Lindsey Graham asked some very pointed questions to Petraeus and Crocker last week, and David Broder picked up on where he was going.
After a few more questions, Graham turned to Crocker and confronted him with a surprising question: “What’s the difference between a dysfunctional government and a failed state?”
Crocker replied: “In a parliamentary democratic system such as Iraq has, there is a mechanism for the removal of governments that people get tired of. Parliament can simply vote no confidence.”
That sounded to me — and to Graham — like a hint that the United States would welcome a change from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki if new and more flexible leadership were to appear in Baghdad.
Graham wanted to underline that message. “Would you agree with me,” he asked Crocker, “that Iraq is a dysfunctional government at this moment in time?”
“Certainly, it is a challenged government,” Crocker replied.
When Broder followed up with Graham, he appeared to give a very no nonsense response as to why he asked the questions and the way he asked them…
But Graham said that he thought Crocker was “making a pretty major statement that the clock is running out on the Maliki government — and we can have an effect on it by what we do here.”
“There are alternatives,” he said — Shiite political leaders who are willing, for example, to tour the Baghdad jails with Graham and be photographed with Sunnis who are protesting the imprisonment of so many of their coreligionists. “The good news,” Graham said, “is that Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites are ready to play politics. Judges feel more secure because of the surge, and that is important, because all of them have experienced rough justice.
“What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues — oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections — in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state.”
Three months folks…and that’s from one of the lead proponents of the war and the surge.
As Broder puts it, “that sounds realistic.”
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Chris Dodd has been crystal clear on this. Now Obama has joined that club.
Obama, who had resisted measures to tie money for the war to a deadline for withdrawal, said Sunday he would no longer support funding measures in the Senate that do not include deadlines.
“We are going to bring an end to this war and I will fight hard in the United States Senate to make sure we don’t pass any funding bill that does not have a deadline,” Obama told the crowd.
Perfect. Now can we hear this from Hillary? A unified front from the Senate presidential candidates on this front — two of which are the two highest-profile Democrats in the land (Hillary and Barack) would go a long way toward framing the terms of this debate.
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There’s never really all that much you have to say about a Broder column, just as there’s never really any way to say it without being told in the comments that you should just stop talking about Broder.
But the fact is, we’re still stuck with him as a Wise Old Man of Washington. Until we finally break through with people that he’s a broken record — and a 78 at that.
This time, Broder’s slavering over Master Thespian Lindsey Graham. He’s incisive! He’s provocative! He’s not as self-absorbed as Barbara Boxer!
Whatever.
So here’s the final word from the latest dispatch:
“What we do can affect the outcome. But if we don’t see progress on two of the three big issues — oil revenues, de-Baathification, provincial elections — in the next 90 days, it may not happen. And Iraq could be a failed state.”
Despite the president’s words, that sounds realistic.
Note the brash independence! “Despite the president’s words!” Scintillating!
But seriously, you’re buying into the “in the next 90 days” thing again? How many times do you have to see this play before you just start laughing? Don’t you study game film, Broder?
Seriously. At 78 years old, you can’t afford to be giving away many more Friedman Units or subdivisions thereof.
Let’s face it, at this stage of the game, there’s nothing “realistic” about anyone who fights every mention of the word “timeline,” and yet hands you exactly that every time you ask. Over and over and over again.
Shake it off, Broder. You don’t want to go down this way.
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In an attempt to inject some life into his dying presidential campaign, John McCain has embarked on a “No Surrender” bus tour around the country, where he is attempting the rather neat trick of distancing himself from George Bush while wholeheartedly embracing the “Petraeus Report.” You can understand why he retired the “Straight Talk Express.”
At stop after stop, McCain:
…pays tribute to Gen. David Petraeus and the report the general issued about progress in Iraq.
…he has seized on Petraeus’ report as a validation not only of the so-called surge strategy in Iraq but also of McCain’s argument, made long before the White House came to the same conclusion, that victory in Iraq required many more troops there.
