As noted previously, in Ultimate Posturing, the showdown was sure to come - the House, then the Senate, passed their supplemental spending bills to fund the ongoing effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The House and Senate versions have to be reconciled before the final consolidated bill goes to the White House, but what it will contain is clear. The president can have the money - as long as he agrees at least to try to wind things down and get the troops out of combat next year. There are strings attached - including more funds for the Veterans Administration and this and that about assuring proper equipment and rest and all that “readiness” stuff for our troops - but the main string attached is the demand that he change direction. We should move from “combat only” to diplomacy, with support and training and security and rebuilding for that new nation.
He says they shouldn’t tell him how to run the war. He’s the commander-in-chief, after all, so this really is none of their business. They should just appropriate the funds.
They say that’s fine - what they want has nothing to do with specific “battlefield decisions.” They’re calling for a change at the policy level, if you will - or maybe for what is essentially a different geopolitical strategy. The “regime change through war” model of dealing with all international problems has, they pretty much say, failed. They’d rather we got serious about transnational terrorism everywhere and abandon the concept of removing this government or that - specific nasty governments being a secondary issue, and only insofar as they provide the host for the problem “virus” for a time. Yeah, we have a responsibility to fix Iraq - a place with a sham government, no real army to protect its integrity, no police force to keep things calm internally, no judicial system at all, and not much of a service infrastructure left. There are funds for that - and we owe them that. But let’s wind down this war.
Still, it is our policy - often stated explicitly by the man who sets policy for the administration, the vice president - that we don’t talk with the “evil” regimes around the world, we change them. We did that in Iraq. Iran, Syria, and perhaps Venezuela are next (and Cuba if Fidel’s eventual passing doesn’t change things sufficiently there). Condoleezza Rice finally got the president to make a deal with Kim Jong-il, outmaneuvering the vice president, so North Korea is the exception to the policy, no matter how angry that made Cheney. Congress seems to be saying that general policy is a bit loony, and it doesn’t work, and it hurts us - and doesn’t fix the terrorism problem at all. So wind down the war are start dealing with the damned stateless madmen that are the real problem.
In his press conference on Tuesday, April 3, it was clear the president just didn’t get it. He said he would veto the final funding bill, and then the troops would be left out there to die, without ammunition, or food, or whatever, and that would be the Democrats’ fault, and everyone would know that, and they’d hate them for abandoning our brave men and women. He just cannot accept funds with any restrictions on how he chooses to use the funds.
Fred Kaplan, saying President Bush is playing chicken with the Democratic Congress, puts it nicely -
George W. Bush faces a real predicament over the congressional challenges to the war in Iraq, and it is one entirely of his own making.
This is what happens when a president dashes to war on shaky premises and false pretenses; when he buys into a theory of warfare that promises instant victory with startlingly few resources; when he demands such iron party discipline that skeptics are hounded and oversight is banned.
What happens is that, when the theory proves wrong, the war goes bad, and the opposition party wins back Congress (mainly because the war’s gone bad), skeptics rise to the fore, oversight returns, a few erstwhile stalwarts jump ship - and, if he wants to keep his war going, he has to put up a convincing case for once, he has to drop the bluster in favor of bargaining and persuasion.
But he won’t bargain. The business with North Korea was an anomaly. Kaplan notes what everyone has long noted - “this president tends to believe that bargaining and persuasion are signs of weakness and appeasement.”
Kaplan’s view of the unfortunate reality -
In the end, he may have no choice. When the House and Senate Democrats attached a timetable for troop withdrawal into the $96 billion emergency-spending bill that funds military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush threatened to veto the entire bill, thus saddling the Democrats with charges of abandoning the troops.
Such threats used to send shivers down what remained of lawmakers’ spines - but, at least so far, not this time. House Speaker Pelosi told the president to calm down, acknowledge that there’s a new Congress in town, and deal with it. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid upped the ante, saying that if Bush vetoes the bill, he will urge Congress to pass a more radical measure - sponsored by Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold - that would not only impose a timetable for withdrawal but start to cut off funding now.
This led to the Tuesday press conference, where, Kaplan suggests, the president “made statements of extraordinary cynicism even by his considerable standards.”
Insofar as cynicism usually requires a certain jaded worldliness and a bit of mordent wit, if not nuanced intelligence, cynicism may be the wrong term. “Unwittingly clueless nonsense” might be a better descriptor.
The president said that the Democrats are “more interested in fighting political battles in Washington than providing our troops what they need.” Right. Who was late supplying these same troops with adequate armor, and who kept cutting funding for wounded veterans? Was that a cynical thing to say? Perhaps he really thinks they have done right by our troops. He said he doesn’t read the papers. Everyone else does. This may be a conceptual problem. He doesn’t make the connection. The result is nonsense.
