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On Iraq, U.S. Turns to Onetime Dissenters
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 14, 2007; A01

First of an occasional series

Timothy M. Carney went to Baghdad in April 2003 to run Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Minerals. Unlike many of his compatriots in the Green Zone, the rangy, retired American ambassador wasn't fazed by chaos. He'd been in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, Phnom Penh as it was falling to the Khmer Rouge and Mogadishu in the throes of Somalia's civil war. Once he received his Halliburton-issued Chevrolet Suburban, he disregarded security edicts and drove around Baghdad without a military escort. His mission, as he put it, "was to listen to the Iraqis and work with them."

He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned. The U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), placed ideology over pragmatism, he believed. His boss, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, refused to pay for repairs needed to reopen many looted state-owned factories, even though they had employed tens of thousands of Iraqis. Carney spent his days screening workers for ties to the Baath Party.

"Planning was bad," he wrote in his diary on May 8, "but implementation is worse."

When he returned to Washington, he made little secret of his views. They were so scathing that his wife lost a government contract. He figured his days of working on Iraq were over.

Until a phone call on Tuesday.

David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, was on the line with a question: Would Carney be willing to go back to Baghdad as the overall coordinator of the American reconstruction effort?

The decision to send Carney back to Iraq -- and to abandon the policies that so rankled him in 2003 -- represents a fundamental shift in the Bush administration's approach to stabilizing the country. Desperate for new approaches to stifle the persistent Sunni insurgency and Shiite death squads that are jointly pushing the country toward an all-out civil war, the White House made a striking about-face last week, embracing strategies and people it once opposed or cast aside.

Indeed, Carney's rushed selection came just days after the administration announced two other key Baghdad appointments from among the ranks of dissenters in 2003: Ambassador designate Ryan Crocker and Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will take over command of all coalition forces in Iraq.

Crocker, who spent the summer of 2003 helping to form Iraq's Governing Council, left the country frustrated with the CPA's reluctance to reach out to minority Sunnis. Even before the invasion, he wrote a blunt memo for then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell warning of the uncontrolled sectarian and ethnic tensions that would be released by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Petraeus, who spent 2003 commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, grew dismayed by the heavy-handed tactics fellow military commanders were using to combat insurgents. He also opposed the methods by which Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and fired Baathists from government jobs. And he chafed at the way reconstruction funds, personnel and decision-making were centralized in Baghdad. The CPA's policies, he said in 2004, should have been "tempered by reality."

It's a view the White House now seems to accept.

The plan unveiled by Bush last week calls for many people who lost their jobs under Bremer's de-Baathification decree to be rehired. It calls for more Sunnis, who were marginalized under the CPA, to be brought into the government. It calls for state-owned factories to be reopened. It calls for more reconstruction personnel to be stationed outside the Green Zone. It calls for a counterinsurgency strategy that emphasizes providing security to the civilian population over transferring responsibility to local military forces.

Carney believes such measures could have been effective three years ago. Today, he worries they will be too little, too late.

During the phone call, Satterfield told him that the new reconstruction effort might not succeed. The two men agreed that if it was to have a chance, Americans would have to work more closely and collaboratively with Iraqis.

To Carney, it suggested "a sense of reality."

"It's certainly different than anything I saw out of the CPA or the aftermath of that," he said. "It seemed a little refreshing, actually."

He paused.

"It's been a long time coming."

A Plan in Need of a Leader
Bush and his national security team began working on their new Iraq strategy in earnest shortly after the Nov. 7 midterm elections, which amounted to a rebuke of the president's war policy. They met among themselves. They talked to diplomats and military commanders in Iraq. They conducted a videoconference with Iraq's prime minister. They consulted with retired generals, experts at think tanks and academics.

By late December, the president and his closest security advisers -- Vice President Cheney, new Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley -- had coalesced around the need for more troops in Iraq. They had settled on Crocker to handle political strategy on the ground, replacing Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. And they had picked Petraeus to take over from Gen. George W. Casey Jr., whom they deemed to be too focused on the handover of responsibility to the Iraqis instead of on restoring peace to Baghdad's strife-torn neighborhoods.

But it wasn't until Monday, when Bush was going over a draft of the address he planned to deliver on television Wednesday, that they confronted the issue of who would coordinate the administration's new economic initiatives for Iraq.

Bush was planning to propose increasing the number of province-level reconstruction teams operating outside the Green Zone from 10 to 18. There would be new efforts to help the Iraqi government improve budgeting and management functions. And, most important, there would be a significant new emphasis on putting unemployed Iraqis to work. The strategy also included an implicit reversal of Bremer's policy on state-owned factories.

