By Keith Epstein
Tampa Tribune, 24 March 2003
WASHINGTON - When President Bush ordered Iraq's invasion because its leaders might someday imperil U.S. interests, he did more than defy world opinion and unravel 50 years of national security strategy.
The blistering bombardment of Baghdad broke with decades of American cultural and moral tradition. The new policy of pre-emption also departed from fundamental beliefs shaping society's attitudes on justified self-defense and violence.
In movies and folk legends, good guys don't draw first. In court, lawyers often argue self-defense, but usually only if their clients were attacked. At home, children are discouraged from hitting unless someone else strikes first, and then only after all else fails.
In baseball, batters can be forgiven for charging the mound, but only if - as in Mets catcher Mike Piazza's recent rage against Dodgers pitcher Guillermo Mota - they are beaned first.
In one campaign against schoolyard bullies, the National Education Association sadly noted boys and girls lack Harry Potter's magic powers. The famed wizard of children's fiction never would wave his wand without provocation.
Through most of U.S. history, the same held true.
"We've never thought of ourselves as a first-strike nation," said University of South Florida history Professor Raymond Arsenault.
"It's one thing to be the world's policeman, but this doctrine has never been in play before. There's a danger when you become so certain you can prevent a crime or an attack before it occurs."
In "Minority Report," a recent futuristic movie about an ultimate solution to crime, actor Tom Cruise plays a police officer who, with the aid of psychics, arrests murderers before they kill, pre-empting violence and sparing victims.
"We seem," Arsenault said, "to be edging towards that surreal world."
Firing The First Shot
"We've made it a point through most of American history not to fire the first shot," said Brandeis University history professor David Hackett Fischer, a specialist in first shots, especially the symbolic one on Lexington Green in April 1775.
Who fired the first shot? The British, Fischer said.
"Don't fire unless you're fired on," cautioned Minuteman John Parker, leader of 70 volunteers who stood up to King George's soldiers in the British Colonies' first battle for independence.
But it was the Americans who fired the "shot heard round the world" in response, noted Fischer, author of "Paul Revere's Ride," "but only after John Adams made sure the cause was just and we hadn't been the aggressors."
"From the beginning, American leaders have been very concerned they shouldn't fire the first shot," Fischer said.
Other early American agitators held similar views. Samuel Adams' maxim was: "Put your enemy in the wrong - and keep him there."
The Declaration of Independence lists more than two dozen offenses committed by Great Britain's King George III - to prove the British started the Revolution, not the Colonists.
"He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people," states the Declaration, using actual acts of aggression to justify the coming violence and unrest of the Revolutionary War.
Why Bush Broke With Doctrine
Today, of course, a distant and aggressive leader can threaten U.S. interests almost immediately. Worse, he could leave destruction to someone else. He could provide shelter or assistance to a pack of terrorists who might do the deed.
Bush and his advisers say that is why, as the bombardment and takeover of Iraq began last week, they broke with years of national security doctrine.
Even a handful of unseen enemies or a small, impoverished nation now can wield powers previously reserved for organized armies of superpowers. They have the capability, for example, to snuff out thousands of lives by crashing hijacked airliners into two of the world's tallest office towers.
Waiting for another such attack, the president said, is "not self-defense; it is suicide."
Any link between Iraq and the attack on the World Trade Center in New York may be murkier than many Americans realize, but the nation's new sense of vulnerability since Sept. 11 has resulted in a new posture of "anticipatory self- defense."
In essence, it is the same reason authorities allow torture of suspects abroad, confinement of people accused of no crime and the rounding up hundreds of Iraqi-Americans for questioning.
"If we wait for threats to fully materialize," Bush said, "we will have waited too long. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge."
U.S. targets may be tyrants such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein or terrorists such as al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden. They may also be suspects, or regimes whose threats are "emerging," not necessarily "imminent."
For the first time, a U.S. president is stating a preventive war is justified, even when the U.S. is not directly challenged and threats are not immediately obvious.
This could be "the most important reformulation of U.S. grand strategy in over half a century," writes John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale University professor of military and naval history, in the March/April issue of "Foreign Policy" magazine.
Other presidents usually felt otherwise, even when staring down the prospect of nuclear attack.
Neither President Harry S. Truman, who authorized dropping the first atomic bomb, nor President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who masterminded the liberation of Europe from the Nazis, favored preventive war. Not even when advisers urged first strikes against a new member of the nuclear club: the Soviet Union.
"You don't 'prevent' anything by war - except peace," Truman said.
Mused Eisenhower: "I don't believe there is such a thing. I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing."
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy, despite his tough stance during the Cuban missile standoff, refused to launch a preventive attack.
"Pearl Harbor in reverse," his brother, Robert, responded. "For 175 years, we have not been that kind of country."
As with Bush, Kennedy's strategy, a blockade of Cuba, raised eyebrows and questions of international law. But unlike Bush, Kennedy managed to avoid armed conflict with the Soviets, who had put the missiles in Cuba.
"Our arms will never be used to strike the first blow in any attack," Kennedy said earlier in his presidency. "It is our national tradition."
In the earliest days of U.S. history, England had a habit of opening fire - especially when an enemy vessel attempted to catch an upwind advantage.
Most U.S. wars began with provocations, even when circumstances seemed murky, such as in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when American ships fired during a supposed encounter with the North Vietnamese. President Lyndon B. Johnson used the incident to justify escalating the war in Vietnam.
The Spanish-American War began when Spain was accused of blowing up a U.S. ship. The United States stayed out of World War I until Germany sank American vessels in the North Atlantic Ocean. The attack on Pearl Harbor, regarded by the Japanese as preventive, triggered U.S. entry into World War II, ending a long period in which many Americans regarded the German Nazis as Europe's problem.
President Abraham Lincoln went out of his way to make sure the Confederacy fired the first shot in 1861. Confederate President Jefferson Davis obliged with a pre-emptive strike on Fort Sumter, thinking it would unite the South in the Civil War. It gave Lincoln the trigger he needed.
Though rare, there were occasions when the United States struck first.
Native Americans were attacked many times without provocation, as were Mexicans in Texas during the Mexican War.
But mostly, said historian Fischer, "American leaders have usually felt that a provocation was necessary, and that relates to the American way of always wanting to do the right thing in the right way."
Cultural Images Matter
Stories we read and movies we watch reinforce the idea that good guys never start a fight.
Hamlet avenged the murder of his father. The evil ways of the Clantons in Tombstone justified their slayings by Wyatt Earp and the boys in "Gunfight at the OK Corral." And John Rambo's false arrest and roughing-up led to his rampage in "First Blood."
If someone messes with you, you have the moral authority to whack 'em.
"It's a theme that runs through American films, which are really about good and bad and how, for the good guy, there must always be an ethical consideration before pulling the trigger," said USF Professor Bryan Shuler, who teaches movies and American culture.
The rules are simple, he said: "It is good to defend oneself, bad to attack."
Abroad, some caricatures of Bush as a "cowboy" with a twitchy finger may stem from foreigners' love of American westerns.
In "Shane" or "High Noon," the character viewers care about - the gunfighter or sheriff - never starts something. The main character in "Shane," played by Alan Ladd, wants to put violence behind him.
In more recent movies, the good guys aren't entirely good, and the world is a more threatening place. But protagonists still don't act without having to.
"We show the hero as one who's been attacked, not as the aggressor," Shuler said. "This is the way we look at ourselves and the world. Movies are about how we see ourselves, and how we want to be. They are how we create our mythology."
As for the movie version of Operation Iraqi Freedom?
"Maybe it will take the Hollywood version of [Attorney General John] Ashcroft and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell for us to fully understand this war. Who knows?" Shuler said.
"Maybe there's something more to the plot that we don't know yet. Maybe they'll add something. ... Maybe the movie will show it's OK to strike first."
Researchers Buddy Jaudon and Marianne Hoeppner contributed to this story. Reporter Keith Epstein can be reached at (202) 662-7673.
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Citation: Keith Epstein. "Bush's Strategy Abandons U.S. Tradition," Tampa Tribune, 24 March 2003.
Original URL: http://www.tampatrib.com/MGA0SJKLMDD.html
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31 October 2006
Civilian deaths turn Afghans against NATO: report
Reuters, 30 October 2006
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading human rights group on Monday urged NATO to do more to avoid civilian casualties in Afghanistan, saying reports of increasing civilian deaths were "turning the local population against" the Western alliance.
Fighting between NATO forces and a resurgent Taliban this year has been the bloodiest since U.S.-led forces removed the strict Islamist movement from power after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Afghan authorities are investigating allegations that about 60 civilians were killed last week as a result of NATO operations in Kandahar province, where the Taliban was born. Local leaders and villagers said dozens more were wounded and 25 houses were razed during several hours of NATO bombing.
"NATO's tactics are increasingly endangering the civilians that they are supposed to be protecting, and turning the local population against them," said Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
"While NATO forces try to minimize harm to civilians, they obviously are not doing enough," he added in the statement, which also called on NATO forces to compensate Afghans who have lost family members, been injured or suffered property damage because of their actions.
NATO supreme military commander for Europe, U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, last week apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the incident, saying the bombing took place in "the fog and heat of war" and blaming the Taliban for using villagers as human shields.
Suicide attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups have jumped this year, killing more than 200 people compared with 50 to 60 in all of 2005.
A NATO official said the alliance was working closely with the Afghan government in its investigation of last week's incident but was not carrying out its own independent probe.
Human Rights Watch said it supported the Afghan effort but called on NATO to either conduct its own probe or to allow independent, international experts to investigate and make their findings public.
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Citation: "Civilian deaths turn Afghans against NATO: report," Reuters, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061030/wl_nm/afghanistan_casualties_dc
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading human rights group on Monday urged NATO to do more to avoid civilian casualties in Afghanistan, saying reports of increasing civilian deaths were "turning the local population against" the Western alliance.
Fighting between NATO forces and a resurgent Taliban this year has been the bloodiest since U.S.-led forces removed the strict Islamist movement from power after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Afghan authorities are investigating allegations that about 60 civilians were killed last week as a result of NATO operations in Kandahar province, where the Taliban was born. Local leaders and villagers said dozens more were wounded and 25 houses were razed during several hours of NATO bombing.
"NATO's tactics are increasingly endangering the civilians that they are supposed to be protecting, and turning the local population against them," said Sam Zarifi, Asia research director for New York-based Human Rights Watch.
"While NATO forces try to minimize harm to civilians, they obviously are not doing enough," he added in the statement, which also called on NATO forces to compensate Afghans who have lost family members, been injured or suffered property damage because of their actions.
NATO supreme military commander for Europe, U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, last week apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karzai for the incident, saying the bombing took place in "the fog and heat of war" and blaming the Taliban for using villagers as human shields.
Suicide attacks by the Taliban and other militant groups have jumped this year, killing more than 200 people compared with 50 to 60 in all of 2005.
A NATO official said the alliance was working closely with the Afghan government in its investigation of last week's incident but was not carrying out its own independent probe.
Human Rights Watch said it supported the Afghan effort but called on NATO to either conduct its own probe or to allow independent, international experts to investigate and make their findings public.
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Citation: "Civilian deaths turn Afghans against NATO: report," Reuters, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061030/wl_nm/afghanistan_casualties_dc
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A hidden enemy frustrates efforts to rebuild Afghanistan
By Raymond Whitaker
The Independent, UK, 31 October 2006
"Effing brilliant," said a Royal Marine as J Company, 42 Commando, returned to base from their heaviest clash with the Taliban since they arrived in Afghanistan a month ago. Their elation and relief was understandable, but the engagement also showed the movement remained a threat, even in the relatively secure centre of Helmand province.
Up to a dozen Taliban fighters were believed killed. No marines were hurt, but the company found an Afghan civilian with a leg wound lying in the road after the encounter. He was brought to the Gereshk base and evacuated by helicopter to the hospital at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand.
The encounter began yesterday afternoon as the company was completing a patrol on the eastern bank of the Helmand river about six miles outside Gereshk, an area known to be heavily infiltrated by the Taliban. "Just as we were returning to our vehicles, we came under mortar fire from two positions, one on each side of the river," said the company commander, Major Ewen Murchison.
"At first the fire was inaccurate, but then it started coming closer to us, and one shell fell 25 metres from some of the men. We saw a group of five to seven armed individuals down on the river bed, who were signaling with mirrors to the mortar crews, apparently to direct their fire. We neutralised them with machine-gun fire. One of the mortars was in range, and we neutralised that too." Although two RAF Harriers were scrambled from Kandahar air base, the pilots could not identify the second mortar, which was mounted on a truck. Major Murchison said he decided against a follow-up operation, which could have run into a prepared ambush, and casualties could not be verified.
"Every time we've gone out in force before, they've always moved out," said one of J Company's officers, Captain Tom Vincent. "This was the first time they've been prepared to stand up and have a go. That's why the lads are so happy." His commander added that for some of the younger men, "it was the first time they've heard the thump of a mortar and the whizz of the shell going past. It's an interesting sound if you've never heard it before."
Rarely, though, are encounters between British forces and armed Afghans so straightforward. Major Murchison described an incident earlier in the patrol, when they detained an Afghan with a shotgun who appeared to be passing on their movements by mobile phone. Although they found two AK-47 ammunition clips beneath his bed when they searched his home, they could not find any clear evidence that the man was connected to the Taliban or the opium trade, and he was released. It lent force to the major's comment that "it is difficult to distinguish between the Taliban and ordinary hoods".
Gereshk, the commercial capital of Helmand, is an important target for the Taliban, because it straddles a strategic intersection. "But they do not need to take the town," said the marines' commander. "They can sit outside and have an influence, both economically and through intimidation. It is our job to restrict their freedom of action and allow the Afghan security forces to build up competence and confidence."
The death of a marine in a suicide bombing in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, this month signalled that British forces faced a new threat, although Major Murchison said he was more concerned about roadside bombs, three of which had exploded in Gereshk in the past three weeks.
As for the main mission of British troops in Helmand, to support development, the major made it clear that only a handful of smaller projects were possible at the moment.
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Citation: Raymond Whitaker. "A hidden enemy frustrates efforts to rebuild Afghanistan," The Independent, UK, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1943287.ece
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The Independent, UK, 31 October 2006
"Effing brilliant," said a Royal Marine as J Company, 42 Commando, returned to base from their heaviest clash with the Taliban since they arrived in Afghanistan a month ago. Their elation and relief was understandable, but the engagement also showed the movement remained a threat, even in the relatively secure centre of Helmand province.
Up to a dozen Taliban fighters were believed killed. No marines were hurt, but the company found an Afghan civilian with a leg wound lying in the road after the encounter. He was brought to the Gereshk base and evacuated by helicopter to the hospital at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Helmand.
The encounter began yesterday afternoon as the company was completing a patrol on the eastern bank of the Helmand river about six miles outside Gereshk, an area known to be heavily infiltrated by the Taliban. "Just as we were returning to our vehicles, we came under mortar fire from two positions, one on each side of the river," said the company commander, Major Ewen Murchison.
"At first the fire was inaccurate, but then it started coming closer to us, and one shell fell 25 metres from some of the men. We saw a group of five to seven armed individuals down on the river bed, who were signaling with mirrors to the mortar crews, apparently to direct their fire. We neutralised them with machine-gun fire. One of the mortars was in range, and we neutralised that too." Although two RAF Harriers were scrambled from Kandahar air base, the pilots could not identify the second mortar, which was mounted on a truck. Major Murchison said he decided against a follow-up operation, which could have run into a prepared ambush, and casualties could not be verified.
"Every time we've gone out in force before, they've always moved out," said one of J Company's officers, Captain Tom Vincent. "This was the first time they've been prepared to stand up and have a go. That's why the lads are so happy." His commander added that for some of the younger men, "it was the first time they've heard the thump of a mortar and the whizz of the shell going past. It's an interesting sound if you've never heard it before."
Rarely, though, are encounters between British forces and armed Afghans so straightforward. Major Murchison described an incident earlier in the patrol, when they detained an Afghan with a shotgun who appeared to be passing on their movements by mobile phone. Although they found two AK-47 ammunition clips beneath his bed when they searched his home, they could not find any clear evidence that the man was connected to the Taliban or the opium trade, and he was released. It lent force to the major's comment that "it is difficult to distinguish between the Taliban and ordinary hoods".
Gereshk, the commercial capital of Helmand, is an important target for the Taliban, because it straddles a strategic intersection. "But they do not need to take the town," said the marines' commander. "They can sit outside and have an influence, both economically and through intimidation. It is our job to restrict their freedom of action and allow the Afghan security forces to build up competence and confidence."
The death of a marine in a suicide bombing in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, this month signalled that British forces faced a new threat, although Major Murchison said he was more concerned about roadside bombs, three of which had exploded in Gereshk in the past three weeks.
As for the main mission of British troops in Helmand, to support development, the major made it clear that only a handful of smaller projects were possible at the moment.
--------------------------
Citation: Raymond Whitaker. "A hidden enemy frustrates efforts to rebuild Afghanistan," The Independent, UK, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1943287.ece
--------------------------
Secret Cabinet memo admits Iraq is fuelling UK terror
By Patrick Hennessy and Sean Rayment
The Sunday Telegraph, UK, 30 October 2006
Tony Blair's claim that there is no link between Britain's foreign policy and terrorist attacks in this country is blown apart by a secret cabinet memo revealed today.
A classified paper written by senior Downing Street officials says that everything Britain does overseas for the next decade must have the ultimate aim of reducing "terror activity, especially that in or directed against the UK".
The memo, circulated in recent weeks to ministers and security chiefs and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, outlines an extraordinary "wish list" of how the Government would like world troublespots to look in 10 years' time. It also signals a drive to reduce Britain's military commitments around the globe.
It admits that, in an ideal world, "the Muslim would not perceive the UK and its foreign policies as hostile" – effectively accepting the argument that Britain's military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has served as a recruiting sergeant for Islamist terrorist groups. Publicly, Mr Blair has resisted this line fiercely. During his final speech as leader to Labour's annual conference last month, he described such claims as "enemy propaganda".
His cabinet allies have supported his position. Earlier this year, John Reid, the Home Secretary, said: "I think it is a dreadful misjudgment if we believe the foreign policy of this country should be shaped in part, or in whole, under the threat of terrorist activity, if we do not have a foreign policy with which the terrorists happen to agree."
But the memo leaves no doubt that all foreign policy must be driven by the goal of thwarting terrorism in Britain. It demands a "significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity".
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After a decade, Iraq must have "stable central and local government, accepted by all sectarian groups". Afghanistan must be "stable, democratic, with all territory under central government control".
Israel must have "secure borders" and live in "peaceful co-existence" with its Arab neighbours, while Iran must have a "representative, tolerant government … no nuclear weapons" and "no sponsorship of terrorism".
The document concludes: "If all or most of the above were in place, threats from other sources of Islamic terrorism (eg Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria) would be manageable or on the way to resolution. Any remaining deployments of the British armed forces should be seen as contributing to international stability and security."
A Downing Street spokesman declined to comment on the memo. However, in an interview, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, played down suggestions that large numbers of British troops may soon be coming home from Iraq. "I think you're perhaps a little impatient to see a huge change, which I don't think we are yet in," she said.
She acknowledged, how-ever, that Britain and America had failed, before going to war, to predict that "there were huge pent-up hatreds and resentments in Iraq which exploded once Saddam Hussein was deposed".
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Citation: Patrick Hennessy and Sean Rayment. "Secret Cabinet memo admits Iraq is fuelling UK terror," The Sunday Telegraph, UK, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/29/nmemo29.xml
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The Sunday Telegraph, UK, 30 October 2006
Tony Blair's claim that there is no link between Britain's foreign policy and terrorist attacks in this country is blown apart by a secret cabinet memo revealed today.
A classified paper written by senior Downing Street officials says that everything Britain does overseas for the next decade must have the ultimate aim of reducing "terror activity, especially that in or directed against the UK".
