Connect to freedom or not?
OPINION: On negotiating with Tehran, by Henry A. Kissinger, International Herald Tribune, November 23, 2006
Pretty decent starter piece by Kissinger that gets everyone a bit closer to realistic expectations on Iran, which is sort of in its Khrushchevian "we will bury you" (at least in the Shiite belt) bragging phase. To a great extent, all the talks need to do is buy us time and a forum for starting what will inevitably be a long-term forum for regional security discussion, much like the OSCE forum was in Europe.
No, this forum won't magically make our rapid departure from Iraq possible, and no, it won't stop Iran from getting the bomb. Keep those two realities firmly in your head: we won't be leaving Iraq (even though our role and numbers will change) and Iran will be getting the bomb.

The regional forum concept is not designed for magical outcomes, but slowly building the collective will for permanent security regimes to arise in the region that settle the endemic conflicts and allow enough political stability for economic connectivity to ensue, which in turn will fuel social change already underway and political change that seethes just below the surface (the great fears of the despots).

In many ways, the Big Bang strategy continues to work by playing a forcing function: forcing the emergence of negotiations, deals, fora, etc. that are required for any sort of security advance in the region. If Iraq had gone well, dictators quaking in their boots would have moved in this direction out of fear. As Iraq goes badly, dictators quaking in their boots are moving in this direction out of fear. At this minimum, the Big Bang was always going to work: the only question was how much pain was going to be involved and what threat that pain would pose to America's will to continue (which, for now, holds up incredibly well--unless I'm missing the mass demonstrations in the streets and the constitutional crisis in DC).

Realism is just idealism stretched over time. It is a belief in inevitabilities that prefers inaction to action and cynicism to morality. But such delays do not constitute diversions much less defeats.

Remember what Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution and decide which side of history you want to be on: those who connect to freedom or those who disconnect to achieve tyranny.

To me, the outcome will never be in doubt, just the timing.

Thanks to TurcoPundit for sending this in.

Democracy Can Still Work in Iraq
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By Michael Rubin
Posted: Friday, November 24, 2006

ARTICLES
Windsor Star (Windsor, Ontario)
Publication Date: November 24, 2006

The democratically elected government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has proved a grave disappointment. Security has worsened since al-Maliki has been in power. Ignoring the pleas of U.S. officials, he has been unwilling to crack down on the militias and death squads that fuel sectarian violence. The mass kidnapping from a Ministry of Higher Education building in Baghdad on Tuesday by gunmen in police uniforms shows the consequences.


Resident Scholar Michael Rubin

In October, al-Maliki's government refused to co-operate with U.S. troops searching for a kidnapped comrade. A week later, al-Maliki ordered U.S. forces to lift a blockade of Sadr City, where the missing soldier was believed to be held.

Corruption remains corrosive. Al-Maliki's administration has hemorrhaged hundreds of millions of dollars. Oil revenues and foreign aid disappear. Al-Maliki and his allies treat ministries as mechanisms for patronage. They dispense jobs to political loyalists, not able technocrats. Officials in the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, for example, have replaced experienced doctors with uneducated militiamen. But does this mean that the U.S. ambition to bring democracy to Iraq was a mistake?

As a supporter of the war, and later an adviser to the U.S. occupation authority, I don't think so. Despite our disappointment with al-Maliki, the strategic rationale for promoting democracy in the Middle East--and in Iraq, in particular--remains sound. But it needs to be a long-term strategy, as demonstrated by our success in Korea, where more than 35,000 American servicemen sacrificed their lives. Half a century later, the juxtaposition of totalitarian, destitute and nuclear North Korea with thriving and peaceful South Korea shows the value of a long-term strategy to build democracy.

With chaos growing, impatience in Washington should not come as a surprise. In March, Congress charged a bipartisan commission chaired by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former Representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.) to look at Iraq with "fresh eyes," but it's already clear that its final recommendations will not make a priority of preserving democracy.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has said he has no confidence in al-Maliki and has called for Iraq's division. Others seek to scrap the constitution or impose a strongman. Rumors circulate in Baghdad that the CIA plans a coup.

