How To Lose A War

A very troubling article in Salon today explores the events surrounding the apparent execution in cold blood of an unarmed Iraqi farmer by U.S. Army snipers, and asks “why would these elite American soldiers kill an unarmed prisoner in cold blood?”

The answer: pressure from their commanding officers to pump up a statistic straight out of America’s last long war against an intractable insurgency.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to [the Iraqi farmer, Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi]’s death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam’s counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war.[…]

The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion’s snipers.

I think we’ve seen this “dead bodies=success” mentality bleed out into pro-war blogs as well, where the numbers of insurgent dead are credulously relayed and uncritically reported as progress, irrespective of the collateral damage incurred in those deaths and of the galvanizing effects that this has on support for insurgency. (Of course, if you’re someone who believes that trying not to create more insurgents is irrelevant to the task of counterinsurgency, then no big deal. I suppose one could always apply the Bush Doctrine on the ground in Iraq, and justify the murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi on the theory that he might, one day, have joined the insurgency. But then you’d have to kill his son, and then all his friends, too. Nice war we’ve got going here, huh?)

The murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, and the atmosphere in which it occurred, is reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib abuses. In both cases, a high-pressure environment, hazy rules of engagement, and pressure from above to produce usable intelligence/dead “insurgents” led to atrocity. In both cases, the lowest men down were punished for carrying out the directives of their commanders (and Commander-in-Chief), while those commanders were left untouched.

As the article demonstrates, it is a mistake to regard this killing as an isolated incident. I think it would also be a mistake to see this any of this solely as a failure of command. Rather, the lesson to be drawn here is that we should, if at all possible in the future, avoid invading and occupying foreign countries, and thereby creating situations where tragedies like this one are predictable and inevitable. One of the best ways to support our troops is to ensure that they not be misused as instruments of bad policy.

Lebanon: Another Violent Takeover In The Middle East Undermines Bush’s Freedom Agenda

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Armed gunmen from the Shi’a Lebanese Hezbollah movement have seized control of the streets in the Lebanese capital city today, surrounding the homes and offices of Sunni and Druze leaders in Western Beirut. This week’s clashes represented the worst violence since Lebanon’s civil war and demonstrated how far the situation has deteriorated in the three years since the Cedar Revolution brought much hope for change in this divided country.

Coming in advance of President Bush’s trip to the Middle East next week, the instability in Lebanon is a reminder of the dangers that can emerge from neglect and inattention and an approach to the Middle East too heavily focused on Iraq. Less than a year after the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, another Middle Eastern civil war in bubbling over – this time with a group that some have called the “A team” of global terrorists which has used violence to seize control of the capital city – hardly the result President Bush was hoping for when he prematurely declared that freedom was on the march in Lebanon and elsewhere in 2005. Ironically, the global trends in freedom have stalled and retrenched on President Bush’s watch, according to Freedom House.

How did the situation in Lebanon deteriorate so rapidly? The immediate cause: the Lebanese government confronted Hezbollah, a group that receives backing from Syria and Iran, by declaring the group’s private communications network illegal and replacing the airport security chief because of his alleged ties to militant groups. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed that this amounted to a “declaration of war,” and his movement’s fighters took the fight to the streets against Lebanese government security forces.

But there were numerous and early warning signs that Lebanon was a tinderbox. A year and a half ago, Jordan’s King Abdullah came to Washington and warned of the possibility of three civil wars – between Iraqis, Palestinians, and Lebanese. In the afterglow of the Cedar Revolution, long-standing Lebanese internal divisions endured, and assassinations and political murders, including the November 2006 killing of Christian political leader Pierre Gemayal, continued. In the past year, a deadlock over power-sharing between Lebanese political factions has left the country without a new president.

As the Center’s Middle East Bulletin has highlighted on numerous occasions, the internal divisions in Lebanon has created a dangerous vacuum. Addressing it requires a comprehensive approach with engagement by the United States, countries in the region, and other global powers. Last March’s poorly-attended Arab League summit in Damascus did not result in any concrete plan for addressing the deadlock; no way forward was developed to help Lebanese factions bridge internal divides.