He lauds Petraeus, portraying him as a hero to cheering crowds — “thank God America is blessed with that kind of leadership”
So, let’s do a quick review of what David Petraeus, the Savior of Baghdad, had to report: That sure, the Iraqi government failed to meet any of the key benchmarks that were the reason for the so-called surge, and even though upward of 16,000 Iraqis have been killed in the past eight months, violence is down because of the location of the bullets in their heads, so it was a success and we can start to bring our troops home. Never mind that those announced withdrawals were a foregone conclusion, we’ve turned another corner in Iraq. And this is what McCain is now endorsing. Apparently McCain has forgotten his remarks before the Armed Services Committee in January, when he said:
The other elements of the President’s strategy are also critical. The Iraqi government must meet new benchmarks, including a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, more equitable distribution of government resources, sharing oil revenue with the entire Iraqi population, and holding provincial elections that will bring Sunnis into government.
Critical until they failed to materialize? Because providing the “breathing space” for those benchmarks was the mission, right? And what did McCain say about completing the mission when he spoke in front of the American Enterprise Institute?
The deployment also needs to be sustained. The presence of additional brigades should be tied to completion of their mission rather than to some arbitrary deadline. The worst of all worlds would be a small, short surge of US forces…A short surge would have all the drawbacks associated with greater deployments, including increased US casualties.
So, first he endorsed the surge, as long as the additional troops stayed until the critical benchmarks were met. And now he endorses a timed end to the surge without the benchmarks being met, even though he said that would lead to increased U.S. casualties. Apparently that’s a “small price” to pay if it helps him get elected.
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Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) is the only member of the Senate to have lost a relative in the Iraq War. His nephew, Marine Cpl. Philip E. Baucus, was killed in Al Anbar province last year. He was just 28 years old.
Senator Baucus is in Iraq this weekend, along with Senators Ken Salazar (D-CO), Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). It is Senator Baucus’s first trip to Iraq. He has requested a meeting with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (who, by the way, “has refused to meet with visiting members of the U.S. Congress for a month”). The delegation has already met with Iraq President Jalal Talabani. Here are some of Senator Baucus’s comments:
“I and others repeatedly made it clear to the [Iraqi] leadership that they’ve got to do a lot more than they are doing now,” said Baucus, who is on his first visit to Iraq. “They need a bigger nudge. They could stand a greater dose of reality to move them.”
He added, “The clock is ticking as far as I’m concerned.”
Based on what he has seen, Baucus said he doesn’t believe President Bush’s “surge,” or increase in American troops in Iraq, has worked. In January 2007, Bush announced he was sending 20,000 more troops to Iraq. As of last week, the United States had 168,000 troops in Iraq, the most ever.
“It was supposed to give breathing room for the Iraqi government,” Baucus said. “It did not work.”
Baucus said it wasn’t at all clear to him that maintaining the same U.S. troop level “will result in its desired effect.”
“Our troops are getting thin with the desired rotation,” he said, adding, “The army is getting very strained.”
Senator Baucus co-sponsored and voted for S.J. Res 9 back in March, which was a non-binding resolution requiring redeployment within 120, with a goal of completing redeployment (with limited exceptions) by March 31, 2008 (The bill failed to pass).
Less than two months later, he voted against Reid-Feingold, which required that redeployment begin within 120 days, and which contained the firm requirement that no funds be used “to continue the deployment in Iraq of members of the United States Armed Forces after March 31, 2008.”
A revised version of Reid-Feingold will again be introduced in the Senate, and Senator Baucus will get a chance to vote on that “bigger nudge” he says is necessary.
Call Senator Baucus and explain to him that it is the will of the majority of Americans that a firm timeline be set for withdrawal.
Contact Senator Baucus:
- The toll-free switchboard number is 888-355-3588.
- The direct number for Senator Baucus is 202) 224-2651 (leave a voicemail today, call back tomorrow).
- You can also email Senator Baucus here.
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The WaPo’s Marc Fisher blogged the DC protests today, and spoke to participants in the “Gathering of Eagles” pro-war counterprotest:
Choate said he and his friend felt compelled to come to Washington because most Americans refused to believe that “the terrorists have got people planted all over the country from Al Queda who are preparing to go on one day into many elementary schools in our country and kill our children. We have this on good authority, we have sources.”
Choate said he was disappointed to see how few people turned out to the Gathering of Eagles. “Most of the country doesn’t want to believe it, ” he said. “Everybody’s getting a false feeling of security. Every morning, I wake up and just hope another 9-11 hasn’t happened overnight.”