The memo, circulated in recent weeks to ministers and security chiefs and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, outlines an extraordinary "wish list" of how the Government would like world troublespots to look in 10 years' time. It also signals a drive to reduce Britain's military commitments around the globe.
It admits that, in an ideal world, "the Muslim would not perceive the UK and its foreign policies as hostile" – effectively accepting the argument that Britain's military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has served as a recruiting sergeant for Islamist terrorist groups. Publicly, Mr Blair has resisted this line fiercely. During his final speech as leader to Labour's annual conference last month, he described such claims as "enemy propaganda".
His cabinet allies have supported his position. Earlier this year, John Reid, the Home Secretary, said: "I think it is a dreadful misjudgment if we believe the foreign policy of this country should be shaped in part, or in whole, under the threat of terrorist activity, if we do not have a foreign policy with which the terrorists happen to agree."
But the memo leaves no doubt that all foreign policy must be driven by the goal of thwarting terrorism in Britain. It demands a "significant reduction in the number and intensity of the regional conflicts that fuel terror activity".
advertisement
After a decade, Iraq must have "stable central and local government, accepted by all sectarian groups". Afghanistan must be "stable, democratic, with all territory under central government control".
Israel must have "secure borders" and live in "peaceful co-existence" with its Arab neighbours, while Iran must have a "representative, tolerant government … no nuclear weapons" and "no sponsorship of terrorism".
The document concludes: "If all or most of the above were in place, threats from other sources of Islamic terrorism (eg Indonesia, Philippines, Nigeria) would be manageable or on the way to resolution. Any remaining deployments of the British armed forces should be seen as contributing to international stability and security."
A Downing Street spokesman declined to comment on the memo. However, in an interview, Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, played down suggestions that large numbers of British troops may soon be coming home from Iraq. "I think you're perhaps a little impatient to see a huge change, which I don't think we are yet in," she said.
She acknowledged, how-ever, that Britain and America had failed, before going to war, to predict that "there were huge pent-up hatreds and resentments in Iraq which exploded once Saddam Hussein was deposed".
-----------------------
Citation: Patrick Hennessy and Sean Rayment. "Secret Cabinet memo admits Iraq is fuelling UK terror," The Sunday Telegraph, UK, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/10/29/nmemo29.xml
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Iraqi opposition group joins conference
By Shafika Mattar
The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
AMMAN, Jordan - A delegation of Iraq lawmakers met with a newly formed group of Iraqi political activists in the Jordanian capital on Monday and agreed to hold a national reconciliation conference next month, a leader of the advocacy group said.
The conference will take place on Nov. 15 in Baghdad under the auspices of the Iraqi prime minister, said Hassan al-Bazzaz, the secretary general of the Patriotic and National Forces Movement opposition group.
The movement was formed by both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and includes Iraqi politicians, former military officers, former leaders of Saddam's Baath party, intellectuals and tribal chiefs representing most of Iraq's ethnic and religious factions.
Created in Amman in August, it is headed by prominent tribal leader Hamid al-Gaoud of Anbar province — where many insurgents are based — and aims at helping maintain Iraq's unity and ending the bloodshed.
Its leader has denounced the U.S.-led occupation and called for the "liberation of Iraq." However, al-Gaoud also said in August the movement was willing to establish ties with the United States, Britain, Europe and Arab countries based on "mutual understanding and peaceful means."
The group held two-day talks that ended Monday at Iraq's embassy in Jordan with a government delegation, which was headed by lawmaker Saleh al-Fayadh, said al-Bazzaz, a professor of political sciences at Baghdad's university.
The reconciliation conference was initiated by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to discuss a 24-point plan to heal the nation's severe political wounds.
Al-Bazzaz said his group, called Heqooq _or "rights"_ in Arabic, supported the prime minister's initiative and sensed that the Iraqi government had "true intentions of reconciliation."
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Citation: Shafika Mattar. "Iraqi opposition group joins conference," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_reconciliation
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The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
AMMAN, Jordan - A delegation of Iraq lawmakers met with a newly formed group of Iraqi political activists in the Jordanian capital on Monday and agreed to hold a national reconciliation conference next month, a leader of the advocacy group said.
The conference will take place on Nov. 15 in Baghdad under the auspices of the Iraqi prime minister, said Hassan al-Bazzaz, the secretary general of the Patriotic and National Forces Movement opposition group.
The movement was formed by both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and includes Iraqi politicians, former military officers, former leaders of Saddam's Baath party, intellectuals and tribal chiefs representing most of Iraq's ethnic and religious factions.
Created in Amman in August, it is headed by prominent tribal leader Hamid al-Gaoud of Anbar province — where many insurgents are based — and aims at helping maintain Iraq's unity and ending the bloodshed.
Its leader has denounced the U.S.-led occupation and called for the "liberation of Iraq." However, al-Gaoud also said in August the movement was willing to establish ties with the United States, Britain, Europe and Arab countries based on "mutual understanding and peaceful means."
The group held two-day talks that ended Monday at Iraq's embassy in Jordan with a government delegation, which was headed by lawmaker Saleh al-Fayadh, said al-Bazzaz, a professor of political sciences at Baghdad's university.
The reconciliation conference was initiated by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to discuss a 24-point plan to heal the nation's severe political wounds.
Al-Bazzaz said his group, called Heqooq _or "rights"_ in Arabic, supported the prime minister's initiative and sensed that the Iraqi government had "true intentions of reconciliation."
---------------------------
Citation: Shafika Mattar. "Iraqi opposition group joins conference," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_reconciliation
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Partitioning Iraq
Would dividing the country decrease ethnic infighting or lead to more fighting and inflame the Middle East?
By Juan Cole
Salon.com, 30 October 2006
The possibility that ethnic rivalries may break Iraq into three pieces has emerged as an election issue in U.S. politics. Last week, Bush administration spokesman Tony Snow branded any plan for partition a "nonstarter." Other politicians, however, are not so sure. Both Republicans and Democrats have endorsed a loose Iraqi federation of three equal parts, and some are even campaigning on the idea. Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee and Democratic House candidate Ted Ankrum of Texas are among those who have touted versions of partition on the stump. What are the pros and cons here, and what explains George Bush’s die-hard opposition?
The most determined opponents of the creation of regional confederacies in Iraq are Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Turks fear that if there is an independent Kurdistan in Iraq's north, it will become a magnet for Turkey's own substantial and fractious minority of Kurds. Saudi Arabia, which adheres to the ultra-strict Wahhabi Sunni school of Islam, has poor relations with Shiite Iran, and traditionally had severe tensions even with its own Shiites, who form perhaps 10 percent of the Saudi population. It objects to a Shiite super-province right next door in Iraq's south.
It is likely in order not to ruffle Turkish and Saudi feathers that the Bush administration so firmly opposes all partition plans. Turkey, a NATO ally of Washington, has been even more vocal and critical than Saudi Arabia about the Iraq imbroglio. But Bush and Cheney are especially attentive to Saudi concerns. Like Riyadh, they would view an autonomous Shiite super-province, which could easily fall under the gravitational pull of Iran, as highly undesirable.
Within Congress, however, the temptation to indulge Iraq's warring factions in their desire to divide the country has grown. The most prominent proponent of carving Iraq into three major ethnically based provinces, with regions for the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites under a weak federal umbrella, is Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. The idea has now been adopted by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. She told the Texas press last week, "Yes, it would be hard to do, but it would be worth trying ... People say, 'Well, that would balkanize the country.' Well, things are pretty stable in the Balkans right now. It's looking better than Iraq."
The senators believe that as the conflict in Iraq continues and sectarian violence mounts, trying to make Iraq’s battling ethnic groups cooperate with one another in multiethnic provinces has begun to look like a mistake. But surely it is the souring of the U.S. electorate on the war and the need of election campaigns to sketch out distinctive positions and realistic solutions to the crisis that in some part impels U.S. politicians to turn to this desperate expedient.
Within Iraq, Biden and Hutchison are echoed by the Kurds and by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In a public sermon on Tuesday, al-Hakim, the head of the largest bloc in Parliament, advocated a Shiite provincial confederacy in the south that would unite eight or nine largely Shiite provinces into a federal region. He said that such loose federalism "does not spell partition." Addressing his followers at a mosque in Baghdad on the Eid al-Fitr, the celebration of the breaking of the Ramadan fast, al-Hakim said, "everyone should be reassured that we are supporters of the unity of Iraq and will stand against any plan for partition."
Al-Hakim went on, however, to condemn a strong central government as inherently tyrannical. He also pointed to history as support for his plan. He said that under the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had consisted of three big provinces, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. What he did not say was that what is now Iraq was not a nation-state then but part of a large empire, and that even the Ottomans ruled Mosul and Basra through Baghdad. The three were not equal as provinces.
Al-Hakim’s scheme for a southern Iraqi super-province, which some have called "Sumer," after the ancient civilization of southern Iraq, is vehemently opposed by the Sunni Arab minority, the recruitment pool for the former ruling elite. Sunni Arabs lack much in the way of petroleum or gas in the areas where they predominate, and they fear that the Shiites will monopolize the vast Rumaylah oil field and other fields yet to be discovered if they have their own semiautonomous region.
The young nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also rejects this plan in favor of a relatively strong central government. The wily al-Hakim, however, outmaneuvered both al-Sadr and the Sunnis in early October and rammed through Parliament a law authorizing the formation of the southern regional government. He scraped together a coalition of members of his own party, weaker factions of other Shiite parties, independents and Kurds to gain a bare majority of 140 out of 275 votes.
The Kurds supported al-Hakim, presumably because the creation of a Shiite regional government modeled on their Kurdistan (which groups Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaymaniyah) helps legitimate the idea of regional confederacies and protects Kurdish gains in greater self-determination. The Kurds have been a prime mover in Iraq’s march toward decentralization, and they probably would not mind much if the Sunnis and the Shiites did establish their own regions.
The biggest foreign backer of al-Hakim’s scheme, meanwhile, is the Iranian regime. A southern Shiite "Sumer" region with partial or complete autonomy would inevitably, Iranian leaders believe, fall into the orbit of Shiite Iran. And that prospect is particularly alarming to the Saudis and the United States.
Last year, the New York Times quoted Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, saying that ‘"the main worry of all the neighbors" was that the potential disintegration of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states would "bring other countries in the region into the conflict." In particular, he worries about Iran. He told the Council on Foreign Relations last fall, "We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason." He was referring to the domination of Parliament and 11 of the country’s provinces by Shiite fundamentalist parties, especially the Iran-backed SCIRI.
Last week, with the possibility of partition becoming more likely, the Saudis attempted for the first time to intervene in the Iraq crisis in a major way. They hosted a conference in Mecca of Sunni and Shiite clergymen from Iraq. In a historic achievement, the Saudis persuaded their guests to issue a joint fatwa, or religious legal ruling, that it is impermissible for a Muslim to shed the blood of another Muslim. They declared that the difference between Shiites and Sunnis was merely a matter of personal opinion and did not rise to the level of a dispute about first principles.
The Saudis hoped that, through this conference, they could begin a process whereby Sunni and Shiite reprisal killings in Iraq could be halted. The tit-for-tat sectarian violence is the main reason many Iraqis have begun taking the idea of partition seriously.
But aside from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.
A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq’s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria’s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.
If Iraq does sink into long-term instability, it will not hold the world harmless. With two-thirds of the globe’s proven petroleum reserves and 45 percent of its natural gas, the Persian Gulf hinterland of Iraq is key to the well-being of an industrialized or industrializing world. Long-term political instability in this region could drive petroleum prices so high as to endanger the world economy.
Ironically, those who plotted the Iraq war as a guarantee that the new century would also be an American one may well have put U.S. energy security in such question, and so weakened the dollar, as to raise the question of whether U.S. power has been dealt a permanent setback. Americans should pray that Iraqis heed the fatwa issued in Saudi Arabia late last week, forbidding inter-Muslim bloodshed.
---------------------------
Citation: Juan Cole. "Partitioning Iraq," Salon.com, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/10/30/iraq_partition/
---------------------------
By Juan Cole
Salon.com, 30 October 2006
The possibility that ethnic rivalries may break Iraq into three pieces has emerged as an election issue in U.S. politics. Last week, Bush administration spokesman Tony Snow branded any plan for partition a "nonstarter." Other politicians, however, are not so sure. Both Republicans and Democrats have endorsed a loose Iraqi federation of three equal parts, and some are even campaigning on the idea. Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee and Democratic House candidate Ted Ankrum of Texas are among those who have touted versions of partition on the stump. What are the pros and cons here, and what explains George Bush’s die-hard opposition?
The most determined opponents of the creation of regional confederacies in Iraq are Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Turks fear that if there is an independent Kurdistan in Iraq's north, it will become a magnet for Turkey's own substantial and fractious minority of Kurds. Saudi Arabia, which adheres to the ultra-strict Wahhabi Sunni school of Islam, has poor relations with Shiite Iran, and traditionally had severe tensions even with its own Shiites, who form perhaps 10 percent of the Saudi population. It objects to a Shiite super-province right next door in Iraq's south.
It is likely in order not to ruffle Turkish and Saudi feathers that the Bush administration so firmly opposes all partition plans. Turkey, a NATO ally of Washington, has been even more vocal and critical than Saudi Arabia about the Iraq imbroglio. But Bush and Cheney are especially attentive to Saudi concerns. Like Riyadh, they would view an autonomous Shiite super-province, which could easily fall under the gravitational pull of Iran, as highly undesirable.
Within Congress, however, the temptation to indulge Iraq's warring factions in their desire to divide the country has grown. The most prominent proponent of carving Iraq into three major ethnically based provinces, with regions for the Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiites under a weak federal umbrella, is Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. The idea has now been adopted by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas. She told the Texas press last week, "Yes, it would be hard to do, but it would be worth trying ... People say, 'Well, that would balkanize the country.' Well, things are pretty stable in the Balkans right now. It's looking better than Iraq."
The senators believe that as the conflict in Iraq continues and sectarian violence mounts, trying to make Iraq’s battling ethnic groups cooperate with one another in multiethnic provinces has begun to look like a mistake. But surely it is the souring of the U.S. electorate on the war and the need of election campaigns to sketch out distinctive positions and realistic solutions to the crisis that in some part impels U.S. politicians to turn to this desperate expedient.
Within Iraq, Biden and Hutchison are echoed by the Kurds and by Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). In a public sermon on Tuesday, al-Hakim, the head of the largest bloc in Parliament, advocated a Shiite provincial confederacy in the south that would unite eight or nine largely Shiite provinces into a federal region. He said that such loose federalism "does not spell partition." Addressing his followers at a mosque in Baghdad on the Eid al-Fitr, the celebration of the breaking of the Ramadan fast, al-Hakim said, "everyone should be reassured that we are supporters of the unity of Iraq and will stand against any plan for partition."
Al-Hakim went on, however, to condemn a strong central government as inherently tyrannical. He also pointed to history as support for his plan. He said that under the Ottoman Empire, Iraq had consisted of three big provinces, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. What he did not say was that what is now Iraq was not a nation-state then but part of a large empire, and that even the Ottomans ruled Mosul and Basra through Baghdad. The three were not equal as provinces.
Al-Hakim’s scheme for a southern Iraqi super-province, which some have called "Sumer," after the ancient civilization of southern Iraq, is vehemently opposed by the Sunni Arab minority, the recruitment pool for the former ruling elite. Sunni Arabs lack much in the way of petroleum or gas in the areas where they predominate, and they fear that the Shiites will monopolize the vast Rumaylah oil field and other fields yet to be discovered if they have their own semiautonomous region.
The young nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also rejects this plan in favor of a relatively strong central government. The wily al-Hakim, however, outmaneuvered both al-Sadr and the Sunnis in early October and rammed through Parliament a law authorizing the formation of the southern regional government. He scraped together a coalition of members of his own party, weaker factions of other Shiite parties, independents and Kurds to gain a bare majority of 140 out of 275 votes.
The Kurds supported al-Hakim, presumably because the creation of a Shiite regional government modeled on their Kurdistan (which groups Irbil, Dohuk and Sulaymaniyah) helps legitimate the idea of regional confederacies and protects Kurdish gains in greater self-determination. The Kurds have been a prime mover in Iraq’s march toward decentralization, and they probably would not mind much if the Sunnis and the Shiites did establish their own regions.
The biggest foreign backer of al-Hakim’s scheme, meanwhile, is the Iranian regime. A southern Shiite "Sumer" region with partial or complete autonomy would inevitably, Iranian leaders believe, fall into the orbit of Shiite Iran. And that prospect is particularly alarming to the Saudis and the United States.
Last year, the New York Times quoted Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, saying that ‘"the main worry of all the neighbors" was that the potential disintegration of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states would "bring other countries in the region into the conflict." In particular, he worries about Iran. He told the Council on Foreign Relations last fall, "We fought a war together to keep Iran out of Iraq after Iraq was driven out of Kuwait. Now we are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason." He was referring to the domination of Parliament and 11 of the country’s provinces by Shiite fundamentalist parties, especially the Iran-backed SCIRI.
Last week, with the possibility of partition becoming more likely, the Saudis attempted for the first time to intervene in the Iraq crisis in a major way. They hosted a conference in Mecca of Sunni and Shiite clergymen from Iraq. In a historic achievement, the Saudis persuaded their guests to issue a joint fatwa, or religious legal ruling, that it is impermissible for a Muslim to shed the blood of another Muslim. They declared that the difference between Shiites and Sunnis was merely a matter of personal opinion and did not rise to the level of a dispute about first principles.
The Saudis hoped that, through this conference, they could begin a process whereby Sunni and Shiite reprisal killings in Iraq could be halted. The tit-for-tat sectarian violence is the main reason many Iraqis have begun taking the idea of partition seriously.
But aside from the selfish interests of all the political actors inside and outside Iraq, as a practical policy, partitioning Iraq is too risky. It would probably not reduce ethnic infighting. It might produce more. The mini-states that emerge from a partition will have plenty of reason to fight wars with one another, as India did with Pakistan in the 1940s and has done virtually ever since. Worse, it is likely that if the Sunni Arab mini-state commits an atrocity against the Shiites, it might well bring in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They in turn would be targeted by Saudi and Jordanian jihadi volunteers.
A break-up of Iraq might not stop at Iraq’s borders. The Sunni Arabs could be picked up by Syria, thus greatly increasing Syria’s fighting power. Or they could become a revolutionary force in Jordan. A wholesale renegotiation of national borders may ensue, according to some thinkers. Such profound changes in such a volatile part of the world cannot be depended on to occur without bloodshed. The region is already racked by the Arab-Israeli conflict and the struggle between secular and religious politics.
If Iraq does sink into long-term instability, it will not hold the world harmless. With two-thirds of the globe’s proven petroleum reserves and 45 percent of its natural gas, the Persian Gulf hinterland of Iraq is key to the well-being of an industrialized or industrializing world. Long-term political instability in this region could drive petroleum prices so high as to endanger the world economy.
Ironically, those who plotted the Iraq war as a guarantee that the new century would also be an American one may well have put U.S. energy security in such question, and so weakened the dollar, as to raise the question of whether U.S. power has been dealt a permanent setback. Americans should pray that Iraqis heed the fatwa issued in Saudi Arabia late last week, forbidding inter-Muslim bloodshed.
---------------------------
Citation: Juan Cole. "Partitioning Iraq," Salon.com, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/10/30/iraq_partition/
---------------------------
US force in Iraq swells to 150,000: Pentagon
By Jim Mannion
Agence France-Presse, 30 October 2006
WASHINGTON (AFP) - With the US death toll in Iraq passing 100 this month and mid-term elections just days away, the Pentagon said the US force in Iraq has grown to 150,000 troops, the biggest it has been since January.
A Pentagon spokesman attributed the growth to overlapping unit rotations, but it came amid surging violence that so far this month has claimed the lives of 101 US troops and many more Iraqis.