Scores of Americans ensconced in Baghdad's Green Zone would be involved: The U.S. Embassy has an economic section. There's a U.S. Agency for International Development mission. And there's the Project and Contracting Office, which manages reconstruction funded by an $18.4 billion U.S. aid package.

"Who's going to coordinate this?" Bush asked as he read through the economic initiatives, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.

When Satterfield got back to his State Department office, he told his staff to "give me names."

The next day -- less than 36 hours before Bush addressed the nation -- Satterfield called Carney.

Idle Factories, Idle Workers
Before Carney left Iraq in June 2003, he tried one last time to persuade Bremer to rethink his refusal to repair more than a handful of state-owned factories. Iraq's government-run businesses employed more than 100,000 people before the U.S. invasion. To Carney, it was a no-brainer: Fixing the factories would allow thousands of Iraqis to get back to work, not only allowing them to provide for their families, but also keeping them occupied. He knew from his time in other post-conflict societies that the idle and unemployed are the best recruits for insurgencies.

But Bremer and his chief economic adviser, Peter McPherson, didn't want to pour money into inefficient state-run firms. They believed private investors would buy Iraq's government factories and set up new businesses to employ the populace. So they refused to give Carney money to reopen the plants.

The day before he left, Carney sent a note to McPherson titled "Fatal Flaws in Budget Policy towards State-Owned Enterprises." He argued that the CPA was violating the Geneva Conventions by undermining "assets of the Iraqi people." He also accused McPherson of drawing up policy "without adequate Iraqi participation."

"Instead of transparency, with major concerned Iraqi Ministries and academics engaged," he wrote, "the policy seems to be the thinking of a small group in the Coalition Provisional Authority."

"We need to rethink this," he wrote in closing.

Petraeus also opposed the immediate privatization of state-run firms. "What happens when you have privatization is . . . you end up with a hell of a lot less workers in the short term," he told an interviewer in 2004. "If you want to increase unemployment en route to greater employment and greater productivity and greater a lot of other things, that's great, but you've got to survive in the short term."

For almost three years, the policy didn't change. Although the Iraqi government reopened a small fraction of its 148 factories and began operating them at a diminished capacity, the efforts to sell them to private investors were unsuccessful.

When Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, at the time the top U.S. field commander in Iraq, sought to increase production at a state-owned tractor factory south of Baghdad early last year, a State Department official in Baghdad refused to pay for the necessary repairs, even though the rehabilitated facility would have been able to provide employment for many of the 10,000 people who worked there before the invasion. Chiarelli used money from a different program -- for small-scale reconstruction projects -- to fund the construction.

It wasn't until June that the Bush administration began to reevaluate its approach. Paul A. Brinkley, who had recently taken over as deputy undersecretary of defense for business transformation, returned from a trip to Iraq convinced that quelling violence depended on increasing employment. To Brinkley, a former corporate executive, the most effective way to create jobs was to reopen state-run factories.

Brinkley persuaded Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England to authorize funding to repair as many as 200 factories. England's predecessor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, was among the administration officials who opposed resuscitating state-owned firms in 2003.

It's not clear how effective Brinkley's initiative will be. Many of the factories are in dangerous, Sunni-dominated areas of the country. Electricity remains in short supply. Raw materials can be hard to come by. And given the intensity of the sectarian conflict, giving Iraqis jobs may not be enough to get them to put down their weapons.

Even if the odds are slim, the Bush administration wants to give it a try. Brinkley's team is focusing on 10 factories that it thinks could be open and employing more than 11,000 Iraqis by the end of this month.

"Any counterinsurgency strategy has to have an economic component to it," said Celeste Ward, who spent last year in Iraq as Chiarelli's political adviser. "It might give us a marginal increase in stability by getting some people off the street. You want people to start saying, 'Hey, we're a normal country where people go to work.' "

De-Baathification
"This is a big mistake," Carney thought in May 2003, when Bremer told senior CPA officials that he would soon issue an edict prohibiting many former members of Hussein's Baath Party from holding government jobs. The one-and-a-half-page decree, which was drafted in the Pentagon office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, banned anyone who had been in the party's top four ranks; it also banned hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file members from holding senior management positions in government ministries. Bremer's stated goal was to cleanse Iraq's government of the former president's cronies.

Carney and the other Americans tapped to run Iraq's ministries knew that the senior managers in almost all government departments were Baathists. Hussein's government had forced them to join the party, but that didn't mean they all had blood on their hands or that they were all close associates of the former leader. And without them, it would be much more challenging to get the government running again.

With unemployment at more than 40 percent, Carney also knew that anyone kicked out of a government job wasn't going to find work elsewhere. They would be unemployed and angry.

Carney was one of many CPA officials to object. But Bremer refused to soften the policy.