Choate said he and his friends, who he called true patriots, are doing their duty to spread the word that “most Muslims are out to kill us or convert us to Islam.”
How are we supposed to protect ourselves when our SuperPatriots are constantly shitting their pants?
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The political movement loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr quit Iraq’s ruling Shi’ite Alliance on Saturday, leaving Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition in a precarious position in parliament.
The move further weakens the ruling coalition, which even before the defection had failed to push through laws aimed at reconciling Iraq’s warring majority Shi’ite and minority Sunni Arabs.
Not only are they not meeting their benchmarks, but they are going in reverse.
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First from the BBC:
Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, 37, led what was known as the “Anbar Awakening”, an alliance of Sunni Arab tribes that rose up against al-Qaeda in Iraq.
US President George Bush met and endorsed the sheikh last week in Iraq.
The White House, which has held up the movement in Anbar province as an example for the rest of Iraq, condemned his assassination as “an outrage”.
However that meeting may have actually been causal in his assassination. Over at The American Prospect Marc Lynch writes:
While Americans celebrate their cordial relations with certain tribal shaykhs, the insurgency’s leaders publicly fumed that the fruits of their victory might be snatched by undeserving interlopers. The widely disseminated pictures of President Bush shaking hands with Sattar Abu Risha, the epitome of such illegitimate bon vivantes, were likely his death warrant.
Additionally he goes on to point out that while here Abdul Sattar Abu Rish claims to have told W “that his people had achieved in four months what the American military could not achieve in four years.” and that Abu Rish is not alone in speaking or seeing the situation in Anbar this way:
In their literature and public rhetoric, the Sunni insurgency has already defeated the American occupation — which is why the Americans stopped fighting them and came to them for help in fighting al-Qaeda. One discovers virtually nothing in this literature of the American conceit that our forces wore them out or forced them to come to the table.
If Lynch is speaking truly then what we’ve been seeing in Anbar is a short term gain that will ultimately prove to have a high long term cost. That is, of course, provided that the US military leaders aren’t aware of that. So ultimately the real questions to ask are “Who is using who?” and “Who is spinning the real situation to their people?”. I’m hoping that the answers to those questions are simply “Us” and “Them” but the simple fact of the matter is, that in order to find out, all we can do is wait and to quote Tom Petty, “The waiting is the hardest part.”.
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Remember last February when the White House promised it would improve its dismal record of resettling Iraqi refugees in the United States? While 2.35 million Iraqis had fled to countries around Iraq, mostly Jordan and Syria, and thousands more had been accepted by countries such as Sweden, at the time, nearly four years after the invasion, the U.S. had accepted fewer than 500 Iraqi refugees. Apparently, even Cheney-Bush found this embarrassing and decided finally to take … uh … bold action:
The United States will accelerate the resettlement of about 7,000 Iraqis referred by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and will contribute $18 million to the agency’s appeal for Iraq, about one-third of the total, Undersecretary of State Paula J. Dobriansky said Wednesday.
Plans call for the paperwork allowing the Iraqis to enter the United States to be completed by the end of September, said Dobriansky, appearing at a news conference in Washington with U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres, and Assistant Secretary of State Ellen Sauerbrey.
The 7,000 have left Iraq and are waiting in third countries, such as Jordan and Syria.
It was a pathetic response – Sweden, population 9 million, took in 9000 Iraqis in 2006 – but some hailed it anyway as, finally, movement in the right direction.
As of a week ago, with three weeks to fulfill the promise, the total of Iraqi refugees admitted into the United States for the previous 11 months was 719.
But, wait, that’s not as bad as it sounds. Because several months ago, the administration moved the goal posts and lopped 5000 off its originally promised target. Just 2000 refugees would be accepted into the country by the end of September.
But, obviously, they won’t reach that target either.
Kirk Johnson, a former USAID official who worked with Rifaat in Baghdad, is now pressing for the U.S to move faster to help those who helped the United States in Iraq.
Johnson has prepared a list of more than 500 Iraqis who were employed by the U.S. military or government in Iraq and now seek resettlement in America. He has provided the list, along with documentation, to the State Department, with updates every month as he finds more.
So far, he said, only five have been accepted in principle, and only two of those have made it to the U.S. yet.