"Several units are transitioning out as several are transitioning in," said Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros, who said that as of Monday the number of US troops in Iraq was 150,000.
A Pentagon official, who asked not to be named, said the US Army's 4th Infantry Division was near the end of its year-long rotation.
US commanders in the past have timed the overlap of troop rotations to increase the US military presence during Iraqi elections and other critical milestones in the political process.
The increase this time follows the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which US military officials anticipated would bring higher levels of violence, and comes just ahead of the November 7 congressional elections in the United States.
Pentagon officials, echoing Vice President
Dick Cheney, have expressed concern in recent days that Al-Qaeda is trying to step up the violence in Iraq to influence the outcome of the US vote.
Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, said he did not know why US troops levels were climbing.
"This is news to me," Ruff told reporters. "Talk to MNF-I (Multi-National Forces-Iraq). That's General Casey's decision."
The increase is noteworthy because US troop strength in Iraq is only 10,000 under the all-time high of about 160,000 reported in January after the Iraqi elections.
It had fallen to as low as 127,000 in June when US commanders still believed they could make troop cuts this year.
In late July, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reversed directions and ordered a combat brigade to be extended beyond a year as part of buildup to quell burgeoning sectarian violence in Baghdad.
In mid-September, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, said more than 140,000 troops would be needed through the first six months of 2007 to check the violence.
Since then, US troop levels have oscillated between 142,000 to 147,000, the level it reached last week.
But the stepped-up operations have so far failed to bring the violence under control in Baghdad or stop its spread to other cities, prompting a review of military tactics.
General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, had said earlier this month that it was an "open question" whether bringing in more troops would have a lasting effect on the violence.
But he left the door open to it last week at a press conference in Baghdad.
"Now, do we need more troops to do that? Maybe," he said. "And as I've said all along, if we do, I will ask for the troops I need, both coalition and Iraqis."
Rumsfeld, however, insisted two days later that Casey's comments had been mischaracterized in press reports.
"Listen, we're in the political season," he said. "People are trying to take what he said and turn it in a way that it plays the way they'd like to see it play."
---------------------------
Citation: Jim Mannion. "US force in Iraq swells to 150,000: Pentagon," Agence France-Presse, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061031/pl_afp/usiraqmilitaryforces_061031001643
---------------------------
Agence France-Presse, 30 October 2006
WASHINGTON (AFP) - With the US death toll in Iraq passing 100 this month and mid-term elections just days away, the Pentagon said the US force in Iraq has grown to 150,000 troops, the biggest it has been since January.
A Pentagon spokesman attributed the growth to overlapping unit rotations, but it came amid surging violence that so far this month has claimed the lives of 101 US troops and many more Iraqis.
"Several units are transitioning out as several are transitioning in," said Lieutenant Colonel Mark Ballesteros, who said that as of Monday the number of US troops in Iraq was 150,000.
A Pentagon official, who asked not to be named, said the US Army's 4th Infantry Division was near the end of its year-long rotation.
US commanders in the past have timed the overlap of troop rotations to increase the US military presence during Iraqi elections and other critical milestones in the political process.
The increase this time follows the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which US military officials anticipated would bring higher levels of violence, and comes just ahead of the November 7 congressional elections in the United States.
Pentagon officials, echoing Vice President
Dick Cheney, have expressed concern in recent days that Al-Qaeda is trying to step up the violence in Iraq to influence the outcome of the US vote.
Eric Ruff, the Pentagon press secretary, said he did not know why US troops levels were climbing.
"This is news to me," Ruff told reporters. "Talk to MNF-I (Multi-National Forces-Iraq). That's General Casey's decision."
The increase is noteworthy because US troop strength in Iraq is only 10,000 under the all-time high of about 160,000 reported in January after the Iraqi elections.
It had fallen to as low as 127,000 in June when US commanders still believed they could make troop cuts this year.
In late July, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reversed directions and ordered a combat brigade to be extended beyond a year as part of buildup to quell burgeoning sectarian violence in Baghdad.
In mid-September, General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, said more than 140,000 troops would be needed through the first six months of 2007 to check the violence.
Since then, US troop levels have oscillated between 142,000 to 147,000, the level it reached last week.
But the stepped-up operations have so far failed to bring the violence under control in Baghdad or stop its spread to other cities, prompting a review of military tactics.
General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, had said earlier this month that it was an "open question" whether bringing in more troops would have a lasting effect on the violence.
But he left the door open to it last week at a press conference in Baghdad.
"Now, do we need more troops to do that? Maybe," he said. "And as I've said all along, if we do, I will ask for the troops I need, both coalition and Iraqis."
Rumsfeld, however, insisted two days later that Casey's comments had been mischaracterized in press reports.
"Listen, we're in the political season," he said. "People are trying to take what he said and turn it in a way that it plays the way they'd like to see it play."
---------------------------
Citation: Jim Mannion. "US force in Iraq swells to 150,000: Pentagon," Agence France-Presse, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061031/pl_afp/usiraqmilitaryforces_061031001643
---------------------------
Auditors want rules for Iraq aid
By Lolita C. Baldor
The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
WASHINGTON - Federal auditors are recommending that the Iraqi government meet specific milestones of progress to receive any future aid for reconstruction, according to a report released Monday that echoes a message the Bush administration has delivered to Iraqi leaders.
The study, issued by the special inspector general who audits U.S. work in
Iraq, also concluded that reconstruction is being blocked by violence, and efforts to empower Iraqis to do more are fraught with problems 3 1/2 years after the U.S. invaded the country.
The Iraqis should "meet concrete milestones and political and economic benchmarks as a condition of future aid," the report recommended. It said U.S. relief and reconstruction aid could be provided through conditional loans and be tied to specific actions by the Iraqi government.
During the past two weeks U.S. officials have pressed the Iraqis to begin to meet milestones of progress, an effort that has revealed rifts in the relationship between the two governments.
Last week Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki complained publicly after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the Iraqis had agreed to meet specified benchmarks for progress. Bush later voiced confidence in al-Maliki, but warned that the U.S. will not have "unlimited patience" with the Iraq government's failure to quell sectarian violence.
The strains have surfaced in the run-up to the Nov. 7 elections for control of Congress, a campaign in which voters' dissatisfaction with Bush administration policy in Iraq has become a significant weak point for Republicans.
The quarterly audit report by the inspector general said the "deteriorating security situation across Iraq continues to impede progress," causing construction project delays, increasing costs and preventing repairs to critical power supplies.
The report underscores the persistent problems faced by the Iraqi government as it struggles to rebuild and take control of its own security in the face of a stubborn insurgency and a populace on the brink of civil war.
"The U.S.-funded phase of Iraq's relief and reconstruction has entered its concluding stages," the report said. "The government of Iraq's success in building on the foundation established by the U.S. relief and reconstruction program will now depend in part on (Iraq's) ability to attract more support from other donors and the private sector."
A consistent theme in the audits is that the escalating violence in Baghdad is stalling reconstruction. For example, auditors found that "repairing power lines is nearly impossible because of sniper attacks and death threats to repair crews." As a result, on one day earlier this month there was only enough power to generate a few hours of electricity.
The audit also said corruption continues to exist in a number of the Iraqi government ministries, and that building up a system of inspectors general is the most important initiative to fight such wrongdoing.
It said the Iraqi government must improve its ability to spend and manage its own money on capital projects, or international aid could dry up. The budget available for capital projects is about $6 billion, the audit said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Lolita C. Baldor. "Auditors want rules for Iraq aid," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_go_ot/us_iraq
-----------------------------
The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
WASHINGTON - Federal auditors are recommending that the Iraqi government meet specific milestones of progress to receive any future aid for reconstruction, according to a report released Monday that echoes a message the Bush administration has delivered to Iraqi leaders.
The study, issued by the special inspector general who audits U.S. work in
Iraq, also concluded that reconstruction is being blocked by violence, and efforts to empower Iraqis to do more are fraught with problems 3 1/2 years after the U.S. invaded the country.
The Iraqis should "meet concrete milestones and political and economic benchmarks as a condition of future aid," the report recommended. It said U.S. relief and reconstruction aid could be provided through conditional loans and be tied to specific actions by the Iraqi government.
During the past two weeks U.S. officials have pressed the Iraqis to begin to meet milestones of progress, an effort that has revealed rifts in the relationship between the two governments.
Last week Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki complained publicly after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said the Iraqis had agreed to meet specified benchmarks for progress. Bush later voiced confidence in al-Maliki, but warned that the U.S. will not have "unlimited patience" with the Iraq government's failure to quell sectarian violence.
The strains have surfaced in the run-up to the Nov. 7 elections for control of Congress, a campaign in which voters' dissatisfaction with Bush administration policy in Iraq has become a significant weak point for Republicans.
The quarterly audit report by the inspector general said the "deteriorating security situation across Iraq continues to impede progress," causing construction project delays, increasing costs and preventing repairs to critical power supplies.
The report underscores the persistent problems faced by the Iraqi government as it struggles to rebuild and take control of its own security in the face of a stubborn insurgency and a populace on the brink of civil war.
"The U.S.-funded phase of Iraq's relief and reconstruction has entered its concluding stages," the report said. "The government of Iraq's success in building on the foundation established by the U.S. relief and reconstruction program will now depend in part on (Iraq's) ability to attract more support from other donors and the private sector."
A consistent theme in the audits is that the escalating violence in Baghdad is stalling reconstruction. For example, auditors found that "repairing power lines is nearly impossible because of sniper attacks and death threats to repair crews." As a result, on one day earlier this month there was only enough power to generate a few hours of electricity.
The audit also said corruption continues to exist in a number of the Iraqi government ministries, and that building up a system of inspectors general is the most important initiative to fight such wrongdoing.
It said the Iraqi government must improve its ability to spend and manage its own money on capital projects, or international aid could dry up. The budget available for capital projects is about $6 billion, the audit said.
-----------------------------
Citation: Lolita C. Baldor. "Auditors want rules for Iraq aid," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061031/ap_on_go_ot/us_iraq
-----------------------------
Iraq says needs $100 bln to rebuild infrastructure
Reuters, 31 October 2006
KUWAIT - Iraq needs around $100 billion over the next four to five years to rebuild its shattered infrastructure, a government spokesman said on Tuesday.
"The situation in Iraq surpasses Iraq's ability to finance development projects," Ali al-Dabbagh told a news conference in Kuwait, during a meeting of officials from donor nations and the United Nations to discuss Iraqi reconstruction and economic reform.
"The Iraqi economy is a one-crop economy built on oil only and there are no other revenue sources in Iraq, therefore oil exports are being spent on operational expenditure," he said.
"Until the oil sector can rise and assume its full role ... we need this sum for the infrastructure and for investment expenditure."
Iraq's infrastructure was ravaged by decades of sanctions and war during the rule of deposed President Saddam Hussein, and by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the violence that followed.
Reconstruction has been hampered by insurgent violence which forced many projects to be halted and diverted funds away from rebuilding and into increased security.
The oil industry has been hit by frequent sabotage.
The meeting in Kuwait is the last set of discussions on the International Compact for Iraq, a roadmap for economic reform.
Dabbagh said the compact also included planned measures to build dialogue in Iraq and disband militias to try to halt the violence.
------------------------
Citation: "Iraq says needs $100 bln to rebuild infrastructure," Reuters, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-10-31T105735Z_01_L31558758_RTRIDST_0_ECONOMY-IRAQ-UPDATE-2.XML
------------------------
KUWAIT - Iraq needs around $100 billion over the next four to five years to rebuild its shattered infrastructure, a government spokesman said on Tuesday.
"The situation in Iraq surpasses Iraq's ability to finance development projects," Ali al-Dabbagh told a news conference in Kuwait, during a meeting of officials from donor nations and the United Nations to discuss Iraqi reconstruction and economic reform.
"The Iraqi economy is a one-crop economy built on oil only and there are no other revenue sources in Iraq, therefore oil exports are being spent on operational expenditure," he said.
"Until the oil sector can rise and assume its full role ... we need this sum for the infrastructure and for investment expenditure."
Iraq's infrastructure was ravaged by decades of sanctions and war during the rule of deposed President Saddam Hussein, and by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the violence that followed.
Reconstruction has been hampered by insurgent violence which forced many projects to be halted and diverted funds away from rebuilding and into increased security.
The oil industry has been hit by frequent sabotage.
The meeting in Kuwait is the last set of discussions on the International Compact for Iraq, a roadmap for economic reform.
Dabbagh said the compact also included planned measures to build dialogue in Iraq and disband militias to try to halt the violence.
------------------------
Citation: "Iraq says needs $100 bln to rebuild infrastructure," Reuters, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-10-31T105735Z_01_L31558758_RTRIDST_0_ECONOMY-IRAQ-UPDATE-2.XML
------------------------
Resistance to Deadlines for Iraq is Weakening
More U.S. officers doubt insurgents would gain, and believe that Baghdad must be pushed.
By Julian E. Barnes and Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times, 31 October 2006
WASHINGTON — Growing numbers of American military officers have begun to privately question a key tenet of U.S. strategy in Iraq — that setting a hard deadline for troop reductions would strengthen the insurgency and undermine efforts to create a stable state.
The Iraqi government's refusal to take certain measures to reduce sectarian tensions between Sunni Arabs and the nation's Shiite Muslim majority has led these officers to conclude that Iraqis will not make difficult decisions unless they are pushed.
Therefore, they say, the advantages of deadlines may outweigh the drawbacks.
"Deadlines could help ensure that the Iraqi leaders recognize the imperative of coming to grips with the tough decisions they've got to make for there to be progress in the political arena," said a senior Army officer who has served in Iraq. He asked that his name not be used because he did not want to publicly disagree with the stated policy of the president.
Former Pentagon official Kurt Campbell said more officers are calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of U.S. forces enables the Shiite-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.
"There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems," said Campbell, coauthor of a book on national security policy. "We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level."
For months, the Bush administration has been politely prodding the Iraqis on political and security reforms including the sharing of oil revenue, a crackdown on Shiite militias and constitutional changes. The discussions so far have yielded little, prompting experts to question whether the Iraqi government will ever compromise if there is no penalty for failing to make hard choices.
Over the last week, Bush administration officials have spoken about possible timetables for progress in Iraq, but softened their suggestions after talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
Although top administration officials are still steering clear of discussing the timing of American troop withdrawals, the officers' comments come alongside public statements by prominent Republicans who have begun talking about the need to establish a date that the U.S. will begin to draw down, whether or not the Iraqi government takes steps toward political compromise.
President Bush and other administration opponents of hard deadlines have argued that telegraphing troop departures would help the insurgents.
Once the U.S. sets a withdrawal date, the Sunni-led guerrillas know how long they must hang on before American troops are gone, the administration has argued.
Opponents of timetables also fear that small drawdowns will unleash public demand for more dramatic withdrawals, allowing violence fomented by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to erode whatever political advances have been made.
Military officials generally have agreed with the civilian leadership that a deadline would strengthen insurgent and militia groups. But the failure of the Iraqi government to move forward on key political and security measures has left senior military leaders frustrated.
Although U.S. military leaders remain wary of the consequences of imposing deadlines, increasingly officers say they are starting to look more attractive. The shift in opinion is a sign that gridlock in the Iraqi government is seen as a greater threat to achieving stability in Iraq than the insurgency itself.
John Batiste, a retired major general who commanded a division in Iraq and has been critical of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said that setting a date for a drawdown of combat brigades must be considered. Before the deadline, Batiste said, the U.S. also needs to step up its effort to advise and train the Iraqi military and police.
"Holding the Iraqi government accountable is important, and that has everything to do with setting expectations and timelines," Batiste said. "It also has everything to do with doing all we can to ensure they are capable completing the task they are trying to do."
Some officers who have served in Iraq believe that much of the Iraqi government is not functioning effectively. Finding ways to force the sectarian factions to put aside their differences and focus on improving security and basic services must be the top priority in Iraq, these officers say. Without government reform, the Iraqi security forces are unlikely to ever be strong enough to take on the insurgency or the sectarian militias.
"It's basic counterinsurgency," said a military officer who has served in Baghdad and did not want to publicly disagree with the president's stated policy. "You have to have a trusted, capable government."
Some in the military argue that publicizing a timetable for reducing forces is far less damaging to a counterinsurgency campaign than the administration has suggested.
Many officers, particularly those who adhere to the military philosophy of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe that deadlines are necessary to avoid getting mired in an endless war fueled by enmity between Iraq's long-subjugated Shiite population and the Sunni Arabs who ran the government under Saddam Hussein.
"The Powell Doctrine is all about overwhelming numbers of troops with specific missions, with specified end-states, for specified durations with — go figure — an exit strategy," said the officer who has served in Baghdad. "To not mention this stuff is actually counter to the contemporary military mind-set."
Although Democrats like Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, have long argued that a deadline is the best way to move development of the Iraqi security force forward, opponents of the administration are no longer the only ones making the argument.
A number of Republicans now have either explicitly endorsed timelines for troop drawdowns or voiced support for considering a strategy shift.
Among them are Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Richard L. Armitage, Powell's former top deputy at the State Department.
Sen. John W. Warner, the Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee, has called for a new approach if the security situation does not improve.
"The key to this thing is impressing upon that government that they've got to come to grips with what is causing this increase in violence and killing both Iraqis and our own armed forces," Warner said this month on Fox News.
Without a deadline, Maliki will not tackle the difficult problem of bridging Sunni and Shiite political disagreements, said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Coalition Provisional Authority official.
"Maliki will not hit the benchmarks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give them," said Rubin, who does not favor troop withdrawals as a penalty. "Iraqis approach deadlines by doing nothing until two days before, and then locking themselves in smoke-filled rooms and only then do they … try to hash out a solution."
Officially, administration officials remain opposed to discussing deadlines.
Nevertheless, with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad drafting a series of benchmarks for the Maliki government, there were signs last week that the administration had eased its opposition to timetables and might take a tougher stance with the Iraqi government.
Former Pentagon official Campbell said that military officers would not be discussing their change of heart over timetables if administration officials had not signaled a new willingness to shift positions.
"Even though there are deep reservoirs of unhappiness in the military about certain aspects of administration policy, active-duty guys are very reluctant to publicly disagree with the leadership," he said.
"But the signals are clear from the administration that it is acceptable to talk about timetables. They are taking their cues from their civilian masters."
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Back story
The debate over timetables, timelines and deadlines as terms in U.S. policy on Iraq heated up a week ago, when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad outlined a series of political milestones he said the Iraqi government had agreed to.
Khalilzad said Iraqi and U.S. officials had agreed to a timeline covering the sharing of oil revenue, establishment of a reconciliation program, and a plan to confront the sectarian militias.
The following day Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki seemed to reject Khalilzad's benchmarks, saying "we do not believe in a timetable."
The White House insisted that Maliki had been misunderstood. But in a meeting with Khalilzad on Friday, Maliki asserted his independence and called the U.S. tone patronizing.
However, in a joint statement released after the meeting, Maliki and Khalilzad agreed to a timeline for various political reforms and reasserted the U.S. commitment to helping Iraq.
On Saturday, President Bush and Maliki held a 50-minute air-clearing session in a videoconference between Washington and Baghdad.
--------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes and Doyle McManus. "Resistance to Deadlines for Iraq is Weakening," Los Angeles Times, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deadlines31oct31,0,6295222.story?coll=la-home-headlines
--------------------
By Julian E. Barnes and Doyle McManus
Los Angeles Times, 31 October 2006
WASHINGTON — Growing numbers of American military officers have begun to privately question a key tenet of U.S. strategy in Iraq — that setting a hard deadline for troop reductions would strengthen the insurgency and undermine efforts to create a stable state.
The Iraqi government's refusal to take certain measures to reduce sectarian tensions between Sunni Arabs and the nation's Shiite Muslim majority has led these officers to conclude that Iraqis will not make difficult decisions unless they are pushed.
