Why al Qaida need not come here
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are given to a frequent mantra that if we don’t fight them “over there” in Iraq, the Islamic terrorists will come to America and fight us here. There are at least a dozen logic flaws, misunderstandings of history, culture and geography and several cruel ironies bundled into this statement. But none of them is the real reason why this is a flawed foundation for the initial action in Iraq.
The simple fact is that - except for an occasional terrorist plot in the U.S. for PR purposes - al Qaida doesn’t need to bring the fight to our shores, for the same reason that if I worked in a supermarket, I would not choose to walk across town to buy milk at a 7-11.
Iraq and Afghanistan are the supermarkets of terrorism – the latter courtesy of the Taliban and the former courtesy of the Wolfowitzian neocons. Working in those local terrorism supermarkets, al Qaida can not only recruit more boxboys among the regional population and readily attack US and NATO forces sent to the region, but they have access to the Achilles heel of the West: cheap oil.
By accelerating civil disorder and economic conflagration in Iraq and soon in Saudi Arabia, al Qaida is setting the stage to disrupt oil supplies and drive up the price of crude in dramatic measure.
We saw the world price of crude oil double in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War OPEC Oil Embargo. On October 19, 1973, the official price of Saudi Light was roughly $5 a barrel; within a few weeks it jumped to $12 a barrel. It rose dramatically again following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 from about $15 a barrel to nearly $40 a barrel ($70 in 2006 prices) at the height of the Iraq-Iran War in 1981.
World oil was about $25 a barrel on September 11, 2001. Today it fluctuates between $60 and $80. Doubling, tripling, as a consequence of four planes crashing.
Following an eventual withdrawal of US Forces from Iraq, should the region explode as predicted, the disruption could easily double or triple the price of oil again, this time to $160 or even $250 a barrel. At that point no Western economy can absorb the increase without massive economic and social disruption. Daily life as we know it will change drastically. The resultant depression will do to the US, European and Japanese economies what 9/11 did not: bring them to their knees.
However incidental or complicit al Qaida’s role in this, its initial aims will have been realized. There will be celebration in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And no al Qaida member need have crossed the US-Mexican border to achieve it.
Labels: al Qaida, Bush, Cheney, Iraq, oil, Saudi Arabia
Bi-czar failure
The Bush-Cheney White House is seeking a “war czar” to take control of their ill-conceived, incompetently executed, out-of-control Mid-east fiasco.
“Czar” and its spelling variants are a contraction of the word Caesar, referring to emperors, dictators and supreme leaders, especially in Russia, Bulgaria, and Serbia. In the US, it most recently refers to an expert in charge of implementing policy, e.g. the drug czar.
American czars have a sad history of failure. A series of Presidential drug wars, led by drug czars, have produced an exploding prison population (as befits dictatorial epochs) and little else. Meanwhile, our leaders can focus on fund-raising and PR, having delegated responsibility for real issues to some czar.
Three top retired generals have passed on the “war czar” job, including Army General Jack Keane, who, last December, promoted the idea of a U.S. military surge. Bush bought the Keane’s PR idea of a surge – which is, in fact, a mere escalation of “stay the course”. Now Keane wants no part of running his surge. His Marine counterpart, retired four-star General John Sheehan also rebuffed the White House job offer, telling the Washington Post, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going. So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks.’”
Bush’s failures of competence are reaching critical mass. The administration is imploding. Having failed to deliver a competent Commander in Chief, the Bushies now seek a surrogate.
Why do we need a “war czar” anyway? Isn’t that the job of the Commander in Chief? We need a competent Commander in Chief.
Labels: Bush, czar, failure, Iraq, Keane, Sheehan, war
It's bad. It's very bad.
I yield the floor to Tim Dickenson writing in Rolling Stone (rollingstone.com), March 22, 2007. A panel of experts tells writer Tim Dickinson the war is lost, surge or no surge. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Persian Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again." How awful can it get? The panel's three scenarios:
BEST CASE -- Civil war in Iraq and a stronger al-Qaida: "The best we can hope for is an Iraq that is politically passive but hostile toward America," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser.
"It's complete anarchy now," says Nir Rosen, author of "In the Belly of the Beast." "Americans are still killing Iraqi civilians left and right. There's no government in Iraq; it doesn't exist outside of the Green Zone. We deliberately created a weak government so that we would have final authority over everything in Iraq. ... The best you can hope for is that doesn't spill into the neighboring countries."
MOST LIKELY -- Years of ethnic cleansing and war with Iran: Rosen says our Sunni allies like Saudi Arabia are pushing the United States to switch sides and support the minority Sunnis in Iraq. "The whole buildup to a new war against Iran, which sounds so much like the buildup in 2002, is part of that," he says.
Bob Graham, ex-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, adds: "This administration seems to be getting ready to make -- at a much more significant, escalated level -- the same mistake in Iran that we made in Iraq. If Iraq has been a disaster, this would be multiple times Iraq. The extent to which this could be the horror of the 21st century is hard to exaggerate."
Brzezinski says, "If the war continues without any American willingness to accommodate regionally and to pull out, the Iraq war will be extended to Iran."
WORST CASE -- World War III: "Israel sees that it's threatened by these developments," says McPeak. "Once the Israelis get involved, then everybody piles on. And you've got nuclear events going off in the Middle East."
He concludes: "Our country's international standing has been frittered away by people who don't have the foggiest understanding of how the hell the world works. America has been conducting an experiment for the past six years, trying to validate the proposition that it really doesn't make any difference who you elect president. Now we know the result of that experiment . If a guy is stupid, it makes a big difference."
