The Wonk Room

Report Presumes ‘Strategic Imperative’ Of US-Iraq Relationship »

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Center for a New American Security recently released a report entitled “After the Fire,” detailing what the authors think the U.S. relationship with Iraq should be after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011. There is little controversial or bold in the report for reasonable readers to disagree with — the basic thrust is that the United States should remain diplomatically engaged in Iraq after 2011 as it would in any other important post-conflict country with which it has diplomatic relations. Beyond this banal main point, the report suggests that the United States might maybe keep a number of adviser troops in Iraq beyond 2011 -– which is something of a CNAS hobbyhorse -– but political realities in Iraq (which the authors themselves point out) make such a development exceedingly unlikely.

But the report does suffer from two main flaws, one specific to the topic and another afflicting DC policy reports in general. First, the report doesn’t mention Iraqi refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs). These people will have to be dealt with one way or another, either by returning them to their homes or by resettling them elsewhere in Iraq or overseas. Either way, refugees and IDPs present a tremendous political problem for the Iraqi government –- one that could spark renewed violence if handled improperly. And if Iraqis choose or are forced to resettle overseas, the brain drain preventing Iraq’s economy from rebuilding itself will become permanent. This oversight is glaring given the relatively common-sensical main recommendations of the report.

More broadly, though, the CNAS report reflects a major problem with DC foreign policy reports -– assuming away strategic questions while focusing on operational and tactical issues. For instance, the report asserts that we have a “strategic imperative of establishing an enduring relationship with a key country in a region of vital importance to the United States” without establishing why this is so. It may be true, but no one actually argues why. Maybe we don’t have to have an “enduring relationship” with Iraq for it to be stable. Maybe we do, but DC discussions don’t really go beyond the assertion that this sort of relationship is necessary.

Moreover, the authors assert “the primary objective and guiding principle of U.S. Middle East policy must be to keep the region politically stable and secure in order to protect American allies in the region and avoid sudden disruptions in the supply of energy resources.” Which is well and good, but it really begs a broader US Middle East policy which isn’t really found beyond faint outlines in a report that, after all, focuses on Iraq. To my eyes, at least, it seems like the report’s goals for Iraq are informing the overall regional strategy (such as it is) rather than the other way around. This sort of thinking is all too common in various DC foreign policy reports -– there’s little questioning of overall U.S. strategy and too much focus on questions of technique.

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The KBR Disaster In Iraq

Our guest blogger is Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND), Chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee held the 19th in its series of hearings on waste, fraud and corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan yesterday. What we heard was really stunning.

We learned that the Army’s biggest contractor in Iraq, KBR, received bonuses totaling $83.4 million for work done during 2007 under LOGCAP III Task Order 139, which included electrical wiring work throughout Iraq. According to the Army’s own criteria for performance bonuses, in order to properly receive such a bonus, the firm’s work was to have been “excellent.”

Witnesses told our committee KBR’s work was far from excellent. As they described it, it sounds more like a disaster:

– One witness was Eric Peters, a former KBR Master Electrician who worked in Iraq for KBR as recently as this year. He said he quit the company after determining that KBR was incapable of doing the electrical wiring work properly, did not care about the safety of its own employees, and sought to intimidate those who spoke up. Peters also noted that KBR hires third country nationals who are not electricians to do wiring work. Often, workers and supervisors don’t even speak the same language.

– Another witness was Jim Childs, also a Master Electrician. The Army hired him to inspect KBR’s wiring work in Iraq after I asked the Army to take a closer look at what KBR was doing. He told us KBR’s electrical wiring work in Iraq was the “most hazardous, worst quality work I have ever inspected. During my theatre-wide inspections, I concluded that roughly 90 percent of the new construction building work by KBR was not properly wired. This means that over 70,000 buildings in Iraq were not up to code.”

– Our third witness was the former Army contract manager who previously managed KBR’s LOGCAP III contract. He told us the $83.4 million bonus received by KBR was “highly inappropriate” and if he had not been forced out of his position managing that contract – after he refused to rubber stamp nearly a billion dollars in questionable KBR charges – he would have objected to awarding the bonus.

