"The worst case has become true"

President Bush says he's determined to "stay the course" in Iraq. He has not said what "the course" is. What is the plan? Is there a plan?

Plan A for this adventure was a fantasy of rose-petal parades and George Washington Chalabi. Plan B does not seem to exist. No one knows what winning or losing would look like in this war without "major combat operations," but to any honest observer this looks a lot more like losing.

On the rare occasions that someone manages to ask our war president if he has a plan he accuses them of wanting to "cut and run."

It's not clear that President Bush knows what he means by "cut and run." That would seem to describe what he ordered done in Tora Bora, in most of Afghanistan, in Fallujah, in Samarra, in Najaf, in Sadr City -- in anywhere but the besieged Green Zones of Baghdad and Kabul.

Instead of a coherent plan, Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld offer a hollow optimism and toy with our troops like they're playing some ghastly mixture of children's games. Send the Marines in / Pull the Marines out / Send the Marines in and shake them all about ... Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The toll of America's dead and wounded increases steadily, but not as steadily as the toll of wounded civilians or as steadily as the growth in the insurgency. And to what end? What legitimate goal remains beyond an attempt to save face?

Here is just a sample of recent reporting.

From Markos at Daily Kos:

We've lost this war. We've literally lost entire swaths of Iraqi territory to the insurgents. We've empowered al-Qaida and Islamist militants with new recruits and pictures of prison torture and rape to fuel their cause. We've stretched our military thin, hurt recruitment, made it impossible to respond to actual threats.

In short, this is the biggest political and military blunder this country has faced since -- I'll let the historians decide when. But as things are going, this is going to have worse repercussions for our nation than Vietnam ever did.

From the Royal Institute of International Affairs:

Iraq will be lucky if it manages to avoid a breakup and civil war, and the country can become the spark for a vortex of regional upheaval, a report released Wednesday by Britain's highly regarded Royal Institute of International Affairs concludes. ...

At most, the report suggests, the United States and its allies can hope for a "muddle-through" scenario, holding the country together but falling short of their original goal: the creation of a full-fledged democracy friendly to the West. ...

The fragmentation of Iraq is the "default" scenario, the report says, and would occur if American-led forces pull out of the country too quickly or if the U.S. government imposes its vision on the country too rigidly.

From a New York Times report on the classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared by the National Intelligence Council:

A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq, government officials said Wednesday.

The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war, the officials said. The most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms.

"There's a significant amount of pessimism," said one government official who has read the document, which runs about 50 pages. ...

Its pessimistic conclusions were reached even before the recent worsening of the security situation in Iraq, which has included a sharp increase in attacks on American troops and in deaths of Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters.

The Times also quotes Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who responded to a White House request to shift some reconstruction spending to pay for security:

"It's beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous.

Katherine Pfleger Shrader of the Associated Press provides further details about the NIE:

A highly classified National Intelligence Estimate assembled by some of the government's most senior analysts this summer provided a pessimistic assessment about the future security and stability of Iraq.

The National Intelligence Council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined at best the situation would be tenuous in terms of stability, a U.S. official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

At worst, the official said, were ''trend lines that would point to a civil war.''

Shrader quotes another Republican senator, Richard Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations:

''Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration what I call the 'dancing in the street crowd,' that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,'' Lugar said. ''The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.''

Knight Ridder's Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel interview several other experts who see little hope:

The U.S. strategy to create a stable, democratic Iraq is in danger of failing, current and former U.S. officials say, and the anti-American insurgency is growing larger, more sophisticated and more violent.

A wave of brazen attacks across Iraq has included the deadliest single bombing in Baghdad in six months on Tuesday and at least seven bombings in the capital on Sunday.

The violence increasingly appears to threaten nationwide elections planned for January, which are key to President Bush's hopes for reducing the number of U.S. troops, now 140,000, and making a graceful exit from Iraq.

Many experts on Iraq say the best that can be hoped for now is continued chaos that falls short of a civil war.

"The overall prospects ... are for a violent political future," said Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. ...

