Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Victory "Defined"

posted by Will
Quote in the Washington Post on the Democratic response to the Bush “Plan”: “We need leadership, and we need a policy on Iraq that includes a flexible timetable for completing our military mission there, so that we can focus on our national security priority -- defeating the global terrorist networks that threaten the U.S.” Well said, Senator Feingold, well said. Now repeat that 5,000 times a day in every venue you can get access to.

The President’s “Plan” for Iraq is drawing fire for being insufficient, stubborn, and nearsighted. Rightly so. But the administration’s reasoning should also be drawing fire for being internally inconsistent, specious, and circular.

cont'd after link

Right at the top, in the Executive Summary, are several points that seem so patently and blatantly false that it would be laughable if it weren’t so scary. Further, they illustrate some of the basic fallacies upon which the administration continues to pin its ill-defined hopes. See this under "Victory in Iraq is Defined in Stages":

“Longer term: Iraq is peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism.”

compare with, just below it:

“Failure in Iraq will embolden terrorists and expand their reach; success in Iraq will deal them a decisive and crippling blow.”

So, the global war on terror is elsewhere? Finally it is admitted that Iraq is not the central front of the war on terror? We need Iraq to help us fight global terror...somewhere else?

Now, it’s been a long time since I was taking formal logic, but I don’t think W.V.O. Quine would like this kind of reasoning. The “planners” sound like they can’t quite distinguish between cause and effect. Maybe they should study up. Crack a book. I think their argument is supposed to go something like this: Everything in Iraq will be great...once we’ve defeated the terrorists...which will, in turn, help us to fight the terrorists...which is critical because if we leave now there will be terrorists...so we can’t talk about leaving, at all, yet because then the terrorists that are there will be encouraged to become terrorists once we leave...so there will be an insurgency and terrorists if we leave immediately.

But there already is an insurgency, and Iraq is already an operations haven for terrorists. Senators Kerry and Reed were right to call the addministration on their straw man argument. It only further highlights that Murtha is absolutely right: the administration is failing--completely--to take into account the effect that our troops’ presence in Iraq has on encouraging young, unemployed, uneducated Iraqis to join the insurgency. Maybe if they had their old military jobs all along, they’d listen to reason.

It’s silly, frankly. If the enemy is “diffuse and sophisticated”, as the “Plan” says, will they really be stumped by the lack of an American drawdown strategy? Does it seem to anyone like the insurgents are waiting to hear about when we leave to start operations? They're already blowing things up left and right, kidnapping Westerners, and assassinating the lawyers in Hussein's trial. Will even a stable government in Iraq with perpetual American support hinder their operations?

Not to mention that Iraq is certainly not the only place in the world where terrorists can plan attacks against America. Has Saudi Arabia’s stable government done a good job of preventing terrorists from hatching plots on its soil? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Iran? 9/11 was hatched, at least in part, in Germany, and right here in the U.S., too. The insurgency is a separate problem from the global war on terror. Utterly separate. And our plan, so far, to link the two is only hurting our efforts to win both struggles.

This is the second silly inconsistency in the Plan that I’ve noticed so far, and I’m still only talking about the Executive Summary. Defeating the “disparate” elements of the insurgency is “planned” thusly:

"Each element shares a common short-term objective – to intimidate, terrorize, and tear down – but has separate and incompatible long-term goals. Exploiting these differences within the enemy is a key element of our strategy."

What this fails to consider is that for however long our military is in Iraq, those “differences” are meaningless--the only goal they will all have is the continued fight against American forces. Their hope for whatever nasty vision they may have for Iraq’s future is overshadowed by the presence of an American occupation. Therefore, in fact, the only way to begin “exploiting” the incompatible long-term goals of the various factions in the insurgency is by LEAVING and allowing the Iraqis to exploit the incompatibilities. So, our strategy for stopping the insurgency relies on something that can only obtain when we do what the plan says we will never do! Without being anywhere close to clear-headed enough to realize it, Bush’s “Planners” actually agree with Murtha, only in a twisted, inverted, and dangerous way.

Also, the American presence in Iraq creates political problems for the Iraqis that we hope will “stand up” so that we can “stand down”. As long as we are there, they have to walk a fine line of working with us while appearing independent. A stable Iraqi government, as many Iraqis leaders have said, demands that America leaves so that the government can get busy legitimating itself. Our war “planners” have read way too much Robert Dahl and not nearly enough Rodney Barker. The American presence does not provide Iraq with some fixed quantity or ‘reservoir’ of legitimacy and stability. Stability will only arise in Iraq when an Iraqi government is allowed to independently legitimate itself as a political force. I’m not saying I know how to make that happen, but the presence of 150,000 American troops sure hasn’t helped so far.