The de-Baathification expert in the CPA's headquarters was Meghan O'Sullivan, then an aide to Bremer and now a deputy national security adviser working on Iraq. Although she voiced initial misgivings, she quickly became a vigorous and uncompromising enforcer of the edict.

From the moment the order was issued, most of Carney's time was devoted to de-Baathification. He held long meetings with the industry ministry's management, first to explain the policy and then to comb through records to identify people who were ineligible for future employment.

"It was a terrible waste of time," Carney said. "There were so many more important things we should have been doing, like starting factories and paying salaries."

After a few months, the CPA began to receive reports that 10,000 to 15,000 teachers had been fired because of the de-Baathification order. In some Sunni-dominated areas, entire schools were left with just one or two teachers.

Bremer eventually concluded that the policy had been applied "unevenly and unjustly." But instead of rescinding his edict, he announced that appeals would be handled by a de-Baathification commission headed by Ahmed Chalabi, a controversial former exile whose informants had helped the Bush administration make the case for war. Chalabi, a Shiite, saw little need to accommodate former Baathists, most of whom are Sunnis.

By the summer of 2004, as the United States was relinquishing sovereignty of Iraq, many officials handling Iraq policy in Washington had concluded that Bremer's initial edict was a mistake. But it was too late for the Americans to do anything other than urge Iraq's Shiite-led interim government to rehire ex-Baathists. The CPA no longer had the power to issue edicts.

U.S. officials in Baghdad and in Washington leaned on the governments of prime ministers Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jafari, but the country's powerful Shiite and Kurdish leaders were unwilling to embrace the changes sought by the Bush administration. As far as they were concerned, Bremer enacted a sound policy in 2003, and there was little need to change it.

Finally, in 2005, the Shiites and Kurds agreed to reexamine the de-Baathification rules as part of a compromise to get Sunni political parties to support Iraq's new constitution. The agreement called for a revised de-Baathification law to be enacted by parliament.

But that still hasn't happened.

In an attempt to get the process moving, Bush used his televised address last week to call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to embrace the reintegration of former Baathists. Maliki told Bush recently that he supports a revised de-Baathification law -- but the issue isn't in the prime minister's hands. It's still with Chalabi.

Chalabi is the chairman of the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which continues to have ultimate authority to decide which ex-Baathists can return to work and which cannot. He has prepared draft legislation that calls for easing some elements of Bremer's policy, but he said parliament has been unable to act on it because a majority of the members of the legislature's de-Baathification committee belong to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's political party, which walked out in November to protest a meeting between Maliki and Bush.

Speaking by telephone from Baghdad, Chalabi said he expects progress "pretty soon."

But he said the law will not contain a key demand of the U.S. government: a sunset clause that would abolish the commission, effectively depriving Chalabi of political influence. He called it unconstitutional.

Chalabi said he heard Bush's call for swift action on the de-Baathification law, but he emphasized that he and his fellow Iraqis, not U.S. officials, are in charge of the legislative timetable.

"We don't feel any pressure," he said.

URL: http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/opinion_columnists/article/0,1406,KNS_364_5273290,00.html
Barnett: Iran: This emperor has no clothes
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT
January 14, 2007

Americans swallow enemy propaganda at face value, subjecting us to knee-jerking manipulation by fiery orators. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a few choice phrases, successfully elevates himself to the status of a Muslim "Hitler." But this populist windbag is already losing his grip in Tehran, giving Washington a strategic opportunity we don't yet appreciate.
While American neocons and Israeli hawks would bomb Iran today, lest it continue enriching uranium, try viewing the situation less emotionally.

First, credible estimates say Iran won't field any nuclear missiles for several years. If and when such a time comes, Tehran will be no more difficult to deter with the threat of massive retaliation — as in, wiping off the map — than anybody else in history. Nuclear-armed Israel, backed up by ever-present America, faces no more strategic risk than Western Europe did during the Cold War.

Extrapolating suicidal nations from suicide bombers is compelling rhetoric but unsupported by history, which says two-sided nuclear standoffs are inherently more stable than one-sided superiority (Israel's current advantage). As for sharing technology with bad actors, that's far more likely if Iran remains an unrecognized nuclear power — like Pakistan.

Second, Ahmadinejad is no fuehrer. Iran's president doesn't control the military (the grand ayatollah does) and has no say over Tehran's nuclear program (ditto).

When reformer Mohammad Khatami previously served as president, American hardliners dismissed calls to engage Iran, arguing the grand ayatollah held all the marbles. Now, despite the Iraq Study Group's call for dialogue, these same hawks vociferously denounce the notion by citing Ahmadinejad's fiery threats.