"We are in a no-win situation," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who's spent time in Iraq but spoke on condition of anonymity.

"I just don't see where we are headed. I think it's getting worse. ..."

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, meanwhile, declared explicitly and bluntly that in the eyes of the U.N. and its Security Council, the failing war is illegal. The Guardian reports:

"I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. charter. From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal."

Also in The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal provides the assessments of several prominent strategists and retired military leaders.

Retired Marine Gen. Joseph Hoare, former head of U.S. Central Command:

"The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. ...

Jeffrey Record, professor of strategy at the Air War College:

"I see no ray of light on the horizon at all. The worst case has become true. ...

"I see no exit. ... We've been down that road before. It's called Vietnamization. The idea that we're going to have an Iraqi force trained to defeat an enemy we can't defeat stretches the imagination."

W. Andrew Terrill, professor at the Army War College's strategic studies institute:

"We have a growing, maturing insurgency group. ... We see larger and more coordinated military attacks. They are getting better and they can self-regenerate. The idea there are x number of insurgents, and that when they're all dead we can get out is wrong. The insurgency has shown an ability to regenerate itself because there are people willing to fill the ranks of those who are killed. ... The longer we stay, the more they are confirmed in that view."

"If we leave and there's no civil war, that's a victory."

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency:

"Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost. ... Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving bin Laden's ends."

"This is far graver than Vietnam. There wasn't as much at stake strategically, though in both cases we mindlessly went ahead with the war that was not constructive for U.S. aims. But now we're in a region far more volatile, and we're in much worse shape with our allies."

"I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster. The two parties whose interests have been advanced have been the Iranians and al-Qaida. Bin Laden could argue with some cogency that our going into Iraq was the equivalent of the Germans in Stalingrad. They defeated themselves by pouring more in there. Tragic."

And finally, here's Christopher Albritton, reporting from Iraq:

... practically the entire Western part of the country is controlled by insurgents, with pockets of U.S. power formed by the garrisons outside the towns. Insurgents move freely throughout the country and the violence continues to grow.

I wish I could point to a solution, but I don't see one. People continue to e-mail me, telling me to report the "truth" of all the good things that are going on in Iraq. I'm not seeing a one. ...

And in the midst of all this violence, most of the Iraqi Interim Government is out of town. Security Advisors, heads of important ministries and the chief of the new Mukhabarat are all mysteriously absent. The Iraqi security forces are a joke, with the much talked about Fallujah Brigade disbanded for being feckless and -- worse -- riddled with insurgents who were being paid and trained by the U.S. Marines. ...

The poor and the disenfranchised are finding their leaders in the populist and fundamentalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr or in the radical Islam of the jihadis, who are casting a long shadow on this formerly secular country. Iraq has its own home-grown Wahhabists now, something it didn’t have 18 months ago.

In the context of all this, reporting on a half-assed refurbished school or two seems a bit childish and naive, the equivalent of telling a happy story to comfort a scared child. Anyone who asks me to tell the "real" story of Iraq -- implying all the bad things are just media hype -- should refer to this post. I just told you the real story: What was once a hell wrought by Saddam is now one of America’s making.

No one seriously seems to be considering any longer the idea that Iraq will be "liberated" or that it will be more than nominally democratic. The best-case scenarios paint a picture of a country at the cliff's edge -- teetering on the brink of destruction, of becoming another failed state and haven for terrorists, like Afghanistan outside the capital.

The "muddle-through" scenario is now our best hope -- but muddle-through to what? Where will we end up once we have "muddled" our way to the end, and how many lives and limbs will have been lost in achieving that muddled result?

Comments

[mecki]

...and the green zone isn't as safe as it has been, either. We're even losing downtown Baghdad.

[myxococcus]

Part of me wants to say to the president, 'I told you so' because so far, everything that's happened over there is almost exactly like I would have expected before we went to war, and that's why I opposed the war. The other part of me is just sad.....really sad....and a little scared for the United States, and for all of the people of Iraq and Afghanistan who are caught in the middle of all of this.