But to give up on democracy would affirm our adversaries' conspiracy theories, betray the Iraqi people and undercut U.S. diplomacy for decades. Rather, Washington should leave the elected government in place but stop funding it. If al-Maliki wants to treat ministries as fiefdoms, let him do it without our money. American taxpayers are under no obligation to subsidize an ineffective government that is hostile to U.S. interests.

Some who advocate shock therapy to reform the al-Maliki government, such as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), argue that the way to force it to take responsibility is through a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. But only the best-armed groups would benefit. Ending subsidies to the central government, though, would promote better government, more efficient tax collection and greater transparency over oil revenues without, most likely, actually bringing down the al-Maliki government. Accountability, not elections, is the bedrock of democracy.

I'm not suggesting that aid to Iraq should be cut off entirely. Rather, it should be redirected away from the central government through the U.S. military to Iraq's municipalities, especially those that are run by democratically elected city and town councils. Democracy is best built from the bottom up.

Shortly after Saddam Hussein's ouster, I spent a few days with the 173rd Airborne Brigade around Kirkuk, an ethnic and sectarian flashpoint. The U.S. troops offered aid, but the councils determined how it would be spent. For example, Kurds might be a plurality, but they could not dictate. In order to win consensus, they had to compromise with Turkomen and Arabs. Technocrats and those willing to compromise rose as Iraqis pushed the populists aside. Can this local emphasis work given the ongoing sectarian violence?

Yes. Many Iraqis support ethnic militias because they provide services and security the central government is unable to supply. The greatest impediments to reconstruction now are corruption and security. But every day, U.S. servicemen go on patrol across Iraq. They visit every city, town and village. They know what is possible and can keep tabs on the money they are handing out. While billions spent by Green Zone diplomats have evaporated, U.S. troops can provide accountability.

Injecting money directly to local projects works. Indeed, it is how Muqtada al-Sadr and the militias have won hearts, if not minds, and at a far lower cost. Rather than ignore our enemies, we should copy their model of success. The stakes for Iraq and U.S. national security are simply too high to throw in the towel.

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at AEI.

November 24, 2006

Telling the future isn't that hard
ARTICLE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/23/AR2006112301007.html?referrer=email, By Colum Lynch, Washington Post, November 24, 2006; Page A12
Slowly but surely, China rises up the ranks of the world's peacekeepers. The biggest numbers of bodies have historically come from countries with the largest populations, so the anomaly of Pakistan and Bangladesh supplying so many.
My prediction: within a generation China consistently provides more peacekeepers globally than any nation in the world.

Locate labor where the problem is, I say, which is why I prefer to deal in inevitabilities rather than possibilities. Just follow the money, and the energy, and the demographics, and the security, and spotting logical future pathways for the planet isn't all that hard, with the big questions being speed of technology and strength of will.

Posted by Thomas P.M. Barnett at 4:24 PM | Comments (2) | Email this post

The reality is that IRAQ IS SAFER TODAY THAN IT WAS UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN.
SADDAM murdered over 1 million of his people. Some 50,000 a year perished by his, or his ruling class, arbitrary decision to execute men, women and children for the smallest or even 'suspected' crimes which may have included some insinuated or derogatory comment against Saddam or someone in the Baathist regime.

The truth is that today, the US death toll to our soldiers and marines is under 3000 which and less than the murderous attacks on 9/11/2001.

While it is true a civil war rages, it is also true that the killing isn't coming from the hands of the repressive regime of Sunni Baathist which represents about 3-5% of the ruling elite.

So while it may be inevitable that the revenge killings and 'blood letting' happens in Iraq, until they figure it all out, the USA in large part has allowed this next painful part of the hopeful healing of a nation which in realistic terms may take decades.

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November 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
No One to Lose to

By MAUREEN DOWD
Washington

After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.”