But recent events prove Ahmadinejad has already lost favor among the ruling mullahs, thanks to outrageous stunts like hosting an international conference of Holocaust deniers.

Last month, the Majlis (Iran's parliament), which has clashed with Ahmadinejad more than once, voted overwhelmingly to shorten his presidential term by 18 months, citing budgetary savings.

Also last month, Ahmandinejad's cronies took a beating in local elections, including the influential Tehran city council race, where his successor as mayor, Mohammad Ghalibaf, won big. Iranian political analysts pick Ghalibaf to be Ahmadinejad's main competition for re-election in 2009.

Most importantly, Ahmadinejad's religious allies fared badly in the vote for the Assembly of Experts, a College of Cardinals-like entity that selects the next grand ayatollah once Ali Khamenei, currently under a deathwatch, passes from the scene.

That fix was in: Khamenei himself pre-emptively struck several Ahmadinejad allies from the ballot. Former president Ali Rafsanjani, whom Ahmadinejad beat to become president in 2005, was overwhelmingly elected the assembly's new chief, making him a credible candidate to succeed Khamenei.

As George Bush might say, that was a thumping defeat.

Want more evidence?

How about a surly mob of Tehran's college students forcing Ahmadinejad to cut short a speech last month?

Their chant? "Death to the dictator!"

Ring a few bells?

Even more telling is that Iran's state-controlled TV reported the stunning protest.

Suffering the world's worst brain drain and a birth rate that's dropped through the floor, Iranian society is imploding before the world's eyes, triggering a resurgent domestic reform movement that's now aligned with pragmatic conservatives determined to arrest the nation's downward spiral.

Externally, however, Iran is peddling influence across the region, quietly executing regime-building investment strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and southern Lebanon. Iran's oil revenue is creating development all right, just not back home where increasingly angry Iranians want it.

Slap these dichotomous images together, and you can't help but wonder at the similarities between today's Iran and the Soviet Union in the late Brezhnevian period: the blustery facade of regional domination covering a system rotten to its spiritual core.

Sooner than we think, Iran's Gorbachev-like figures will reveal themselves, not because we desire it but because Iran's rate of internal decay — so visible in its oil industry — will demand it. Remember, Gorby wanted to fix — not dismantle — the U.S.S.R. America's approach to this looming transition should mirror Ronald Reagan's with the Soviets: talk and act tough publicly, but privately seek out pragmatic opportunities for detente-like cooperation. This "soft kill" strategy has worked before.

Our dialogue with Iran should begin now, if for no other reason than any planned surge effort in Iraq is doomed to fail unless Tehran's obvious countering efforts are somehow neutralized.

Larger strategic opportunities await but only if we learn to see through the propaganda.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

Op-Ed Columnist
The American Way of Equality

By DAVID BROOKS
Income inequality is on the rise. The rich are getting better at passing their advantages on to their kids. Lifestyle and values gaps are widening between the educated and uneducated. So the big issue is: Will Americans demand new policies to reverse these trends — to redistribute wealth, to provide greater economic security? Are we about to see a mass populist movement in this country?

Nobody was smarter on this subject than Seymour Martin Lipset, the eminent sociologist who died at 84 on New Year’s Eve. Lipset had been a socialist in the hothouse atmosphere of City College during the 1940s, and though he later became a moderate Democrat, he continued to wonder, with some regret, why America never had a serious socialist movement, why America never adopted a European-style welfare state.

Lipset was aware of the structural and demographic answers to such questions. For example, racially diverse nations tend to have lower levels of social support than homogeneous ones. People don’t feel as bound together when they are divided on ethnic lines and are less likely to embrace mutual support programs. You can have diversity or a big welfare state. It’s hard to have both.

But as he studied these matters, Lipset moved away from structural or demographic explanations (too many counterexamples). He drifted, as Tocqueville and Werner Sombart had before him, to values.

America never had a feudal past, so nobody has a sense of social place or class-consciousness, Lipset observed. Meanwhile, Americans have inherited from their Puritan forebears a sense that they have a spiritual obligation to rise and succeed.

Two great themes run through American history, Lipset wrote in his 1963 book “The First New Nation”: achievement and equality. These are often in tension because when you leave unequally endowed people free to achieve, you get unequal results.

Though Lipset never quite put it this way, the clear message from his writings is that when achievement and equality clash in America, achievement wins. Or to be more precise, the achievement ethos reshapes the definition of equality. When Americans use the word “equality,” they really mean “fair opportunity.” When Americans use the word “freedom,” they really mean “opportunity.”

Lipset was relentlessly empirical, and rested his conclusions on data as well as history and philosophy. He found that Americans have for centuries embraced individualistic, meritocratic, antistatist values, even at times when income inequality was greater than it is today.