The sad story of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret, really tells it all. He was electrocuted as he showered in a shower stall on a U.S. military base. His mother was told he was electrocuted because he carried an electrical appliance into the shower. She refused to accept that explanation and forced an investigation which determined that the real cause of Sgt. Maseth’s electrocution was faulty electrical wiring.

Did KBR move quickly to correct the wiring? Not according to Jim Childs, who told us that a full 10 months after Sgt. Maseth’s electrocution death, KBR still had not fixed the wiring problems to make the shower safe.

I intend to continue to pursue this issue. I want to know why KBR got these bonuses and who approved them. I also want to know what the Pentagon is doing to hold KBR accountable for its work in Iraq. Tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for slipshod, deadly wiring work sure isn’t holding anybody accountable for anything.

I intend to keep asking these questions, and more, until I get satisfactory answers. American taxpayers and American soldiers, who put their lives on the line, deserve no less.

Conservatives And COIN: A Short-Term Marriage

Ralph Peters’ latest cry for help supports a suspicion that I’ve long had about conservatives and counterinsurgency. For all of their praise of General Petraeus for having “turned Iraq around” using population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) methods, (what COIN guru David Kilcullen has called “armed social work“) conservatives remain generally committed to the proposition that the best way to protect Americans from terrorism is to just go out into other countries and kill lots and lots of people.

Praising the promotion of former joint special operations chief Lt. Gen. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Peters writes that “Petraeus’ deservedly lauded performance in Iraq appears to have inhibited his ability to think clearly about Afghanistan”:

[Petraeus] doesn’t seem to grasp that, while al Qaeda was a foreign and ultimately unwanted presence in Iraq, the Taliban’s the home team in Afghanistan. Afghan tribesmen just don’t share our interests. And Iraq’s a state. Afghanistan’s an accident. [...]

Will McChrystal, our special operator without peer, be allowed to do what’s necessary — and to jettison huggy-bear programs that sound good but don’t work? Can he focus on the destruction of our enemies?

While recognizing that violent kinetic operations such as those that McChrystal oversaw in Iraq are often an underplayed aspect of counterinsurgency — and McChrystal’s promotion strongly indicates that such operations will play a major role in Afghanistan — it’s important to note here that we spent a number of years doing “what’s necessary” in Iraq, (as Peters wrote so charmingly at the time, “if we can’t leave a democracy behind, we should at least leave the corpses of our enemies… Give therapeutic violence a chance.”) and only managed to incite a violent insurgency and midwife a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands and utterly changed the face of the country. Of course, Peters’ view was that we weren’t doing enough of “what’s necessary” — we just needed to do more of it, and harder.

He was, of course, proved wrong on that, just as were many on the other side like myself who were skeptical that any strategy conducted under the auspices of a U.S. occupation could actually succeed in bringing violence down. (It still remains to be seen, however, whether that strategy will result in a stable and unified Iraqi state.) While I think it’s correct to note the difference between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, it seems to me that the fact that the Taliban (or the various insurgent factions that are often carelessly referred to together as “the Taliban”) are more deeply embedded in Afghan society argues even more for a careful population- and governance-centric approach to isolate the irreconcilable hardcore from the reconcilable opportunists.

Peters’ basic argument, though, is that protecting the population was all fine and nice in Iraq, but in Afghanistan it’s time to get back to the KILLIN’. Add this to the tendency of people like Bill Kristol to diminish or dismiss the role that public relations and symbolism play in counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency and you really have to question whether they really understand or believe in the strategic approach that they’ve been hailing so vociferously for the past couple years. I have my own concerns about the Cult of COIN that’s been developing here in Washington, but I think it’s becoming clear that, for many pro-war conservatives, what Petraeus and the COINdinistas really deserve praise for is helping them save face.

Can The Iraq War Explain The Economic Crisis?

Via Andrew Sullivan, Derek Thompson examines a new Brookings Institution report in which economist James Hamilton argues that the economic crisis was caused by the sharp rise on oil prices that occurred over the last several years:

Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around $30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140) would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual GDP. [...]

What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults? Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening up long before the recession — “subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3.” And housing is factored into Hamilton’s analysis. It was just one of a handful of multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.

