The Wonk Room

The Consequences Of McCain’s Bad Judgment»

Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview of John McCain is very worth reading, as it gives a pretty good view into the coloring book version of the Middle East that McCain offers to the American people. For all of the Middle East leaders that McCain has met with — and he really, really wants you to know how many he has met with — McCain’s knowledge of the region persists at the level of a twenty minute briefing. It’s nice that he can name-check Barak, Olmert, and Abbas; It would be really nice if he demonstrated any knowledge of the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, or offered any good idea on how to move the peace process forward, which he does not.

What’s really troubling is McCain’s cluelessness about the disastrous effects of the Iraq war on American security. Asked by Goldberg whether he thinks Iran’s intention “is the actual destruction of America,” McCain answers that…the United States should stay in Iraq:

It’s hard for me to say what their intentions are, but the effect -– If they were able to drive us out of Iraq, and al Qaeda established a base there, and the Shiite militias erupted and the Iranian influence was expanded, which to my mind is what would happen, then the consequences for American national security would be profound. I don’t know if their intention is to destroy America and what we stand for, but I think the consequences of them succeeding in the destruction of the state of Israel and their continued support for terrorist organizations – all of these would have profound national security consequences.

You know what’s also had profound negative consequences for American national security? Invading and occupying Iraq. McCain has offered this justification before, and continues to completely miss the point.

Iran has been the single biggest beneficiary of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Former diplomat Peter Galbraith wrote last September that Iraq was a “mission accomplished–for Iran“:

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching…For eight years of brutal warfare in the 1980s, Iran tried to breach that line but could not. (At the time, the Reagan administration supported Saddam Hussein precisely because it feared the strategic consequences of an Iraq dominated by Iran’s allies.) The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished what Khomeini’s army could not.

Journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in March that “the United States has spent most of the past five years in a de facto alliance with Iran in support of the Shiite-led (and US-installed) regime in Baghdad….Washington’s decision to topple Saddam’s government has put in place a ruling elite that is far closer to Iran than it is to the United States.”

Rather than weakening Iranian hard-liners, as the Iraq war’s advocates insisted it would, the American invasion only strengthened them.

The consequences of Iraq for Israel’s security have also been negative. Brian Katulis writes that “in the summer of 2006, when Israel was fighting a live war with the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, it was clear whose side most Iraqi leaders were on — and it was not Israel.”

Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki condemned Israel’s “aggression,” and that same summer, the Iraqi speaker of parliament Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani accused “Jews” of being behind the violence and murders in Iraq. Are these the type of allies that the United States wants? Is the current policy in Iraq undermining U.S. and Israeli security interests by giving Iran some breathing room to expand its influence further around the region? These are tough questions to answer, but U.S. leaders need to address this fundamental contradiction at the heart of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Rather than consider these questions, however, McCain prefers to engage in empty sloganeering and fear-mongering as he plans the next war.

A Scholar’s Influence In Iraq»

In an otherwise very good analysis of Muqtada al-Sadr in yesterday’s Washington Post, Amit Paley glossed over what I think is a very significant point about the Iraqi Shia political scene:

Sadr, the third of four sons, was born in Najaf into one of the most revered clerical families in Shiite Islam. His father’s cousin, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, was an adored religious figure who founded a school of thought that became the Sadrist movement, which argued that the clergy should actively engage in politics to aid the downtrodden Shiite masses. When he was tortured and killed in 1980 by Saddam Hussein’s government, Moqtada’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, also a grand ayatollah, took his place as the head of the movement and became a chief opponent of Hussein’s rule.

It’s true that the Sadrist movement is based upon the teachings and theories of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, who is generally regarded as the most significant and innovative Shia scholar of the 20th century. But even more than that, all of the major Shia parties in Iraq derive elements of their programs from his work, a deeply intellectual form of Islamic scholarship which engaged and critiqued the various political ideologies at work in the contemporary Middle East.

Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Dawa Party was co-founded by Sadr in Najaf in 1957. The Dawa (”call to Islam”) was conceived by Iraq’s Shia clerics as an effort to combat the influence of secular ideologies such as socialism and Communism among Iraq’s poor and middle class. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) –formerly known as the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) — was founded in Iran in 1982 by the exiled cleric Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, himself a former Dawa colleague of Bakr al-Sadr. SCIRI was also grounded in Sadr’s theories of clerical activism, though it became more closely aligned with the extremist theory of vilayet e-faqih (rule of the religious scholars), as espoused by the group’s Iranian patron, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In the brutal, sanctions-starved Iraq of the 1990s, Muqtada’s father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, developed his elder cousin’s ideas into the potent populist-nationalist message that defines the current Sadrist movement. Sadeq also established a network of activist clerics and social services in opposition to the perceived “quietism” of the Najaf establishment. The latter aspect has enabled Muqtada to establish a base of political power far out of proportion to his relatively meager scholarly credentials, as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis depend on services provided by his offices.

While Dawa and ISCI continue to appeal more to Iraq’s scholarly and commercial classes, the Sadrists find the vast majority of their support among Iraq’s poor. Given the size of their constituencies, it’s no secret why Dawa and ISCI are extremely nervous about the coming provincial elections, and are seeking to weaken the Sadrists in advance. Trying to isolate and marginalize this movement — which should not be confused with, or simply reduced to, the Mahdi Army, it’s militia wing — is not likely to achieve sustainable gains.

Muqtada al-Sadr doesn’t fit the simplistic mold of a radical firebrand cleric as he is sometimes portrayed to be in the media. He is a major nationalist figure who was born into what is perhaps the most important family for Shia politics in Iraq –- akin to the Bush family for Republicans or the Kennedy family for Democrats here in the U.S. Bakr al-Sadr’s influence has shaped the current generation of Shia leaders in Iraq, and Muqtada’s ability to personally draw upon that legacy has been of significant benefit to him.

McClellan Apparently Hasn’t Read Feith’s Book»

The Politico reports that former White House press secretary Scott McCellan’s new memoir pretty much confirms what we already knew about the invasion of Iraq: It was sold to the American public with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” :

In a chapter titled “Selling the War,” [McClellan] alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

So, McClellan now admits that, back when he was accusing the Bush administration’s critics of politicizing national security, he was fully aware that it was actually the Bush administration that was politicizing national security. No points for candor, Scott.

But McClellan obviously has not read Doug Feith’s book. If he had, he would know that there was no manipulation of intelligence, only “honest error,” and that the error wasn’t Doug Feith’s, it was the CIA’s.

Writing in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Feith lamented “the damage to the president’s credibility…caused by the CIA’s errors on Iraqi WMD.” Feith neglects to mention that it was he, and his Office of Special Plans operation, who reinterpreted the CIA’s data, removed important qualifiers relating to Iraqi WMD, and then passed the new machined intelligence on to the White House. So, if the CIA was wrong, and it was, Feith was even more wrong.

Last week, continuing his life’s work of trying to repair his (justly) shattered reputation, Feith also insisted that “what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat,” by which he meant Saddam’s intention to someday reconstitute a WMD program. McClellan could have Feith in mind when he states that President Bush and his advisers “confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war.”

Ignoring McCain’s Record in Favor of ‘Reborn Multilateralist’ Narrative»

John McCain delivered a foreign policy address today on nuclear proliferation, in which he stressed the need to work with Russia in securing loose nuclear materials and preventing them from falling into the wrong hands:

While we have serious differences, with the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies. As our two countries possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, we have a special responsibility to reduce their number. […]

I would also redouble our common efforts to reduce the risk that nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons may fall into the hands of terrorists or unfriendly governments.

McCain did not say whether his surge in Russia diplomacy would occur before or after he gets Russia kicked out of the G8, as he has suggested he would try to do.