[nitpicker]

I really don't understand how Bush& co. managed to fuck it up, I was against the war becuase they hadn't finished in afganistan and that the 'evidence' they produced for Saddam having WMD was pathetic, and it was obvious that they had already assumed that Saddam was guilty of haveing WMD and was merely going through the formality of proving it.

But Iraq was rediculously easy to win for god's sake, they just had use the same techniques Roosevelt used after the depression, institute large infrastructural work projects using the local Iraqi workforce, and give the new iraqi army and police force higher than average wages as an incentive for recruitment.

Iraq was very winnable, but bush decided that the outsourcing of Iraqi jobs to american amateurs and allowing torture as a valid interrogation technique was more important I guess.

Of course it can probably still be stabalised, like afganistan can, it'll just take alot longer and even more money now. it'll need some common sense too.

Bush has tried to hurry his 'war on terror' to fit into his political time table, and this is the inevitable result.

If I was president, my first act would be a stand-down order to the troops, and withdrawal to the bases. Then I would negotiate a total US withdrawal with the nominal government, with the significant term that Iraqi's who cooperated with the US military or development corporations were not to be targeted as collaborators, and work out some kind of terms for mutual amnesties for war related actions.

Then I would invite the Iraqi govt to ask for whatever aid it wanted, through the UN, which would mediate all international aid.

I would revoke all the Halliburton and US contracts, and renegotiate contracts directly with Iragi businesses, instead of foreigners.

Any additional US aid to Iraq would be only if directly requested by the IRaqi govt, and after Senate debate on each request.

Thats all I can think of now, but I think it would be a good first step.

[James]

I've for some time found the use of the word "insurgency" bothersome. Perhaps it's the fact that it feels like it was first used at the same time as we were confronted with all the propaganda about "foreign fighters", implying that this is outside forces and part of a different conflict than "the war". But there's also the fact that I'm not convinced that what is happening fits the definition/connotations of "insurgency".

Webster's Dictionary of Law defines "insurgency" as:

"The quality or state of being insurgent; specifically : a condition of revolt against a recognized government that does not reach the proportions of an organized revolutionary government and is not recognized as belligerency"

What that definition does not make explicit is who said government needs to be recognised by. Presumably in the ideal democracy that the Bush junta wanted us to believe they would establish in Iraq it would be some combination of "the international community" and "the people". I for one would be interested in reporting on what proportion of the Iraqi people believe the Governing Council is their legitimate government and how committed they are to that belief.

[wanderindiana]

Chris "New Wave Journo" Allbritton, the Time Magazine stringer guy who was recently seen tossing softballs to the CIA's newest man in Iraq, Iyad Allawi, says that Iraq is now America's Hell?

Man, things must be bad. I mean, upon his return, he took great pains to tell his readers the story of Baghdad's blossoming art scene!

What happened to the art scene, Chris?

[animus]

I assumed that "stay the course" meant "just keep dropping bombs until Jesus returns."

The Bush plan for Iraq seems to be a direct copy of the South Park Underpants Gnomes business plan.
Phase 1 - Steal underpants
Phase 3 - Make profit
Hey! What's Phase 2? I don't know. Do you know?

[Buhallin]

Watched ABC Nightly News last week when the story on the NIE broke. At the conclusion, the reporter described the response administration officials had given to make it seem not so bad:

"They said they hadn't even really bothered to look at it."

Now, I know they probably meant that as a "It's really not that important" kind of thing, but... Damn. Can anyone think of a more blatant case of them admitting they only listen to good news?

No wonder we're so hosed.

It's pretty obvious, really.

US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has rested on three things -- forced market access, 'containment of the Communist Menace', and control of the global oil supply.

The oil supply blipped with the embargo -- it was safe to get stroppy then, since the military power that backs all of this commercial advantage up was in no shape to do anything, post-Vietnam, and everyone knew it -- but you'll note what happened to the constant dollar price of oil in the eighties and nineties? It went down and it stayed down.