Therefore, they say, the advantages of deadlines may outweigh the drawbacks.
"Deadlines could help ensure that the Iraqi leaders recognize the imperative of coming to grips with the tough decisions they've got to make for there to be progress in the political arena," said a senior Army officer who has served in Iraq. He asked that his name not be used because he did not want to publicly disagree with the stated policy of the president.
Former Pentagon official Kurt Campbell said more officers are calling for deadlines after concluding that the indefinite presence of U.S. forces enables the Shiite-run Iraqi government to avoid making compromises.
"There is a new belief that the biggest problem that we face is that our forces are the sand in the gears creating problems," said Campbell, coauthor of a book on national security policy. "We are making things worse by giving the Iraqis a false sense of security at the governing level."
For months, the Bush administration has been politely prodding the Iraqis on political and security reforms including the sharing of oil revenue, a crackdown on Shiite militias and constitutional changes. The discussions so far have yielded little, prompting experts to question whether the Iraqi government will ever compromise if there is no penalty for failing to make hard choices.
Over the last week, Bush administration officials have spoken about possible timetables for progress in Iraq, but softened their suggestions after talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.
Although top administration officials are still steering clear of discussing the timing of American troop withdrawals, the officers' comments come alongside public statements by prominent Republicans who have begun talking about the need to establish a date that the U.S. will begin to draw down, whether or not the Iraqi government takes steps toward political compromise.
President Bush and other administration opponents of hard deadlines have argued that telegraphing troop departures would help the insurgents.
Once the U.S. sets a withdrawal date, the Sunni-led guerrillas know how long they must hang on before American troops are gone, the administration has argued.
Opponents of timetables also fear that small drawdowns will unleash public demand for more dramatic withdrawals, allowing violence fomented by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias to erode whatever political advances have been made.
Military officials generally have agreed with the civilian leadership that a deadline would strengthen insurgent and militia groups. But the failure of the Iraqi government to move forward on key political and security measures has left senior military leaders frustrated.
Although U.S. military leaders remain wary of the consequences of imposing deadlines, increasingly officers say they are starting to look more attractive. The shift in opinion is a sign that gridlock in the Iraqi government is seen as a greater threat to achieving stability in Iraq than the insurgency itself.
John Batiste, a retired major general who commanded a division in Iraq and has been critical of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, said that setting a date for a drawdown of combat brigades must be considered. Before the deadline, Batiste said, the U.S. also needs to step up its effort to advise and train the Iraqi military and police.
"Holding the Iraqi government accountable is important, and that has everything to do with setting expectations and timelines," Batiste said. "It also has everything to do with doing all we can to ensure they are capable completing the task they are trying to do."
Some officers who have served in Iraq believe that much of the Iraqi government is not functioning effectively. Finding ways to force the sectarian factions to put aside their differences and focus on improving security and basic services must be the top priority in Iraq, these officers say. Without government reform, the Iraqi security forces are unlikely to ever be strong enough to take on the insurgency or the sectarian militias.
"It's basic counterinsurgency," said a military officer who has served in Baghdad and did not want to publicly disagree with the president's stated policy. "You have to have a trusted, capable government."
Some in the military argue that publicizing a timetable for reducing forces is far less damaging to a counterinsurgency campaign than the administration has suggested.
Many officers, particularly those who adhere to the military philosophy of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired Army general who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believe that deadlines are necessary to avoid getting mired in an endless war fueled by enmity between Iraq's long-subjugated Shiite population and the Sunni Arabs who ran the government under Saddam Hussein.
"The Powell Doctrine is all about overwhelming numbers of troops with specific missions, with specified end-states, for specified durations with — go figure — an exit strategy," said the officer who has served in Baghdad. "To not mention this stuff is actually counter to the contemporary military mind-set."
Although Democrats like Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, have long argued that a deadline is the best way to move development of the Iraqi security force forward, opponents of the administration are no longer the only ones making the argument.
A number of Republicans now have either explicitly endorsed timelines for troop drawdowns or voiced support for considering a strategy shift.
Among them are Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Richard L. Armitage, Powell's former top deputy at the State Department.
Sen. John W. Warner, the Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee, has called for a new approach if the security situation does not improve.
"The key to this thing is impressing upon that government that they've got to come to grips with what is causing this increase in violence and killing both Iraqis and our own armed forces," Warner said this month on Fox News.
Without a deadline, Maliki will not tackle the difficult problem of bridging Sunni and Shiite political disagreements, said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Coalition Provisional Authority official.
"Maliki will not hit the benchmarks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't give them," said Rubin, who does not favor troop withdrawals as a penalty. "Iraqis approach deadlines by doing nothing until two days before, and then locking themselves in smoke-filled rooms and only then do they … try to hash out a solution."
Officially, administration officials remain opposed to discussing deadlines.
Nevertheless, with the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad drafting a series of benchmarks for the Maliki government, there were signs last week that the administration had eased its opposition to timetables and might take a tougher stance with the Iraqi government.
Former Pentagon official Campbell said that military officers would not be discussing their change of heart over timetables if administration officials had not signaled a new willingness to shift positions.
"Even though there are deep reservoirs of unhappiness in the military about certain aspects of administration policy, active-duty guys are very reluctant to publicly disagree with the leadership," he said.
"But the signals are clear from the administration that it is acceptable to talk about timetables. They are taking their cues from their civilian masters."
(INFOBOX BELOW)
Back story
The debate over timetables, timelines and deadlines as terms in U.S. policy on Iraq heated up a week ago, when U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad outlined a series of political milestones he said the Iraqi government had agreed to.
Khalilzad said Iraqi and U.S. officials had agreed to a timeline covering the sharing of oil revenue, establishment of a reconciliation program, and a plan to confront the sectarian militias.
The following day Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki seemed to reject Khalilzad's benchmarks, saying "we do not believe in a timetable."
The White House insisted that Maliki had been misunderstood. But in a meeting with Khalilzad on Friday, Maliki asserted his independence and called the U.S. tone patronizing.
However, in a joint statement released after the meeting, Maliki and Khalilzad agreed to a timeline for various political reforms and reasserted the U.S. commitment to helping Iraq.
On Saturday, President Bush and Maliki held a 50-minute air-clearing session in a videoconference between Washington and Baghdad.
--------------------
Citation: Julian E. Barnes and Doyle McManus. "Resistance to Deadlines for Iraq is Weakening," Los Angeles Times, 31 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deadlines31oct31,0,6295222.story?coll=la-home-headlines
--------------------
30 October 2006
Why God is Winning
By Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft
Foreign Policy, July/August 2006
Religion was supposed to fade away as globalization and freedom spread. Instead, it’s booming around the world, often deciding who gets elected. And the divine intervention is just beginning. Democracy is giving people a voice, and more and more, they want to talk about God.
After Hamas won a decisive victory in January’s Palestinian elections, one of its supporters replaced the national flag that flew over parliament with its emerald-green banner heralding, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet." In Washington, few expected the religious party to take power. "I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard," said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. More surprises followed. Days after the Prophet’s banner was unfurled in Ramallah, thousands of Muslims mounted a vigorous, sometimes violent, defense of the Prophet’s honor in cities as far flung as Beirut, Jakarta, London, and New Delhi. Outraged by cartoons of Muhammad originally published in Denmark, Islamic groups, governments, and individuals staged demonstrations, boycotts, and embassy attacks.
On their own, these events appeared to be sudden eruptions of "Muslim rage." In fact, they were only the most recent outbreaks of a deep undercurrent that has been gathering force for decades and extends far beyond the Muslim world. Global politics is increasingly marked by what could be called "prophetic politics." Voices claiming transcendent authority are filling public spaces and winning key political contests. These movements come in very different forms and employ widely varying tools. But whether the field of battle is democratic elections or the more inchoate struggle for global public opinion, religious groups are increasingly competitive. In contest after contest, when people are given a choice between the sacred and the secular, faith prevails.
God is on a winning streak. It was reflected in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Shia revival and religious strife in postwar Iraq, and Hamas’s recent victory in Palestine. But not all the thunderbolts have been hurled by Allah. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s was strengthened by prominent Christian leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Hindu nationalists in India stunned the international community when they unseated India’s ruling party in 1998 and then tested nuclear weapons. American evangelicals continue to surprise the U.S. foreign-policy establishment with their activism and influence on issues such as religious freedom, sex trafficking, Sudan, and AIDS in Africa. Indeed, evangelicals have emerged as such a powerful force that religion was a stronger predictor of vote choice in the 2004 U.S. presidential election than was gender, age, or class.
The spread of democracy, far from checking the power of militant religious activists, will probably only enhance the reach of prophetic political movements, many of which will emerge from democratic processes more organized, more popular, and more legitimate than before—but quite possibly no less violent. Democracy is giving the world’s peoples their voice, and they want to talk about God.
Divine Intervention
It did not always seem this way. In April 1966, Time ran a cover story that asked, "Is God Dead?" It was a fair question. Secularism dominated world politics in the mid-1960s. The conventional wisdom shared by many intellectual and political elites was that modernization would inevitably extinguish religion’s vitality. But if 1966 was the zenith of secularism’s self-confidence, the next year marked the beginning of the end of its global hegemony. In 1967, the leader of secular Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israeli Army. By the end of the 1970s, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, avowedly "born-again" U.S. President Jimmy Carter, television evangelist Jerry Falwell, and Pope John Paul II were all walking the world stage. A decade later, rosary-wielding Solidarity members in Poland and Kalashnikov-toting mujahedin in Afghanistan helped defeat atheistic Soviet Communism. A dozen years later, 19 hijackers screaming "God is great" transformed world politics. Today, the secular pan-Arabism of Nasser has given way to the millenarian pan-Islamism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose religious harangues against America and Israel resonate with millions of Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike. "We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point—that is the Almighty God," Ahmadinejad declared in his recent letter to President Bush.
The modern world has in fact proven hospitable to religious belief. The world is indeed more modern: It enjoys more political freedom, more democracy, and more education than perhaps at any time in history. According to Freedom House, the number of "free" and "partly free" countries jumped from 93 in 1975 to 147 in 2005. UNESCO estimates that adult literacy rates doubled in sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries, and South and West Asia between 1970 and 2000. The average share of people in developing countries living on less than a dollar a day fell from 28 percent to 22 percent between 1990 and 2002, according to World Bank estimates.
If people are wealthier, more educated, and enjoy greater political freedom, one might assume they would also have become more secular. They haven’t. In fact, the period in which economic and political modernization has been most intense—the last 30 to 40 years—has witnessed a jump in religious vitality around the world. The world’s largest religions have expanded at a rate that exceeds global population growth. Consider the two largest Christian faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism, and the two largest non-Christian religions, Islam and Hinduism. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a greater proportion of the world’s population adhered to these religious systems in 2000 than a century earlier. At the beginning of the 20th century, a bare majority of the world’s people, precisely 50 percent, were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. At the beginning of the 21st century, nearly 64 percent belonged to these four religious groupings, and the proportion may be close to 70 percent by 2025. The World Values Survey, which covers 85 percent of the world’s population, confirms religion’s growing vitality. According to scholars Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before—and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population."
Not only is religious observance spreading, it is becoming more devout. The most populous and fastest-growing countries in the world, including the United States, are witnessing marked increases in religiosity. In Brazil, China, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, religiosity became more vigorous between 1990 and 2001. Between 1987 and 1997, surveys by the Times Mirror Center and the Pew Research Center registered increases of 10 percent or more in the proportions of Americans surveyed who "strongly agreed" that God existed, that they would have to answer for their sins before God, that God performs miracles, and that prayer was an important part of their daily life. Even in Europe, a secular stronghold, there have been surprising upticks in religiosity.
God’s comeback is in no small part due to the global expansion of freedom. Thanks to the "third wave" of democratization between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, as well as smaller waves of freedom since, people in dozens of countries have been empowered to shape their public lives in ways that were inconceivable in the 1950s and 1960s. A pattern emerged as they exercised their new political freedoms. In country after country, politically empowered groups began to challenge the secular constraints imposed by the first generation of modernizing, postindependence leaders. Often, as in communist countries, secular straitjackets had been imposed by sheer coercion; in other cases, as in Atatürk’s Turkey, Nehru’s India, and Nasser’s Egypt, secularism retained legitimacy because elites considered it essential to national integration and modernization—and because of the sheer charisma of these countries’ founding fathers. In Latin America, right-wing dictatorships, sometimes in cahoots with the Catholic Church, imposed restrictions that severely limited grassroots religious influences, particularly from "liberation theology" and Protestant "sects."
As politics liberalized in countries like India, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, and Indonesia in the late 1990s, religion’s influence on political life increased dramatically. Even in the United States, evangelicals exercised a growing influence on the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s, partly because the presidential nomination process depended more on popular primaries and less on the decisions of traditional party leaders. Where political systems reflect people’s values, they usually reflect people’s strong religious beliefs.
Many observers are quick to dismiss religion’s advance into the political sphere as the product of elites manipulating sacred symbols to mobilize the masses. In fact, the marriage of religion with politics is often welcomed, if not demanded, by people around the world. In a 2002 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 91 percent of Nigerians and 76 percent of Bangladeshis surveyed agreed that religious leaders should be more involved in politics. A June 2004 six-nation survey reported that "most Arabs polled said that they wanted the clergy to play a bigger role in politics." In the same survey, majorities or pluralities in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates cited Islam as their primary identity, trumping nationality. The collapse of the quasi-secular Baathist dictatorship in Iraq released religious and ethnic allegiances and has helped Islam play a dominant role in the country’s political life, including in its recently adopted constitution. As right- and left-wing dictatorships have declined in Latin America and democratization has deepened, evangelicals have become an influential voting bloc in numerous countries, including Brazil, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
The New Orthodoxies
Far from stamping out religion, modernization has spawned a new generation of savvy and technologically adept religious movements, including Evangelical Protestantism in America, "Hindutva" in India, Salafist and Wahhabi Islam in the Middle East, Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, and Opus Dei and the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church. The most dynamic religiosity today is not so much "old-time religion" as it is radical, modern, and conservative. Today’s religious upsurge is less a return of religious orthodoxy than an explosion of "neo-orthodoxies."
A common denominator of these neo-orthodoxies is the deployment of sophisticated and politically capable organizations. These modern organizations effectively marshal specialized institutions as well as the latest technologies to recruit new members, strengthen connections with old ones, deliver social services, and press their agenda in the public sphere. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, founded in 1964, "saffronized" large swaths of India through its religious and social activism and laid the groundwork for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral successes in the 1990s. Similar groups in the Islamic world include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia. In Brazil, Pentecostals have organized their own legislative caucus, representing 10 percent of congresspeople. Religious communities are also developing remarkable transnational capabilities, appealing to foreign governments and international bodies deemed sympathetic to their cause.
Today’s neo-orthodoxies may effectively use the tools of the modern world, but how compatible are they with modern democracy? Religious radicals, after all, can quickly short-circuit democracy by winning power and then excluding nonbelievers. Just as dangerous, politicized religion can spark civil conflict. Since 2000, 43 percent of civil wars have been religious (only a quarter were religiously inspired in the 1940s and 50s). Extreme religious ideology is, of course, a leading motivation for most transnational terrorist attacks.
The scorecard isn’t all negative, however. Religion has mobilized millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, support human rights, and relieve human suffering. In the 20th century, religious movements helped end colonial rule and usher in democracy in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The post-Vatican II Catholic Church played a crucial role by opposing authoritarian regimes and legitimating the democratic aspirations of the masses.
Today’s religious movements, however, may not have as much success in promoting sustainable freedom. Catholicism’s highly centralized and organized character made it an effective competitor with the state, and its institutional tradition helped it adapt to democratic politics. Islam and Pentecostalism, by contrast, are not centralized under a single leadership or doctrine that can respond coherently to fast-moving social or political events. Local religious authorities are often tempted to radicalize in order to compensate for their weakness vis-Ã -vis the state or to challenge more established figures. The trajectory of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in postwar Iraq is not unusual. The lack of a higher authority for religious elites might explain why most religious civil wars since 1940—34 of 42—have involved Islam, with 9 of these being Muslim versus Muslim. We need look no further than Iraq today to see religious authorities successfully challenging the forces of secularism—but also violently competing with each other. Even in a longstanding democracy like India, the political trajectory of Hindu nationalism has demonstrated that democratic institutions do not necessarily moderate these instincts: Where radical Hindu nationalists have had the right mix of opportunities and incentives, they have used religious violence to win elections, most dramatically in the state of Gujarat.
The belief that outbreaks of politicized religion are temporary detours on the road to secularization was plausible in 1976, 1986, or even 1996. Today, the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound. God is winning in global politics. And modernization, democratization, and globalization have only made him stronger.
Timothy Samuel Shah is senior fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Monica Duffy Toft is associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
--------------------
Citation: Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft. "Why God is Winning," Foreign Policy, July/August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3493&print=1
--------------------
Foreign Policy, July/August 2006
Religion was supposed to fade away as globalization and freedom spread. Instead, it’s booming around the world, often deciding who gets elected. And the divine intervention is just beginning. Democracy is giving people a voice, and more and more, they want to talk about God.
After Hamas won a decisive victory in January’s Palestinian elections, one of its supporters replaced the national flag that flew over parliament with its emerald-green banner heralding, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet." In Washington, few expected the religious party to take power. "I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard," said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. More surprises followed. Days after the Prophet’s banner was unfurled in Ramallah, thousands of Muslims mounted a vigorous, sometimes violent, defense of the Prophet’s honor in cities as far flung as Beirut, Jakarta, London, and New Delhi. Outraged by cartoons of Muhammad originally published in Denmark, Islamic groups, governments, and individuals staged demonstrations, boycotts, and embassy attacks.
On their own, these events appeared to be sudden eruptions of "Muslim rage." In fact, they were only the most recent outbreaks of a deep undercurrent that has been gathering force for decades and extends far beyond the Muslim world. Global politics is increasingly marked by what could be called "prophetic politics." Voices claiming transcendent authority are filling public spaces and winning key political contests. These movements come in very different forms and employ widely varying tools. But whether the field of battle is democratic elections or the more inchoate struggle for global public opinion, religious groups are increasingly competitive. In contest after contest, when people are given a choice between the sacred and the secular, faith prevails.
God is on a winning streak. It was reflected in the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Shia revival and religious strife in postwar Iraq, and Hamas’s recent victory in Palestine. But not all the thunderbolts have been hurled by Allah. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s was strengthened by prominent Christian leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Hindu nationalists in India stunned the international community when they unseated India’s ruling party in 1998 and then tested nuclear weapons. American evangelicals continue to surprise the U.S. foreign-policy establishment with their activism and influence on issues such as religious freedom, sex trafficking, Sudan, and AIDS in Africa. Indeed, evangelicals have emerged as such a powerful force that religion was a stronger predictor of vote choice in the 2004 U.S. presidential election than was gender, age, or class.
The spread of democracy, far from checking the power of militant religious activists, will probably only enhance the reach of prophetic political movements, many of which will emerge from democratic processes more organized, more popular, and more legitimate than before—but quite possibly no less violent. Democracy is giving the world’s peoples their voice, and they want to talk about God.
Divine Intervention
It did not always seem this way. In April 1966, Time ran a cover story that asked, "Is God Dead?" It was a fair question. Secularism dominated world politics in the mid-1960s. The conventional wisdom shared by many intellectual and political elites was that modernization would inevitably extinguish religion’s vitality. But if 1966 was the zenith of secularism’s self-confidence, the next year marked the beginning of the end of its global hegemony. In 1967, the leader of secular Arab nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israeli Army. By the end of the 1970s, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, avowedly "born-again" U.S. President Jimmy Carter, television evangelist Jerry Falwell, and Pope John Paul II were all walking the world stage. A decade later, rosary-wielding Solidarity members in Poland and Kalashnikov-toting mujahedin in Afghanistan helped defeat atheistic Soviet Communism. A dozen years later, 19 hijackers screaming "God is great" transformed world politics. Today, the secular pan-Arabism of Nasser has given way to the millenarian pan-Islamism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose religious harangues against America and Israel resonate with millions of Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike. "We increasingly see that people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point—that is the Almighty God," Ahmadinejad declared in his recent letter to President Bush.