Given that a New York Times story on McCain’s speech quotes an expert praising McCain’s “references…to multilateralism,” we may be about to witness the same phenomenon as occurred after McCain’s earlier foreign policy speech in late March. After that speech, some analysts seriously surmised that McCain had forsworn American unilateralism, despite a clear past record of advocacy for American unilateralism, and despite having some of the foremost advocates of American unilateralism among his foreign policy advisers.

McCain’s foreign policy spokesman, Randy Scheunemann, has suggested in regard to Russian objections to U.S. missile defense in Eastern Europe, that “there will be no trade-offs,” which are “a relic of a bygone era of power politics.” This is the essence of McCain’s approach to foreign affairs. Like Bush, McCain defines “negotiation” as presenting our enemies with ultimata, and “diplomacy” as laying out for them the terms of their capitulation.

Max Bergmann at Democracy Arsenal isn’t fooled:

Since McCain is not willing to negotiate with Iran or North Korea - what non-military strategies does McCain have to ensure that North Korea and Iran end their nuclear programs? The fact is he has no non-military strategy. His sole approach is to say to them: we demand you to stop doing what you are doing or else we will attack you and destroy you.

The latter approach is what McCain advocated in a 1999 speech on the North Korean nuclear threat, in which he suggested that the U.S. should have taken a harder line much sooner. McCain asserted that “a firmer response to North Korea might have triggered a war, a war we would win, but not without paying a terrible price…North Korea is still inexorably nearing total collapse, and its leaders remain quite capable of launching in their country’s death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.”

I think we can safely predict that McCain would follow this advice in regard to Iran, with predictably disastrous results.

Is McCain Quietly Backing Off His Support For Another Escalation In Iraq?»

Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John McCain’s new website, unveiled last week, features a significant policy change on the Iraq page.

Until Tuesday, this paragraph was the first point on the old Iraq page:

“A greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success in Iraq. John McCain agrees with retired Army General Jack Keane that there are simply not enough American forces in Iraq. More troops are necessary to clear and hold insurgent strongholds; to provide security for rebuilding local institutions and economies; to halt sectarian violence in Baghdad and disarm Sunni and Shiite militias; to dismantle al Qaeda; to train the Iraqi Army; and to embed American personnel in Iraqi police units. Accomplishing each of these goals will require more troops and is a crucial prerequisite for needed economic and political development in the country.”

On the new page, that entire paragraph has been deleted. The new page does not call for more troops and makes no mention of the “critical prerequisite” of disarming Sunni and Shiite militias.

This change raises two questions.

First, does John McCain still think we need more troops in Iraq, as his website stated until earlier this week?

Second, since John McCain currently supports President Bush’s policy of arming certain Shiite and Sunni militias, has he changed his view that disarming Shiite and Sunni militias is a “critical prerequisite” for success, as his website stated as recently as Tuesday?

Neocons Can’t Stop Spinning»

In a column in this morning’s LA Times, Commentary magazine essayist Gabriel Schoenfeld (who we last saw here, misunderstanding Al Qaeda’s use of media), attacks widely respected arms control expert Joe Cirincione for Cirincione’s skepticism of a Syrian nuclear weapons threat. Schoenfeld writes:

Interviewed by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker after the [September 2007] Israeli raid, Cirincione was emphatic: “Syria does not have the technical, industrial or financial ability to support a nuclear weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for 15 years, and every once in awhile a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear weapons threat from Syria.” […]

Cirincione has admitted that he got it wrong, explaining that the evidence “seems strong” that Syria was building a reactor and that no one can bat 1,000.

The way Schoenfeld writes it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there actually was a nuclear weapons threat from Syria. And, of course, that’s the point. This is the sort of alarmism in which Schoenfeld regularly trafficks. But the thing is, Joe Cirincione is right: There was and is no nuclear weapons threat from Syria. In late April, the Bush administration revealed intelligence indicating that Syria was “within weeks or months” of completing a nuclear reactor. And a nuclear reactor is not a nuclear weapon. The Washington Post’s William Arkin pointed out that “Even if Syria managed to complete a plutonium production reactor, and then managed to operate it for the months would be needed to manufacture the materials it needed, and then managed to machine that plutonium, and then design and fabricate a nuclear weapon, many months if not years would go by. Such a program would be detected, proven and probably thwarted by the international community.”