Labels: blunder, Bush, fiasco, Iran, Iraq
Where is Bandar Bush when the world needs him?
In two current New York Times analyses, the think-for-yourself conservative David Brooks points out that Iraq is now in the pre-Darfur, pre-Rwanda, pre-Bosnia phase of the coming bloodbath.
Brooks writes, “Iraq already has the psychological conditions that have undergirded the great bloodbaths of recent years. Iraqi minds, according to the most sensitive reporting, have already been rewired by the experiences of trauma and extreme stress.
"Some people become hyperaggressive and turn into perfect killers. Others endure a phased mental shutdown that looks like severe depression. They lose their memory and become passive and fatalistic. They become perfect victims.” (http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/opinion/25brooks.html?th&emc=th)
The solution is a “soft partition” of Iraq.
Brooks outlines a 4-step plan including (1) modify the Iraq Constitution, which already decentralizes power, to equitably share oil and gas revenue; (2) get implicit consent from all sects that separation and federalism are in their interest; (3) relocate people into Shia, Sunni and Kurdish districts as was done successfully in Bosnia; (4) get Iraq’s neighbors – who have everything to lose in the coming transnational bloodbath – to buy into the arrangement. (http://select.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/opinion/28brooks.html?hp)
Brooks concludes: "In short, logic, circumstances and politics are leading inexorably toward soft partition. The Bush administration has been slow to recognize its virtues because it is too dependent on the Green Zone Iraqis. The Iraqis talk about national unity but their behavior suggests they want decentralization. Sooner or later, everybody will settle on this sensible policy, having exhausted all the alternatives."
But does anyone think Bush-Cheney will actually plan this or just pretend it isn't happening and screw this up, too? And where are Iraq's neighbors in all this? If a transnational bloodbath is a possibility; if “failure is unthinkable” as Bush said in his State of the Union; then why aren't Iraq’s neighbors, many of them our allies, stepping up and offering to help? Where is Bandar Bush when the world – and George W – need him most?
Labels: bloodbath, Bush, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, partition, Saudi
A plan to fail, following a failure to plan
President George W. Bush is sending 17,500 more people to Baghdad. I agree that now that Bush has our tit in their wringer, we should do what we can to overcome the myriad disasters there. But Bush's half-measure, hell, quarter-measure, will fail. Period. After failing to plan, Bush now offers a plan to fail. The only potentially winning MILITARY strategy is the Powell Doctrine, and now that Bush and Clinton have reduced the size of the standing army, that would require an FDR-like mobilization of the full resources of the United States of America and its people. Not gonna happen? Right. Because George W. Bush correctly says that the stakes are huge, Western civilization hangs in the balance, and then Bush antes only enough to lose. The best alternative is a POLITICAL strategy like the one advocated by the Iraq Study Group with emphasis on engaging regional neighbors, forcing political compromises within Iraq, phased troop withdrawals and an serious, renewed effort to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
We will have to wait till 2009 for what we hope will be a strong, intelligent (A-student), inspiring leader to reassess the whole Mideast mess and devise a long-term, full-throated strategy involving the entire country.
Labels: Bush, Iraq, Mideast, Powell, surge
Irony Redeux: Carney heads Iraq reconstruction
The State Department announced on January 10, 2007, that Timothy Carney, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as a senior civilian American authority in Iraq for three months in 2003, is the new coordinator for Iraq reconstruction.
Carney is no stranger to working amid political instability and conflict. After graduating from MIT in 1966 and joining the State Department, Carney, who speaks Cambodian, Thai and French, was posted to Vietnam and Cambodia during the Indochina War, and Lesotho and South Africa before the end of apartheid.
As part of a number of United Nations missions, he was the senior American on UNTAC in Cambodia from March 1992-August 1993; then in Somalia for UNOSOM II from December 1993-February 1994 (just after U.S. military's 1993 campaign to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid – a period captured in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down); and in South Africa with UNOMSA from March-June 1994 for Nelson Mandela's election.
Most significantly, Carney was Ambassador to Sudan from 1995-97 and is the last accredited U.S. Ambassador there. Why? Because, in Carney’s words, “In early 1996, CIA director John Deutch convinced Secretary of State Warren Christopher to pull U.S. diplomats out of Sudan out of fear for their safety. His anxiety was based on intelligence that implicated the Sudanese government.”
“Soon afterward,” Carney wrote in the Washington Post in June, 2002, “the CIA figured out that its analysis was wrong. A key source had either embellished or wholly fabricated information, and in early 1996 the agency scrapped more than 100 of its reports on Sudan. Did the State Department then send its diplomats back? No. The bad intelligence had taken on a life of its own.”
In the Post article Carney concludes, “Whether hunting terrorists in Afghanistan, judging the integrity of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, mediating a dispute between India and Pakistan, or contemplating the virtue of an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration has given great weight to the content of U.S. (and sometimes foreign) intelligence reports. As the United States wages war on terrorism and Congress reorganizes and bolsters U.S. intelligence agencies, the influence of intelligence on foreign and military policy will only grow.
"But American policymakers have to be intelligent about using intelligence. The story of U.S. policy in Sudan shows how bad intelligence -- or good intelligence badly used -- can damage U.S. interests. In Sudan, it confused us about political Islam, hurt our ability to intervene in the 47-year-old Sudanese civil war, and in 1996 undermined our best chance ever to capture Osama bin Laden and strangle his organization, before he was expelled from Sudan and found his way to Afghanistan.
We write from experience.”
Pity George Bush was not listening to Carney before invading Iraq and creating the mess Carney now hopes to help unwind.
Labels: Carney, Iraq, Irony, Sudan