The modern world has in fact proven hospitable to religious belief. The world is indeed more modern: It enjoys more political freedom, more democracy, and more education than perhaps at any time in history. According to Freedom House, the number of "free" and "partly free" countries jumped from 93 in 1975 to 147 in 2005. UNESCO estimates that adult literacy rates doubled in sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries, and South and West Asia between 1970 and 2000. The average share of people in developing countries living on less than a dollar a day fell from 28 percent to 22 percent between 1990 and 2002, according to World Bank estimates.
If people are wealthier, more educated, and enjoy greater political freedom, one might assume they would also have become more secular. They haven’t. In fact, the period in which economic and political modernization has been most intense—the last 30 to 40 years—has witnessed a jump in religious vitality around the world. The world’s largest religions have expanded at a rate that exceeds global population growth. Consider the two largest Christian faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism, and the two largest non-Christian religions, Islam and Hinduism. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a greater proportion of the world’s population adhered to these religious systems in 2000 than a century earlier. At the beginning of the 20th century, a bare majority of the world’s people, precisely 50 percent, were Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Hindu. At the beginning of the 21st century, nearly 64 percent belonged to these four religious groupings, and the proportion may be close to 70 percent by 2025. The World Values Survey, which covers 85 percent of the world’s population, confirms religion’s growing vitality. According to scholars Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before—and they constitute a growing proportion of the world’s population."
Not only is religious observance spreading, it is becoming more devout. The most populous and fastest-growing countries in the world, including the United States, are witnessing marked increases in religiosity. In Brazil, China, Nigeria, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, religiosity became more vigorous between 1990 and 2001. Between 1987 and 1997, surveys by the Times Mirror Center and the Pew Research Center registered increases of 10 percent or more in the proportions of Americans surveyed who "strongly agreed" that God existed, that they would have to answer for their sins before God, that God performs miracles, and that prayer was an important part of their daily life. Even in Europe, a secular stronghold, there have been surprising upticks in religiosity.
God’s comeback is in no small part due to the global expansion of freedom. Thanks to the "third wave" of democratization between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, as well as smaller waves of freedom since, people in dozens of countries have been empowered to shape their public lives in ways that were inconceivable in the 1950s and 1960s. A pattern emerged as they exercised their new political freedoms. In country after country, politically empowered groups began to challenge the secular constraints imposed by the first generation of modernizing, postindependence leaders. Often, as in communist countries, secular straitjackets had been imposed by sheer coercion; in other cases, as in Atatürk’s Turkey, Nehru’s India, and Nasser’s Egypt, secularism retained legitimacy because elites considered it essential to national integration and modernization—and because of the sheer charisma of these countries’ founding fathers. In Latin America, right-wing dictatorships, sometimes in cahoots with the Catholic Church, imposed restrictions that severely limited grassroots religious influences, particularly from "liberation theology" and Protestant "sects."
As politics liberalized in countries like India, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey, and Indonesia in the late 1990s, religion’s influence on political life increased dramatically. Even in the United States, evangelicals exercised a growing influence on the Republican Party in the 1980s and 1990s, partly because the presidential nomination process depended more on popular primaries and less on the decisions of traditional party leaders. Where political systems reflect people’s values, they usually reflect people’s strong religious beliefs.
Many observers are quick to dismiss religion’s advance into the political sphere as the product of elites manipulating sacred symbols to mobilize the masses. In fact, the marriage of religion with politics is often welcomed, if not demanded, by people around the world. In a 2002 Pew Global Attitudes survey, 91 percent of Nigerians and 76 percent of Bangladeshis surveyed agreed that religious leaders should be more involved in politics. A June 2004 six-nation survey reported that "most Arabs polled said that they wanted the clergy to play a bigger role in politics." In the same survey, majorities or pluralities in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates cited Islam as their primary identity, trumping nationality. The collapse of the quasi-secular Baathist dictatorship in Iraq released religious and ethnic allegiances and has helped Islam play a dominant role in the country’s political life, including in its recently adopted constitution. As right- and left-wing dictatorships have declined in Latin America and democratization has deepened, evangelicals have become an influential voting bloc in numerous countries, including Brazil, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
The New Orthodoxies
Far from stamping out religion, modernization has spawned a new generation of savvy and technologically adept religious movements, including Evangelical Protestantism in America, "Hindutva" in India, Salafist and Wahhabi Islam in the Middle East, Pentecostalism in Africa and Latin America, and Opus Dei and the charismatic movement in the Catholic Church. The most dynamic religiosity today is not so much "old-time religion" as it is radical, modern, and conservative. Today’s religious upsurge is less a return of religious orthodoxy than an explosion of "neo-orthodoxies."
A common denominator of these neo-orthodoxies is the deployment of sophisticated and politically capable organizations. These modern organizations effectively marshal specialized institutions as well as the latest technologies to recruit new members, strengthen connections with old ones, deliver social services, and press their agenda in the public sphere. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, founded in 1964, "saffronized" large swaths of India through its religious and social activism and laid the groundwork for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral successes in the 1990s. Similar groups in the Islamic world include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Nahdlatul Ulama in Indonesia. In Brazil, Pentecostals have organized their own legislative caucus, representing 10 percent of congresspeople. Religious communities are also developing remarkable transnational capabilities, appealing to foreign governments and international bodies deemed sympathetic to their cause.
Today’s neo-orthodoxies may effectively use the tools of the modern world, but how compatible are they with modern democracy? Religious radicals, after all, can quickly short-circuit democracy by winning power and then excluding nonbelievers. Just as dangerous, politicized religion can spark civil conflict. Since 2000, 43 percent of civil wars have been religious (only a quarter were religiously inspired in the 1940s and 50s). Extreme religious ideology is, of course, a leading motivation for most transnational terrorist attacks.
The scorecard isn’t all negative, however. Religion has mobilized millions of people to oppose authoritarian regimes, inaugurate democratic transitions, support human rights, and relieve human suffering. In the 20th century, religious movements helped end colonial rule and usher in democracy in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia. The post-Vatican II Catholic Church played a crucial role by opposing authoritarian regimes and legitimating the democratic aspirations of the masses.
Today’s religious movements, however, may not have as much success in promoting sustainable freedom. Catholicism’s highly centralized and organized character made it an effective competitor with the state, and its institutional tradition helped it adapt to democratic politics. Islam and Pentecostalism, by contrast, are not centralized under a single leadership or doctrine that can respond coherently to fast-moving social or political events. Local religious authorities are often tempted to radicalize in order to compensate for their weakness vis-Ã -vis the state or to challenge more established figures. The trajectory of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in postwar Iraq is not unusual. The lack of a higher authority for religious elites might explain why most religious civil wars since 1940—34 of 42—have involved Islam, with 9 of these being Muslim versus Muslim. We need look no further than Iraq today to see religious authorities successfully challenging the forces of secularism—but also violently competing with each other. Even in a longstanding democracy like India, the political trajectory of Hindu nationalism has demonstrated that democratic institutions do not necessarily moderate these instincts: Where radical Hindu nationalists have had the right mix of opportunities and incentives, they have used religious violence to win elections, most dramatically in the state of Gujarat.
The belief that outbreaks of politicized religion are temporary detours on the road to secularization was plausible in 1976, 1986, or even 1996. Today, the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound. God is winning in global politics. And modernization, democratization, and globalization have only made him stronger.
Timothy Samuel Shah is senior fellow in religion and world affairs at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Monica Duffy Toft is associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and assistant director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.
--------------------
Citation: Timothy Samuel Shah and Monica Duffy Toft. "Why God is Winning," Foreign Policy, July/August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3493&print=1
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After the fighting and dying, the Taleban return as British depart
By Anthony Loyd and Tahir Luddin
The Times, 30 October 2006
Among the many battles in his life, Nafaz Khan recalls the long fight for Musa Qala as one of special significance. As the former chief of police and militia commander in the northern Helmand town it was there that he fought alongside British troops against the Taleban.
"I loved those British soldiers," he said. "They were great fighters and knew each of my men by name. Together we killed many, many Taleban."
Soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment, who were withdrawn from Musa Qala this month as part of a deal with Afghan tribal elders after more than two months of heavy fighting, remember the experience as one of violence, dirt, heat and lack of water. For Mr Khan, though, it held particular deprivation.
"Shrapnel from a Taleban mortar blew off one of my testicles soon after the fighting started," he said while waiting to petition the governor of Helmand in Lashkar Gah for more men and munitions to attack a Taleban headquarters elsewhere. "But I stayed in Musa Qala with the British and fought on for another two and a half months until we were ordered to leave. The pain was terrible, but there were Talebs to kill."
But when asked whether the deal to withdraw from Musa Qala had left the town free of Taleban influence, as Nato and Afghan government officials claim, Mr Khan’s face clouded as if in greater discomfort.
"Those British soldiers were cursing with us when we were all told to leave," he said. "They said that they had fought and lost friends to keep the town. And now these tribal elders who are in charge of Musa Qala are the same who gave the Taleban support when they fought against us. The deal was just a clever trick to get the foreign soldiers to go."
Musa Qala was one of four towns in northern Helmand to which British troops were sent this summer at the request of the Muhammad Daud, the governor of the province, after his officials and police proved incapable of defending themselves against Taleban attack.
Most observers agree that British commanders had little choice but to respond to Governor Daud’s request for troops. Yet opinion divides sharply as to whether the fighting — and loss of 17 British lives — has improved stability in the province. Today there are neither Afghan police nor British soldiers nor, apparently, Taleban in the centre of Musa Qala, which is governed instead by a shura — council — of 50 tribal elders, each of whom has supplied one gunman to protect the centre of the town.
Under the terms of the 14-point deal leading to the demilitarisation, Musa Qala is supposed to remain under nominal government control with the rule of law, including the collection of taxes, education and redevelopment, administered by the elders. None of that has yet happened.
"It is too early to expect these things to have occurred," Governor Daud said. "The administration of elders has only had two weeks. Schools remain closed in Musa Qala, but they remain closed in many other districts in Helmand, both for girls and boys."
He insisted that he was examining costings for redevelopment work in Musa Qala, and hoped to extend stability from the town centre into new territory. But elders said that since the British withdrawal almost all the surrounding district had returned to the Taleban.
They also said that most of the fighters who had attacked the British, rather than being insurgents who had crossed the border from Pakistan, were local people.
"Most of the fighters weren’t real Taleban," said Wakil Haji Mohammed Naim, one of the elders in Musa Qala’s new administration. "There were some outsiders, but most were local men who were angry with the Government, its robbery and corruption, who were persuaded to fight against the foreigners by our preachers in the mosques. We’ll see how long this deal lasts. The Taleban are respecting it but our people are very angry with the Government." His words reflected how easily, despite their best intent, British forces in northern Helmand often became embroiled in defending criminalised district officials against a force that was only part Taleban. "I’ll take a hell of a lot of convincing to believe that the fighting in Sangin didn’t start as a struggle between a bunch of drug criminals," one British official in Afghanistan said, referring to another of Helmand’s battle zones in which British forces saw heavy action. "We should never have gone near it. It was a straight-up face-off between two drug lords and we were used to tip the balance."
Whatever their success in suppressing attacks, the British may find that the force required and the death toll among indigenous Afghan fighters makes it all the harder to mollify the rural population with redevelopment projects.
To illustrate, Mr Khan pulls out the ID of an attacker killed in the fighting at Musa Qala. It was a United Nations voter registration card, belonging to an Afghan man who only two years ago had believed enough in the political process to vote in the presidential elections.
-------------------------------
Citation: Anthony Loyd and Tahir Luddin. "After the fighting and dying, the Taleban return as British depart," The Times, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-2428038,00.html
-------------------------------
The Times, 30 October 2006
Among the many battles in his life, Nafaz Khan recalls the long fight for Musa Qala as one of special significance. As the former chief of police and militia commander in the northern Helmand town it was there that he fought alongside British troops against the Taleban.
"I loved those British soldiers," he said. "They were great fighters and knew each of my men by name. Together we killed many, many Taleban."
Soldiers from the Royal Irish Regiment, who were withdrawn from Musa Qala this month as part of a deal with Afghan tribal elders after more than two months of heavy fighting, remember the experience as one of violence, dirt, heat and lack of water. For Mr Khan, though, it held particular deprivation.
"Shrapnel from a Taleban mortar blew off one of my testicles soon after the fighting started," he said while waiting to petition the governor of Helmand in Lashkar Gah for more men and munitions to attack a Taleban headquarters elsewhere. "But I stayed in Musa Qala with the British and fought on for another two and a half months until we were ordered to leave. The pain was terrible, but there were Talebs to kill."
But when asked whether the deal to withdraw from Musa Qala had left the town free of Taleban influence, as Nato and Afghan government officials claim, Mr Khan’s face clouded as if in greater discomfort.
"Those British soldiers were cursing with us when we were all told to leave," he said. "They said that they had fought and lost friends to keep the town. And now these tribal elders who are in charge of Musa Qala are the same who gave the Taleban support when they fought against us. The deal was just a clever trick to get the foreign soldiers to go."
Musa Qala was one of four towns in northern Helmand to which British troops were sent this summer at the request of the Muhammad Daud, the governor of the province, after his officials and police proved incapable of defending themselves against Taleban attack.
Most observers agree that British commanders had little choice but to respond to Governor Daud’s request for troops. Yet opinion divides sharply as to whether the fighting — and loss of 17 British lives — has improved stability in the province. Today there are neither Afghan police nor British soldiers nor, apparently, Taleban in the centre of Musa Qala, which is governed instead by a shura — council — of 50 tribal elders, each of whom has supplied one gunman to protect the centre of the town.
Under the terms of the 14-point deal leading to the demilitarisation, Musa Qala is supposed to remain under nominal government control with the rule of law, including the collection of taxes, education and redevelopment, administered by the elders. None of that has yet happened.
"It is too early to expect these things to have occurred," Governor Daud said. "The administration of elders has only had two weeks. Schools remain closed in Musa Qala, but they remain closed in many other districts in Helmand, both for girls and boys."
He insisted that he was examining costings for redevelopment work in Musa Qala, and hoped to extend stability from the town centre into new territory. But elders said that since the British withdrawal almost all the surrounding district had returned to the Taleban.
They also said that most of the fighters who had attacked the British, rather than being insurgents who had crossed the border from Pakistan, were local people.
"Most of the fighters weren’t real Taleban," said Wakil Haji Mohammed Naim, one of the elders in Musa Qala’s new administration. "There were some outsiders, but most were local men who were angry with the Government, its robbery and corruption, who were persuaded to fight against the foreigners by our preachers in the mosques. We’ll see how long this deal lasts. The Taleban are respecting it but our people are very angry with the Government." His words reflected how easily, despite their best intent, British forces in northern Helmand often became embroiled in defending criminalised district officials against a force that was only part Taleban. "I’ll take a hell of a lot of convincing to believe that the fighting in Sangin didn’t start as a struggle between a bunch of drug criminals," one British official in Afghanistan said, referring to another of Helmand’s battle zones in which British forces saw heavy action. "We should never have gone near it. It was a straight-up face-off between two drug lords and we were used to tip the balance."
Whatever their success in suppressing attacks, the British may find that the force required and the death toll among indigenous Afghan fighters makes it all the harder to mollify the rural population with redevelopment projects.
To illustrate, Mr Khan pulls out the ID of an attacker killed in the fighting at Musa Qala. It was a United Nations voter registration card, belonging to an Afghan man who only two years ago had believed enough in the political process to vote in the presidential elections.
-------------------------------
Citation: Anthony Loyd and Tahir Luddin. "After the fighting and dying, the Taleban return as British depart," The Times, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-2428038,00.html
-------------------------------
U.S. tactics swelling Al Qaeda in Iraq-Sunni moderate
By Suleiman al-Khalidi
Reuters, 29 October 2006
AMMAN, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Sunnis radicalised by brutal U.S. tactics and disillusioned mainstream insurgents are swelling the ranks of Al Qaeda, which believes it can turn part of Iraq into an Islamic emirate, a moderate Sunni politician said on Sunday.
Saleh Mutlaq, whose Iraqi National Dialogue group supports the U.S.-backed political process, said al Qaeda's growing control of strongholds at the heart of the country's Sunni insurgency was paving the way for an Islamic fundamentalist state in western, central Iraq and even the capital Baghdad.
"In the beginning it was a percentage that did not exceed two to four percent of the total resistance," Mutlaq said in an interview in Amman. "Now al-Qaeda's growth is at the expense of the nationalist resistance."
Last week dozens of al Qaeda-linked gunmen took to the streets of Ramadi in a show of force to announce the city was joining an Islamic state comprising Iraq's mostly Sunni Arab provinces, Islamists and witnesses said.
The western Anbar province encompasses a third of Iraq, has been the deadliest region of Iraq for U.S. forces.
Mutlaq said the decision this month by the Shi'ite-controlled parliament to pass a law allowing provinces to form federal regions encouraged Islamist Sunni groups to launch their own rule in areas under their control.
"They are saying we also have our provinces and will set up an Islamic emirate and this is terrifying," Mutlaq said.
ZEALOTS
Mutlaq said heavy-handed U.S. tactics against civilians have propelled many ordinary Sunnis into the arms of al-Qaeda.
"American prisons have become the school for suicide bombers and transformed many prisoners into al-Qaeda elements when they were not before," Mutlaq said.
He said al Qaeda plans to turn its territorial gains into a launching pad for expansion in Iraq and beyond its borders.
"They want to capture territory to attract more jihadists to destabilise everywhere and they think they can take over all of Iraq later when they have the territory to operate," he said.
He said al Qaeda's growth has exposed a flaw in U.S. military strategy which conceived Iraq as a place where Islamists zealots from across the region could be drawn into a battlezone far from the United States and wiped out.
Mutlaq said he also saw signs that U.S strategists -- reeling from growing casualties and domestic pressure for an exit strategy -- were ready to talk to mainstream nationalist insurgents opposed to al Qaeda's harsher aspirations for Iraq.
The moderate Sunni politician who has pressed the U.S. military to talk with mainstream insurgents said direct dialogue could emerge in the "next few months."
But he warned mainstream Sunni insurgents whose backbone were former army officers and former regime loyalists were not ready to drop their arms without tangible political concessions.
"The nationalist resistance wants those who talk to them to bring them a plan that attains the goals they fought for... Then it will ready to give up its arms," Mutlaq said.
------------------------
Citation: Suleiman al-Khalidi. "U.S. tactics swelling Al Qaeda in Iraq-Sunni moderate," Reuters, 29 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29887817.htm
------------------------
Reuters, 29 October 2006
AMMAN, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Sunnis radicalised by brutal U.S. tactics and disillusioned mainstream insurgents are swelling the ranks of Al Qaeda, which believes it can turn part of Iraq into an Islamic emirate, a moderate Sunni politician said on Sunday.
Saleh Mutlaq, whose Iraqi National Dialogue group supports the U.S.-backed political process, said al Qaeda's growing control of strongholds at the heart of the country's Sunni insurgency was paving the way for an Islamic fundamentalist state in western, central Iraq and even the capital Baghdad.
"In the beginning it was a percentage that did not exceed two to four percent of the total resistance," Mutlaq said in an interview in Amman. "Now al-Qaeda's growth is at the expense of the nationalist resistance."
Last week dozens of al Qaeda-linked gunmen took to the streets of Ramadi in a show of force to announce the city was joining an Islamic state comprising Iraq's mostly Sunni Arab provinces, Islamists and witnesses said.