Right now, India and China are honest-to-Tiwaz industrializing -- major areas of fundamental research have shifted their centres of gravity to those locations, they've got the self-sustaining import replacement thing going on, and they're maintaining enough political stability to pull it off. (Heavily driven by memories of being helpless in the face of industrialized powers.) (Yes, they have problems -- look at the problems the US and England had when they were doing the same thing throughout the nineteenth. Those problems aren't anything like large enough to stop the process of industrialization.)

Once they've done that, there are two billion-plus population industrial powers with larger, more capable economies than the US; the US stops being a superpower, and we go back to a world with multiple Great Powers, one in which the US economy -- fundamentally propped up by the US's superpower status and all that forced market access -- has crashed brutally hard.

Basic Grand Strategic Situation, right?

That economic crash is something that keeps people in the Bush administration up nights; if they had the wits the bright gods gave a gecko in figuring out what to do about it, we'd all be much better off. (Most of them want to get as large a pile of money as possible under their personal mattress before it happens.)

Ok; the Bush government is essentially a mix of thieves, thugs, and theocrats united behind Bush as their neo-fascist front.

The Thieves was a return to Cold War levels of military spending, much more forced market access (effectively, monopolies and guaranteed profits), and a removal of the tax burden from their class. All of which adds up to a giant wealth transfer from everybody else to the ~1% of the population able to really take advantage of those policy changes. The Thieves are backing Iraq because it leads to monumentally padded government contracts and it goes along with the Tax Cuts for the Rich agenda as a sort of quid-pro-quo. They also think choking the life out of India and China through control of the Middle East oil supply is a good thing.

The Thugs -- it's a tossup whether Cheney is the chief thief or the chief thug -- want a situation where the rule of law doesn't constrain them, and they want a situation where they have all the material power; everbody else helpless to keep them from doing whatever they want.

They backed Iraq because it was supposed to scare people -- behold! we can kick Iraqi ass, and ifest thou gets out of line, the same shall be done to thine ass also -- which would further their core goal of making everyone too scared of them to complain about whatever they choose to do.

This core goal of submission-with-a-smile, aside from being really bad insecurity management, makes them really fundamentally stupid, because their goal is impossible; any attempt to pursue it will breed chaos. Throw in that the thugs have a whole lot of odd political philosophies, unconstrained by much in the way of fact or rigorous analysis of actual events, nothing that resembles competence in the use of force, and contempt for those who do, and they're exceedingly unhelpful people to have anywhere near the levers of power. (Also people obsessed with access to the levers of power.)

But they, too, think choking the life out of India and China through control of the Middle East's oil supply is a good thing. (Note that the strategy was supposed to be Iraq first, not just Iraq.)

The Theocrats want the Apocalypse; that makes chaos in the Middle East attractive. They also want a authoritarian society which enforces conformity to their particular repressive morality in the United States, and will support anything -- anything at all -- which makes it more likely that they'll get it. The prestige of the Victor of Iraq would have helped them get that.

The most basic of all rules about strategic choices -- strategic choices are the choices which pick objectives -- is to not make choices that shrink your choice space.

The most basic of all rules about tactical choices -- the choices that you make to achieve your objectives -- is that people do what they perceive to be in their best interest; if you want to alter their behaviour, you have to alter their perception of their best interest.

They thought they were following the first -- having all that oil would expand their choice space substantially -- although why they didn't look at the 'other energy storage and transport technology' end of things I have no idea. (Probably because they want to maintain the current social order in perpetuity; this is (along with using military force for commercial advantage) what dooms empires.)

The second, though, dear bright gods -- it would have been so easy to make things better for Iraqis, to have planned for it, to have the plan and the cash in place, so that it would be obvious to any Iraqi that yeah, they were better off. But that would be admitting that the opinions of others matter, and the the whole world is isn't composed of their slaves, for the Thugs; it would involve spending money on non-American infidels, for the Theocrats; and it would involve somebody else getting something, anything, instead of them, for the Thieves.

[Davis X. Machina]

Shorter Everyone: There Is No "Course" To Stay.