He could describe, hypothetically, a series of naïve, arrogant and self-defeating blunders, including his team’s failure to comprehend that in the Arab world, revenge and religious zealotry can be stronger compulsions than democracy and prosperity.

But W. is not yet able to view his actions in subjunctive terms, much less objective ones. Bush family retainers are working to deprogram him, but the president is loath to strip off his delusions of adequacy.

W. declined to tear himself away from his free-range turkey and pumpkin mousse trifle at Camp David and reassure Americans about the deadliest sectarian attack in Baghdad since the U.S. invaded. More than 200 Shiites were killed and hundreds more wounded by car bombs and a mortar attack in Sadr City. October was the bloodiest month yet for civilians, and in the last four months, some 13,000 men, women and children have died.

American helicopters and Iraqi troops did not arrive for two hours after Sunni gunmen began a siege on the Health Ministry controlled by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has a militia that kills Sunnis and is married to the Maliki government.

Continuing the cycle of revenge yesterday, Shiite militiamen threw kerosene on six Sunnis and set them on fire, as Iraqi soldiers watched, and killed 19 more.

The New York Times and other news outlets have been figuring out if it’s time to break with the administration’s use of euphemisms like “sectarian conflict.” How long can you have an ever-descending descent without actually reaching the civil war?

Some analysts are calling it genocide or clash of civilizations, arguing that civil war is too genteel a term for the butchery that is destroying a nation before our very eyes. Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Iraq coverage, went back recently and described “the final, frenzied maturity of once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion. There was civil-war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival; a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too easy a term, a little too tidy.”

It will be harder to sell Congress on the idea that America’s troops should be in the middle of somebody else’s civil war than to convince them that we need to hang tough in the so-called front line of the so-called war on terror against Al Qaeda.

With Iraq splitting, Tony Snow indulges in the ludicrous exercise of hair-splitting. He said that in past civil wars, “people break up into clearly identifiable feuding sides clashing for supremacy.” In Iraq, “you do have a lot of different forces that are trying to put pressure on the government and trying to undermine it. But it’s not clear that they are operating as a unified force.” But Lebanon was a shambles with multiple factions, and everybody called that a civil war.

Mr. Snow has said this is not a civil war because the fighting is not taking place in every province and because Iraqis voted in free elections. But that’s like saying that the Battle of Gettysburg only took place in one small corner of the country, so there was no real American Civil War. And there were elections during our civil war too. President Lincoln was re-elected months before the war’s end.

The president’s comparison to how Vietnam turned out a generation later, his happy talk that Iraq is going to be fine, is preposterous.

As Neil Sheehan, a former Times reporter in Vietnam who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Bright Shining Lie,” told me: “In Vietnam, there were just two sides to the civil war. You had a government in Hanoi with a structure of command and an army and a guerrilla movement that would obey what they were told to do. So you had law and order in Saigon immediately after the war ended. In Iraq, there’s no one like that for us to lose to and then do business with.”

The questions are no longer whether there’s a civil war or whether we can achieve a military victory. The only question is, who can we turn the country over to?

At the moment, that would be no one.

November 24, 2006
In Video, Hussein Uses Slingshots and Bows to Rally Iraqis for War

By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — As the world worried about Saddam Hussein’s quest for nuclear and biological weapons, he took time out to discuss with his top advisers the merits of a decidedly more primitive arsenal: slingshots, Molotov cocktails and crossbows.

In a previously undisclosed video, apparently shot in the months before the American-led invasion in 2003, Mr. Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, beams as military officers display and demonstrate low-tech weapons spread on a table in a ceremonial room. Whether the episode shows genuine preparation for an insurgency or was merely a bizarre propaganda exercise is unclear.

In the video, Mr. Hussein, wearing a double-breasted gray suit, aims a slingshot, shoots an arrow at a door using a crossbow (as aides scamper out of the way) and swings a mock gasoline bomb over his head with a rope. He urges his aides to get such weapons into the hands of Iraqis.

