Light blogging today (I’ll post some stuff here eating breakfast) as I’ll be driving with Sara from the Yglesias family compound in Brooklin, ME to Acadia National Park on the other side of the bay. I was a little upset to see yesterday that the Bangor Daily News‘s usual steady diet of small town-ey stories has been interrupted by George W. Bush’s decision to follow me to Maine and, even worse, bring Vladimir Putin with him.
National Park Service Photo
During a press conference last week, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace said that “the recent rise in U.S. troop deaths in Iraq is the ‘wrong metric‘ to use in assessing the effectiveness” of the U.S. military in Iraq. “So it’s not about levels of violence,” he explained. “It’s about progress … in the minds of the Iraqi people.”
Today, Pace made similar remarks. He called the measuring the level of violence in Iraq a “self-defeating approach to tracking results” and added, “What’s most important is do the Iraqi people feel better about today than they did about yesterday, and do they think tomorrow’s going to be better than today?” When asked if he actually knew how the Iraqi people currently feel about the U.S. occupation of Iraq he conceded, “I do not have that in my head.” Watch it:
If Pace did consult the Iraqis about whether they “feel better about today than they did about yesterday,” the answer would be a resounding “no.” As a recent ABC News/BBC News poll found, “The optimism that helped sustain Iraqis during the first few years of the war has dissolved into widespread fear, anger and distress amid unrelenting violence“:
- 39 percent of Iraqis said they feel their lives are “going well,” compared to 71 percent in November 2005.”
- 40 percent of Iraqis said the situation in Iraq will be “somewhat or much better” a year from now, compared to 69 percent in November 2005.
- 26 percent of Iraqis said they feel “very safe” in their neighborhoods, compared to 63 percent in November 2005.
- 82 percent of Iraqis said they “lack confidence” in coalition forces.
- 69 percent of Iraqis said coalition forces make “the security situation worse.”
Whether one measures results in Iraq based on “how the Iraqi people believe they are today,” or on the increasing levels of violence, it is clear the United States is not succeeding in the war.
Transcript: Read more
Via GFR, Scott MacLeod takes a look at the administration’s efforts to fund Iranian civil society groups backfiring exactly as the initiative was predicted to backfire. As Garance says, “The reverse-Midas touch of this administration is really a thing to behold.”
Early this morning, British police “discovered an explosive device in a car laden with gasoline, nails, and gas canisters” in central London. British authorities have not said who may be responsible for the attempted attack, but Jacqui Smith, Britian’s new homeland secretary, characterized the incident as attempted “international terrorism.” The BBC noted that the timing may be significant as the incident comes as “the second anniversary of the 7 July bombings approach[es].”
Despite counterterrorism officials having “no prior intelligence information indicating” this attack might be imminent, Britain’s increased risk of “international terrorism” has long been attributed to British involvement in the war in Iraq by numerous national security experts:
Foreign Affairs Committee of the British Parliament:
“Britons are more – not less – likely to be the target of terrorist attacks as a result of the war in Iraq.” [BBC News, 2/2/2004]
Britain’s Joint Terrorist Analysis Center:
“[E]vents in Iraq are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.” [Financial Times, 7/19/2005]
Former chief of the British intelligence service MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller:
“UK foreign policy … in Iraq and Afghanistan” has inspired a “violent threat” to the UK that will persist for “more than a generation.” [The Independent, 11/11/2006]
David Cameron, leader of Britain’s Conservative Party:
“It is clear that over the last few years decisions that have been taken, the difficulties there have been in Iraq, clearly have had a wider effect” and “the threat to Britain was now greater as a result of the war [in Iraq] was ‘a statement of fact.’” [ABC News, 12/18/2006]
Dr. Jonathan Eyal, the director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute:
The “terrorist threat facing Britain from home-grown al-Qaeda agents is higher than at any time since the September 11 attacks in 2001.” He faulted the “wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” and western government’s inability to kill or capture Osama bin Laden. [The Telegraph, 2/25/2007]
The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iraq “has become the ‘cause celebre‘ for jihadists.” The State Department has acknowledged the war in Iraq “has been used by terrorists as a rallying cry for radicalization and extremist activity that has contributed to instability in neighboring countries.” The longer the occupation in Iraq continues, the more it serves as a recruiting and propaganda tool for terrorists. Ultimately — as British experts understand — the Iraq war leads to greater insecurity around the globe.