This “Plan” is appalling in the same way that the initial estimates of the war planners were. Remember Wolfowitz saying the war would pay for itself? In George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate, which tells a story that deserves more attention in day to day war reporting that it gets, we see military “Planners” guessing that we’d be out of Iraq by August, 2003. AUGUST, 2003! We’ll be welcomed as liberators, remember? How’s that again, Cheney? The idea that this administration has any credibility left with which to even begin to shape a new and realistic plan for Iraq is insane.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Hoping For Leadership

posted by Will
While the president remains incompetent when it comes to being direct and open about the war and its future (because it draws him uncomfortably close to discussing the method by which his administration went to war), critics of the war miss a golden opportunity to do something important and positive. They sink all their rhetorical stanchions into the partisan swamp of “the war was a mistake and was based on corrupted intelligence.” While true, in the sense that the administration set up an alternative intelligence-gathering-and-filtering system in order to ensure that only the juiciest bits of pro-war information made it to the President and Congress (see George Packer’s excellent The Assassins’ Gate), it is now dreadfully beside the point. The American public and (more urgently) our troops abroad are waiting for something more, and they won’t get it from this lame administration. Will anyone step up and take the kind of political risk that success demands? Hard choices? Everyone claims that they want to be trusted to make them, so who's willing to actually do it?

cont'd after link

A summary argument in the current Economist seems to me to be the most clear-headed piece out there this week. We can all be upset about how we got to Iraq (and there are certainly thousands of families around the country with more reason to be upset than most people reading this), but the party out of power, which has real grievances to air and a seemingly infinite number of problems to fix, must avoid being so easily dismissible in our current climate as “unpatriotic” or “not supporting the troops”. The pro-war Cheney Republicans rely on the American people buying that line and immediately abandoning all their critical faculties and their senses of decency, reason, and the possibility of progress. (Is Iraq the best of all possible Iraqs? Eh, Donald “Dr. Pangloss” Rumsfeld?) The Democrats, in turn, continue to be not quite smart enough to avoid opening themselves up to that childish attack. What is left over from all that silliness is nothing of any use to a large country with large problems, and a military in need of answers and a plan. It is time to put forward something that is not susceptible to such cheap, easy, and boldly dishonest attacks.

What Representative Murtha did took courage, and as a veteran with his kind of credentials, he absolutely should be out there standing up for the interests of the troops against the forces of perpetual commitment to a mostly-failed enterprise. I applaud him for it even as I wish he started a bit earlier. But his statement is being taken now as the only Democratic war policy. Murtha simply did not do or say enough to constitute anything resembling a Democratic stance on the war. Have you seen a comprehensive DNC war plan lately? Simple withdrawal is not a plan. Let’s say we do, just in time for the Republicans to salvage a respectable finish in the ‘06 cycle. What then? We will simply wash our hands of it? Unrealistic. American interest in the future of Iraq and the region will not cease--nor will Iraqi interest in America fulfilling the Geneva Convention-mandated responsibility we have to stabilize and secure a country we invaded and whose (awful) government we overthrew.

Rhetoric is important. And even if a plan is not forthcoming, the Democrats ought to be talking about the plan that doesn’t but should exist. Why is there, essentially, no one discussing the future of Iraq in any terms other than military involvement? Has our country completely given up, having botched it so badly so far? Yes--we must withdraw soon, and yes--the Iraqi military must take over, and yes--we must demand that a stable and non-tyrannical government succeed in Baghdad, and yes--the Bush administration will be blamed when the time comes for blame. All that seems painfully obvious. But does the acknowledgment of those facts constitute a plan? If the best Democrats can do is criticize the war and call for it to end, and the best Republicans can do is resort to childish name-calling, jingoism, and the nasty questioning of critics’ patriotism, then our country is failing miserably on all sides in one of the most important functions our government has, and one that we have often failed to execute properly: serving our troops abroad who are serving our country. They deserve a plan. And no one is giving it to them.

Even if a plan does exist or is being formulated, it is to our collective shame that it is not discussed publicly, openly, and frequently. We owe it to everyone to do that.

