I was traveling yesterday during the big news: With the aid of cellphone surveillance and an Al Qaeda informer who suggested tracking “spiritual adviser” Sheikh Abd al-Rahman, the US military dropped two 500-lb bombs on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leading Iraq insurgent (and Al Qaeda poster boy for the administration.) Undoubtedly good news for our efforts in Iraq (and, lord knows, Dubya needed some good news in the worst way, particularly in the wake of Haditha.) Still, this big kill obviously doesn’t answer the big questions about Iraq’s stability, or our continued involvement in the region: “‘The immediate aftermath of this will probably be an upsurge of violence’ as Sunni insurgents hurry to show that Zarqawi’s killing has not broken the resistance, said Michael Clarke, an expert on terrorism at the International Policy Institute of King’s College London. ‘In the medium term, in the next month or two, it will probably help to downgrade sectarianism,’ Clarke said by telephone. ‘But the dynamic of sectarian violence is probably past the point of no return.’” And, of course, while this strike will hopefully be a stunning blow to Al Qaeda in Iraq, what of the original Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and around the world? We’re nearing five years since 9/11, and Osama’s still out there…
Tag: War in Iraq
Horrors of Haditha.
“‘I was sorry for staying in the bathroom. I should have died like them,’ recalls Safa, who now lives with a cousin. ‘The Americans are murderers, criminals. They have no mercy.'” So much for hearts and minds. Obviously, the big news over the past week has been the nightmarish revelations of the atrocities at Haditha, which have moved the Senate to hearings (and some moderate Senators to consternation with Rumsfeld), re-fueled anti-American sentiment around the world, demonstrated once again the corrosive consequences of this administration’s pathetic lack of planning and leadership in Iraq, and forced us all to wonder anew exactly what the hell is going on over there that’s led to the deaths of approximately 40,000 Iraqi civilians. “‘People were taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking. They’d go on raids and patrols totally stoned.’ Hicks, who volunteered at the age of 17, said, ‘We’re killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by accident. One guy in my squadron ran over a family with his tank.‘”
Regrets, We’ve Had a Few.
“Saying, ‘Bring it on’; kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. ‘Wanted, dead or alive’; that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted. And so I learned from that.” In a joint press conference, Dubya and Tony Blair own up to some mistakes in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib — “the biggest mistake“, according to Dubya — and de-Baathification, according to Blair. “The prime minister’s examples appeared to be a direct rebuke of both the Pentagon’s insistence that a detailed “nation-building” plan was unnecessary before the invasion and the push by key members of Bush’s administration for broad de-Baathification.“
The Dems Ascendant?
“‘This administration may be over,’ Lance Tarrance, a chief architect of the Republicans’ 1960s and ’70s Southern strategy, told a gathering of journalists and political wonks last week. ‘By and large, if you want to be tough about it, the relevancy of this administration on policy may be over.‘” Are we at the turn of the tide? As even committed conservatives and right-leaning observers start sticking a fork in the Dubya administration, newly confident Dems begin to prepare for a return of the House. Foremost in their plans is “a legislative blitz during their first week in power that would raise the minimum wage, roll back parts of the Republican prescription drug law, implement homeland security measures and reinstate lapsed budget deficit controls…a Democratic House would [also] launch a series of investigations of the Bush administration, beginning with the White House’s first-term energy task force and probably including the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.”
Powell: Told You So.
“‘The president’s military advisers felt that the size of the force was adequate; they may still feel that years later. Some of us don’t. I don’t,’ Powell said. ‘In my perspective, I would have preferred more troops, but you know, this conflict is not over.‘” In a slap at Rumsfeld, Cheney, and his other one-time nemeses in the Dubya White House, former Secretary of State Colin Powell airs some of his grievances with the build-up to war in Iraq. “‘At the time, the president was listening to those who were supposed to be providing him with military advice,’ Powell said. ‘They were anticipating a different kind of immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad; it turned out to be not exactly as they had anticipated.’”
Coming In from the Cold (War).