Large majorities of Americans have always believed that individuals are responsible for their own success, Lipset reported, while people in other countries are much more likely to point to forces beyond individual control. Sixty-five percent of Americans believe hard work is the key to success; only 12 percent think luck plays a major role.

In his “American Exceptionalism” (1996), Lipset pointed out that 78 percent of Americans endorse the view that “the strength of this country today is mostly based on the success of American business.” Fewer than a third of all Americans believe the state has a responsibility to reduce income disparities, compared with 82 percent of Italians. Over 70 percent of Americans believe “individuals should take more responsibility for providing for themselves” whereas most Japanese believe “the state should take more responsibility to ensure everyone is provided for.”

America, he concluded, is an outlier, an exceptional nation. And though his patriotism pervaded his writing, he emphasized that American exceptionalism is “a double-edged sword.”

Political movements that run afoul of these individualistic, achievement-oriented values rarely prosper. The Democratic Party is now divided between moderates — who emphasize individual responsibility and education to ameliorate inequality — and progressive populists, who advocate an activist state that will protect people from forces beyond their control. Given the deep forces in American history, the centrists will almost certainly win out.

Indeed, the most amazing thing about the past week is how modest the Democratic agenda has been. Democrats have been out of power in Congress for 12 years. They finally get a chance to legislate and they push through a series of small proposals that are little pebbles compared to the vast economic problems they described during the campaign.

They grasp the realities Marty Lipset described. They understand that in the face of inequality, Americans have usually opted for policies that offer more opportunity, not those emphasizing security or redistribution. American domestic policy is drifting leftward, but there are sharp limits on how far it will go.

http://dan92024.blogstream.com/v1/pid/174758_Mr-President-I-pray-your-new-plan-works-But-I-also-pray-you-and-your-team-learn-how-to-play-Middle-Eastern-chess-By-Dan-Hare.html#TP




Mr. President, I pray your new plan works. But I also pray you and your team learn how to play Middle Eastern chess!


Yes, I pray our President and Commander in Chief is right on this new strategy to secure Baghdad so that real reconstruction efforts can take place. One of the real problems is the unemployed youth that is at staggering levels. These are the ones, which typically are lured into various militias and ‘causes’ to better their lot and form their ideologies. It is difficult for them to pass up lucrative compensation to set off IED’s which kill and maime our men and women in uniform. As diverse scholars including Newt Gingrich and Tom Barnett, say, the best exit strategy is a strong economy in Iraq with low unemployment. Yes security is needed and the president’s new direction makes sense, even though it has taken much too long.

From the military folks I have talked to, some on the record and some not, tell me that the assumptions that the Iraqi’s will put aside a culture of ‘justice’ and revenge after decades of murder and brutality against their families and tribes is simply naïve.

The Washington Post had an insightful article, which is posted on my blog at:

http://dan92024.blogstream.com/v1/pid/173978_Iraqi-Army-marked-by-lack-of-will-poor-discipline-and-poor-equipment-and.html#TP

This is the type of comment, which is common among the brave men, and women of our armed forces.

General Joe Hoer, retired four star general, who commanded Centcom after the first Gulf War, whom I interviewed said last year about this notion:

“GIVE ME A BREAK”.

It is in the same vein that the Iraqi’s were going to “greet us as liberators” and ‘all of a sudden hold hands and sing ‘Kumba Yah’” around the campfire while they continue to run a country that was essentially in rubbles even before the invasion/liberation. “What a kroc!”

President Bush is playing baseball, while his opponents are playing cricket!

The reality is that this age old part of the world
is beyond complicated and they think in terms of
generations, unlike Americans who think in terms
of ‘instant gratification’.

It is as though we are playing against the ‘grand masters’ of Middle Eastern chess.

The Iraqi leadership understands personal pain much better than ‘we support you’ rhetoric. They understand reality and play the west like a maestro on the fiddle! They will continue to jockey for position and profit until they are forced to move when their own personal comfort and safety is seriously threatened, not merely at risk.

“We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem,” said an American military official in Baghdad involved in negotiations over the plan. “We are being played like a pawn.”

The almost complete lack of planning for this war borderlines on criminal, not in terms of ‘intent’ but in terms of strategy or lack or strategy.

Lt. Col Kim Olsen, executive assistant to General Jay Garner, said it well in her C Span booknotes interview, that they

were given two weeks to come
up with a reconstruction plan.


Then when that didn’t happen, the following group under Ambassador Paul Bremer, Lt. Col Alan King, said in his C Span booknotes interviews that

they were given 24 hours to come
up with a reconstruction plan!

One would think that there would be contingent plans in place when the assumptions that the Iraqi’s weren’t all in alignment on how to move their country forward after decades of brutality.