The violence in Lebanon demonstrates more than ever the need for sustained and continued U.S. engagement to stabilize the Middle East. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton outlined a strategy for a comprehensive regional diplomacy aimed at managing and resolving conflicts in the Middle East - pragmatically recognizing that the challenges in Iraq could not be dealt with in isolation of what happens in places like Lebanon.

Hagee: ‘A Millstone Around John McCain’s Neck’

Radical cleric Rev. John Hagee just can’t stay out of trouble. He’s spent the last few weeks trying to moderate his image so as to mitigate the damage his past statements have done to John McCain’s campaign. But speaking on a conference call with religious supporters yesterday:

Hagee denounced Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for pressing a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. He called it “a cheap political ploy” aimed at “making Condoleezza Rice a vice presidential candidate and building a midnight legacy for George Bush.”[…]

Hagee also attacked “the liberal media for trying to produce a millstone around John McCain’s neck.”

Speaking to the 2007 AIPAC conference, Hagee compared supporters of a two-state solution in the Middle East to Nazis. Hagee also echoed right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu, telling the audience that “Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler.”

Hagee’s opposition to a two-state solution, the eventual establishment of which remains the stated policy of the United States, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority, puts Hagee far out of the American mainstream. Hagee’s view is grounded in an extremist interpretation of scripture known as premillenial dispensationalism, which holds that we are currently living in the end times, and that the return of the Jewish people to the entire land of Israel (or at least the land of Israel as it was drawn by Sykes and Picot) is a necessary precondition for the second coming of Jesus Christ. In Hagee’s view, establishing a homeland for the Palestinians ruins this plan.

Given how deeply the media have interrogated the views of Barack Obama’s former pastor, it’s certainly appropriate to expect them to explore the bizarre apocalyptic beliefs of a cleric whose endorsement John McCain specifically sought. Where does John McCain stand on Hagee’s implication that U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine is “Nazi”-like? Maybe it’s time to throw this millstone under the bus.

‘Special Groups’: A ‘Useful Fiction’

In a story on the continuing fighting in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood, the LA Times reports that “the U.S. military has tied itself into a verbal knot as it tries to avoid further inflaming tensions with Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr while confronting members of his Mahdi Army militia.”

U.S. forces battle almost daily with Shiite militiamen in Sadr City, including Sadr loyalists, but commanders are careful to avoid blaming the Mahdi Army for the violence. […]

The military still insists that Sadr’s Mahdi Army is not its main problem, saying it is “special groups” that have broken away from Sadr’s control. Those groups are trained and armed by Iran and not bound by Sadr’s directives.

However, military officials acknowledge that mainstream Mahdi Army elements took part in the initial fighting that erupted March 25 against an offensive launched by U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces.

Abu Muqawama’s Dr. iRack notes rightly that “the notion of ’special groups’– JAM factions that supposedly have close ties to Iran’s Quds force –is, in many respects, a useful fiction,” as it allows U.S. forces to move against elements of Sadr’s militia without appearing to directly challenge Sadr’s wider political movement, which is the largest in Iraq. But, as iRack notes, the U.S. military has “made a habit of describing all JAMsters who violate the ‘freeze’ on armed activities declared by Moqtada al-Sadr last August as ’special groups.’ ”

[This] creates a false impression that the majority of JAMsters fighting U.S. forces take their orders directly from the mullahs in Iran (much as the use of the label “Al Qaeda in Iraq” as a catch all term for a disparate and very loosely aligned collection Sunni insurgent groups creates the false impression that most Sunni insurgents take their orders from Bin Laden or the foreign leadership of AQI).

The Bush administration has consistently tried to blame outside actors for violence in Iraq in order to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that the U.S. occupation is opposed by a substantial majority of the population who the U.S. is ostensibly there to support. In seeking to defend a continued U.S. presence in Iraq, the administration and its supporters have drawn a deeply distorted picture of the political struggles currently taking place within various Iraqi communities.

In this podcast, New York Times reporters Alissa Rubin and Stephen Farrell discuss the situation on the ground in Sadr City. Farrell characterizes the current fighting as part of an intra-Shia struggle between “the haves and have nots, the establishment and outsiders.”

