“This fragile stability is where the 16-year arc from the eruption of the Balkan wars in 1991 has led. Given that regional realities make an Iraqi breakup unthinkable, the architecture of the Yugoslavia-in-miniature in Bosnia is probably the most helpful guide for Baghdad: a fig-leaf national government presiding over a loose federation.”

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/opinion/13cohen.html?hp
September 13, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Ottoman Swede

By ROGER COHEN
STOCKHOLM

As members of Congress mull what to do next in Iraq, they might glance at a League of Nations report of July 16, 1925, on the new Middle Eastern state then being carved by the British from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.

The report said that despite “the good intentions of the statesmen of Iraq, whose political experience is necessarily small, it is to be feared that serious difficulties may arise out of the differences which in some cases exist in regard to political ideas between the Shiites of the South and the Sunnites of the North, the racial differences between Arabs and Kurds, and the necessity of keeping the turbulent tribes under control.”

And it warned: “These difficulties might be fatal to the very existence of the State if it were left without support and guidance.”

So much for things changing. They don’t, or only slowly, when attempts are made to carve sustainable nation states from multiethnic empires.

This 82-year-old document was handed to me by Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, a man of dry humor and quick tongue who can claim to be the world’s authority on messes in post-Ottoman areas. “From Bihac to Basra,” he said, referring to towns in western Bosnia and Southern Iraq, “these things take time and benchmarks don’t count for much.”

Bildt recently returned from Baghdad where Sweden has much to discuss given that 20,000 Iraqi refugees are expected to arrive here this year, a number that dwarfs the trickle of fleeing Iraqis into the United States. This imbalance is shameful, but that’s another story. Iraqis have no special desire to trade desert for pine forest, but Sweden has the merit of letting them in.

In the Iraqi capital, Bildt heard divergent political visions from Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, and Tariq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president. The notion of give-and-take, of compromise reached rather than domination imposed, is a Middle Eastern novelty.

Give-and-take has not been a big Balkan thing either, and it was in the Balkans, as a special European Union envoy, that Bildt cut his teeth on post-Ottoman mayhem. He sees “massive parallels” between Yugoslavia’s violent dismemberment once dictatorship ended and Iraq’s turbulent deliverance from tyranny.

Both states were invented in the post-World War I years in areas long under complete or partial Ottoman dominion. Both were beautiful inventions, bridges between divergent cultures and religions and ethnic groups, mosaics beneath a national flag. Both had the drawback of tending toward their own self-destruction in the absence of a strongman to resolve contradiction through force.

Freedom is a funny thing. Life without it is misery.

But a glance at the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia or now Iraq is a sufficient reminder that distinct peoples forcefully gathered into a dictatorial state will react in the first instance to liberty by trying to get free of each other rather than trying to imagine a liberal democracy.

As Miroslav Hroch, the Czech political theorist, has observed, ethnic or religious nationalism easily become the “substitutes for factors of integration in a disintegrating nation.” That’s where we are in Iraq. In plotting a social revolution, the ushering to power of a subjugated Shiite majority through the overthrow of a minority Sunni dictatorship, the Bush administration did not ponder or plan for these realities.

That’s unfortunate, indeed unforgivable, but it’s done.

Bildt, Balkan-hardened, takes the long view. “If you take the Ottoman areas, they were Muslim but tolerant with an array of different cultures and their replacement with different versions of the 19th-century nation state has proved very difficult, be it in the Balkans, in Cyprus or the Middle East.”

He cannot imagine a quick American exit. “Iraqi leaders will want some sort of exit perspective, but a long-term one,” he says. As long as Iran and Saudi Arabia see Iraq as a Shia-Sunni battlefield, peace will be elusive.
=
The Balkan analogy is interesting. Yugoslavia’s breakup saw four years of war, then another war in Kosovo four years later. Only regional pressure — the bait of European Union membership — and a large European and American military presence have brought calm. The question of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia remains explosive.

This fragile stability is where the 16-year arc from the eruption of the Balkan wars in 1991 has led. Given that regional realities make an Iraqi breakup unthinkable, the architecture of the Yugoslavia-in-miniature in Bosnia is probably the most helpful guide for Baghdad: a fig-leaf national government presiding over a loose federation.