When considering the impact that oil prices had on the U.S. economy, it’s also obviously worth considering what impact the Iraq war — by creating greater uncertainty and risk in the world’s leading oil producing region — had on oil prices. According to a leading oil economist, Dr. Mamdouh Salameh, the Iraq war “tripled the price of oil…costing the world a staggering $6 trillion in higher energy prices alone”:

Salameh, who advises both the World Bank and the UN Industrial Development Organization (Unido), [said] that the price of oil would now be no more than $40 a barrel, less than a third of the record $135 a barrel reached last week, if it had not been for the Iraq war.

This is part of the combined impact of the war on the U.S. economy that economist Joseph Stiglitz placed at around $3 trillion, possibly going as high as $5 trillion. Of course, these are just the economic costs — there are numerous political and security costs still to be tallied, but they all need to be kept in mind when confronted by conservatives arguing that the Iraq war was, in any sense, “worth it.”

Torturing The Al Qaeda-Iraq Connection

Shedding some well-needed light on why it could have possibly been necessary to waterboard someone 183 times, McClatchy reports that according to “a former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue,” former Vice-President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld “demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.”

“There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.

“The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.” [...]

“There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people to push harder,” he continued.

I suppose it’s fitting, if disturbingly ironic, that techniques adopted wholesale from methods intended to extract false confessions were used in an attempt to generate evidence of a non-existent Al Qaeda-Saddam operational relationship.

In addition to the basic issue of illegal torture, however, we have the issue of mis-allocation of resources. The time spent and assets used in attempting to torture out a justification for what we now know was a predetermined Iraq invasion could have been better spent actually protecting America. In other words, the Iraq war was damaging U.S. national security even before it began.

Abdullah: Iraqi Sunnis ‘Want A Real Reconciliation’ »

Dr. Tariq Al-Abdullah is a tribal sheikh in Iraq’s Anbar province, and one of the leaders of what became known as the “Awakenings” movement, in which members of Sunni tribes — many of them former insurgents — allied with U.S. coalition forces against Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Yesterday I spoke with Dr. Al-Abdullah about the current situation in Iraq, specifically the state of Iraq’s political reconciliation in the wake of a series of battles between Awakenings forces and Iraqi government troops. Dr. Al-Abdullah offered a discouraging diagnosis. “I can assure you,” he said “that it [reconciliation] doesn’t go even slowly, it is stopped completely. There is no action regarding reconciliation.”

My dream, like any other Iraqi, we are looking for stability and democracy and freedom, and we think we cannot deliver…these things if we are not united. And because we have our own government, our elected government, they should deal — even if there are many concerns about the election as we heard, and you heard in the past time — but it’s a matter of fact that they are existing and we should deal with them and they should deal with the situation as a government for the whole Iraq. To bring stability and progress and the reconstruction of Iraq I think they should be looking for the unity of the Iraqis, and reconciliation. And here when we say we want reconciliation, we want a real reconciliation.

Watch it:

While Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised that significant numbers of Awakenings members would either be incorporated into Iraq’s security forces or provided other government jobs, a promise that Maliki’s government has thus far failed to keep.

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Chalabi: ‘Iran Benefited From Toppling Saddam’

Via Tom Ricks, a very interesting Dar al-Hayat interview with Ahmad Chalabi, in which Chalabi shares his views of President Bush and the strategic consequences of the Iraq invasion for Iran:

[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?

[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.

[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?

[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn’t mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam’s fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.

[Al-Hayat]: This happened?

[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.

[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?

[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.

The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran. Incidentally, many of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.

Like Ricks, I’d be very interested to hear more about the “implicit agreement” that Chalabi asserts between the U.S. and Iran. Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous about dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag.

Obama’s Trip To Iraq: A Shift In Tone, No Flying Footwear

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

At the end of his European trip yesterday, President Barack Obama made an unscheduled stopover in Iraq, in order to visit U.S. troops and talk with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In contrast with President Bush’s last visit in December 2008, no shoes were thrown at the American head of state.