And there’s this -
Congress’ failure to fund our troops on the front lines will mean that some of our military families could wait longer for their loved ones to return from the front lines, and others could see their loved ones headed back to the war sooner than they need to. That is unacceptable to me, and I believe it is unacceptable to the American people.
Kaplan -
How many jaws dropped when the president uttered these words? It is the administration’s poor planning, not any action taken or not taken by Congress, that has already accelerated troop rotations and caused precisely this heartbreaking situation, which Bush (correctly) calls “unacceptable.” And it is unacceptable, by the way, not only to military families but to the military itself, especially to the Army, which is nearly breaking under the strain.
Perhaps, again, he just doesn’t follow the news. This then is not a cynical ploy. He just doesn’t make the connection. Assume his speechwriters are cynical. He just learns his lines. He delivers them. That way you get a certain air of utterly sincere and steely resolve. That used to poll well - and may yet, or so they hope.
The real cynic may be Vice Cheney who, the day before, had this to say at a political fund-raiser in Alabama - “It’s time the self-appointed strategists on Capitol Hill understood a very simple concept: You cannot win a war if you tell the enemy when you’re going to quit.”
Kaplan unpacks that -
Three things are wrong this with surefire applause line. First, whether they’re wise or foolish, the congressional Democrats are raising issues of policy, not strategy. In other words, they’re acting not like “self-appointed strategists” but rather like popularly elected lawmakers.
Second, who is this “enemy” that Cheney says the timetable would be tipping off? If it’s al-Qaeda and the other terrorist groups in Iraq, he and Bush know very well that the House and Senate proposals allow U.S. troops involved in counterterrorism to stay in Iraq indefinitely. (The bills also exempt from withdrawal those troops involved in training Iraqi security forces, as well as those protecting and supplying U.S. workers, officials, and military personnel.)
Third, what is this business about winning the war? Does Cheney think we can win? And how is he defining the term?
Winning? The applause is more important.
President Bush said nothing about winning at the Tuesday press conference. He said all we’re trying to do “is to give the Iraqi government time to reconcile, time to unify the country … to provide some breathing space for this democratically elected government to succeed.” He minimized the issue of winning. We’re just trying to do the right thing.
Kaplan has the temerity to note that the previous day Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, “urged the rejection of a bill that would allow thousands of former rank-and-file members of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Party to return to government.” What of that? It would reverse Paul Bremmer’s big mistake three years ago - allowing Sunni Arabs actually to take part in the political system. You remember Bremmer disbanded the Iraqi Army and fired all the schoolteachers and public servants who had any even vague ties to the Baathist Party. Sistani is having none of that.
Kaplan - “So, if reconciliation isn’t going to happen, owing to internal politics and pressures, then what good is the time and breathing space that American blood and treasure are providing?”
That’s a good question. Perhaps no one told the president about that news item.
But the president will veto the consolidated bill, so what does it matter?
Hillary Clinton longs for the good old days -
I saw a lot of what happened when my husband had a Republican Congress. We would stake out one position, they would stake out one position. And then people would begin to try to figure out how to narrow the difference. That’s what should be happening here.
That is not how things are done now, and Kaplan is vivid -
Over the next few weeks, the showdown will escalate. It will seem like a game of highway chicken, with both drivers gunning their engines, flashing their brights, tossing things that look like steering wheels out their windows. All the while they’ll know that it won’t be until late May, or by some calculations late June, that their cars will collide - i.e., that funding for the war really will run out - and they’ll be hoping that somebody pulls over at the last minute.
So be it. Any reassessment and redirection of our policy toward Iraq and the region is moot. The man is a Texan, he like showdowns. And he knows his base. They like Texas swagger.
But then the same day there was a buzz about something Grover Norquist said -
The base isn’t interested in Iraq. The base is for Bush. If Bush said tomorrow, we’re leaving in two months, there would be no revolt.
What?
Duncan Black explains -
It’s hard for non-lizard brain people to see how they could pivot on a dime like that, but noted Bush basers like Glenn Reynolds spent years arguing against more troops in Iraq then immediately went to arguing the opposite as soon as Dear Leader said it was a good idea.
So, yeah, Grover’s probably right. They’d just need to create some fake political event to allow them to declare victory and go home.
But Bush won’t do it. And the 30 percenters are happy to stay in Iraq just as they’d be happy to leave. Whatever Dear Leader says is fine with them.
That might not be that easy. Max Hastings, in the Guardian (UK), carefully argues “whatever the tactical successes of the US surge, it is hard to believe that anything other than defeat and disaster await.”
That would be Sir Max Hastings - the British journalist, editor and historian. That last link will tell you he is the son of Macdonald Hastings, “the noted British journalist and war correspondent,” and Anne Scott-James, sometime editor of Harper’s Bazaar and, after her divorce from her first husband, the wife of Sir Osbert Lancaster. There’s no note on why anyone would name his or her son Osbert. Hastings covered sixty countries and eleven wars for the BBC television and the Evening Standard in London - and after ten years as editor and then editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph he returned to The Evening Standard as editor in 1996 until his retirement in 2001 - and he was knighted in 2002. Sir Max knows a thing or two - he wrote a lot of books, and received lots of awards.