If the United States meets the responsibilities its invasion engaged and the region can be coaxed to help rather than hinder, we may attain such fragile stability 16 years from Saddam’s fall: that would be 2019, just over a century after the Ottoman collapse.

•

You are invited to comment at my blog: www.iht.com/passages.

The Public Looks beyond Iraq


By Michael Barone
Posted: Monday, September 10, 2007

ARTICLES
Creators Syndicate
Publication Date: September 10, 2007


Resident Fellow
Michael Barone

This week, the American public will surely be focused on Iraq, as Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker present their reports to Congress. Petraeus and Crocker will undoubtedly speak of the striking military success of the surge strategy, while Democrats will try to focus on the failure of Iraqi politicians to reach agreement on major issues.

But Iraq is not the only challenge America will face in the coming years. Islamist terrorists will continue to try to attack the United States and undermine if not destroy our free society. And Americans, for all the media's concentration on Iraq, seem aware of this--and will be keeping it in mind as they decide on how to vote next year.

That's the message you get from an interesting poll conducted in mid-August by Public Opinion Strategies, a widely respected Republican firm, for the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Unlike most polls, it doesn't include specific questions on Iraq, but rather focuses on the wider struggle.

Will the United States be safer from terrorism if it confronts the countries and groups that promote terrorism or if it stays out of other countries' affairs?

It still shows some divisions that parallel those on Iraq. Will the United States be safer from terrorism if it confronts the countries and groups that promote terrorism or if it stays out of other countries' affairs? Some 48 percent prefer confrontation, 44 percent staying out of other countries' affairs. Fully 79 percent of Republicans are for confrontation, while 67 percent of Democrats are for staying out of other countries' affairs.

But you don't see such a partisan division when the question is whether the next generation of Americans will be less safe from foreign threats than we are now. Americans agree by a 57 percent to 39 percent margin--the margin of agreement is statistically identical among Republicans (17 percent), independents (19 percent) and Democrats (18 percent).

Will the threat from Islamic fundamentalism be significantly reduced once George Bush is no longer president? By a 58 percent to 35 percent margin, Americans say no. Will that threat be significantly reduced once U.S. troops leave Iraq? By a 58 percent to 37 percent margin, they say no.

What we see here is quite at odds with what has been the prevailing political dialogue. When the question is approval or disapproval of the conduct of the war in Iraq, the middle segment of the electorate--independents--have joined Democrats in expressing sharp disapproval.

In the Democratic presidential debates, candidates have been vying to show that they support withdrawing from Iraq (though lately some have felt obliged to concede that they wouldn't remove all U.S. troops anytime soon). On this issue, the Democratic field is in line not only with the Democratic primary voter, but also with most of the general electorate.

But when it comes to the question of protecting Americans from Islamist terrorists, the Democrats have little to say, or nothing. Democratic candidates have mentioned Islamist terrorism only briefly or, more often, not at all in their several debates. In contrast, Republican candidates in their debates have more to say on the subject. On this issue, it is the Republican candidates who are in line not only with their primary electorate but also with most voters in the general election.

This helps to explain one anomaly in current polling, that while voters generically prefer a Democratic candidate, when they are presented with a choice between the two candidates now leading in the polls, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, they are split just about evenly. The reason is that Democrats are giving voters the impression that they believe everything will be just fine in the world once Bush is back in Crawford and the troops are home from Iraq.

The Public Opinion Strategies poll indicates that that is a notion a solid majority of American voters reject. They know that the Sept. 11 attacks were planned long before Bush became president and that our enemies will try to launch new attacks after he is gone.

Raging against George W. Bush plays well among Democratic primary voters while Bush still has more than a year left in his presidency. The Democratic base has been in a fury against Bush since the Florida controversy in late 2000, and its appetite for denunciation of him and all his works seems never to be satisfied. But raging against Bush, and leaving the impression that you feel the threats we face will disappear when he does, could leave the Democratic presidential nominee vulnerable next fall when Bush's presidency will be about to recede into history.

Michael Barone is a resident fellow at AEI.

Battle of the Generals?