“[F]or all their practical failures, conservatives have at least told a coherent political story, with deep historical roots, about what keeps America safe and what makes it great. Liberals, by contrast, have offered adjectives drawn from focus groups and policy proposals linked by no larger theme.” In keeping with the intellectual territory he staked out after the 2004 election, former TNR editor Peter Beinart makes the case for a return to Cold War liberalism in a NYT excerpt of his new book, The Good Fight (also discussed in the recent Atlantic Monthly.)
I couldn’t agree more with Beinart’s paragraph above, but I don’t think the lack of a sufficiently robust national security emphasis is really the defining element missing among today’s Dems. Are there really Democrats out there who don’t agree with Beinart’s three main assessments here, that (a) America faces a real enemy in Al Qaeda and other fundamentalist terror networks, (b) our foreign policy should be less hubristic and more attuned to both local contingency and international institutions, and (c) our national sense of self should emphasize our own fallibility at times? Beinart would probably target the MoveOn crowd, but as Eric Alterman noted in the last round of this back-and-forth, that’s just a DLC straw man, roughly akin to Joe Klein’s cadre of phantom lefty consultants in the last update.
Plus, I think there are two significant historical problems with the Cold War liberalism Beinart unreservedly espouses, which he fails to discuss here. For one, Cold War liberals could very easily be seen as best inattentive to and — at worst complicit in — the excesses of McCarthyism. If the enemy abroad becomes the central defining focus of your national narrative, then the enemy within is undoubtedly going to start eating at you as well. For another, (and as John Gaddis, among others, has pointed out) — for all its early sense of diplomatic complexity and limited, realistic goals — the Cold War liberalism Beinart promotes all too readily (d)evolved into the guiding rationale for wildly wrongheaded foreign policy interventions, most notably in Vietnam. (You’d think Beinart would pay more lip service to this issue, particularly as he himself made much the same mistake in shilling for the Iraq war in The New Republic.)
In short, I agree with Beinart’s assessment that the Dems lack a sense of usable past, but the problems with his argument can be encapsulated by his ideal of a what a good, hawkish, Cold War liberal Democrat should look like these days: That, if Beinart’s tenure at TNR is any indication, would be Joe Lieberman, a politician who’s not only been flagrantly cheerleading for the administration during the current war, but has exhibited little interest in today’s wartime civil liberties issues. Simply put, Joe Lieberman would hardly be my choice of template for the Democratic party. (Who would? That’s easy: Russ Feingold, who’s displayed a strong commitment to preserving both national security and civil liberties at home, while arguing for a more level-headed, less-in-your-face American foreign policy.)
Paging William Fulbright.
“‘The current debate over our national security by a series of retired generals — some critical, some supportive of the present leadership in the Department of Defense — is an important exercise of the right to freedom of speech,’ he said. ‘Another valued tenet is the right of the president to select the members of his own Cabinet.'” Senate Armed Service Committee chairman John Warner (R-VA) makes noise about holding Senate hearings on Rumsfeld. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The KBR Relocation Authority.
I’m a bit late on this one: In an ugly confluence of several of this administration’s shady dealings, CheneyCo.’s KBR/Halliburton — its attempts at continued war profiteering faltering — recently won a $385 million contract to build immigrant detention centers for the Dept. of Homeland Security. “The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs.” Um, new programs? (By way of Supercres.)
Torture…again.
US officials find repeated instances of detainee abuse at six more Iraqi prisons, and — unlike last time — are not removing all the tortured prisoners from their place of custody, thus violating a promise made by Joint Chiefs chairman Peter Pace last November. “Pace said at a news conference Nov. 29 with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, ‘It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it.’ Turning to Pace, Rumsfeld responded: ‘I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.‘” Now, why make that distinction, Rummy?
Crisis of the New Order.
“Observers describe Bush as ‘messianic’ in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, ‘The Almighty has His own purposes.’ Invoking also Lincoln’s remarks on the Mexican War, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. laments the rise of preemption, senses dark forebodings in Dubya’s saber-rattling with Iran, and concludes that “there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.”