A new report from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies was also “dismissive of Syria’s nuclear prospects, [and] said it made little sense for the country to secretly build nukes when it already had an arsenal of chemical weapons.”

This is not to downplay the threat of nuclear proliferation. But those interested in dealing seriously and productively with the problem (as opposed to, ahem, laying the groundwork for a war with Iran) should understand that the record of the Bush administration on proliferation has been, like the rest of Bush’s foreign policy, disastrous. As Joe Cirincione himself wrote in May 2006:

The [Bush] administration’s counter-proliferation strategy has made these [nuclear] dangers grow, not shrink. Proliferation problems over the past five years have gotten worse, not better. Most of the construction and development of Iran’s nuclear program has occurred since 2000. The same is true in North Korea. In the past three years, while we have been bogged down in Iraq, North Korea has pulled out of the agreement that had frozen its plutonium program, gone from enough material for perhaps two bombs to an estimated ten bombs worth, withdrawn from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and declared itself a nuclear-weapon state. U.S. policy has completely failed to stop either country’s efforts.

The unfortunate reality is that the sort of complicated diplomatic work involved in protecting America from loose nukes is generally irrelevant to conservatives’ conception of national security, which is more about identifying new enemies, and then bombing them, and later, attacking liberals for having been right about what a stupid plan that was.

While it’s gratifying to see some of our conservative friends develop, at long last, an interest in accuracy, if Gabe Schoenfeld is truly interested in sounding the alarm on experts who have been proven repeatedly and monumentally wrong, he could probably start with his fellow Commentarian Max Boot, who — after warning of Saddam Hussein’s “top-of-the-line weapons of mass destruction” — has been declaring victory in Iraq since December 2003. Then Schoenfeld can stop by Norman Podhoretz’s office and see if Norm’s figured out what a Kurd is. Then Schoenfeld can move on to the various experts employed by the network of conservative think tanks, magazines, and vanity publications — many of whom, like Boot, now work as advisers to John McCain’s presidential campaign — whose countless distortions and deceptions helped to get the United States into Iraq, and now endeavor to keep us there.

But that’s only if Schoenfeld is genuinely interested in accuracy, and not just talking trash.

Fighting Them Over Here»

Yesterday, the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg welcomed President Bush as the guest speaker for the Division Review ceremony, marking the end of All American Week. Predictably, the most unpopular president in American history used his speech to the troops and their families as another opportunity to buttress his legacy and defend the disastrous decision to invade Iraq by — what else? — waving the bloody shirt of 9/11.

VetVoice’s Rock Richard, himself a member of the 82nd Airborne, attended the ceremony and found the president’s remarks extremely inappropriate. “Six and a half years after the September 11th attacks,” Richard writes, and “the President is still linking those attacks to Iraq and Iraq to Osama bin Laden…This is just too ridiculous“:

Given the opportunity to thank honorable men and women for their service to their country, the President, using a captive back drop of American Soldiers seized the opportunity to make political demands of the Senate, make ridiculous errant arguments for our entry to the Iraq war, and link Iraq to Osama bin Laden and the September 11th attacks. I must say, in my entire career, of all the military functions I’ve attended, not a single one has disgusted me as much as I was today when President Bush finally ended his remarks.

Among the various discredited claims which the president continued to indulge is the idea that, by invading Iraq, the United States has “taken the battle to the terrorists abroad — so we do not have to face them here at home.”

It is far past time that the president and his supporters abandoned this ridiculous and reprehensible talking point. First, and most obviously, because it’s been long established that “the terrorists” weren’t in Iraq in any real sense until after the U.S. invaded and created the chaos which “the terrorists” subsequently exploited. Secondly, and more profoundly, “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here” is simply another way of saying that America has chosen to turn the towns, streets and homes of Iraq into battlefields, to use the Iraqi people themselves as bait for “the terrorists” and as cannon fodder in an illusory “war on terror.”