By Frederick W. Kagan
Posted: Monday, September 10, 2007

ARTICLES
National Review Online
Publication Date: September 9, 2007


Resident Scholar
Frederick W. Kagan

Press reports assert that General George Casey, chief of staff of the Army, and the other chiefs have advised President Bush to reduce forces in Iraq dramatically next year. Casey has publicly questioned the current strategy and stated that the surge will have to end in April because of strains on the Army. Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno, the commanders of those forces, have repeatedly indicated that they cannot now commit to a clear timeline for any such reduction, while recognizing the strains on the Army and Marine Corps. The media has been quick to describe this apparent dispute as a battle of the generals: "The chief of staff's position on the surge reflects a divide in opinion on the Iraq war among the top leadership in the American military," one article noted. In reality, it is nothing of the sort. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have one job--looking after the institutional well-being of the armed forces. Commanders in the field have another--winning the war. Both must advise the secretary of defense and the president within the scope of their duties, and the nation's top two civilian commanders must decide how to balance competing priorities.

The actual disagreement between Casey and the other chiefs on the one hand and Petraeus and Odierno on the other is less obvious than drama-seeking news stories have made out. After the New York Times reported that Pace would advise the president to draw down tens of thousands of U.S. forces in Iraq next year, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs issued a public statement denying the claim. And a sensationalist article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to pit Casey against Petraeus nevertheless claimed that Casey wanted to pull six brigades out of Iraq by the end of 2008--in other words, to return to pre-surge levels. That is what both Petraeus and Odierno have been suggesting that they would like to do as well, if it is possible. It is by no means clear from the public record, therefore, just how much space there actually is between the chiefs and the commanders in the field.

As the national discussion unfolds and everyone involved in the process offers advice, however, it is important to understand the profound differences between the duties of the Joint Chiefs and those of the commanders. The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 created the foundation of the current U.S. military structure at the highest levels. It has received much praise for improving the cooperation among the services--its original purpose--but it has had a number of unintended consequences, including the development of tensions between the Joint Chiefs and field commanders in wartime.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have one job--looking after the institutional well-being of the armed forces. Commanders in the field have another--winning the war.

The American military system today works like this: The chain of command--people who can actually give orders to combat units--runs from the president to the secretary of defense to the Unified Combatant Commander (Admiral Fox Fallon of U.S. Central Command, in this case; previously General John Abizaid) to the field commanders (General Petraeus and his subordinate, General Odierno). The job of the combatant commanders is to use American military force to pursue U.S. interests, including but not limited to fighting and winning the nation's wars.

The Joint Chiefs have a different job. They are explicitly excluded from the chain of command. Instead, each individual service chief has the task of being a "force provider"--training and equipping the military units of his service so that they are ready for use by combatant commanders. In addition, the chiefs collectively are the president's military advisers, although Goldwater-Nichols eliminated some earlier confusion in this regard by specifying that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the president's principal military adviser and the only chief with the right of direct access to the president.

To put it simply: The Joint Chiefs have the task of preparing American armed forces for present and future combat, while the combatant commanders have the job of fighting the wars. Or, to put it another way, there is no uniformed military officer in the Pentagon whose primary job it is to win wars. Only two people in Washington actually have that job: the secretary of defense and the president.

This situation is markedly different from the famous example of World War II, for instance. General George C. Marshall was the chief of staff of the Army, and he took his job of building, training, equipping, and preparing that force to fight very seriously. But he was also responsible for actually winning the war, and so he balanced concerns about the well-being of the Army with the needs of combat within his own staff and within his own mind. The current chiefs do not have any such mandate. Their job, by statute, is to think about the well-being of their services, and that is what they do.

There are trade-offs with either system, but now is not the place to consider what might be better. As the debate over Iraq progresses, however, we must keep constantly in mind the perspective that the various generals bring to bear on the problem. The chiefs would be remiss if they did not advise the president and secretary of defense about the strains that this war--like all significant wars--put on the armed services. The commanders in the field would be failing in their task if they did not provide honest advice about what forces they need to win. The ultimate burden of decision falls upon the president. He must evaluate the relative danger of withholding necessary forces from commanders engaged in an important struggle against the damage that keeping more forces deployed for longer is doing to the military.