But there were more important contrasts between Bush’s and Obama’s trips to Iraq than a lack of footwear hurled by local journalists. In each of President Bush’s three visits to Iraq since Maliki came to power, he has portrayed the United States military presence as indispensable to progress in Iraq — with the implied notion that the outcome in Iraq would be dependent on the actions of the United States, not Iraqis.

During his September 3, 2007 trip to Anbar province, for example, Bush made a point to “reassure [Iraqis] that America does not abandon our friends, and America will not abandon the Iraqi people.” The implication being that Iraqis could not possibly succeed without the United States having a long-term presence.

By contrast, President Obama delivered a different message. Rather than reiterating an open-ended military commitment to Iraq, the president made it clear to U.S. troops that “it is time for us to transition to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country and for their sovereignty.” Speaking with Prime Minister Maliki, Obama reiterated the United States’ commitment to drawing down all of its forces by the end of 2011, as per the Bush-negotiated security agreement.

Equally important, the president focused on resolving Iraq’s outstanding political conflicts while noting, “we can’t do it for them.” At the same time, though, he committed the United States to a more civilian political partnership with Iraq — promising to work “in a spirit of partnership” with the Iraqi government to resolve Iraq’s domestic governance and regional security problems. These differences amount to a major shift in tone from Bush’s visits, which emphasized the military and security aspects dominated by the United States.

More importantly, though, Obama’s shift in tone represents a shift in policy away from tinkering with U.S. force levels and toward letting Iraqis control their own fate. As Senior Fellow Brian Katulis recently argued, “For far too long, I think we’ve hung on to this notion… that we can simply change and reshape things with our military presence.” Obama’s new policy and recent remarks in Baghdad recognize that there is a limit to what the United States military can accomplish in Iraq, and that political and diplomatic engagement will be far more potent in helping Iraqis resolve their internal conflicts.

Claims Of Iraq ‘Success’ Still Unreality-Based

Since the new administration took office, there has been a clear and concerted effort by the Iraq war’s architects and supporters to present post-surge Iraq as a success, to be either preserved or squandered by President Obama. In reality, however, the continuing violence in Iraq speaks for itself.

Anthony Shadid reports today that a series of six car bombs “struck markets, a police convoy and a gaggle of workers in Shiite Muslim neighborhoods Monday, killing 32 people and wounding more than 120 in one of the most violent days in the capital in months.”

Last week Alissa Rubin reported that “Iraqi and American security officials say that jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight in areas that are largely quiet now, regrouping as a smaller but still lethal insurgency.”

A non-comprehensive list of other attacks in Iraq since January 2009:

- 23 killed by a suicide bomber in Youssifiyah on January 2.
- 38 killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad on January 4.
- 16 killed by two car bombs at a bus terminal in Baghdad on February 11.
- 8 killed by a suicide bomber in Karbala on February 12.
- 40 killed by a suicide bomber in Musayyib on February 13.
- 13 killed by a car bomb in Hillah on March 5.
- 30 killed by a suicide bomber at a Baghdad police academy on March 8.
- 38 killed by a suicide bomber in an Abu Ghraib market on March 10.
- 32 killed in a series of attacks on March 23.
- 16 killed by a car bomb in Baghdad’s Shaab neighborhood on March 26.

As Eric Martin writes, “412 Iraqi civilians were killed in March, up from 346 in February which was itself up from 296 in January” according to Iraq Body Count. By any definition, Iraq remains in crisis.

Looking at last week’s battles between Sunni Awakenings forces and Iraqi government troops, CAP’s Brian Katulis noted the “shaky foundation constructed by the 2007 surge of U.S. troops — a foundation that largely glossed over long-standing political rivalries.” Katulis also stressed that the “tension between the central government and these independent militia groups is less dangerous than the growing tensions between Arab and Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.”

This is the Iraq in which Dick Cheney claims “we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do,” and Bill Kristol insists “we have succeeded.” Leaving aside the myriad ways in which such claims are preposterous, given Kristol’s new effort to present himself as a bipartisan supporter of President Obama’s Afghanistan effort, I’ll be interested to see whether he interprets similar levels of violence in Afghanistan as an Obama “success” four years from now.

