Chaos Factor off the scale in Mideast
This NY Times piece today re the mideast and Washington seems almost a parody, but, alas, is true. (Posted below as a comment.)
When one combines the confusion in Washington and the turmoil from Lebanon to Iran, the Chaos factor seems off the scale.
No one knows who’s in charge of US foreign policy. Baker-Gates and Cheney-Bolton are 180 degrees apart (re “working with” Syria and Iran, to begin) and yet each team is actively out there hacking out arrangements and moulding publicity.
And the window of opportunity for unfettered action by Bush-Cheney is closing as the Dem congress of January approaches. Thus this interregnum seems particularly risky. Perle’s war of pacification in the mideast was never meant to be popular with the American people. There is still reason to think the Neo-cons will pursue it until entirely dragged from power. (See the NY Times discussion of Cheney’s trip to Saudia Arabia.)
Meanwhile, after absolutely blasting the Gaza with a tank army the past weeks, Israel over the weekend announced withdrawal and Olmert in headlines everywhere today is said to be offering Peace and Statehood and all sorts of other goodies to the Palestinians. It’s the most ludicrous theater — like a comic fast-motion Keaton film. Hard not to think this abrupt shutdown of the Gaza offensive has something to do with accelerating plans re Iraq and Iran.
Given al-Sadr’s ultimatum, Iraq seems primed to explode when Bush meets Maliki in Jordan in midweek (returning from emergency NATO conference on escalating fighting in Afghanistan). Will the meeting be cancelled — citing concerns for the President’s safety? No sign of that yet.
If Bush keeps the meeting, all pretense of government in Iraq will cease as the shia abandon the government. (Yet see how, on this topic, the NYT article concludes. Ironic pretense. No mention of al Sadr’s ultimatum.)
Sending Bush to the meeting, then, seems a provocation. Why is he going? What possibly can be accomplished re Iraqi security by such a tea-time fly-by photo-op meeting? Are the Cheney/Neo-cons (having put ducks in line best they could during Cheney’s visit to Saudi Arabia) looking to trigger a violent Shia reaction, a larger disaster in Iraq that would justify US participation in the attack on Iran?
Here’s a responsible-sounding overview on global terrorism. By a Russian in Moscow.
China and Russia (managing partners of the SCO) are in the catbird seat, and can be counted on to behave as responsibly as possible. But the US cannot. And at a certain point opportunities for behaving responsibly dissolve, ala the guns of August 1914. Buy oil and gold?
ed says:
This is the article referenced above
The New York Times
November 27, 2006
By David E. Sanger
PANEL TO WEIGH OVERTURE BY U.S. TO IRAN AND SYRIA
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military withdrawal, according to officials who have seen all or parts of the document.
While the diplomatic strategy appears likely to be accepted, with some amendments, by the 10-member Iraq Study Group, members of the commission and outsiders involved in its work said they expected a potentially divisive debate about timetables for beginning an American withdrawal.
In interviews, several officials said announcing a major withdrawal was the only way to persuade the government of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to focus on creating an effective Iraqi military force.
Several commission members, including some Democrats, are discussing proposals that call for a declaration that within a specified period of time, perhaps as short as a year, a significant number of American troops should be withdrawn, regardless of whether the Iraqi government’s forces are declared ready to defend the country.
Among the ideas are embedding far more American training teams into Iraqi military units in a last-ditch improvement effort. While numbers are still approximate, phased withdrawal of combat troops over the next year would leave 70,000 to 80,000 American troops in the country, compared with about 150,000 now.
“It’s not at all clear that we can reach consensus on the military questions,” one member of the commission said late last week.
The draft report, according to those who have seen it, seems to link American withdrawal to the performance of the Iraqi military, as President Bush has done. But details of the performance benchmarks, which were described as not specific, could not be obtained, and it is this section of the report that is most likely to be revised.
While the commission is scheduled to meet here for two days this week, officials say the session may be extended if members have trouble reaching consensus.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush will be visiting Latvia and Estonia, then will head to Amman, Jordan, on Wednesday for two days of meetings with Mr. Maliki and King Abdullah II of Jordan.
The recommendations of the commission, an independent advisory group created at the suggestion of several members of Congress, are expected to carry unusual weight because its members, drawn from both political parties, have deep experience in foreign policy. They include its co-chairmen, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, a Republican, and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman.
Though the commission has met many times, interviewing administration officials, policy experts, military officers and others, the meeting here on Monday will be the first time that members have gathered to hash out the most difficult issues.
The basis for their discussion will be a draft report that Mr. Baker and Mr. Hamilton directed the commission staff to prepare, based on informal conversations among the members.
The group is expected to present its final report to President Bush and to Congress in December.