His problem is made more complex by the fact that, although removing U.S. forces from Iraq would relieve the immediate pressure on the ground forces, it would also almost certainly lead to a humiliating defeat of those forces. Such a defeat will inflict its own damage on the well-being of the U.S. military, which has not yet lost a war since it became an all-volunteer force after Vietnam. And the president must also weigh the damage now being done to the military against the possibly greater damage that might result from a need to reengage in the Middle East in coming years after Iraq has collapsed and spread greater chaos through a region of vital national interest to the United States. These are difficult decisions that will require the president soberly to evaluate all of the advice he is given. The American people and Congress must do the same. Above all, we must avoid succumbing to the temptation to portray a battle of the generals as some kind of political theater or strife within the military. Choosing rightly at this critical pass in American history is too important for that.

Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at AEI.

Gingrich: Petraeus Report 'Wholly Inadequate'
By Nathan Burchfiel
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
September 11, 2007

(CNSNews.com) - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Monday criticized Republicans and Democrats on their approach to the war in Iraq and their singular focus on Gen. David Petraeus' progress report to Congress.

"The gap between where we are and where we should be is so large that it seems almost impossible to explain why the Petraeus Report, while important, will be a wholly inadequate explanation as to what is required to defeat our enemies and secure America and her allies," Gingrich said at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., according to a prepared copy of his speech.

Gingrich said politicians are "having the wrong debate about the wrong report" and criticized Democrats who "would legislate surrender and defeat for America" and Republicans who advocate "staying the course" in Iraq.

"America needs a more realistic and more powerful solution to the challenges of our enemies," said Gingrich. "Beyond the Petraeus Report, we need a report on the larger war with the irreconcilable wing of Islam."

Gingrich called for "a debate about a vision of victory for the larger war in which we are engaged and the strategies needed to achieve that vision. We need a debate about the genuine risks to America of losing cities to nuclear attack or losing millions of Americans to engineered biological attacks."

He said politicians focused on the Petraeus report and other reports on the war in Iraq are missing the bigger picture of the broad war on terrorism, citing Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Great Britain and the United States as other fronts in the struggle with the "irreconcilable wing of Islam."

"Iraq has to be analyzed as only one campaign in this larger war. It is a very important campaign, and it deserves thorough consideration but it should not be confused with the larger war," Gingrich said.

While he was critical of Republicans' "stay the course" strategy, Gingrich said that "the results [of the troop] surge are impressive and worthy of our continued support." He added that "supporting Gen. Petraeus in Iraq is not enough to win the larger war."

Citing Abraham Lincoln's adaptability during the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt's mobilization of the American people in World War II, and Ronald Reagan's efforts to define the enemy and victory during the Cold War, Gingrich called for a more broad approach than a dual focus on Iraq and Afghanistan allows.

"The key debate for the next year should not be the Petraeus Report and conditions in Iraq," he said. "The key debate for the next year ought to be the larger war, the real enemies, the need for a real strategy, and solutions to the scale of the challenge we face."

In an interview published Monday in GQ Magazine, former Secretary of State Colin Powell disputed conventional wisdom that terrorism is the greatest threat facing the United States.

"[A]re there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system?" Powell asked. "No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the greatest threat we are facing?

"It should be about how we create institutions that keep the world moving down a path of wealth creation," Powell told the magazine, "of increasing respect for human rights, creating democratic institutions and increasing the efficiency and power of market economies?"

Powell said Americans are "taking too much counsel of our fears" and that while "there is a threat" from terrorists, the United States should focus on inviting and integrating foreigners who can contribute to American society.

"Let's show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do," he said. "The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn't do it ourselves, and we shouldn't use fear for political purposes -- scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."

Marines trade bullets for compassion
Posted: September 8, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Matt Sanchez



The Anbar Awakening, for some, is a cliché easily dismissed as an Iraqi fluke in a quagmire of military missteps shuffling to the tune of opportunities lost. Gunner Terry Walker, a 30-year plus veteran of the military and senior gunner of the United States Marine Corps, said, "The pre-packaged concept of an 'awakening' is absolutely absurd. These sheiks didn't just get up one day and declare their allegiance to Coalition Forces. What you see throughout Anbar Province is the fruit of five years of concerted COIN (counter-insurgency) operations." Whether you believe in spontaneous epiphanies or effective military small-war strategies, the fact remains that waking up was just one point in the Sunni Triangle conversion from the Wild, Wild West to Mayberry.