“Let’s use all the methods we can,” he tells his generals. “These methods can be made at home.”

Later he says, “Let’s talk to the minister of industry to see if we can mass produce this.” Tariq Aziz, Mr. Hussein’s close adviser and deputy prime minister, pipes in, “This can be shown to our group of people, who can introduce it to the others.”

Phebe Marr, a historian of Iraq, says that what is most striking about the video is the archaic and impotent nature of the weapons Mr. Hussein appears to be taking seriously. “This stuff is medieval,” she said. “The interesting question is whether this was preparation for the resistance we’ve seen since.”

The 20-minute video, part of a vast collection of videotapes seized by American forces in Iraq, was obtained from a military source by Peter W. Klein, a television producer who has included an excerpt in a documentary, “Beyond Top Secret,” to be shown Friday night and Saturday morning on The History Channel.

The video is undated. But it appears to have been made in late 2002 or early 2003, based on the contents and the physical appearance of Mr. Hussein and Mr. Aziz, said specialists on Iraq who reviewed it for The New York Times and The History Channel.

“I’d say it was one or two months before the invasion,” said Louay Bahry, an Iraqi scholar who taught political science at the University of Baghdad in the 1960s and 1970s and now lives in Washington. “They were trying to inflame the people with propaganda.”

Mr. Bahry, who reviewed the video with Ms. Marr, his wife, says that Mr. Hussein and his aides use the Arabic word “muqawama,” which means “resistance,” and discuss enlisting civilians in a future insurgency against an occupying army.

But the staged nature of their show-and-tell suggests a political purpose: to show that the ruler is planning for the coming conflict and expecting all citizens to help. Whether the video was ever shown on television is not known.

“The message is that the coalition is coming after all the Iraqi people and not just the regime,” said Paul R. Pillar, a top Middle East analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000 to 2005 and now a professor at Georgetown University. “My guess is that the propaganda value was at least as important as any true military preparation.”

Marc E. Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in the Iraqi leadership and who was in Iraq early in the war, said Mr. Hussein was “quite delusional” at times about the military threat he faced. Still, Mr. Garlasco said, the tape’s main purpose was probably “to send a message: ‘We’re all in this together, and there’s a part for everyone to play.’ ”

A Defense Intelligence Agency spokesman, Cmdr. Terry Sutherland, reviewed the video but said the agency had no comment.

Mr. Hussein, 69, was sentenced to death on Nov. 5 after being convicted of crimes against humanity for the persecution of residents of Dujail, Iraq, in response to what was said to be an assassination attempt against him there in 1982.

Military analysts have debated what he and his aides did before the invasion, to prepare for a guerrilla campaign. Some studies have suggested that he doubted that American troops would come to Baghdad and that he was more worried that any attack could set off a rebellion by the country’s Shiite majority, as occurred after the Persian Gulf war in 1991, or an invasion by Iran.

Whatever the thinking, enormous quantities of small weapons and explosives were hidden around the country before the invasion. “We found caches everywhere with thousands of weapons,” said Mr. Garlasco, now a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch.

Those supplies have fueled the three-year-old insurgency, which has relied mainly on firearms, improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers. Attacks using slingshots to shoot ball bearings have occasionally been reported, but there is no evidence that Mr. Hussein’s videotaped exhortation led to action.

In most of the video, the lead role in demonstrating the low-tech weapons is played by a man experts identified as Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaish, chief of the military industrialization commission, which once oversaw attempts to build unconventional weapons.

In the video, however, Mr. Huwaish, who was captured by allied forces not long after the invasion, shows off martial arts weapons, including a sharp-pointed throwing star, a slingshot designed to be stretched between the feet and fired sitting down, and metal spikes designed to destroy the tires of passing vehicles.

“There are more than 100 ideas, but I chose these,” Mr. Huwaish says. Pointing out Molotov cocktail devices using soda bottles, he says, “Pepsi, Coke — things that are in the house.”