago, explaining why opponents of the Iraq war are only a few degrees away from anti-semitism:

The antiwar conservatives aren't satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation's enemies.

It's sometimes said, with some justification, that the right seeks converts while the left seeks apostates. And I don't mean this post like that. Nor do I mean it to embarass Frum. We all write dumb stuff sometimes, especially when we believe something passionately. 

What I mean to say is that I remember Frum's 2003 National Review cover story, "Unpatriotic Conservatives," very vividly. It was barely a month before the invasion, and Frum decided to organize a civil war within conservatism. Some of the people he goes after in the piece, like my old boss (long story) Taki Theodoracopulos, really are antisemites.

But Frum's piece did not draw very sharp distinctions. It did not rigorously distinguish between those with reservations about the Iraq war qua the war and those who opposed the war because of darker motivations. And in that slippage, it encapsulated an ugly period in American discourse, where fear and demagoguery substituted for reason. Its effect was to chill the opposition to a war that Frum now considers ill-regarded. My colleague at the time, Lawrence F. Kaplan, engaged in a dizzying, perverse bit of slander by asserting that a "chorus" of antiwar criticism was in fact antisemitic -- and it was those antisemites who were trying to stifle the discourse, not Kaplan himself.

And so this is what I mean. It's cool for Frum to no longer believe these follies. Perhaps he could provide us with some explanation for what led him to change his mind, and what his cooler head now makes of his earlier piece. It's not about relitigating the past; after all, I was a dumb-ass 22 year old war supporter myself. It's about grappling with your mistakes so you don't make them again. 

And The Irony Escaped Them While They Did It

The government of Iraq continued to respond vigorously on Monday to a tip from the new interim leaders in Libya that former members of Saddam Hussein’s military and Baath Party were plotting a coup — so much so that critics are now saying that the information has become a pretext for arresting its political opponents.

As the overwhelming majority of high-ranking Baathists were Sunnis, the mass arrests by the Shiite-controlled government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is fanning sectarian tensions, just six weeks before the United States military is scheduled to withdraw its last soldiers.

No, just kidding, the irony totally didn't escape them. They did the roundup with smiles on their faces that said, Hey, how do you motherfuckers like it this time? 

The First Step Is Admitting You Were Wrong

I once wrote:

Faced with a disastrous war, the most important consideration is not "Were we wrong?" but "Why were we wrong?" and "How can we avoid being so wrong in the future?" 

It also works the other way. Not every war is a disaster, and so when you predict disaster and a non-disaster emerges, you need to ask yourself the same questions. So my piece for Danger Room on the eve of the successful conclusion of the Libya war:

And so, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I need to concede that I got the Libya war wrong. Several Danger Room pieces under my byline ran this year predicting that Libya was an open-ended mission, lacked a clear plan for victory, and could lead to NATO peacekeepers battling post-Gadhafi insurgents. While reasonable people can disagree about whether the war was in the U.S. interest (or even legal), or whether President Obama portrayed it honestly, the fact is that the war successfully ended after eight months, contrary to consistent predictions on display here.

We owe it to you to acknowledge forthrightly that we were wrong, and probably too blinded with fears of Iraq 2.0. It’s not just the Pentagon that has trouble with predictions.

I still don't feel the Libya war was in the U.S. interest. But then all the more reason why I think conceding how well it turned out -- not that history ever stops -- is imperative. As long as the U.S. doesn't get sucked into post-Gadhafi Libya, which it seems we won't, then you can chalk up the Libya war as a success, and (reluctant) opponents like myself ought to acknowledge it. 

Also: what's with the Twitter pushback on this admission? Don't we want to live in a media environment where journalists admit their mistakes? 

Fulfilling Campaign Pledges On Iraq After All Else Fails

Something I shoulda emphasized on Friday after the Iraq announcement. Um, Obama shouldn't get credit for sticking with his campaign pledge of ending the Iraq war after trying and failing to keep a residual force behind. (Leaving aside the fact that the war isn't ending.)

Thanks to Jeff Emanuel for crystallizing something that should have been blaringly obvious to me. The New York Times has a piece on Amb. Jim Jeffrey that adds flesh to the bone:

For the president, the announcement followed through on his campaign promise to end the war. 

But for the ambassador, it was something far different. Over the past year, the ambassador had labored intensely to reach a deal with the Iraqi government to keep a substantial number of troops here.