During the Saddam’ reign, the military was completely dysfunctional, according to the honorable former Iraqi General Georges Sada, who revealed the levels of paranoia which permeated Saddam’s serious lack of command and control. In Saddam’s reign, I understand that about 3-5% of the ruling elite controlled the populace. To think that anything LESS than overwhelming force would keep people in line is simply naïve. In fact the Iraqi’s were used to and NEED a firm hand to keep them in line. They ‘get it’. They respect it.

Yes this is a Middle East chess game and we have been playing checkers I’m afraid.

Over the holidays my dear mother was telling me how a friend of hers, who is married to a diplomat from Dubai, was sharing the story of some prominent men in that country who had requested a meeting with President Bush 43, before the invasion/liberation of Iraq, to give him council on the things that he must do and consider. The President didn’t accept the meeting or receive their council! Now it shows. Yes our president is playing checkers in a game of chess.

Yet I pray that this surge works. Yes it may be to little to late, but I pray that the true colors of the Iraqi military will show sooner than later. Yes it has a chance. Especially if the rules of engagement are changed to warfare and not with some protective political preference given to members of favored militias like the Mahdi Brigade/Al-Sadr’s group.

If it doesn’t work, there are other options. Although I don’t have a crystal ball, my sense is that there will be a continued mass exodus and reintegration into various parts of Iraq along tribal and sectarian lines. It may look something like the Balkans, which have seen the light of economic connectivity after some years of reorganizing their society after their civil war and in the break up of their lands.

Now the boast of the various Balkan states
is how much direct foreign investment they
respectively have attracted. The guns have
gone away and economics have become the
replacement for guns.

After the Iraqi’s have some level of continued civil war, they will have created their own natural security zones. These regions will have the legal ability to vote for succession that is mostly in place for Kurdistan as well as 9 other Shia regions in the south. It will likely be along some type of Shia, Sunni and Kurdish, lines. There will likely be the breakup of many tribal and sectarian mixed marriages, but that will be part of the evolution of Iraq.

We think in terms of ‘terrorist’ who seeks to do us harm in the west, however there are much more local and regional issues, which will have a stronger dynamic. For many in the west see the “Shia” as one unified group holding hands singing ‘kumbaya’ by the campfire. The reality is that it is far more complex. Yes they are Shia, but they are also ARABS AND PERSIANS. These two ethnicities have had great hatred towards each other for centuries.

Currently the rule is ‘my enemy enemies
is my friend’ which puts both branches of
Shia together against the democracy which
could threaten their theocratic power hold
on the populous.

However when the US leaves Iraq and the lines are redrawn in the regions, I bet you will find the Iraqi Arab Shia quickly rebuffing the influence of Iran’s Persian Shia. The truth is that the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, the revered Shiite leader, is in something of a competitor to the Iranian form of Schism. They celebrate similar holidays on different calendar days. So the complexities seemingly have no end.

So if the surge strategy doesn’t work, our next strategy may be to start playing Middle Eastern chess and learning from the masters.

We don’t need to look long to find a successful
model in the Middle East which has been effective.
Hezbollah has been very effective.

It is essentially elements of our current, and often ineffective, USAID married to our CIA and ‘black ops’. The model of ‘throwing’ huge assets and American lives with little finesse is both uneconomical at this point. Smaller FOBS (forwarding operating bases) by host countries who want to partner with us against mutually agreed upon targets make so much more sense.

It has a better chance of staying below the ‘radar’ of our western media that will take exception with just about any military intervention, and can have more of an empowering of local assets effect, and quieter black op type of capability. It may take longer but if the Middle East model of Hezbollah is an example it is worthy of an effort.

The other tool to effectively fight the culture of terror, is to treat energy production as a national security issue. Every barrel take off the world market, is the financier of the bullets that are shot at our soldiers. Further, the corrupt regimes in the middle east which we have propped up have not been good to there people by in large. The one horse economies, have for decades, been the narrowly defined domestic product for many despotic regimes.

It is a simple concept, but one that has lacked political will both in our government as well as our people to mandate MASSIVE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY DEVELOPMENT on the scale of a nation at war.
It is possible, it is needed. This is where we need good governance which would place a floor to the cost of a barrel of oil. This would insure that start ups would be guaranteed a level at which energy production would be profitable. For a free market minded person, this is a evolving position for me.
However the reality is that middle eastern concerns, OPEC, are acutely aware of allowing supply to manipulate our market demand for this cheap energy source. It is a part of Middle East Chess.

If one was to be objective, in my subjective opinion!,

we are facing two major
forces in the world today.