Note the elegant opening -
Every now and again, grown-up people review their cherished opinions and prejudices. Does the evidence still stack up? Or are there grounds for thinking again? It seems especially important to do this at regular intervals with Iraq, because its fate is critical for the west.
Sceptics have for years been rehearsing a countdown to a day of doom. I am often among their number. But, as a compulsive consumer of the torrent of analysis and situation reports that comes out of Iraq, I sometimes shut my eyes and ask: is there a shred of hope?
Europeans are prone to think of the Americans who run the place as body-armoured oafs. If this was sometimes true in the past, it is certainly not so now. On the contrary, the US has belatedly entrusted the salvation of Iraq to its best and brightest - and I do not use that phrase pejoratively.
So he likes David Petraeus - “the cleverest and most imaginative general in the American army” - and his team “passionately committed to retrieving the country from the brink of disaster.” Colonel HR McMaster and Stephen Biddle are fine, and Graeme Lamb, Petraeus’s senior British deputy, “is as able a soldier as the army has got.” The early signs are good.
On the other hand, he doesn’t like was he hears from General Barry McCaffrey, who has just visited the country, seen all the top commanders and delivered a report to the Military Academy at West Point. The chances of success are slim -
… everything turns not upon what Americans - much less the British - do, but upon Iraqis. “Reconciliation is the way out,” writes the general. “There will be no imposed military solution with the current non-sustainable US force levels.”
“Non-sustainable” applies, of course, to both the military and political constraints. Every senior officer engaged in Iraq knows that the British are easing out; the US army is stretched to its limits and beyond; the patience of Congress and the American people is ebbing fast.
Petraeus is doing fine, but what is happening is happening at three minutes to midnight -
Pumpkin time is very close. Huge problems persist, first, with the paralysis of Iraqi rule. McCaffrey acknowledges “there is no function of government which operates across the nation.”
Second, though progress is being made with training Iraqi soldiers and police, these are still a million miles from being sufficiently numerous, motivated, trained, or equipped to assume responsibility for the nation’s security. McCaffrey calls for a hugely increased commitment to the forces: “We are still in the wrong ball park.”
More than this, there is no chance of stabilizing Iraq unless its people are provided with public services that work, and its economy is functioning in a fashion that gives most of its citizens a clear stake in peace. Almost four years after Baghdad fell, basic facilities such as electricity and sewerage, together with local security against crime and kidnapping, work less well than they did under Saddam.
This will cause things to end badly, and he adds that he spoke to a senior British officer who argued that Iraq needs “a Marshall Plan, civil aid on a scale greater than anyone has yet attempted - or than the US Congress in its current mood is willing to endorse.”
There is no time for that, or money, or will - “Yet to put Iraq on its feet, to leave behind a viable society, a minimum of five years and hundreds of billions in cash will be needed.”
It’s funny. The president didn’t mention that in the news conference.
And it may be too late for diplomacy -
In the early days Iran might, just might, have been willing to talk and act in support of its own rational interest in a stable Iraq. Today, however, the British and Americans are engaged in something close to a proxy war with the Iranians, escalated by the seizure of British sailors.
As for the internals -
The foremost challenge is to persuade a sufficient number of Iraq’s people to overcome a visceral desire to see their occupiers humiliated, and act on the basis of self-interest. However successful are Petraeus and his brightest and best in holding the ring, only the Iraqis can save themselves.
Today, as McCaffrey acknowledges: “No Iraqi government official, coalition soldier, diplomat, reporter, foreign NGO, nor contractor can walk the streets of Baghdad, nor Mosul, nor Kirkuk, nor Tikrit, nor Najaf, nor Ramadi, without heavily armed protection.” Surge or no surge, there are not remotely enough western troops in Iraq to alter this wretched reality. Only the people who live there can do it.
John McCain differs on where you can stroll in Baghdad without a worry - but that has become a joke.
Hastings wants to be hopeful. He just cannot do it - “We still look like losing.”
Of course, he doesn’t like it -
Yet this should never become cause for exultation, even among the bitterest foes of the Washington neocons. If defeat, chaos, regional war indeed come to pass, the Iraqi people and the security interests of the west will suffer a disaster for which the disgrace of George Bush and Tony Blair will represent wholly inadequate compensation.
Hastings wrote this before the big “showdown” press conference. What the president said probably wouldn’t have changed his thinking.
There’s no good way to leave, and no good way to stay. And on this side of the pond our leaders are plying chicken with the funding.
This will end badly. Showdowns are like that.