“I look at this as an absolute lack of progress in the past eight months,” he said. “The system is not functioning. It’s because of a lack of political will.”
Meanwhile, Syria has joined Jordan in requiring Iraqis to obtain a visa at the embassies in Baghdad before crossing the border, which means few refugees can any longer take that route out of Iraq. The luckiest ones – those with money who were first to flee the chaos and violence – live a decent live in exile. The rest molder under crowded conditions, their children often unschooled, many of them with inadequate shelter, food and medical care while the U.S. dribbles a few millions into the hands of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
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In a major speech scheduled for Clinton, Iowa, tomorrow, Senator Barack Obama plans to make new proposals for pushing diplomacy in the Middle East, getting out of Iraq, and doing something about the worsening humanitarian mess there. Among those who pay attention to election campaigns at so early a date, friends and foes and curious uncommitteds alike seem eager to hear what the Senator has to say coming on the heels of the testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker.
It was on a Wednesday exactly five years ago that, in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Mister Bush began the final phase of framing the case for what would become the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Five years! In fact, as we learned for certain when former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill spilled the beans in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, the first step in the administration’s planning for that coming war had begun 18 months earlier in the first national security meeting after the January Inaugural. Planning stepped up on September 12, 2001. In the later assessment of Colin Powell’s right-hand man Larry Wilkerson, a “cabal” moved behind the scenes to ensure that nothing stood in the way of taking America into Iraq at the tip of a bayonet labeled “9/11.”
Before that Christmas, while the Cheney-Bush Administration was losing Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, it began softening up the American public for an invasion of Iraq with the help of enablers like Brookings Institution scholars Philip Gordon and Michael E. O’Hanlon. These two promoted the shaping of a new “Bush Doctrine” in their December 2001 piece, Should the War on Terrorism Target Iraq?
All the rest of that winter, and through the spring and summer of 2002, the drumbeat for war sounded louder and louder, while in Britain, on July 23, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, was writing in the Downing Street Memo: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
On September 20, the Bush Doctrine rejecting containment and propounding pre-emption was formalized in the National Security Strategy of the United States. This was followed by an intense public and behind-the-scenes effort to get Congress to pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq resolution, part of which was a lie-filled speech in Cincinnati on October 7, which included the sentence: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
The House passed the AUMF on October 10, with 61% of Democrats and 3% of Republicans opposed, and the Senate on October 11, with 42% of Democrats and 2% of Republicans opposed. From that moment forward, whatever those who voted for the resolution thought they had done, they had actually made invasion inevitable.
A bit more than a week before the vote, a little-known Illinois state senator from Chicago’s south side made a speech in opposition to a “dumb” war, a “rash” war. Making clear he was not “antiwar” in the sense of being against all wars, Barack Obama declared, to his everlasting credit:
But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda.
Too bad he couldn’t have made that speech in the U.S. Senate nine days later. It would have made a nice bookend to the speech in the House by Congressman Pete Stark, who said, after remarking that he didn’t trust Mister Bush or his advisers:
What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this Administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?
I know that Senator Obama as orator will shine tomorrow. He will no doubt move a step or two beyond where he has previously been on withdrawal. He might recommend an inclusive Middle East summit. And he will have at least a few words to say about relief for suffering Iraqis, such as the 2.5 million in exile. Words that will be especially welcome in the face of Mister Bush’s latest failure: Less than 2000 Iraqis of the paltry 7000 he promised to admit to the United States by the end of September will actually be here.
So why am I not excited?
Not because of personal animus against Senator Obama. Or that I’ve already picked another candidate.
Rather it’s that, just once, I’d like to see the political paradigm flipped over. To return to the title, I’d like my Iraq fantasy fulfilled.
I know it’s late and the sun has long since set on the East Coast, but I’d like to see Senator Obama phone up all the other presidential candidates tonight and invite them to stand with him on the podium in Iowa and deliver a unified front on Iraq. United against the Cheney-Bush regime, united for a rapid, well-thought-out withdrawal that could have all but a handful of the troops out of Iraq by election day, 2008, and the remaining handful gone a year later. United behind a bill which supports the troops by fully funding that withdrawal. I’d like to see all the candidates accept Senator Obama’s invitation whatever that does to their schedules.