The western Anbar province encompasses a third of Iraq, has been the deadliest region of Iraq for U.S. forces.
Mutlaq said the decision this month by the Shi'ite-controlled parliament to pass a law allowing provinces to form federal regions encouraged Islamist Sunni groups to launch their own rule in areas under their control.
"They are saying we also have our provinces and will set up an Islamic emirate and this is terrifying," Mutlaq said.
ZEALOTS
Mutlaq said heavy-handed U.S. tactics against civilians have propelled many ordinary Sunnis into the arms of al-Qaeda.
"American prisons have become the school for suicide bombers and transformed many prisoners into al-Qaeda elements when they were not before," Mutlaq said.
He said al Qaeda plans to turn its territorial gains into a launching pad for expansion in Iraq and beyond its borders.
"They want to capture territory to attract more jihadists to destabilise everywhere and they think they can take over all of Iraq later when they have the territory to operate," he said.
He said al Qaeda's growth has exposed a flaw in U.S. military strategy which conceived Iraq as a place where Islamists zealots from across the region could be drawn into a battlezone far from the United States and wiped out.
Mutlaq said he also saw signs that U.S strategists -- reeling from growing casualties and domestic pressure for an exit strategy -- were ready to talk to mainstream nationalist insurgents opposed to al Qaeda's harsher aspirations for Iraq.
The moderate Sunni politician who has pressed the U.S. military to talk with mainstream insurgents said direct dialogue could emerge in the "next few months."
But he warned mainstream Sunni insurgents whose backbone were former army officers and former regime loyalists were not ready to drop their arms without tangible political concessions.
"The nationalist resistance wants those who talk to them to bring them a plan that attains the goals they fought for... Then it will ready to give up its arms," Mutlaq said.
------------------------
Citation: Suleiman al-Khalidi. "U.S. tactics swelling Al Qaeda in Iraq-Sunni moderate," Reuters, 29 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29887817.htm
------------------------
Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake
We know now that invading Iraq was the wrong decision, but that doesn't vindicate the antiwar crowd.
By Jonah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006
THERE'S A STRICT taboo in the column-writing business against recycling ideas. So let me start with something fresh.
The Iraq war was a mistake.
I know, I know. But I've never said it before. And I don't enjoy saying it now. I'm sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that's fine because I'm not joining their ranks anyway.
In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known — or what was believed to have been known — in 2003. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein's bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do. Washington's more important intelligence failure lay in underestimating what would be required to rebuild and restore post-Hussein Iraq. The White House did not anticipate a low-intensity civil war in Iraq, never planned for it and would not have deemed it in the U.S. interest to pay this high a price in prestige, treasure and, of course, lives.
According to the goofy parameters of the current debate, I'm now supposed to call for withdrawing from Iraq. If it was a mistake to go in, we should get out, some argue. But this is unpersuasive. A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out. We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.
Those who say that it's not the central front in the war on terror are in a worse state of denial than they think Bush is in. Of course it's the central front in the war on terror. That it has become so is a valid criticism of Bush, but it's also strong reason for seeing our Iraqi intervention through. If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened.
Bush's critics claim that democracy promotion was an afterthought, a convenient rebranding of a war gone sour. I think that's unfair, but even if true, it wouldn't mean liberty isn't at stake. It wouldn't mean that promoting a liberal society in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world wouldn't be in our interest and consistent with our ideals. In war, you sometimes end up having to defend ground you wouldn't have chosen with perfect knowledge beforehand. That's us in Iraq.
According to the conventional script, if I'm not saying "bug out" of Iraq, I'm supposed to say "stay the course." But there's a third option, and, funnily enough, I found it in an old column of mine (journalistic taboos be damned!). I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay.
Polling suggests that they want us to go. But polling absent consequences is a form of protest. With accountability, minds may change and appreciation for the U.S. presence might grow.
If Iraqis voted "stay," we'd have a mandate to do what's necessary to win, and our ideals would be reaffirmed. If they voted "go," our values would also be reaffirmed, and we could leave with honor. And pretty much everyone would have to accept democracy as the only legitimate expression of national will.
Finishing the job is better than leaving a mess. And if we can finish the job, the war won't be remembered as a mistake.
-----------------------
Citation: Jonah Goldberg. "Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake," Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-goldberg19oct19,0,7691039.column?coll=la-util-opinion-sunday
-----------------------
By Jonah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006
THERE'S A STRICT taboo in the column-writing business against recycling ideas. So let me start with something fresh.
The Iraq war was a mistake.
I know, I know. But I've never said it before. And I don't enjoy saying it now. I'm sure that to the antiwar crowd this is too little, too late, and that's fine because I'm not joining their ranks anyway.
In the dumbed-down debate we're having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren't really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn't to war per se. It's to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush's or Israel's or ExxonMobil's interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.
But that's no excuse. Truth is truth. And the Iraq war was a mistake by the most obvious criteria: If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to war with Iraq in 2003. I do think that Congress (including Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller and John Murtha) was right to vote for the war given what was known — or what was believed to have been known — in 2003. And the claims from Democrats who voted for the war that they were lied to strikes me as nothing more than cowardly buck-passing.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction is a side issue. The WMD fiasco was a global intelligence failure, but calling Saddam Hussein's bluff after 9/11 was the right thing to do. Washington's more important intelligence failure lay in underestimating what would be required to rebuild and restore post-Hussein Iraq. The White House did not anticipate a low-intensity civil war in Iraq, never planned for it and would not have deemed it in the U.S. interest to pay this high a price in prestige, treasure and, of course, lives.
According to the goofy parameters of the current debate, I'm now supposed to call for withdrawing from Iraq. If it was a mistake to go in, we should get out, some argue. But this is unpersuasive. A doctor will warn that if you see a man stabbed in the chest, you shouldn't rush to pull the knife out. We are in Iraq for good reasons and for reasons that were well-intentioned but wrong. But we are there.
Those who say that it's not the central front in the war on terror are in a worse state of denial than they think Bush is in. Of course it's the central front in the war on terror. That it has become so is a valid criticism of Bush, but it's also strong reason for seeing our Iraqi intervention through. If we pull out precipitously, jihadism will open a franchise in Iraq and gain steam around the world, and the U.S. will be weakened.
Bush's critics claim that democracy promotion was an afterthought, a convenient rebranding of a war gone sour. I think that's unfair, but even if true, it wouldn't mean liberty isn't at stake. It wouldn't mean that promoting a liberal society in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world wouldn't be in our interest and consistent with our ideals. In war, you sometimes end up having to defend ground you wouldn't have chosen with perfect knowledge beforehand. That's us in Iraq.
According to the conventional script, if I'm not saying "bug out" of Iraq, I'm supposed to say "stay the course." But there's a third option, and, funnily enough, I found it in an old column of mine (journalistic taboos be damned!). I think we should ask the Iraqis to vote on whether U.S. troops should stay.
Polling suggests that they want us to go. But polling absent consequences is a form of protest. With accountability, minds may change and appreciation for the U.S. presence might grow.
If Iraqis voted "stay," we'd have a mandate to do what's necessary to win, and our ideals would be reaffirmed. If they voted "go," our values would also be reaffirmed, and we could leave with honor. And pretty much everyone would have to accept democracy as the only legitimate expression of national will.
Finishing the job is better than leaving a mess. And if we can finish the job, the war won't be remembered as a mistake.
-----------------------
Citation: Jonah Goldberg. "Iraq Was a Worthy Mistake," Los Angeles Times, 19 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/la-oe-goldberg19oct19,0,7691039.column?coll=la-util-opinion-sunday
-----------------------
101 Americans die in Iraq during October
By Steven R. Hurst
The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The American death toll for October climbed past 100, a grim milestone reached as a top White House envoy turned up unexpectedly in Baghdad on Monday to smooth over a rough patch in U.S.-Iraqi ties. At least 80 people were killed across Iraq, 33 in a Sadr City bombing targeting workers.
A member of the 89th Military Police Brigade was killed in east Baghdad Monday, and a Marine died in fighting in insurgent infested Anbar province the day before, raising to 101 the number of U.S. service members killed in a bloody October, the fourth deadliest month of the war. At least 2,814 American forces have died since the war began.
Upon arriving on an unannounced visit, National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley went straight into meetings with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his security chief, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, telling them he "wanted to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president."
The White House said Hadley was not on a mission to repair ragged relations, accounts of which it said had been "overblown" by the news media.
"Absolutely not," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington. "This is a long planned trip to get a first hand report of the situation on the ground from the political, economic and security fronts."
But the timing of the visit argued otherwise.
Last week Al-Maliki issued a string of bitter complaints — at one point saying he wasn't "America's man in Iraq" — after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad unveiled adjustments in America's Iraq strategy.
The ambassador said the prime minister was in agreement. Al-Maliki angrily charged the White House with infringing on his government's sovereignty and said that he was not consulted.
By week's end, al-Maliki and
President George W. Bush held a hastily convened video conference call and agreed to speed the training of Iraqi forces and the return of control over all territory to the Iraqi army.
With American voter support for the war at a low point and the midterm vote just days away, a top aide to al-Maliki said the Iraqi leader was using Bush and Republican vulnerability on the issue to leverage concessions from the White House — particularly the speedy withdrawal of American forces from Iraqi cities to U.S. bases in the country.
The case of a kidnapped American soldier, meanwhile, took a curious turn when a woman claiming to be his mother-in-law said that the soldier was married to her daughter, a Baghdad college student, and was with the young woman and her family when hooded gunmen handcuffed and threw him in the back seat of a white Mercedes early last week. The marriage would violate military regulations.
The soldier's disappearance prompted a massive and continuing manhunt in Baghdad, with much of it focused on Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum in extreme northeastern Baghdad.
The military still had checkpoints surrounding the district Monday when a suspected Sunni insurgent bomber slipped in and set off a bomb among laborers assembled to find a day's work. The blast tore through food stalls and kiosks shortly after 6 a.m., killing at least 33 and wounding 59.
Sadr City, is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and has been the scene of repeated bomb attacks by suspected al-Qaida fighters in what were seen as attempts to incite Shiite revenge attacks and drag the country into full-blown civil war.
Al-Sadr, in a statement addressed to supporters in Sadr City Monday night, warned of unspecified action if the "siege" of the neighborhood continued and criticized what he called the silence of politicians over actions by the U.S. military in the district.
"If this siege continues for long, we will resort to actions which I will have no choice but to take, God willing, and when the time is right," he said in the statement, a text of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
Ali Abdul-Ridha, injured in the head and shoulders, said he was waiting for a job with his brother and about 100 others when he heard the massive explosion and "lost sight of everything."
He said the area had been exposed to attack because U.S. and Iraqi forces had driven into hiding Mahdi Army fighters who police the district.
"That forced Mahdi Army members, who were patrolling the streets, to vanish," the 41-year-old Abdul-Ridha said from his bed in al-Sadr Hospital, his brother lying beside him asleep.
However, Falih Jabar, a 37-year old father of two boys, blamed the militia forces for provoking extremists to attack civilians in the neighborhood of 2.5 million people.
"We are poor people just looking to make a living. We have nothing to do with any conflict," said Jabar, who suffered back wounds. "If (the extremists) have problems with the Mahdi Army, they must fight them, not us," he added.
The last major bombing in Sadr City occurred on Sept. 23 when a bomb hidden in a barrel blew up a kerosene tanker and killed at least 35 people waiting to stock up on fuel for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Elsewhere in the capital, gunmen killed hard-line Sunni academic Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professors Union, as he was leaving home. At least 156 university professors have been killed since the war began. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, more are believed to have fled to neighboring countries, although Education Ministry spokesman Basil al-Khatib al-Khatib said he had no specific numbers on those who had fled.
Police and security officials throughout Iraq reported that at least 45 other people, many of them police, were killed in sectarian violence Monday or found dead, many of them dumped in the Tigris River and a tributary south of the capital.
-----------------------
Citation: Steven R. Hurst. "101 Americans die in Iraq during October," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
-----------------------
The Associated Press, 30 October 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The American death toll for October climbed past 100, a grim milestone reached as a top White House envoy turned up unexpectedly in Baghdad on Monday to smooth over a rough patch in U.S.-Iraqi ties. At least 80 people were killed across Iraq, 33 in a Sadr City bombing targeting workers.
A member of the 89th Military Police Brigade was killed in east Baghdad Monday, and a Marine died in fighting in insurgent infested Anbar province the day before, raising to 101 the number of U.S. service members killed in a bloody October, the fourth deadliest month of the war. At least 2,814 American forces have died since the war began.
Upon arriving on an unannounced visit, National Security Adviser
Stephen Hadley went straight into meetings with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his security chief, Mouwafak al-Rubaie, telling them he "wanted to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president."
The White House said Hadley was not on a mission to repair ragged relations, accounts of which it said had been "overblown" by the news media.
"Absolutely not," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington. "This is a long planned trip to get a first hand report of the situation on the ground from the political, economic and security fronts."
But the timing of the visit argued otherwise.
Last week Al-Maliki issued a string of bitter complaints — at one point saying he wasn't "America's man in Iraq" — after U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad unveiled adjustments in America's Iraq strategy.
The ambassador said the prime minister was in agreement. Al-Maliki angrily charged the White House with infringing on his government's sovereignty and said that he was not consulted.
By week's end, al-Maliki and
President George W. Bush held a hastily convened video conference call and agreed to speed the training of Iraqi forces and the return of control over all territory to the Iraqi army.
With American voter support for the war at a low point and the midterm vote just days away, a top aide to al-Maliki said the Iraqi leader was using Bush and Republican vulnerability on the issue to leverage concessions from the White House — particularly the speedy withdrawal of American forces from Iraqi cities to U.S. bases in the country.
The case of a kidnapped American soldier, meanwhile, took a curious turn when a woman claiming to be his mother-in-law said that the soldier was married to her daughter, a Baghdad college student, and was with the young woman and her family when hooded gunmen handcuffed and threw him in the back seat of a white Mercedes early last week. The marriage would violate military regulations.
The soldier's disappearance prompted a massive and continuing manhunt in Baghdad, with much of it focused on Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite slum in extreme northeastern Baghdad.
The military still had checkpoints surrounding the district Monday when a suspected Sunni insurgent bomber slipped in and set off a bomb among laborers assembled to find a day's work. The blast tore through food stalls and kiosks shortly after 6 a.m., killing at least 33 and wounding 59.
Sadr City, is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and has been the scene of repeated bomb attacks by suspected al-Qaida fighters in what were seen as attempts to incite Shiite revenge attacks and drag the country into full-blown civil war.
Al-Sadr, in a statement addressed to supporters in Sadr City Monday night, warned of unspecified action if the "siege" of the neighborhood continued and criticized what he called the silence of politicians over actions by the U.S. military in the district.
"If this siege continues for long, we will resort to actions which I will have no choice but to take, God willing, and when the time is right," he said in the statement, a text of which was obtained by The Associated Press.
Ali Abdul-Ridha, injured in the head and shoulders, said he was waiting for a job with his brother and about 100 others when he heard the massive explosion and "lost sight of everything."
He said the area had been exposed to attack because U.S. and Iraqi forces had driven into hiding Mahdi Army fighters who police the district.
"That forced Mahdi Army members, who were patrolling the streets, to vanish," the 41-year-old Abdul-Ridha said from his bed in al-Sadr Hospital, his brother lying beside him asleep.
However, Falih Jabar, a 37-year old father of two boys, blamed the militia forces for provoking extremists to attack civilians in the neighborhood of 2.5 million people.
"We are poor people just looking to make a living. We have nothing to do with any conflict," said Jabar, who suffered back wounds. "If (the extremists) have problems with the Mahdi Army, they must fight them, not us," he added.
The last major bombing in Sadr City occurred on Sept. 23 when a bomb hidden in a barrel blew up a kerosene tanker and killed at least 35 people waiting to stock up on fuel for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
Elsewhere in the capital, gunmen killed hard-line Sunni academic Essam al-Rawi, head of the University Professors Union, as he was leaving home. At least 156 university professors have been killed since the war began. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, more are believed to have fled to neighboring countries, although Education Ministry spokesman Basil al-Khatib al-Khatib said he had no specific numbers on those who had fled.
Police and security officials throughout Iraq reported that at least 45 other people, many of them police, were killed in sectarian violence Monday or found dead, many of them dumped in the Tigris River and a tributary south of the capital.
-----------------------
Citation: Steven R. Hurst. "101 Americans die in Iraq during October," The Associated Press, 30 October 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061030/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq
-----------------------
The False Friends of the American Military: The Cowboy Culture
By David Rieff
The New Republic, 10 October 2005
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
By Robert D. Kaplan
(Random House, 421 pp., $27.95)
The French writer Jean Larteguy is largely forgotten now, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s his novels chronicling and celebrating the French paratroopers' fight against Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionaries, first for empire and then for a metropole stretching from Normandy to the Sahara, were immensely popular. These books, which were very skillfully written, had titles such as The Mercenaries, The Centurions, and The Praetorians, all evocative of the comparison that was central to Larteguy's vision: the French troops as latter-day Roman centurions holding the line against the barbarians, exactly as their Roman ancestors had done along Hadrian's Wall. Larteguy's books extolled the self-sacrifice of commando soldiers who were unappreciated or even reviled at home, but were nonetheless the bulwark between la patrie and anarchy.
It was hardly surprising that rootless Paris cosmopolitans, homosexuals, self-serving politicians, and traitorous leftists tended to be the villains in Larteguy's books, and far more so than the revolutionaries whom his commandos were fighting. But even the regular French army did not escape his scorn. "I'd like to have two armies," he once wrote,
In the case of Larteguy's heroes, those "tricks," as he called them so disingenuously, included the lavish use of torture. Indeed, one of the principal characters in The Centurions, Captain Boisfeuras, was loosely modeled on Brigadier General Pierre Aussarresses, a hero of the French Resistance and a career officer who became one of the leading torturers in what came to be known as the Battle of Algiers, and whose frank defense in his memoirs of the crimes he and his comrades committed caused a scandal in France in 2001. In the case of Robert D. Kaplan, there is no question of any defense of torture. If anything, the elite soldiers whose actions he chronicles in his new book view human rights as what he calls "a tool of counterinsurgency." Still, the book is in large measure an updated if unwitting recapitulation of Larteguy's themes: the nobility and the necessity of the Western imperial vocation; the contrast between the valorous, self-sacrificing, can-do young commandos at empire's edge and the careerist, conventional bureaucrats of the risk-averse regular army; the belief that empire--not just the American one, as Kaplan adamantly describes it, but Rome, Venice, Britain: in sum, all the great European hegemons of the past--"were the most morally enlightened states of their age." But what Larteguy lived as a paratrooper in Indochina, Kaplan experiences as a journalist reporting from almost every part of the world where American forces are active--which, as he himself points out, means a lot of the planet.
Kaplan's many books have won him a wide following within the United States military: Imperial Grunts comes festooned with praise from retired senior officers such as Anthony Zinni and Barry McCaffrey, and an acknowledgements section in which the military theorist and pundit, retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, is credited with the idea for the book. One of Kaplan's critics, Thomas P. M. Barnett, a professor at the Naval War College, once accused him of accepting without question the views of the Pacific Command about China in an article that Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic Monthly about the coming confrontation between the United States and China.
This is not to say that Kaplan's views are uncontroversial. To the contrary, his basic contention--that the heart and soul of the American military is now its expeditionary component, above all the Marine Corps, and its commando component, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM)--is one that many senior officers and military intellectuals within the War Colleges and Service Academies would repudiate. But they would do so at their peril, since, as Kaplan himself notes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's implementation of the Global War on Terrorism has made SOCOM "a war fighting command in more than name only," and, however imperfectly (Kaplan blames this on turf battles within the Department of Defense), "the executive arm for the War on Terrorism." (General Eric Shinseki discovered, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that speaking before Congress in opposition to Rumsfeld's opinions resulted in forced retirement.)