The commission’s co-chairmen have urged members and staff not to discuss their deliberations. As a result, those who were willing to talk about the commission’s work and the draft reports did so on the condition of anonymity.
President Bush is not bound by the commission’s recommendations, and during a trip to Southeast Asia that ended just before Thanksgiving, he made it clear that he would also give considerable weight to studies under way by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his own National Security Council.
Last Monday in Bogor, Indonesia, he said he planned to make no decisions on troop increases or decreases “until I hear from a variety of sources, including our own United States military.”
But privately, administration officials seem deeply concerned about the weight of the findings of the Baker-Hamilton commission.
“I think there is fear that anything they say will seem like they are etched in stone tablets,” said a senior American diplomat. “It’s going to be hard for the president to argue that a group this distinguished, and this bipartisan, has got it wrong.”
Mr. Bush’s nominee for secretary of defense, Robert M. Gates, resigned from the commission after his nomination this month, and was replaced by Lawrence S. Eagleburger, another Republican who once was secretary of state. Mr. Gates has said little about his thoughts on military strategy, other than to express amazement when he visited Iraq with the study group over Labor Day that the administration had let the situation spin so far out of control.
Mr. Bush spent 90 minutes with commission members in a closed session at the White House two weeks ago “essentially arguing why we should embrace what amounts to a ‘stay the course’ strategy,” said one commission official who was present.
Officials said that the draft of the section on diplomatic strategy, which was heavily influenced by Mr. Baker, seemed to reflect his public criticism of the administration for its unwillingness to talk with nations like Iran and Syria.
But senior administration officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, have expressed skepticism that either of those nations would go along, especially while Iran is locked in a confrontation with the United States over its nuclear program. “Talking isn’t a strategy,” he said in an interview in October.
“The issue is how can we condition the environment so that Iran and Syria will make a 180-degree turn, so that rather than undermining the Iraqi government, they will support it.”
Administration officials appear to be taking steps that will enable them to declare that they are already implementing parts of the Baker-Hamilton report, even before its release. On Saturday, Vice President Dick Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a meeting with King Abdullah, whom he has known for 17 years.
An official who was briefed on the vice president’s trip, and who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it with reporters, said discussion at the two-hour meeting had covered all the crises in the Middle East.
“The best way to describe it is as a consultation, on a number of issues,” that official said. “But because Iraq is such a big issue, it obviously took up a major part of the conversation.”
The official said Mr. Cheney had not gone to Riyadh to enlist Saudi help for any specific proposals on Iraq.
During an interview on the ABC News program “This Week” on Sunday, King Abdullah said that his agenda with the president extended beyond Iraq, and that his top concern in the region was the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians — which he called the “core issue” in the Middle East — along with tensions in Lebanon.
But, he said, he was hoping that Mr. Bush’s meeting with Mr. Maliki would bring about “something dramatic” to stop the violence in Iraq.
Last week, administration officials played down expectations for the meeting with Mr. Maliki. But they are clearly hoping that Mr. Maliki will show a greater willingness to crack down on the Shiite militias, including the militia run by the powerful cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
While it is unclear what private messages Mr. Bush was preparing for Mr. Maliki, the public message will be an eagerness to turn more operational control over to the Iraqis, as soon as they are prepared to handle it.
“Any disarming of the militias — in large part because there is such a political element to that — is most effectively carried out by the Iraqi security forces,” said Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor.
November 27th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
ed says:
This is the Moscow overview of terrorism problem referenced above
West Has Failed to Learn From 9/11
by Sergei Karaganov
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
Despite isolated tactical victories in fight against terrorism, the West has failed to learn the lessons of September 11, Russian pundit Sergei Karaganov wrote in his article titled
“The battle was won, but the war is being lost”, published by the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Sept. 27. The Americans have already lost the political war and the U.S. leadership never took the trouble to understand the origin of anti-Western attitudes.
“I did not want to write this article right after the anniversary of the appalling terrorist act of September 11, 2001. The main theme of the article — the thesis that the world is losing the war on terrorism — would have clashed inappropriately with the poignant tributes to the many innocent victims who died that day. The choice not to write about the failure to learn the lessons of 9/11 or about the misinterpretation of these lessons would have been irresponsible, however, from the standpoint of professional ethics and it would have been an affront to the memory of those victims.
”The war on terrorism is not failing everywhere. There have been some isolated victories, although most of them have been of the tactical variety. We were the first to fight against the expansion of militant Islamic terrorism in Chechnya, and we won that fight, but at an outrageous price. The plans to establish an Islamic caliphate from the Black Sea to the Caspian, with a strong possibility of subsequent movement up the Volga, were crushed. People in Russia who were drawn to the militant branch of Islam and were supported by forces from abroad were taught a grim lesson. As far as I know, there are no Wahhabite seminaries in Russia now.