If only the candidates could swallow their personal egos, ignore the media spin, the partisan insults, the fevered shouts of the fear-mongering public intellectuals and militarists and say tomorrow, serially or in unison: “Enough already. From today forward, we will do all in our power – together - to get a well-planned withdrawal started immediately.”
Quit rolling your eyes. I warned you from the get-go this was a fantasy. After five years of our disastrous inability to stop this war from starting and to keep it from never ending, surely you can forgive me a few minutes of if-only?
What plan might there be that those eight candidates could adopt by speech-time tomorrow? I concede that I am uncomfortable with chunks of the plan initially put forth by liberal hawks Brian Katulis and Larry Korb for the Center for American Progress in September 2005, and updated in May 2006 and June 2007. It’s the blurry, unrefined aspect of their proposal to redeploy some troops to neighboring countries that disturbs me most. How many? What for? How long? But, first things first. Which means getting out of Iraq.
If adopted, the latest 60-page CAP proposal, Strategic Reset, would have all the troops out of Iraq in 12 months except for 8-10,000 remaining in Kurdistan for one more year as a buffer against any Kurdish clashes with the Turks. U.S. military bases in Iraq would be closed by the end of 2008, the gigantic embassy downsized. The U.S. would open its doors to 100,000 Iraqis annually. Diplomatic intensity in the Middle East would rise. A new effort would be made to resolve the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli crisis.
The redeployment part of the CAP proposal is front-loaded. In the first six months, 100,000 of the 172,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq would be out – a withdrawal rate of nearly 17,000 a month. The remainder, except for the force in Kurdistan, would be out by November 1.
This would be accomplished by not replacing units that complete their tours on a one-for-one basis. Redeploying in one year would allow sufficient time to dismantle U.S. bases such as Camp Victory in Baghdad and Balad and Tallil Airbases, as well as to return most U.S. military equipment to the United States.
Not perfect. Again, where will all those troops go exactly? A better fantasy would be to pack up all the equipment, order everybody in uniform to stand still for 10 seconds, and beam the entire kit and caboodle out of Iraq by Friday. The best fantasy of all would be the one where we climb into our time machine, toss in a couple of boxes full of documents from the past five years, shift into reverse and slide copies under the doors of every Senator and Representative on September 12, 2001. But I digress from my real fantasy.
Senator Obama obviously isn’t going to issue any invitations. And even if he did, nobody would accept. And even if they did, they’d never be able to agree on a single plan, CAP’s or anybody’s. And even if they could, they’d never get enough fellow Democrats in the Senate and House to go along. And even if they did and the whole Congress sent up a bill whose sole purpose was to fully fund the withdrawal with a date certain for completion, Mister Bush would veto it. And they could never get enough Republican votes to override that veto. Or enough Democratic votes to say before and after the veto: That’s the only funding bill you’re getting, Mister Bush.
Which is too bad. Because whatever Senator Obama says tomorrow, and I have no doubt he will be clarion, and whatever other presidential candidates and congressional leaders say in response, if he and they aren’t willing to add a hard-nosed strategy to their words, then it’s all just theater. The Cheney-Bush regime will have its way and there will still be more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq come January 2009. With 5000 dead Americans and tens of thousands more dead Iraqis, and an ongoing occupation that operates as the biggest recruiting poster for people who would, if they could, produce dozens of September 11ths.
Thus does fantasy turn to nightmare.
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The one most important thing Petraeus has been doing for the last two days, as far as the administration is concerned, is making the case for the criticality to our national security of keeping this the long war. He blew that today in a remarkable display of unbridled honesty, when Sen. Warner asked him if success in Iraq would make the U.S. safer. Petraeus responded, “I don’t know.” TPMmuckraker captured the exchange:
Soon aware that that answer was not going to make him very popular in the White House, Petraeus backtracked, courtesy a soft-ball from Sen. Evan Bayh, again via TPMmuckraker:
The toothpaste was already out of the tube, and Petraeus didn’t do a bang-up job of recovering there. The moment with Warner was enough to make Tweety go postal and ask the questions that every Senator and ever citizen watching the exchange has to ask: if our ongoing presence in Iraq meant a miracle were to occur and we somehow managed to win in Iraq (whatever that would mean), we wouldn’t be any safer, then why in the hell are we still there.
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