Kaplan is a man with whom Rumsfeld would be hard pressed to find fault. Like Rumsfeld, he has no patience with what he calls "the formalized rigidity" of cold war-era military institutions unsuited for the wars and the counterinsurgency operations of the early twenty-first century. Like Rumsfeld, he believes that military successes during the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 demonstrated the viability of "deftly combining high-technology and low-tech unconventional warfare." And, perhaps more enthusiastically even than Rumsfeld, Kaplan sees the tactics being developed in the field by U.S. Special Operations forces as those that America "would employ to manage an unruly world."
Such a sentence only hints at the kind of hero worship to which Kaplan is prey. Major General Sidney Schachnow, a retired Special Forces senior officer, puts him in mind (shades of Larteguy again) of the Roman centurion Ligustinus, who was "rewarded for bravery thirty-four times." In Iraq, he travels into combat with a Marine unit and marvels at their "unpretentious willingness to die," which he attributes to "their working class origins." There is a good deal of right-wing, blog-style bashing of alleged liberal elites in Imperial Grunts, as well as cheap asides contrasting the selfless faith and patriotism of the soldiers, who "saw themselves as belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States," with the egomania of America's "global cosmopolitans." For him, the American military not only fights America's wars, it has also become "the guardian" of America's working-class values and traditions. These are the people "who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty." They inhabit "a world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobaccos, like Copenhagen and Red Man."
When the soldiers he meets do not remind him of Roman legionnaires, Kaplan is apt to compare them to Lewis and Clark or other early heroes of America's push westward, or else to what he calls "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy, without which the nation would not have been able to fight its later wars quite as well as it had." I wonder what the African American officers of today's U.S. military would make of that. The abdication of critical faculties implicit in such a historical comparison is startling in a writer as historically minded as Kaplan. The "gleaming" tradition to which he alludes helped to keep the military segregated until 1949, while its integration was a first step in the desegregation of the South. Indeed, the rise of a new American military that is probably the most intelligent, creative, and successful institution with regard to race relations in the United States represents a victory for the military tradition that looks back to the 54th Massachusetts and the Tuskeegee Airmen, not to Nathan Bedford Forrest's terrorism or to Stonewall Jackson sucking on his lemons at the First Battle of Manassas.
But this is not the most significant of Kaplan's many analogies between the American armed forces of today and its predecessors. The one that is most central to his argument views today's soldiers' fight against Islamists and terrorists as something very close to the Indian-fighting army of the nineteenth-century American West. Those wars too, Kaplan argues, were imperial in nature, and he refers without any further elaboration to "the new American empire west of the Mississippi River." His travels seem to have hardened him in this view: "As I traveled from continent to continent with the American military in the first years of the twenty-first century, my most recurring image would be the one that Remington himself might have painted: singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes."
This is breathtaking. Here is a serious writer in 2005 admiring the Indian wars, which in their brutality brought about the end of an entire American civilization. But then Kaplan goes to some lengths to describe the peoples who lived in North America when white settlers began to arrive as virtually without any civilization worthy of the name. "The North American Indians," he writes, "were a throwback to the nomadic horse peoples of the Eurasian steppe ... They [also] invited comparison with another imperial nemesis: the nineteenth century Pushtuns and Afridis of the Northwest Frontier of British India." And he concludes: "Beyond the Mississippi or Missouri rivers, the American military found a Hobbesian world in which internecine ethnic warfare, motivated by competition for territory and resources, was the primary fact of life."
The primary fact of life? Whatever else one can say about American Indian life in the nineteenth century, the primary fact was the arrival of the white settlers and the military forces that accompanied them, who drove the native peoples off their land, massacred tens if not hundreds of thousands of them, and deported the others to reservations far from arable land or the plains on which they had hunted. Kaplan may claim that a figure such as Remington--whom he admires as the American Kipling--stood for America's "righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos, a mission not unlike that of post-cold war humanitarian interventions," but the assertion is obscene. I doubt very much that many Indians would share Kaplan's enthusiasm for "Remington's mythic universe [in which] those early imperialists, the cavalry officers and the pathfinders, appropriated the warrior ideal of their Indian enemy, which was marked by bravery and steadfastness." Kaplan has been watching too many John Ford movies. Has he never heard of the Trail of Tears? Does he really think that describing Geronimo as having "lived out the last years of his life" at Fort Sill, Oklahoma adequately conveys what took place? Is describing the streets of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as being named for the various "North American Indian tribes with which the US Army negotiated truces" really a historically licit way of accounting for what took place, or how those truces were made? And what on earth does it mean for Kaplan to claim that the habit that American soldiers now have of referring to their postings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, Colombia, or the Philippines as "Indian Country" and, in Kaplan's view, that, like the Indian Wars, the war on terrorism is "really about taming the frontier," should not be understood as a "slight" against Native North Americans?
The problem with all this is that Kaplan is influential, and not just within certain segments of the American military and with right-wing bloggers such as talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. Bill Clinton famously, and in the event disastrously, claimed that Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts convinced him that the United States should not intervene in Bosnia. Tom Brokaw, who is certainly a member in good standing of what people such as Hewitt deride as the "Mainstream" or "Legacy" liberal media, has given Imperial Grunts a blurb in which he described the book as an account of "the new warrior-diplomats who use weapons, imagination, and personal passion to protect and advance the interests of the United States."
So where to begin? Perhaps by injecting a little historical reality into Kaplan's mythical universe. When historians talk about the British taming the Indian frontier, they mean dominating it politically and militarily, not conquering it outright, and expelling its inhabitants, and settling the land with their own people. Despite several disastrous attempts to conquer Afghanistan over the course of the nineteenth century, the principal strategy of the British along the northwestern frontier of the Raj was to impose a status quo that did not threaten British interests in India proper. If they bowed to that, Pushtuns and the Afridis could do what they liked. But the phrase "taming the frontier" when applied to the American West meant something entirely different. It meant driving the Indians out by any means necessary. It was a murderous, zero-sum game, and not at all, to put it mildly, an ideal for contemporary American policy.
Of course, Kaplan knows this perfectly well. Late in his book, in a consideration of whether enough American troops had been sent to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, he muses in an aside that "the Sioux and their allies were ultimately vanquished not because the US Army fully adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy--it didn't--but because of the flooding of the Old West with settlers, who were, in turn, aided by the railroad." Somehow Kaplan can write this sentence and yet feel no obligation to revise his ludicrous analogy between British imperial policy on the Indian-Afghan frontier and the settlement of the American West.
There are many important things to say about the Indian Wars and the western migration of white settlers in nineteenth-century America, but Kaplan says none of them. Instead we get from him boneheaded nonsense about the Indian Wars being exercises in exporting democracy, order, and good government. There are more respectable ways to make the neo-imperialist argument--one could make the case, as Niall Ferguson, Hugh Thomas, and Deepak Lal have done, that the British Empire did more good than harm for the peoples it subjugated; but it is impossible credibly to make such an argument about the subjugation of the native peoples of North America.
Too romantic and sentimental to be called analysis, too ideological to count as reportage, and yet too journalistic to be a straightforward polemic, Imperial Grunts is a disorganized and in many ways an incoherent book. Just when Kaplan the reporter is exercising his considerable talents to their best advantage, Kaplan the ideologue interrupts with his doctrine. As a result, there are times when Kaplan's narrative seems like an extended exercise in free association. In one representative passage, Kaplan is on the front line with a Marine unit moving into Fallujah during the first, abortive assault on the city in the spring of 2004, and splendidly describes the "grunts''' slow advance under fire. But then his attention shifts away from the battle and toward geo-strategical speculation and imperial history. Staring at enemy snipers a few hundred meters away in one paragraph, he opines in the next that "the third world urban environment was like the Old West." A few hundred words later, having briefly doubled back to a description of the fighting, then left it again, Kaplan is cantering from his belief that the martial spirit of "the Old Confederacy [still inhabits] the soul of the American military," to comparing the U.S. military's fight in Iraq to the British army's suppression of the Indian Mutiny, to a meditation on the role of the media on the conduct of military operations in the early twenty-first century. Then, after a space break, Kaplan is back to being a reporter again.
The American military deserves better than this kind of hagiography, just as it deserves better than to have to carry out the thankless and even hopeless missions that Kaplan would like to assign it--missions that, if the experience in Iraq proves anything, will fall clumsily short of any Kiplingesque grandeur. In fairness, Kaplan was never especially enthusiastic about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "The American empire of the early twenty-first century," he writes, "depended on a tissue of intangibles that was threatened, rather than invigorated, by the naked exercise of power." For Kaplan, the real success story of America's commitment to policing the planet (which he calls the "battle space for the American military") is the work of small units of elite U.S. troops, and sometimes even individual soldiers, controlling the world quietly in countries ranging from Yemen to Mongolia.
It is unclear if Kaplan has any conception of the fact that his account of the role of the American military abroad is chilling, or should be, especially to believers in the fundamental benignity of American power. Kaplan's outlook cannot finally be described as interventionism, or imperialism, or anything larger exercised by moral and strategic objectives; it is just plain old militarism. To take the most obvious example: if it is true, as Kaplan contends, that "even as elites in New York and Washington debated imperialism in grand, historical terms, individual marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors were interpreting policy on their own, on the ground, in dozens upon dozens of countries every week, oblivious to such faraway discussions," then civilian control over the military--one of the most fundamental arrangements separating democratic societies from undemocratic ones--is in grave danger. After all, the role of the American military is to carry out the commands of a civilian national command authority, not to make policy on its own.
Soldiers like to grouse; and some of the commando officers or officers on secondment to various units of the Special Operations Command (though not the Marines) have a weakness for dismissing civilian leadership and, indeed, the leadership of what they (and Kaplan, echoing them) view as the chair-bound bureaucrats of the "Big Army" and "Big Navy." They do not enjoy the tendency of senior leaders in the uniformed services to put limits on their freedom to operate as they see fit. Not long ago some SOCOM soldiers grew their hair and beards and dressed in a combination of U.S. military issue fatigues and local costume during the war in Afghanistan, and seeing this in a magazine, one Army three-star made it his business to see that these men conformed to military regulations. Among SOCOM people in the field, one still sometimes hears complaints about this, and, more broadly, complaints about how, despite the new importance of special operations, a more "by the book" mentality remains dominant in the military.
But they are just that: complaints, grousing, letting off steam, by men whose sworn duty is not just to kill but to die, and risk death every day. They are entitled to their venting. But Kaplan has no such excuse when he promotes their grievances into some romantic Rambo-like non-conformist heroism--when he contrasts "conventional thinkers inside the Pentagon [who were] aghast" at this kind of improvisation with SOCOM commanders and erstwhile commanders whom he dubs "unconventional warriors," and portrays as just the kind of freethinkers the American empire needs. When he approvingly quotes Major General Schachnow, who answered his question about how the United States could "infiltrate and police the world" with the retort that "you produce a product and let him loose," he is in effect arguing for a relinquishing of civilian control over the military, since what Schachnow meant by "product," or at least what Kaplan takes him to mean, is not just "smiling" and "understanding" when SOCOM people shed their uniforms and grow Afghan-style beards, but rather letting these elite warriors loose and giving them the latitude to advance their country's interest pretty much as they see fit.
But this is precisely the authority that the American republic, as a constitutional matter, has not granted to its military. To be sure, there are many criticisms that may be made of the American military, operationally and doctrinally; but the cowboy culture of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and of members of the SOCOM establishment who are on his staff or whom he has favored to a degree unheard of in the practice of any previous secretary of defense, must not be allowed to hide behind the spirit of criticism. It has something else in mind. Off the record at least, many officers express considerable anxiety over the SOCOM-izing of the military on Rumsfeld's watch. They point to the fact that General Peter Schoomaker, the current Army Chief of Staff (Rumsfeld brought him out of retirement to replace Shinseki), was one of the originators of Delta Force, the elite commando unit in which Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin--the man who once said that he knew he would successfully hunt down a Somali warlord because "my God is bigger than his God"--also distinguished himself before becoming the deputy of the current undersecretary of defense for intelligence. There were also numerous, if less well-publicized promotions of SOCOM veterans to flag rank.
When he speaks of a "bureaucratic straightjacket," Kaplan sounds as if he is channeling Rumsfeld and his outside-the-box inanities. When he criticizes the failure of the American military to "power down to the level of small units and expand their activities," he sounds like a spokesman for SOCOM. But when he approvingly quotes an Alabama National Guard Lieutenant Colonel named Marcus Custer who told him that "you can't be effective in the War on Terrorism unless you break the rules of the Big Army," and that maybe in the future American special forces would be "incorporated into a new and reformed CIA rather than into the Big Army," Kaplan, whether he knows it or not, is attacking the heart of what the army of a democratic country is supposed to be. Whatever Kaplan may choose to imagine, or whatever some maverick SOCOM extremists may fantasize, it is the task of the American military to carry out American policy, not to make it.
Kaplan has muddled up the general and the particular in the formulation and the implementation of American foreign policy. He may think he is scoring a telling point when, during his time with U.S. forces in Colombia, he muses that "while policy specialists argued general principles like nation-building in Washington and New York seminars, young middle-level officers were the true agents of the imperium." Leaving aside Kaplan's sneering anti-intellectual tone--he seems to have forgotten that writers are also armchair strategists, and that a good deal of strategic wisdom has been discovered in armchairs--it would be almost impossible for his assertion to be more wrong-headed. If post-Saddam Iraq has proved anything, it is that the United States needed more of those seminars, and that the Department of Defense needed to get off its plinth and make a real attempt to think through the implications of the policy recommendations that State Department and other Iraq and post-conflict specialists offered before the invasion got underway.
As a result, the mid-level officers on the ground in Iraq did not respond well to the looting of Baghdad, nor plan adequately for what would happen if Baathists or terrorists mounted a real insurgency. In no sense was this their fault. Their duties were tactical; those of the senior leaders back home strategic. Again, Kaplan can hardly be unaware of the distinction, and yet he wrote this whole book without ever addressing it seriously. The reality is that though the planning failures in Iraq were the responsibility of senior officials in the Bush administration, and not of the "iron majors" who so impressed Kaplan during his travels, this does not mean the majors should have had the last word. The chain of command as it exists is the only one that a democratic society can possibly accept. The problem was not that there was civilian and bureaucratic control of the military. The problem was that the civilian and bureaucratic control of the military was incompetent.
Kaplan declares that he wished to see American troop deployments from one end of it to the other through the eyes of the soldiers themselves--"from their perspective," as he puts it, "not from mine." Are those really the only two perspectives available? Perhaps the explanation for Kaplan's confusions and misunderstandings is that he spent too much time with his beloved grunts. A writer who boasts that he wanted "to cut myself off from civilians as much as possible" may not be in a particularly good position to think through seriously the problem of empire, which is a general question, not a particular one, a subject that may be illuminated by historical and moral analysis, not by reportage, no matter how vivid and valiant. At the end of Imperial Grunts, as Kaplan leaves for Kuwait, heading home, a Marine general tells him, "Go home and rest a few weeks in the world of porcelain shitters. Then come back for more." A fine expression of a certain soldierly parochialism; but Kaplan seems to consider the remark elevating and enlightening.
The real question is, for more what? The general probably meant more experience of battle. And Kaplan has gone back. Imperial Grunts is only the first in what he promises will be a multi-book treatment of what he calls "imperial maintenance on the ground." But while enjoying those porcelain shitters, he would have profited from asking himself the kind of hard questions about the American empire that are best answered away from the front lines, and making the same commitment to the intellect that he made to the field. Presumably, Kaplan will be true to his word and Imperial Grunts will only be the first of his love songs to the American military.
The paradox is that he has written anything but a triumphalist book. The oddest thing about this odd book is its insistence on the transience of the American empire, even as he leaves no stone unturned in his effort to glorify it. "To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment," he observes in his first chapter, "Injun Country." It was "a moment that even if it lasted for several more decades would constitute but a flicker among the long march of hegemons that had calmed broad swaths of the globe." He then goes on to enumerate various empires and their lifespans, from the Achaemenids to the British, by way of the Chinese, the Vandals, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and of course the Romans.
But then he teaches that "a liberal empire like America was likely to create the conditions for its own demise, and thus to be particularly short-lived." So this is not Kipling, it is Spengler. Kaplan is tragically wrong-headed even within his own frame of reference. Put the case, debatable as it is, that the United States is an empire in the same sense that Britain, or Portugal, or Spain, or Rome were empires. Further put the case, as Kaplan also does, that this empire will be gone in no more than several decades. Why on earth would any American patriot, "a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism," as Kaplan puts it, or anyone who just wishes America well, condemn the country to what, on his own account, will be a not-so-long march toward a bleak and broken future? Why not strive, in this case, to create a multi-lateral international order that, taking into account the inevitable rise of new hegemons such as India and China, organizes the international system as favorably as possible toward the interests of the United States?
The Kipling of "The White Man's Burden," whom Kaplan goes to such lengths to defend, was not beseeching the United States to become an imperial power with all the eloquence at his command, while simultaneously holding in his head the vision of the proximate dissolution of that empire. But this seems to be Kaplan's vision, insofar as anything consistent can be extrapolated from his breathless dithyramb to the boots on the ground. Or are we back to Larteguy's lonely centurion, acutely conscious that back in Rome everything is going to hell even as he faithfully carries out his duty on the forward ramparts of the empire--SOCOM in swords and sandals? The good news is that this may describe Kaplan more accurately than it describes his grunts. He reports that "the grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial." He does not explain the distinction, but it seems to be a sign at least of good sense in these American soldiers. So there is hope for the Republic yet.
David Rieff is a contributing editor at TNR.
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Citation: David Rieff. "The False Friends of the American Military: The Cowboy Culture," The New Republic, 10 October 2005.
Original URL: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051010&s=rieff101005
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The New Republic, 10 October 2005
Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
By Robert D. Kaplan
(Random House, 421 pp., $27.95)
The French writer Jean Larteguy is largely forgotten now, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s his novels chronicling and celebrating the French paratroopers' fight against Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionaries, first for empire and then for a metropole stretching from Normandy to the Sahara, were immensely popular. These books, which were very skillfully written, had titles such as The Mercenaries, The Centurions, and The Praetorians, all evocative of the comparison that was central to Larteguy's vision: the French troops as latter-day Roman centurions holding the line against the barbarians, exactly as their Roman ancestors had done along Hadrian's Wall. Larteguy's books extolled the self-sacrifice of commando soldiers who were unappreciated or even reviled at home, but were nonetheless the bulwark between la patrie and anarchy.
It was hardly surprising that rootless Paris cosmopolitans, homosexuals, self-serving politicians, and traitorous leftists tended to be the villains in Larteguy's books, and far more so than the revolutionaries whom his commandos were fighting. But even the regular French army did not escape his scorn. "I'd like to have two armies," he once wrote,
one for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals and dear little regimental officers, who would be deeply concerned over their general's bowel movements or their colonel's piles; an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country. [But] the other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That's the army in which I should like to fight.
In the case of Larteguy's heroes, those "tricks," as he called them so disingenuously, included the lavish use of torture. Indeed, one of the principal characters in The Centurions, Captain Boisfeuras, was loosely modeled on Brigadier General Pierre Aussarresses, a hero of the French Resistance and a career officer who became one of the leading torturers in what came to be known as the Battle of Algiers, and whose frank defense in his memoirs of the crimes he and his comrades committed caused a scandal in France in 2001. In the case of Robert D. Kaplan, there is no question of any defense of torture. If anything, the elite soldiers whose actions he chronicles in his new book view human rights as what he calls "a tool of counterinsurgency." Still, the book is in large measure an updated if unwitting recapitulation of Larteguy's themes: the nobility and the necessity of the Western imperial vocation; the contrast between the valorous, self-sacrificing, can-do young commandos at empire's edge and the careerist, conventional bureaucrats of the risk-averse regular army; the belief that empire--not just the American one, as Kaplan adamantly describes it, but Rome, Venice, Britain: in sum, all the great European hegemons of the past--"were the most morally enlightened states of their age." But what Larteguy lived as a paratrooper in Indochina, Kaplan experiences as a journalist reporting from almost every part of the world where American forces are active--which, as he himself points out, means a lot of the planet.