One is globalism which seeks to connect the world economically and level the playing world with opportunity. The second is a form of fascism which seeks under the guise of religion to ‘disconnect’ the world and subjugate it under a banner called Islam. Other call it Arab Imperialism which seeks to leverage its wealth of energy reserves into world domination under its particular brand. The essence of globalism is the ultimate inclusion of ALL regardless of race or creed, while the essence of the other is a shoddy attempt to keep people ‘disconnected’ from the ‘world’ under the guise that because of their evaluation of ‘hollywood’ images are corrupting to them, and their purity, that they would make all of globalization as evil rather than as empowering.


The most powerful weapon for the future
that I have been fascinated with is the idea
of FIFTH GENERATION WARFARE. It is when
you beat an enemy without them knowing
you are in a fight with them.

It is an evolving and new concept with various shadings of the ‘definition’ which include infrastructure work of roads and water treatment which sustains economic connectivity. However I like to take this a step further in consumerizing the concept to include efforts like ‘one laptop per child’. The idea is that if you can connect a child, a village, to the global community, exposing them to a wider range of knowledge, that they are less likely to follow some tribal sheik who would seek to control them. The old adage that ‘knowledge is power’ is the key ‘weapon’ in the next generation of warfare. One laptop per child is the next step in that evolution. There is a group who are developing a laptop that can sell for $100 and work in underdeveloped parts of the world and operate by self generated power supply.

Wouldn’t it be great if we saw connectivity of the disconnected as a national defence issue. Imagine how many seeds of peace we could sow for the billion dollar a month cost of war. It is really a make over of the ‘peace corps’. It is what Grand Strategist Tom Barnett calls the SYS ADMIN force in his book: BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION. The SYS ADMIN FORCE is the ‘other than war fighting arm’ of the military. The Army corps of Engineers and reconstruction which stretch out their missions. Something of a FUSION..., a PEACE CORPS with a side arm ‘just in case’ made up of teachers, city planners, engineers, doctors etc. It is essentially the idea as explained in Barnett’s DEVELOPMENT IN A BOX which is a plan with an A-Z rule set of standardization. It has nothing to with converting a culture in its most basic sense, it is simply a franchise of sorts which allows a culture to enter and integrate into the globalized world for the economic connectivity which brings millions out of poverty every year.

Yes it is the innovative and cutting edge minds and movements that give me hope in how we as Americans approach the world of Geo politics.

Further, wouldn’t it be great if our private sector and that of the western world, took the lead with even greater intensity to see the mission of ‘connecting’ the disconnected world as a national defence issue.

Wouldn’t it be great if our government had a ‘connectivity’ investment tax credit and other tax breaks for meeting certain objectives.

Newt Gingrich in is 9/11 speech he spoke of the
effort to utilize Iraqi Americans in an internet campaign to ready
and co-op Iraqi nationals, but it was squashed by military brass who didn’t w want to give up any of this type of control! As we emerge into a
new paradigm of warfare, and the next generation of bright
military personnel star tacking on “Stars” to their lapels,
this global approach to 5th generation warfare will increasingly
emerge.

The good news is that Saddam is DEAD! Justice has been served up to this monster that is responsible for hundreds of thousands and likely over a million Iraqi’s. Not just Kurds and Shia, but also his own Sunni Arab brothers. In fact Saddam killed more Arabs than any other leader in history!

The good news is that the elite, the 3-5% of the Iraqi society doesn’t rule the roost any longer. At least killing is on a more level battlefield. It is sad that this is good news, but it is more just than under the reign of Saddam.

The good news is that the Kurds, who were victims of genocide and WMD’s against hundreds of thousands of its people, with over 2000 of its villages being destroyed, and it’s the many who were removed under the thread of death in the city of Keokuk under Saddam’s Arabization program are now thriving and in their own safe region to the north. In fact many Arabs are migrating there because it is safe and secure with opportunity.

The good news is that Kurdish Iraq has two leaders Barzani and Talabani who used to be at war with each other and now both have international airport in their respective regions.

The good news is that LESS PEOPLE TODAY are being killed in Iraq than under Saddam, who my UN estimates murdered 50,000 of his own people a YEAR! While the sectarian violence is increasing it still doesn’t pass the atrocities under a typical year during Saddam’s reign. There is a complete lack of proportionality in our coverage of the war by most all media.

The good news is that American deaths in this war are surprisingly low. In fact lower than any major conflict in the last 100 years. Each and every one is tragic, but again the lack of proportionality isn’t in our coverage of the war.

The good news is that there is a formula available in which any 3 or more regions can succeed if they choose to. The legal framework is essentially in place to make this happen.

The good news is that we as a country honor and respect the brave men and women in uniform. The common salutes and ‘thanks’ to soldiers and marines in airports is 180 degrees of what it was during the Vietnam era.