Brose: Neocons Are Just Alright »

Writing at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government, former Bush administration speechwriter Christian Brose has some fun with yesterday’s Foreign Policy Initiative inaugural event on Afghanistan:

All that you suspect is true. Bill Kristol, wearing a Viking helmet and a bone through his nose, exhorted the participants to invade Chad, just because. He may have listed other countries, but he was speaking in tongues and war whoops half the time, and my Neo-con-to-English translation kept dropping out. Bob Kagan followed, bare-chested (as usual), in full war paint, banging the Mayflower china with a combat boot, shouting that America needed to put 10 million men under arms to extend its hegemony (benevolent, of course) into the Arctic, shouting something about the road to Moscow leading through the North Pole.

I saw this with my own eyes, people.

If only. It would have been a lot more exciting, that’s for sure. As it was, the conference was a pretty staid affair. Some might even call it a love-fest.

Actually, according to my notes, Bob Kagan did, in fact, call the event “a bipartisan love-fest.” As I wrote yesterday, that was really the point of the whole exercise — to re-introduce neoconservative ideas into the foreign policy conversation by filing off all of its rough edges and revolutionary claims in a slick bipartisan package.

Brose takes the familiar tack of broadly accusing the neocons’ critics of conspiracy-mongering. I don’t think I’ve ever promulgated a conspiracy theory of neoconservatism — I recognize that their faction, like most political factions, has both a private and a public aspect. (In specific reference, though, to the little sub-group of neocons that gathered around Ahmad Chalabi in the 1990’s and conspired — or, if you prefer, “strategized in private” — to install him as the new U.S.-and-Israel-friendly leader of Iraq, I think the term “cabal” is clearly appropriate.)

Brose claims that “the neo-cons are really championing tendencies in U.S. foreign policy that run much deeper in American life than the pockets of their advocacy shops.” I don’t completely disagree with this. I think there has historically been a military interventionist streak in U.S. foreign policy, though neoconservatism clearly represents an amped-up, stereoidal version of this. Where I would break with Brose is that I think this is something we need to more carefully guard against, rather than more vigorously indulge. More »« Less

Foreign Policy Initiative: Housebroken Neocons? »

Attending the Foreign Policy Initiative’s inaugural conference on Afghanistan today at the Mayflower Hotel, I was struck by how very little that was said was controversial. And that’s really the point — in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won’t do to bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if not slick.

As their website makes clear, FPI intends to re-brand and mainstream-ize neoconservatism as a “reasonable” and “moderate” — and of course “serious” — alternative to the rising tide of isolationist sentiment in American politics (the fact that no such tide of isolationist sentiment is rising in American politics is entirely beside the point.) This strategy was evidenced in the morning’s first panel, as Robert Kagan praised President Obama’s “gutsy and correct decision” on Afghanistan, but warned that “the United States is at a tipping point between desire to maintain extensive engagement in the world, as it has done since World War II, and the temptation to pull back…[Obama] has decided to maintain the commitment.”

This is a pretty obvious strawman (one that Kagan built more fully in this article last spring, arguing that American foreign policy has essentially always been neoconservative.) There is no real substantive argument for America “disengaging” from the world. There is, on the other hand, a real debate over the nature of that engagement, a debate that the neoconservatives have largely lost. No longer do we insist “with us or with the terrorists.” We now understand that international partnerships and multilateral institutions are key elements of America’s national security architecture. No longer do we insist that we are in a “global war on terror.” We now accept that we face a number of challenges from discrete groups and organizations, some of which work together, some of which compete with each other. No longer do we insist that “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” It is now broadly understood that we do negotiate with our enemies in order to gain strategic advantage over other enemies. Ten years ago, the sponsors of today’s event would have condemned all of this as “weakness.” Today it was simply accepted as wisdom.

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PNAC Activist Downplays PNAC Role In Iraq War

George Packer has a couple of posts on Kristol and Kagan’s neo-neocon Foreign Policy Initiative. Packer’s comments on the outsize role that the neoconservative Project for the New American Century played in getting up the Iraq war drew a protest from PNAC’s Gary Schmitt, who writes that “no one who ever worked for PNAC or was on its board worked in the Bush administration. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, not PNAC.”