Kaplan's many books have won him a wide following within the United States military: Imperial Grunts comes festooned with praise from retired senior officers such as Anthony Zinni and Barry McCaffrey, and an acknowledgements section in which the military theorist and pundit, retired Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, is credited with the idea for the book. One of Kaplan's critics, Thomas P. M. Barnett, a professor at the Naval War College, once accused him of accepting without question the views of the Pacific Command about China in an article that Kaplan wrote in The Atlantic Monthly about the coming confrontation between the United States and China.
This is not to say that Kaplan's views are uncontroversial. To the contrary, his basic contention--that the heart and soul of the American military is now its expeditionary component, above all the Marine Corps, and its commando component, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM)--is one that many senior officers and military intellectuals within the War Colleges and Service Academies would repudiate. But they would do so at their peril, since, as Kaplan himself notes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's implementation of the Global War on Terrorism has made SOCOM "a war fighting command in more than name only," and, however imperfectly (Kaplan blames this on turf battles within the Department of Defense), "the executive arm for the War on Terrorism." (General Eric Shinseki discovered, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, that speaking before Congress in opposition to Rumsfeld's opinions resulted in forced retirement.)
Kaplan is a man with whom Rumsfeld would be hard pressed to find fault. Like Rumsfeld, he has no patience with what he calls "the formalized rigidity" of cold war-era military institutions unsuited for the wars and the counterinsurgency operations of the early twenty-first century. Like Rumsfeld, he believes that military successes during the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 demonstrated the viability of "deftly combining high-technology and low-tech unconventional warfare." And, perhaps more enthusiastically even than Rumsfeld, Kaplan sees the tactics being developed in the field by U.S. Special Operations forces as those that America "would employ to manage an unruly world."
Such a sentence only hints at the kind of hero worship to which Kaplan is prey. Major General Sidney Schachnow, a retired Special Forces senior officer, puts him in mind (shades of Larteguy again) of the Roman centurion Ligustinus, who was "rewarded for bravery thirty-four times." In Iraq, he travels into combat with a Marine unit and marvels at their "unpretentious willingness to die," which he attributes to "their working class origins." There is a good deal of right-wing, blog-style bashing of alleged liberal elites in Imperial Grunts, as well as cheap asides contrasting the selfless faith and patriotism of the soldiers, who "saw themselves as belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States," with the egomania of America's "global cosmopolitans." For him, the American military not only fights America's wars, it has also become "the guardian" of America's working-class values and traditions. These are the people "who hunted, drove pickups, employed profanities as a matter of dialect, and yet had a literal, demonstrable belief in the Almighty." They inhabit "a world of beer, cigarettes, instant coffee, and chewing tobaccos, like Copenhagen and Red Man."
When the soldiers he meets do not remind him of Roman legionnaires, Kaplan is apt to compare them to Lewis and Clark or other early heroes of America's push westward, or else to what he calls "the gleaming officer corps of the Confederacy, without which the nation would not have been able to fight its later wars quite as well as it had." I wonder what the African American officers of today's U.S. military would make of that. The abdication of critical faculties implicit in such a historical comparison is startling in a writer as historically minded as Kaplan. The "gleaming" tradition to which he alludes helped to keep the military segregated until 1949, while its integration was a first step in the desegregation of the South. Indeed, the rise of a new American military that is probably the most intelligent, creative, and successful institution with regard to race relations in the United States represents a victory for the military tradition that looks back to the 54th Massachusetts and the Tuskeegee Airmen, not to Nathan Bedford Forrest's terrorism or to Stonewall Jackson sucking on his lemons at the First Battle of Manassas.
But this is not the most significant of Kaplan's many analogies between the American armed forces of today and its predecessors. The one that is most central to his argument views today's soldiers' fight against Islamists and terrorists as something very close to the Indian-fighting army of the nineteenth-century American West. Those wars too, Kaplan argues, were imperial in nature, and he refers without any further elaboration to "the new American empire west of the Mississippi River." His travels seem to have hardened him in this view: "As I traveled from continent to continent with the American military in the first years of the twenty-first century, my most recurring image would be the one that Remington himself might have painted: singular individuals fronting dangerous and stupendous landscapes."
This is breathtaking. Here is a serious writer in 2005 admiring the Indian wars, which in their brutality brought about the end of an entire American civilization. But then Kaplan goes to some lengths to describe the peoples who lived in North America when white settlers began to arrive as virtually without any civilization worthy of the name. "The North American Indians," he writes, "were a throwback to the nomadic horse peoples of the Eurasian steppe ... They [also] invited comparison with another imperial nemesis: the nineteenth century Pushtuns and Afridis of the Northwest Frontier of British India." And he concludes: "Beyond the Mississippi or Missouri rivers, the American military found a Hobbesian world in which internecine ethnic warfare, motivated by competition for territory and resources, was the primary fact of life."
The primary fact of life? Whatever else one can say about American Indian life in the nineteenth century, the primary fact was the arrival of the white settlers and the military forces that accompanied them, who drove the native peoples off their land, massacred tens if not hundreds of thousands of them, and deported the others to reservations far from arable land or the plains on which they had hunted. Kaplan may claim that a figure such as Remington--whom he admires as the American Kipling--stood for America's "righteous responsibility to advance the boundaries of free society and good government into zones of sheer chaos, a mission not unlike that of post-cold war humanitarian interventions," but the assertion is obscene. I doubt very much that many Indians would share Kaplan's enthusiasm for "Remington's mythic universe [in which] those early imperialists, the cavalry officers and the pathfinders, appropriated the warrior ideal of their Indian enemy, which was marked by bravery and steadfastness." Kaplan has been watching too many John Ford movies. Has he never heard of the Trail of Tears? Does he really think that describing Geronimo as having "lived out the last years of his life" at Fort Sill, Oklahoma adequately conveys what took place? Is describing the streets of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as being named for the various "North American Indian tribes with which the US Army negotiated truces" really a historically licit way of accounting for what took place, or how those truces were made? And what on earth does it mean for Kaplan to claim that the habit that American soldiers now have of referring to their postings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, Colombia, or the Philippines as "Indian Country" and, in Kaplan's view, that, like the Indian Wars, the war on terrorism is "really about taming the frontier," should not be understood as a "slight" against Native North Americans?
The problem with all this is that Kaplan is influential, and not just within certain segments of the American military and with right-wing bloggers such as talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. Bill Clinton famously, and in the event disastrously, claimed that Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts convinced him that the United States should not intervene in Bosnia. Tom Brokaw, who is certainly a member in good standing of what people such as Hewitt deride as the "Mainstream" or "Legacy" liberal media, has given Imperial Grunts a blurb in which he described the book as an account of "the new warrior-diplomats who use weapons, imagination, and personal passion to protect and advance the interests of the United States."
So where to begin? Perhaps by injecting a little historical reality into Kaplan's mythical universe. When historians talk about the British taming the Indian frontier, they mean dominating it politically and militarily, not conquering it outright, and expelling its inhabitants, and settling the land with their own people. Despite several disastrous attempts to conquer Afghanistan over the course of the nineteenth century, the principal strategy of the British along the northwestern frontier of the Raj was to impose a status quo that did not threaten British interests in India proper. If they bowed to that, Pushtuns and the Afridis could do what they liked. But the phrase "taming the frontier" when applied to the American West meant something entirely different. It meant driving the Indians out by any means necessary. It was a murderous, zero-sum game, and not at all, to put it mildly, an ideal for contemporary American policy.
Of course, Kaplan knows this perfectly well. Late in his book, in a consideration of whether enough American troops had been sent to Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, he muses in an aside that "the Sioux and their allies were ultimately vanquished not because the US Army fully adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy--it didn't--but because of the flooding of the Old West with settlers, who were, in turn, aided by the railroad." Somehow Kaplan can write this sentence and yet feel no obligation to revise his ludicrous analogy between British imperial policy on the Indian-Afghan frontier and the settlement of the American West.
There are many important things to say about the Indian Wars and the western migration of white settlers in nineteenth-century America, but Kaplan says none of them. Instead we get from him boneheaded nonsense about the Indian Wars being exercises in exporting democracy, order, and good government. There are more respectable ways to make the neo-imperialist argument--one could make the case, as Niall Ferguson, Hugh Thomas, and Deepak Lal have done, that the British Empire did more good than harm for the peoples it subjugated; but it is impossible credibly to make such an argument about the subjugation of the native peoples of North America.
Too romantic and sentimental to be called analysis, too ideological to count as reportage, and yet too journalistic to be a straightforward polemic, Imperial Grunts is a disorganized and in many ways an incoherent book. Just when Kaplan the reporter is exercising his considerable talents to their best advantage, Kaplan the ideologue interrupts with his doctrine. As a result, there are times when Kaplan's narrative seems like an extended exercise in free association. In one representative passage, Kaplan is on the front line with a Marine unit moving into Fallujah during the first, abortive assault on the city in the spring of 2004, and splendidly describes the "grunts''' slow advance under fire. But then his attention shifts away from the battle and toward geo-strategical speculation and imperial history. Staring at enemy snipers a few hundred meters away in one paragraph, he opines in the next that "the third world urban environment was like the Old West." A few hundred words later, having briefly doubled back to a description of the fighting, then left it again, Kaplan is cantering from his belief that the martial spirit of "the Old Confederacy [still inhabits] the soul of the American military," to comparing the U.S. military's fight in Iraq to the British army's suppression of the Indian Mutiny, to a meditation on the role of the media on the conduct of military operations in the early twenty-first century. Then, after a space break, Kaplan is back to being a reporter again.
The American military deserves better than this kind of hagiography, just as it deserves better than to have to carry out the thankless and even hopeless missions that Kaplan would like to assign it--missions that, if the experience in Iraq proves anything, will fall clumsily short of any Kiplingesque grandeur. In fairness, Kaplan was never especially enthusiastic about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "The American empire of the early twenty-first century," he writes, "depended on a tissue of intangibles that was threatened, rather than invigorated, by the naked exercise of power." For Kaplan, the real success story of America's commitment to policing the planet (which he calls the "battle space for the American military") is the work of small units of elite U.S. troops, and sometimes even individual soldiers, controlling the world quietly in countries ranging from Yemen to Mongolia.
It is unclear if Kaplan has any conception of the fact that his account of the role of the American military abroad is chilling, or should be, especially to believers in the fundamental benignity of American power. Kaplan's outlook cannot finally be described as interventionism, or imperialism, or anything larger exercised by moral and strategic objectives; it is just plain old militarism. To take the most obvious example: if it is true, as Kaplan contends, that "even as elites in New York and Washington debated imperialism in grand, historical terms, individual marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors were interpreting policy on their own, on the ground, in dozens upon dozens of countries every week, oblivious to such faraway discussions," then civilian control over the military--one of the most fundamental arrangements separating democratic societies from undemocratic ones--is in grave danger. After all, the role of the American military is to carry out the commands of a civilian national command authority, not to make policy on its own.
Soldiers like to grouse; and some of the commando officers or officers on secondment to various units of the Special Operations Command (though not the Marines) have a weakness for dismissing civilian leadership and, indeed, the leadership of what they (and Kaplan, echoing them) view as the chair-bound bureaucrats of the "Big Army" and "Big Navy." They do not enjoy the tendency of senior leaders in the uniformed services to put limits on their freedom to operate as they see fit. Not long ago some SOCOM soldiers grew their hair and beards and dressed in a combination of U.S. military issue fatigues and local costume during the war in Afghanistan, and seeing this in a magazine, one Army three-star made it his business to see that these men conformed to military regulations. Among SOCOM people in the field, one still sometimes hears complaints about this, and, more broadly, complaints about how, despite the new importance of special operations, a more "by the book" mentality remains dominant in the military.
But they are just that: complaints, grousing, letting off steam, by men whose sworn duty is not just to kill but to die, and risk death every day. They are entitled to their venting. But Kaplan has no such excuse when he promotes their grievances into some romantic Rambo-like non-conformist heroism--when he contrasts "conventional thinkers inside the Pentagon [who were] aghast" at this kind of improvisation with SOCOM commanders and erstwhile commanders whom he dubs "unconventional warriors," and portrays as just the kind of freethinkers the American empire needs. When he approvingly quotes Major General Schachnow, who answered his question about how the United States could "infiltrate and police the world" with the retort that "you produce a product and let him loose," he is in effect arguing for a relinquishing of civilian control over the military, since what Schachnow meant by "product," or at least what Kaplan takes him to mean, is not just "smiling" and "understanding" when SOCOM people shed their uniforms and grow Afghan-style beards, but rather letting these elite warriors loose and giving them the latitude to advance their country's interest pretty much as they see fit.
But this is precisely the authority that the American republic, as a constitutional matter, has not granted to its military. To be sure, there are many criticisms that may be made of the American military, operationally and doctrinally; but the cowboy culture of Rumsfeld's Pentagon, and of members of the SOCOM establishment who are on his staff or whom he has favored to a degree unheard of in the practice of any previous secretary of defense, must not be allowed to hide behind the spirit of criticism. It has something else in mind. Off the record at least, many officers express considerable anxiety over the SOCOM-izing of the military on Rumsfeld's watch. They point to the fact that General Peter Schoomaker, the current Army Chief of Staff (Rumsfeld brought him out of retirement to replace Shinseki), was one of the originators of Delta Force, the elite commando unit in which Lieutenant General William "Jerry" Boykin--the man who once said that he knew he would successfully hunt down a Somali warlord because "my God is bigger than his God"--also distinguished himself before becoming the deputy of the current undersecretary of defense for intelligence. There were also numerous, if less well-publicized promotions of SOCOM veterans to flag rank.
When he speaks of a "bureaucratic straightjacket," Kaplan sounds as if he is channeling Rumsfeld and his outside-the-box inanities. When he criticizes the failure of the American military to "power down to the level of small units and expand their activities," he sounds like a spokesman for SOCOM. But when he approvingly quotes an Alabama National Guard Lieutenant Colonel named Marcus Custer who told him that "you can't be effective in the War on Terrorism unless you break the rules of the Big Army," and that maybe in the future American special forces would be "incorporated into a new and reformed CIA rather than into the Big Army," Kaplan, whether he knows it or not, is attacking the heart of what the army of a democratic country is supposed to be. Whatever Kaplan may choose to imagine, or whatever some maverick SOCOM extremists may fantasize, it is the task of the American military to carry out American policy, not to make it.
Kaplan has muddled up the general and the particular in the formulation and the implementation of American foreign policy. He may think he is scoring a telling point when, during his time with U.S. forces in Colombia, he muses that "while policy specialists argued general principles like nation-building in Washington and New York seminars, young middle-level officers were the true agents of the imperium." Leaving aside Kaplan's sneering anti-intellectual tone--he seems to have forgotten that writers are also armchair strategists, and that a good deal of strategic wisdom has been discovered in armchairs--it would be almost impossible for his assertion to be more wrong-headed. If post-Saddam Iraq has proved anything, it is that the United States needed more of those seminars, and that the Department of Defense needed to get off its plinth and make a real attempt to think through the implications of the policy recommendations that State Department and other Iraq and post-conflict specialists offered before the invasion got underway.
As a result, the mid-level officers on the ground in Iraq did not respond well to the looting of Baghdad, nor plan adequately for what would happen if Baathists or terrorists mounted a real insurgency. In no sense was this their fault. Their duties were tactical; those of the senior leaders back home strategic. Again, Kaplan can hardly be unaware of the distinction, and yet he wrote this whole book without ever addressing it seriously. The reality is that though the planning failures in Iraq were the responsibility of senior officials in the Bush administration, and not of the "iron majors" who so impressed Kaplan during his travels, this does not mean the majors should have had the last word. The chain of command as it exists is the only one that a democratic society can possibly accept. The problem was not that there was civilian and bureaucratic control of the military. The problem was that the civilian and bureaucratic control of the military was incompetent.
Kaplan declares that he wished to see American troop deployments from one end of it to the other through the eyes of the soldiers themselves--"from their perspective," as he puts it, "not from mine." Are those really the only two perspectives available? Perhaps the explanation for Kaplan's confusions and misunderstandings is that he spent too much time with his beloved grunts. A writer who boasts that he wanted "to cut myself off from civilians as much as possible" may not be in a particularly good position to think through seriously the problem of empire, which is a general question, not a particular one, a subject that may be illuminated by historical and moral analysis, not by reportage, no matter how vivid and valiant. At the end of Imperial Grunts, as Kaplan leaves for Kuwait, heading home, a Marine general tells him, "Go home and rest a few weeks in the world of porcelain shitters. Then come back for more." A fine expression of a certain soldierly parochialism; but Kaplan seems to consider the remark elevating and enlightening.
The real question is, for more what? The general probably meant more experience of battle. And Kaplan has gone back. Imperial Grunts is only the first in what he promises will be a multi-book treatment of what he calls "imperial maintenance on the ground." But while enjoying those porcelain shitters, he would have profited from asking himself the kind of hard questions about the American empire that are best answered away from the front lines, and making the same commitment to the intellect that he made to the field. Presumably, Kaplan will be true to his word and Imperial Grunts will only be the first of his love songs to the American military.
The paradox is that he has written anything but a triumphalist book. The oddest thing about this odd book is its insistence on the transience of the American empire, even as he leaves no stone unturned in his effort to glorify it. "To be an American in the first decade of the twenty-first century was to be present at a grand and fleeting moment," he observes in his first chapter, "Injun Country." It was "a moment that even if it lasted for several more decades would constitute but a flicker among the long march of hegemons that had calmed broad swaths of the globe." He then goes on to enumerate various empires and their lifespans, from the Achaemenids to the British, by way of the Chinese, the Vandals, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, and of course the Romans.
But then he teaches that "a liberal empire like America was likely to create the conditions for its own demise, and thus to be particularly short-lived." So this is not Kipling, it is Spengler. Kaplan is tragically wrong-headed even within his own frame of reference. Put the case, debatable as it is, that the United States is an empire in the same sense that Britain, or Portugal, or Spain, or Rome were empires. Further put the case, as Kaplan also does, that this empire will be gone in no more than several decades. Why on earth would any American patriot, "a believer in the essential goodness of American nationalism," as Kaplan puts it, or anyone who just wishes America well, condemn the country to what, on his own account, will be a not-so-long march toward a bleak and broken future? Why not strive, in this case, to create a multi-lateral international order that, taking into account the inevitable rise of new hegemons such as India and China, organizes the international system as favorably as possible toward the interests of the United States?
The Kipling of "The White Man's Burden," whom Kaplan goes to such lengths to defend, was not beseeching the United States to become an imperial power with all the eloquence at his command, while simultaneously holding in his head the vision of the proximate dissolution of that empire. But this seems to be Kaplan's vision, insofar as anything consistent can be extrapolated from his breathless dithyramb to the boots on the ground. Or are we back to Larteguy's lonely centurion, acutely conscious that back in Rome everything is going to hell even as he faithfully carries out his duty on the forward ramparts of the empire--SOCOM in swords and sandals? The good news is that this may describe Kaplan more accurately than it describes his grunts. He reports that "the grunts I met saw themselves as American nationalists, even if the role they performed was imperial." He does not explain the distinction, but it seems to be a sign at least of good sense in these American soldiers. So there is hope for the Republic yet.
David Rieff is a contributing editor at TNR.
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Citation: David Rieff. "The False Friends of the American Military: The Cowboy Culture," The New Republic, 10 October 2005.
Original URL: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20051010&s=rieff101005
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