The good news is that Iraqi’s are no longer jailed or even killed if they are caught with a cell phone.

The good news is that Iraqi’s have greater connectivity with satellite dishes and consumer items like air conditioning units and various appliances that have been absent for decades.

The good news is that despite a lousy environment to reconstruct much of the Iraqi infrastructure, there has been much accomplished which simply isn’t reported in the headline news.

The good news is that most Iraqi’s are not starving to death today like they were under Saddam who withheld food from the masses and held them in Baathist store houses and watched the rest of Iraqi’s wither away.

The good news is that immunizations are back on track with most of the western world and the infant deaths are much less now than under the reign of Saddam.

The good news is that even though it is very dangerous for journalist in Iraq, we have greater ‘openness’ to the world, if only thru the eyes of courageous military personnel.

But with all of the complexities and textures of the portrait, which is called “Iraq”, we still have to get smart about how we approach the world for the purpose of world peace.


Mr. President, I pray your new plan works. But I also pray you and your team learn how to play Middle Eastern chess!

January 14, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Stumbling Around the World

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
With Iraq sliding off a cliff, and now tugging another 20,000 young Americans along as well, it’s worth wrestling with a larger question: Why are we so awful at foreign policy?

Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who won the Nobel Peace Prize, dropped by the other day, and she made the same point with characteristic bluntness. “It amazes me that the U.S., with all its scientific accomplishments, is so shortsighted in its foreign policy,” she noted.

It is pathetic. We can go safely to the moon but not to Anbar Province. We can peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, but we fail to notice (until it’s too late) that many Iraqis loathe us. We produce movies that delight audiences all over the world, but we can’t devise a foreign policy that anybody likes.

And it’s not just right-wing Republicans who are the problem. President Bush has been particularly myopic, but Democrats mired us in Vietnam: shortsightedness is a bipartisan tradition in foreign policy. Historically, we are often our own worst enemy.

Iraq is the example of the moment. We invaded, thinking that we would get a pro-American bulwark, cheap oil, long-term military bases and the gratitude of liberated Iraqis. Instead, we fought Iraq, and Iran won.

Speaking of which, look at Iran. In 1953, we helped overthrow the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, to achieve a more pro-Western government. That created tensions that led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the rise of mullahs with nuclear dreams. If it weren’t for our own policies, Iran might well now have a pro-American government.

So why do we act so often against our own long-term interests? There are at least two reasons.

The first is that great powers always lumber about, stepping on toes, provoking resentments, and solving problems militarily simply because they have that capability. One of the great passages of Thucydides records how some 2,400 years ago Athens decided to wipe out the city of Melos because it could.

Likewise, in 1955, when Britain was the dominant player in the Middle East, it formed the Baghdad Pact, a military arrangement intended to protect British interests in the Middle East. Instead, the arrangement inflamed Arab nationalists, strengthened anti-British feeling and contributed to the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958 — and, eventually, to the rise of Saddam.

The second reason is particular to the U.S.: We don’t understand the world. The U.S. may owe its existence to prickly nationalist troublemakers like Sam Adams, but (partly because relatively few Americans have lived abroad) we are obtuse about the appeal of prickly nationalist troublemakers elsewhere. Like George III, we empower our enemies.

So what does all this have to do with the price of tea in Baghdad?

Once again the White House is seeking military solutions that are likely to rebound and hurt us. Sending more young Americans into that maelstrom may well have three consequences: inflaming Iraqi nationalism, bolstering Shiite and Sunni extremists alike, and killing more young Americans.

A U.S. military study in 1999, recently declassified and in the National Security Archive, concluded that even 400,000 American troops might not be able to stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq. The study emphasized the importance of diplomacy to engage Iraq’s neighbors.

But President Bush is moving in the opposite direction. Most worrying, he is hinting at engaging Syria and Iran not diplomatically but militarily. We are careering down a road that may ultimately lead to military strikes on Iran — a disaster.

What would a better strategy look like? A good bit like the one advocated by the Iraq Study Group. It would emphasize engaging neighbors, a big push for political compromises within Iraq, steps toward troop withdrawals and an intensive effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace. (Condi Rice is planning this last effort.)

Would this strategy work in Iraq? No one knows. But such a bipartisan plan might at least bring a bit of healing to the U.S.

Meanwhile, history comes around in other ways. The Rev. Bob Edgar, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recalls that as a young congressman in April 1975, he encountered a similar presidential request for a surge of troops. It was a demand by President Gerald Ford for more U.S. forces to stabilize Saigon.

A White House photo captures Ford conferring with two of the architects of that request: senior administration officials named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.