You have the people who rule the street and the people who run the government. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find many Iraqis who would wholeheartedly side with the idea that somehow the official democratic clean honest wonderful government is bringing law and order to an undisciplined rabble. I think most people, certainly most Sunnis that you talk to, would see this as a fight between a militia [ISCI/Badr] which happens to have turned itself into the government army and a militia [Sadr’s Mahdi Army] which hasn’t. The insiders and the outsiders.

Since very early in the occupation of Iraq, the United States has been willing to work with ISCI because it was willing to work with the U.S. That is, they recognized, for the moment, the authority of the U.S. occupation. The Sadrists did not, which resulted in the U.S.’s freezing them out of a political process which the Sadrists in any case viewed as illegitimate. This allowed ISCI to establish itself within the Iraqi government to a far greater extent than its relatively small political base could reasonably justify, and to incorporate large numbers of its (Iranian trained and supported) militia into the security services.

To put it simply, the U.S. is opposing Sadr because he opposes the U.S. occupation, and the U.S. is supporting ISCI because ISCI supports the occupation. As Brian Katulis and I noted in an op-ed several weeks ago, the irony of this strategy is that it has allied the United States with Iran’s primary proxy in the Iraqi government, against what is arguably the most potent nationalist political force in the country.

Worse Than Silence On Sudan

Our guest blogger is Colin Thomas-Jensen, a policy adviser for the ENOUGH Project.

This past Sunday afternoon, the government of Sudan bombed the village of Shegag Karo in North Darfur. One of the bombs fell on an elementary school, killing 6 children. Another bomb destroyed the town’s market, killing 6 civilians and wounding many more. On Monday morning, the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum issued a press statement. Did they condemn the attack as a brazen violation of international humanitarian law and a United Nations Security Council ban on offensive military flights over Darfur? No. In fact, the release commemorated the two-year anniversary of the Darfur Peace Agreement, a moribund and counterproductive deal which the Bush administration still counts as a diplomatic success.

That the administration is clinging to the Darfur Peace Agreement is not surprising; despite all of its lofty rhetoric and hand-wringing over the genocide in Darfur, the administration’s policy decisions have made little difference on the ground in Sudan. For the administration, the peace deal is something tangible. For the people of Darfur, the administration’s blind faith in the Darfur Peace Agreement is cruelly ironic. Civilians, like those in Shegag Karo, are subject to aerial bombardments and ground assaults by Sudanese soldiers and government-backed militias. Absent logistical support from the United States and other military powers, the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur is still too small and too feeble to offer any real protection. Worse, the Bush administration’s one real diplomatic achievement in Sudan, the landmark peace agreement that ended Sudan’s North/South civil war, is on the verge of collapse due to the Sudanese government’s refusal to implement key provisions. Read the rest of this entry »

How Do You Define Crank?

National Review’s Lisa Schiffren thinks the question of whether Barack Obama studied the Qur’an as a child is relevant to the American presidential campaign:

Barack Obama has emphatically denied that he was ever a Muslim, practicing or otherwise. Other people, including family members and teachers, remember things differently. Daniel Pipes collects the varying information here. Several elementary-school teachers in Indonesia have told reporters that he was enrolled as a Muslim — and thus studied Koran instead of the Catechism — at the Catholic school he attended. One of his various half sisters says it too, and several passages in his autobiography seem to indicated the same thing. Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don’t know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank.

I suppose it’s stating the obvious to note how transparently disingenuous it is for Schiffren to insist that Barack Obama come clean (and prove a negative) about not “having been raised Muslim,” while assuring us, of course, that this would be “no disqualifier,” after she and the gang at National Review have worked so assiduously to make it a disqualifier.

I have to agree with Schiffren about Daniel Pipes, though. I tend to regard cranks as mostly harmless eccentrics, like people who believe that our planet was seeded by aliens who will soon return to harvest us, or people who design and construct hugely complicated machines to perform odd combinations of simple household tasks, or Dr. Phil. There’s nothing harmless about Daniel Pipes, a right wing scholar-activist who, since 9/11, has made a career of trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam.

Pipes runs the Middle East Forum, an organization which answers the question “What if the John Birch Society had its own think tank?” Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on scholars it deems to be insufficiently pro-Israel.

Last summer Pipes spearheaded a campaign aga