That is true. Similarly, George W. Bush invaded Iraq, not PNAC. But it’s pretty safe to say that neither the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act nor the 2003 Iraq invasion would have happened without PNAC’s activism. For a sense of how this worked in regard to the former, read former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s account of how PNAC board member Randy Scheunemann — who was then national security adviser to Trent Lott, and later John McCain’s foreign policy adviser, and then a lobbyist for Georgia, and then John McCain’s foreign policy adviser again — leaked a UN weapons report on Iraqi WMD (which turned out to be false) to con artist Ahmad Chalabi, who then provided it to the Washington Post.

The resulting story provided the major impetus for the passing of the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, which made regime change in Iraq the policy of the United States. The piece is fascinating on a number of levels, notably for how pleased with themselves Chalabi’s little cabal of neocon supporters were with their plan to install him as the new post-invasion Iraqi leader, how up front they all were about their scheme to get America into a war, and how completely wrong they all turned out to be about what would happen afterward.

As for Gary Schmitt, he himself served with Scheunemann as an officer on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a front organization founded in 2002 in collaboration with members of the Bush administration to publicly lobby for the Iraq invasion. So while it may be true that “no one who ever worked for PNAC or was on its board worked in the Bush administration” (though both Schmitt and Scheunemann worked as Pentagon consultants) the clear fact is that PNAC and those closely associated with it played a key roles both in laying the early legislative groundwork for the Iraq war, and then later in developing and disseminating Bush administration propaganda leading to the invasion.

Kristol: Accountability Is For Suckers

Appearing on CSPAN’s Washington Journal last Friday, Bill Kristol was confronted by a caller on his role and that of his magazine, The Weekly Standard, as the main ideological drivers behind the Iraq war. As Think Progress noted, Kristol showed absolutely no remorse for having been completely wrong in almost every particular about the war’s consequences for the United States, blithely asserting that “I think the war was right, and I think we’ve succeeded in the war.”

Watch it:

As I’ve written before, the Iraq war has “succeeded” only in the sense that we seem for now to have avoided the very worst imaginable outcome there. Though violence has declined from the catastrophic levels seen in 2006-7, Iraqi factions remain at odds over key political issues of the new Iraqi state, and as shown by the upsurge in violence between the Iraqi government and Sunni militias this weekend, remain prepared to resort to violence to press their claims.

Watching the video, I did get the distinct sense that, at some level, Kristol knows that he’s peddling snake oil, given the way that he quickly pivoted away from Iraq to argue that “in Afghanistan, incidentally, it’s President Obama who’s announcing the increase in troops today” — as if the further deployment of U.S. troops to that country was an affirmation of his ideas, rather than proof of their failure.

Kristol also protested that Obama’s plan “is not something he was forced into by the Weekly Standard or anyone else.” As with most of what comes out of Bill Kristol’s mouth, though, this is not entirely true. The main reason that President Obama has had to commit further troops and resources to Afghanistan is that President Bush failed to finish the job there. The reason he failed to finish the job is that he went and started a war in Iraq, aided and abetted by the trash journalism and shameless jingoism of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard. While The Weekly Standard didn’t “force” Obama to escalate in Afghanistan, they did play a central role in creating a situation wherein escalation is the least worst option. But Kristol is far less interested in honestly considering the costs of the Iraq debacle to American national security than he is in mitigating the costs to his own reputation, as he attempts to re-introduce his discredited ideology into the American political discourse.

Negotiating With Enemies: Now The CW

This part of President Obama’s Afghanistan speech deserves attention, if only because it’s one of so many things that conservatives used to condemn but now have become part of the conventional wisdom:

In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies. I have no illusions that this will be easy. In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al Qaeda. We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan, while understanding that it is a very different country.

There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. That is why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province. As their ranks dwindle, an enemy that has nothing to offer the Afghan people but terror and repression must be further isolated.

Compare this to Dick Cheney’s assertion (on behalf of President Bush) that “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it,” in reference to North Korea — which, if you haven’t heard, is now threatening to test a new ballistic missile. In Iraq, not only did we negotiate with evil, we paid evil vast sums of money to change sides. And now we’re going to attempt something similar with Taliban elements in Afghanistan, as well as with Iran: Try various methods and inducements — some of which have been/will be derided by many conservatives as “appeasement” — to change the strategic calculations of some of our enemies in order to gain advantage against other, worse enemies.