Mr. Jeffrey wanted the troops to stay because he believed the fledgling Iraqi military needed continual training from American troops. He knew that keeping troops in Iraq would push back on Iran’s influence in the region. And he believed the troops would help the State Department, which will have a massive presence here in years to come, get around a country where the security is still tenuous. 

The whole piece is worth reading, especially for the delicious, delicious irony of Ahmed Chalabi explaining that a continued U.S. presence is a red line for the Iraqi political culture. 

Another irony that's worth a brief comment. In 2007, the Bush administration undertook negotiations on a Status of Forces Agreement to maintain an enduring troop presence in Iraq. But the Iraqis in the room -- for the reasons Chalabi explained -- flipped the script and insisted that the SOFA become a mechanism for withdrawal, complete with the timetables that George W. Bush so hated. For reasons that are still opaque to me, Bush ultimately acquiesced. Years later, Obama sends the same diplomat Bush used, Brett McGurk, to undo the very timetable that he endorsed as a presidential candidate and used as political cover for withdrawal. McGurk can't do it -- for the reasons Chalabi explained! -- and so Obama is back saying he's fulfilling his promise. 

We entered Iraq in a cynical, fraudulent way. It's only fitting that's how we leave it. (Or, I should say, "leave" it.)

Who Replaced Tom Ricks With Tom Friedman When I Wasn't Looking?

"Tom Ricks" writes:

The next six months in Iraq will indeed be interesting.

And that's when I shed a single tear. 

Jack Keane: To Save Iraqi Democracy, We Must Ignore It!

Oh, Jack Keane. Please stop clowning yourself. Via the Weekly Standard, the former Army vice chief of staff can't believe we're about to abandon our hard-won efforts to midwife Iraqi democracy at the barrel of a gun:

“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.

“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”

Has Keane really not figured out that precisely those democratic aspirations are the reason why the U.S. has to go? Or are Iraqis merely abstract concepts to him, deployed for whatever argument about the war he feels like making?

General Keane, meet the real-keeping Ambassador Chris Hill:

Why the deal didn’t happen had little to do with the so-called immunity issues that the U.S. insisted on, protections that our troops have when deployed to many other far-flung countries in the world. The reason was very simple: even Iraqis who benefitted enormously from the security provided by our troops, and for whom the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was the happiest moment of their lives, could not, in the end, support a continuation of foreign troops in their country. Call it visceral. Call it cultural. The fact is, no one likes to be invaded and occupied, and for eight years, told what to do and how to behave. To extend the stay of even just a few U.S. troops was to extend what many Iraqis, mindful of their country’s history, considered another occupation. In the end, Prime Minister Maliki got very little support from any other Iraqi political identity. The Sunnis opposed the extension. So did the Shia. The Kurds, the third element in Iraq’s body politic, may have supported an extension, but they could not carry the day without the Iraqi Arabs.

Fun With Iraq Hackishness

The Republican freakout over kind-of-but-not-really leaving Iraq is as sad as it is predictable. It also follows a pattern: ever since 2008, Republicans have been eager to criticize Obama for the modalities of withdrawal, but they're not quite willing to actually argue that the U.S. should stay fighting over there, since they know what sort of domestic electoral rebuke that would invite. They might want to read Marc Lynch's (very good) essay on withdrawal for a possible new talking point to square the circle:

Thanks to Bush's 2008 SOFA deal and Obama's clear public declarations over the last few years, the withdrawal will not be a sudden, unexpected or disruptive removal of a vital support structure. Iraqi politics have already adapted to the declining American role, and factored it in. The result hasn't been pretty -- worrying centralization of power by Prime Minister Maliki, a fractious and ineffective Parliament, continuing institutional deficiencies, a nasty political discourse, and ongoing low level violence. But it looks resilient enough to avoid catastrophe, and above all it doesn't depend on (or want) constant American pushing and prodding and intervention to carry on. 

So just say that vindicates Bush! Iraqi democracy, amirite? Had not we fought so long and so hard against so many, Iraqis would never have gotten the opportunity to kick us out of Iraq! Purple fingers in the sky like it's 2005, everyone!

Any GOP presidential candidate that uses this line in next month's national-security debate, I want credit. Shit, I should pitch this to the Weekly Standard and see if I can Alan Sokel them.