“We won the fight, but not the battle. Russia chose to rely on the military-psychological containment of extremism and separatism. Too little was done, however, to eliminate their causes: the poverty and underdevelopment of some regions in the North Caucasus, inhabited primarily by Russian Muslims.
”The Americans also won two tactical victories. With our help and Iran’s, they routed the Taliban, who had been moving inexorably into the southern republics of the former Soviet Union. Al-Qaida lost many of its bases, but it did not expire and it was not eliminated. Washington’s other tactical victory was its ability to avert a repetition of the tragic events of September 11 — so far — with the help of internal security measures that seriously undermined the appeal of the American society. The special services, separately and sometimes in concert, managed to prevent many terrorist acts in Russia and other European countries, but many terrible terrorist acts nevertheless were committed.
“This is not the main thing, however. The Americans decided that terrorism had to be combated by forcing democracy on people and clambered into Iraq. They have already lost the political war. The country is mired in civil war and has become a huge training ground for future terrorists of every hue. When the Americans leave, and this event is not that distant, this entire international group of terrorists will start spreading out in all directions. I am afraid they will be moving in our direction too. This proved something that had already seemed obvious enough. Networks like Al-Qaida cannot be destroyed by broad-scale military operations. In fact, this seems to promote their growth.
”Almost nothing has been done in the last few years to foster sensible and extensive dialogue between civilizations or to promote participation in the gentle modernization of the Middle East Muslim states and elite, which are lagging behind the progressive countries.
“The West — or, to put it more precisely, the American leadership — never took the trouble to understand that most of the anti-Western and anti-Christian attitudes do not stem from differing values or from cultural and religious differences. Bin Laden does not have many negative things to say about Western culture. These attitudes are largely a result of the West’s unfair treatment of the countries of that region. This impression, compounded by the region’s underdevelopment, the causes of which I have enumerated more than once in this newspaper, has given rise to an increasingly common and increasingly serious Muslim ”Weimar syndrome.“
”The mounting anti-Western sentiment cannot be blamed solely on the West, however. Bin Laden’s rapidly multiplying followers are not only defending themselves and avenging themselves. They are also taking offensive action. Their goal is the eradication of Western influence and, in general, all outside military-political influence in the Middle East, the elimination of the relatively moderate Islamic regimes, and the triumph of radical political Islam.
“The worst thing of all is that the West, realizing that it is losing either because of the United States’ outrageous blunders or because of the essential inactivity of Europe, is now on the defensive even on the ideological front. There is no need to justify stupid cartoons in a Danish newspaper or Pope Benedict’s recent statement about ”aggressive Islam,“ which was not exactly politically correct. There have been apologies, official ones at that, for the stupidity and the poorly worded phrases, in view of the organized pogroms they supposedly have sparked.
”These conciliatory efforts by the aggressor are whetting the appetites of the militant Islamists and convincing them that the West can be beaten (furthermore, they see us as part of the West, although a weaker and less malicious part). The aggressive and unsuccessful inculcation of democracy, which evoked protests and ridicule, combined with the ideological appeasement of absurd demands, especially in view of all the insults and threats religious leaders and officials in the Middle East are hurling at the West, Christianity, and Judaism, seems positively infantile in the political sense.
“What should Russia do in this situation, now that this volatile mixture of democratic and Islamic messianism, aggression, and appeasement has driven the world to the verge of a war between these civilizations? First, we must not become a battlefield in this war, regardless of how earnestly we are being encouraged to do this.
”Second, we must develop the structures for cooperation and security in Central Asia and the Middle East as quickly as possible with countries which still have some credibility because they have not made too many mistakes. Above all, these include India and China. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization could fill the vacuum of trust and security and avert the war between civilizations.
“Third, we must fight as much as possible against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East with every possible partner, but not at our expense. We do not want Iran to be a nuclear power, but we do not want a hostile relationship with Iran and we cannot afford to have Iran as an enemy.
”Fourth, if the proliferation of nuclear weapons begins, and they start falling into the hands of irresponsible groups or terrorists, which easily could happen as a result of, for example, the predicted sociopolitical upheavals in Pakistan, we must be ready to take the most resolute steps. public officials renounce the use of nuclear weapons in any situation, but I think we cannot exclude even this possibility.
“The fifth and final thing we must do is to make ten times the effort to deescalate the conflict, to expand the dialogue between civilizations, and to avoid involvement in this conflict. We must take a stance of armed neutrality. Everyone knows that it can never be absolute, however. We have to avoid situations forcing us to make a choice. We already made this choice once in Chechnya. It would be too bad if we were to be forced to make this choice again by the stupidity, messianism, fanaticism, or political escapism of others.”
November 27th, 2006 at 9:09 pm