First Lt. Mauro Mujica is a true believer; you can tell by the intensity in his eyes. During his first tour in Ramadi, his platoon, from 3rd Battalion 7th Marines, Kilo Company, lost men. Mujica readily explains, "We made a bunch of mistakes," but quickly concedes, "The circumstances demanded it."

Cautious and wiser through experience, this Georgetown graduate, originally from Bethesda, Md., follows (as close as a Marine grunt can) Gandhi's philosophy of non-resistance. With fewer than a dozen Marines, Mujica presides over an Iraqi police station where his men are outnumbered 10 to 1, but that is only part of the strategy, showing their strength by allowing themselves to be vulnerable or rely upon local police forces. It's a psychological judo maneuver that has given the nascent Ramadi police force more confidence and bonded the Marines to their pupils/partner/protectors.

1st Lt. Mauro Mujica and Sgt. Brandon Humphrey from 3rd Battalion 7th Marines.

In a different era, Mujica could have been a sort of Lawrence of Arabia. He is determined to adapt to the habits and customs of the indigenous Arab tribes; today, he refuses American food and has learned enough Arabic to finish his interpreter's sentences.

Capt. Marcus Mainz is the Kilo Company commanding officer and strategist who is fond of saying, "If you're not putting the Iraqis first, you're wrong." This comment is counter-intuitive for a Marine with authority because "You're not taking care of your Marines" is one of the sharpest insults lobbed against Corps officers.

Capt. Marcus Mainz, a psychology major who believes "compassion is a force multiplier."

When the captain is not overseeing SWEAT operations, namely Sewage, Water, Electricity, Academics and Trash, he's insisting that an "M" should be added to the military acronym: "I'm working heavily on medical." Against general military policy, the captain had unofficially opened his 17th Street Joint Security Station to Ramadis who came seeking aid. His Navy corpsman, Jesse Fossetti, saw to the critical care of a burn victim who was airlifted to a Baghdad medical center, but eventually succumbed to his wounds. The victim's family is very grateful for the enormous effort the Marines made, and that type of gratitude from everyday Ramadis has paid dividends.

(Column continues below)

"I asked the IP to roll up a very dirty bad guy. They didn't want to do it because the suspect had tribe connections." Mainz is very animated as he speaks, quite a feat for a man who did not seem to sleep during the three days I visited his area of operations. "Forty-five minutes later, they delivered the guy. It would have taken us months to do that."

Maj. Rory Quinn has also seen the light. He got to know Ramadi the first time around, "last year," as the Marines refer to their last tour when these jarheads patrolled the streets at a steady jog pace instead of the almost leisurely strolling now seen in the souk, Ramadis booming open market district.

Lt. Col. Roger Turner

If there were any doubt about the direction of the Anbari capital, you need look no further then the leader of the pack, Lt. Col. Roger Turner, a physically imposing man that most of the 3/7 use "monster," "insane," "no joke" to describe – grunt compliments for infantrymen. Without the slightest hesitation, Turner will state his goal: "I'm in it to win." Turner can spit tobacco while hob-knobbing with sheiks at town hall-style meetings and sessions with police commissioners. There's an almost cocky confidence typical of Marines that could be due to the recent success in Anbar.

"But things can change in a second," says Capt. Mainz, who holds a degree in psychology. Despite their initial Marine Corps infantry training where they learn more about exploding ammunition than the standard measurements of sewage piping, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines infantrymen are literally on the "cutting edge" of COIN.

Streets that were once littered with refuse are now ritually swept. First Lt. Luke Larson claims to be the first to have requested the Ramadis paint the water towers red, white and black – the colors of the national flag. In typical Marine competitive nature, India Company, down the street, says they were first.

With the focus on city services, national pride and health care, it's easy to confuse this elite fighting force with a socialized political platform, but when you are a foreign, dominating presence in an insular, historically tribal area, a show of magnanimity is more effective than a shower of bullets.

"We are the only ones who can mess this up right now," says Mujica, who almost wishes his tour did not end in the next two months. As a former wrestler and black belt in Marine Corp Martial Arts, Mainz is accustomed to focusing on a clear goal: "Leave this country better off than when we got here." A definition of victory the people of Ramadi, so far, can agree on.