David Frum describes the experience of witnessing Mitt Romney answer some tough foreign policy questions:
Mitt Romney has an amazingly orderly mind and an impressive grasp of detail. He also has a serious Garbage In/Garbage Out problem – that is, while his mind processes information in a lucid and logical way, his intake valves lack filters for screening out nonsense. The overwhelming impression that I took away from his presentation was that it was … silly.
I don’t actually understand this metaphor. If Romney’s mind is so sharp, so lucid and logical, then how come he can’t catch the nonsense? Meanwhile, Frum also tells us that Rudy Giuliani “skips lightly over crucial details” and has ideas that “are much less worked through than Romney’s” but on the plus side “the spirit behind them is exactly right.” At this point, Frum (with Giuliani in tow) departs planet reality. “As he said: the mullahs released the hostages in 1981 because they looked into Ronald Reagan’s eyes and saw something they did not see in Jimmy Carter’s. I saw that same something in Guiliani’s.” Okay, sure. Lessons learned: Romney is silly, whereas Giuliani will force terrorists to back down with his steely gaze and David Frum has no understanding of how international relations work or the history of US-Iranian relations.
Photo by Flickr user Editor B used under a Creative Commons license
It’s easy and, indeed, appropriate to mock Bush for the public diplomacy fiasco involved in saying that his plan is to make Iraq more like Israel but this shouldn’t completely obscure the fact that Bush is making a sound analytic point. What he’s saying about Iraq is, in essence, what John Kerry was saying about the US when he said he thought we should aim to reduce terrorism to a kind of nuisance. Naturally, Kerry got savagely attacked for saying this, but at some point somebody’s going to need to have the courage to make the argument that setting ourselves maximalist goals vis-a-vis terrorism doesn’t make sense.
Plenty of countries have long suffered some degree of terrorism — Spain, Britain, Israel — while being more-or-less pleasant, economically successful democracies whose citizens enjoy a high standard of living. These countries would, of course, like to completely eliminate their terrorism problems and rightly do make efforts in these regards. But during their better moments, at least, all of these countries recognize that the goal is to reduce the harm caused by terrorism to manageable levels, not to turn everything upside down in pursuit of a possibly chimerical “victory.” What we really, really, really need to focus on is making sure no terrorists get nuclear bombs while, beyond that, we keep the risks involved in conventional terrorism (even in Israel you’re more likely to die in a car wreck than a suicide bombing) in perspective.
In the stellar Washington Post expos© on Dick Cheney, the public learned that key presidential aides were often intentionally kept out of the loop on important decisions by the Vice President. For example, President Bush’s decision to try detainees in military commissions and strip them of their due process rights was not conveyed to Secretary of State Colin Powell:
“What the hell just happened?” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001.
In addition, the Post reported that a Cheney-commissioned Justice Department memo that advocated the legal justification for torture was kept out of Powell’s sight:
On June 8, 2004, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell learned of the two-year-old torture memo for the first time from an article in The Washington Post.
Last night in an interview with Larry King, Powell criticized Cheney, saying, “[He] sometimes went directly to the president and the rest of us weren’t aware of what advice he was giving.” He also chastised the White House’s manner of doing business. “It was not a system where we routinely exposed all points of view,” he said. Watch it:
In the interview, Powell reaffirmed his stated desire to close Guantanamo, arguing it is one of the reasons “we are losing around the world”:
The reason I am feeling so strongly about Guantanamo is that while we’re arguing these legal issues, we are getting killed in terms of our international reputation because of the place. And we are losing around the world. And what makes it even more difficult is some of the biggest thugs in the world and people that you want to press on moral issues and human rights issues hide behind Guantanamo and say don’t lecture us when you have Guantanamo.
In the latest of the National Security Network’s efforts to measure progress toward the various benchmarks in Iraq, we see that nothing of note has happened on constitution reform and that nothing is likely to happen given how difficult the process for amending the Iraqi constitution is.
This is the crux of the matter for evaluating America’s recent successes in collaborating with tribal leaders in Anbar province. The leaders in question were the insurgency — and were collaborating with Al-Qaeda in Iraq — just last year because they found both the US occupation and the Iraqi constitution intolerable. There’s no sign that they’ve begun to find these things any less intolerable today. Weapons and training we provide these tribal groups are all-but-certain to be turned against the Iraq government down the road — and against us if we’re still in Iraq, still supporting that government. Which isn’t to say that finding local people interested in fighting al-Qaeda is a bad idea. Instead, it’s to say that we ought to do our best to get out of the way.
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