The Democratic party needs to offer a real strategy for Iraq. Waiting for the administration to make the calculation that their polling data (yes, they listen to polls) demands a course-correction is political suicide. It also lacks courage, and frankly, it is bad for the country. Talk about the war as a mistake might comfort us and fulfill our need to feel righteously indignant about getting steamrolled for the last 5 years, but it doesn’t help to address the real problem we now face. A viable opposition that puts forward ideas and argument is the crucial component to successful representative democracy.

Only when someone makes a sustained effort to bring this debate out of the partisan shadows and beyond questions of pure military involvement will a serious candidate for the presidency in 2008 emerge. Then, finally, will we find out if anyone in fact deserves to be nominated in either party. I’m not expecting any Republican to show that kind of leadership. I hope some Democrat can start doing it, and soon. When someone steps up with a plan, all the recriminations will seem like so much playground name-calling, and Americans might actually start demanding some responsibility from our “leaders” rather than arguing about who is to blame when that responsibility is so dramatically and catastrophically violated.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Unrestrained Detainment Continued

posted by Will
Happy Thanksgiving.

Reaction to the launch of civilian criminal proceedings against Jose Padilla continues. Look anywhere and you will find it, but the best example is from Dahlia Lithwick at Slate. One can only believe that that degree to which any person pays attention to this story is the degree to which they will conclude two things: (1) that the administration is at base adrift on the question of how to combine American values and principles with running an effective war on terror, and (2) that Democrats have been far too impotent for far too long in their criticism of this essential failure of the Republican-dominated government.

cont'd after link
Instead of debating the serious policy questions involving our security and our place in the world, nakedly partisan and downright nasty claims by the administration that being critical of its bad choices in Iraq or in its conduct of the war on terror is unpatriotic, and that they are the sole arbiters of American Values have put their credibility on thin ice at best, and deep in the abyss at worst.

The tragedy is that they have no standing left from which to conduct an effective war on terror. Nothing serious will be accomplished until a balance of power at the federal level is restored.

There are better ways to fight and win the war on terror, and it is to everyone's shame that the debate over our best strategy for winning should be constantly overshadowed by moral debates over basic questions of decency that the administration never fails to shine a spotlight on with its actions.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

On Detainment and Torture

posted by Will
The civilian charges returned by a federal grand jury in Florida against Jose Padilla today constitute a milestone, or a U-turn, in the administration’s conduct of the war on terror. At a time when Vice President Dick Cheney is actively lobbying for the defeat of Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment, there is a stark contrast between the behind-the-scenes maneuvering and the avoidance of a potential public argument in front of the Supreme Court over the rights of detainees.

cont'd after link

A picture is emerging of the White House knowing that its policies in the 'war on terror' would not survive Supreme Court (or public) scrutiny. Democrats and other critics, however, not only need to draw attention to the inconsistencies and dissembling in the west wing, but must also make the further point that the incoherent and legally questionable policies of indefinite detainment damage the United States' image around the globe. For every conceivable reason that the administration might have capitulated in its efforts to hold Jose Padilla without charges in perpetuity, Cheney's efforts to preserve the legality of torture must be openly and loudly challenged as a threat to the political efforts to win the battle of ideas and that go hand-in-hand with military and intelligence operations. The image of America torturing prisoners and detaining them forever must be dealt with for strategic as well as moral reasons.

Senator McCain has said (quoted in the article linked above): "We've got two wars going on: one a military one in Iraq, and then we've got a war for public opinion, for the hearts and minds of all the people in the world." and "We've got to make sure that we don't torture people." He is right, but he and other critics, most notably the Democratic Party, ought to be extending debate to all our policies' collective effect on world opinion of our country and its leaders. America will be more successful in the 'war on terror' when our efforts are not colored by moral ambiguity. The charging and conviction of all suspected terrorists held by the US military will be a first step winning the war for public opinion--the war that critics like Senator McCain urge the administration not to forget. Assuming the evidence against Padilla is as strong as it should be, he will be convicted and put away for good. We will then all be better off for being able to talk about our next steps toward winning the war, rather than being bogged down by the debates about morality in wartime that the administration's actions have put front and center for far too long.

It is high time for the administration to do the right thing, move on, and show some of their much-self-touted leadership. America's moral position in the world should never have caveats.

Friday, November 18, 2005

What to expect:

posted by Will
Smart political commentary. Not like all that other stuff out there. Prepare yourselves...