As we continue to discuss and debate the way forward, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, it’s hugely important to remind people that this central insight — our enemies are not monolithic, they can be disaggregated — represents a resounding refutation of the neoconservative “war on terror” approach that characterized the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the years after 9/11. Clearly, there are terrorist networks that seek to do Americans harm, but they do not represent anything like a united “Islamofascist” front against the West, no “axis of evil” necessitating “with us or against us” ultimata. The fact that progressives have won this argument is, of course, small comfort when one considers the enormous costs incurred by the Bush administration in making our case.

Project For The Rehabilitation Of Neoconservatism

What do you do if your previous organization — and the ideology behind it — has become inextricably bound in the public’s imagination to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history? Obviously, shut it down, and start a new organization with a new name.

The Foreign Policy Initiative lists Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor on its board of directors, so no prizes for guessing what they’re about (more power, less appeasement, stronger wills.) Kagan and Kristol need no introduction, they’re the Tick and Arthur of disastrously counterproductive military adventurism. Given the staggering costs in American blood, treasure, security, and reputation incurred by their boundless enthusiasm for blowing stuff up, you might think they’d have had the decency to retreat to a Tibetan monastery by now, but sadly no. The way it works in Washington is, if you’re willing to argue for more defense spending, you’ll always find someone willing to fund your think tank.

Dan Senor is less known to the general public, but familiar to those who’ve followed the Iraq debacle closely. From 2003 to 2004, Senor served as a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman under Paul Bremer. After that smashing success, Senor returned to Washington, where, among other things, in September 2004 he helped write speeches for Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s U.S. visit, and then apparently went on television to praise those speeches as evidence of Bush’s accomplishments in Iraq.

On March 31, FPI holds its first public event, Afghanistan: Planning For Success, though, given the heavy representation of Iraq war advocates, I think a far better title would be Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage. The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare. Having failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, Bush and the Iraq hawks handed the Obama administration a war that promises to be as difficult and costly as Iraq has been -– if not more. It’s deeply absurd that some of the people most responsible for the crisis in Afghanistan would now presume to tell us how to deal with it.

Cheney’s Iraq Fairy Tale Ignores Afghanistan

I think Ali and Yglesias say most of what needs to be said about Hague-bait Dick Cheney going on TV to engage in the same sort of fear-mongering that characterized his vice-presidency, but Cheney’s assertion that “we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do” in Iraq deserves some attention.

Cheney told CNN’s John King said that “if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorist-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction — say, nukes, for example — and providing those to terrorist organizations.”

What happened in Iraq is we’ve eliminated that possibility. We got rid of one of the worst dictators in the 20th century. We got rid of his government. There is no prospect that Iraq is going to become a place where once again they produce weapons of mass destruction or support terrorists.

I think this argument — thanks to the invasion of Iraq there is no prospect that Saddam will provide WMD he didn’t have to terrorists with whom he had no substantial relationship — is ridiculous enough even without even considering all of the other costs of the war, both in lives, dollars, as well as American security more broadly. Specifically, though, it seems like King missed a real opportunity here to ask about Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are casualties of the Iraq war. Unlike (pre-invasion) Iraq, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 did and do operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unlike Iraq, Pakistan — which is increasingly threatened by an Islamic extremist insurgency — does possess nuclear weapons. There’s no question that, even in 2003, the situation in these two countries represented a far greater threat to the United States than did Iraq. And yet Bush and Cheney chose to invade Iraq, based upon the determination that, in Cheney’s words, “this is a war..”

Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.

Once you go into a wartime situation and it’s a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they’ve got sanctuary.

We can see disastrous consequences of the conception of anti-terrorism that gave primacy to state sponsors over non-state actors: The Bush administration destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and considered the job essentially finished, even though Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape. They secured the commitment of the unpopular Musharraf regime to fight terrorism, and checked that box. Then they turned to Iraq, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan to fester. These costs are not theoretical.

The determination that we were in a war — while domestically politically advantageous — led to the Bush administration emphasizing military solutions to what is a primarily an intelligence and yes, law enforcement issue, at the expense of other tools of U.S. power. Moeover, by casting US anti-terrorism efforts as a “war,” Bush and Cheney helped affirm Al Qaeda’s status as the vanguard of the global Islamic resistance, needlessly forcing governments throughout the Islamic world into the politically difficult position of either supporting or rejecting that resistance.

As Congressman — and former Admiral — Joe Sestak told King later in the program, “The Bush administration may have created, after six, seven long years, some stability with Iraq, but they have not kept the most precious constitutional duty of the presidency in highest regard, which is to enhance the security of America.” To use one of Cheney’s favorite phrases, the fact is that when you strip away the tough talk and the ersatz gravitas, Bush and Cheney just weren’t up to the challenge of national security in the 21st century, which is why he now has to rely on a combination of unfalsifiable assertions and counterfactuals to argue for his administration’s success.

Fleischer: Saddam Might Have Struck Again After 9/11

Fresh from the stunning success of Freedom’s Watch, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer appeared on Hardball last night to promote the achievements of George W. Bush. It was almost like having Ari back in the press room when he floated this whopper in defending the Iraq war:

After September 11th having been hit once how could we take a chance that Saddam might strike again?

Old habits are hard to break, I guess. According to Fleischer, the massive success of George W. Bush’s presidency is really the story of three successes:

1. Fifty-five months of continuous job growth (before the economy tanked in the worst crisis since the Great Depression.)

2. He bequeathed to President Obama a Middle East without Saddam Hussein (but with an Iraq held together by the presence of American troops, with an empowered and unchecked Iran and full of newly radicalized, trained, and networked terrorists.)

3. George Bush kept America safe (after the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history.)

As to the first point, you should be reading my colleague Pat Garofalo. As to the second, this is like arguing that, even though I accidentally burned your house down, you should thank me because I’ve solved your termite problem for you. As to the third, watch Fleischer’s ridiculous indignation when Chris Matthews points out the obvious:

MATTHEWS: We were attacked on your watch. If you start getting into who was attacked when, we suffered the worst domestic calamity in history on your watch. If you guys start getting into ‘whose watch was good,’ you guys blew it. I don’t know if you can do it that way.

FLEISCHER: Chris, how dare you.

MATTHEWS: That’s like saying –

FLEISCHER: Chris, if we get attacked again, are you going to say that we got attacked on Barack Obama’s watch? We got attacked by terrorists! That’s who’s to blame for it, Chris. I think what you just did is shameful.

So Bush deserves no blame for the attack that occurred in the first year of his presidency, but he deserves full credit for the fact that no more attacks occurred for the rest of his presidency. I find this argument to be an insult to snake oil. And does anybody doubt that, whether or not Matthews would blame Obama for another terrorist attack, Fleischer, along with an entire Volkswagen full of conservative clowns, would? Is that even a serious question?

Rikabi: SOFA Referendum Not Necessary

In a just-published interview with Middle East Progress, Sadiq al-Rikabi, one of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s senior advisers, says that “considering the American president’s speech about the U.S. commitment for responsible withdrawal, we do not feel a referendum is necessary.”

The decision will need to be taken in parliament, as the referendum is currently enshrined in law, and so if it is to be cancelled, we need a new law to say so. But even if the referendum is held on its assigned date, I’m not worried at all about the approval of the SOFA.

Marc Lynch comments: “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the U.S. and Maliki would both like to see the referendum quietly dropped.Neither really wanted it to begin with. For the U.S., it complicates strategic planning, while it was forced on Maliki by the Iraqi Parliament as the price of ratification.”

Just because the Prime Minister’s Office or the U.S. would like to avoid the referendum doesn’t mean that it won’t happen, though. It is currently a legal requirement, and canceling it would require new legislation — which would offer an opportunity for ambitious Iraqi politicians to mobilize public support against Maliki and against the United States ahead of the scheduled national Parliamentary elections.

Maliki clearly believes — with more than a little justification — that his victory in the provincial elections has substantially boosted his political power. A walk-back from his commitment to a SOFA referendum could put that belief to the test.