Jose Padilla, Preemption, and Imminent Threat

From my perspective, a consistent and unfortunate habit of the Bush Administration across many issues has been self-confidence and self-righteousness so extreme that all restraints imposed by law or tradition are seen as hindrances. The Executive of the strongest power the planet has ever seen must not be encumbered (at least when the incumbent is a "good man" from the Republican Party).

The archetypical example is related to the War on Terror on its domestic front. In the case of José Padilla, the Bush Administration has torn up literally eight centuries of Anglo-American law that established the right of citizens to trial before a neutral tribunal. The Bush Administration's position is that American citizens may be detained incommunicado, indefinitely, without any recourse to the courts, entirely at the President's pleasure. I start with this example because even a number of conservative lawyers [Volokh, link is audio file; Viet Dinh] are opposed, as are some of the pro-war readers of this blog.

One of my first claims would be that I think that Andrew's own acknowledged animus against the current administration is influencing his perception with regard to the detention of Jose Padilla. While I am by no means a lawyer and freely admit my own ignorance with regard to any number of legal issues, the case of Jose Padilla strikes me as being more or less analogous to the German-American saboteurs during World War 2, who were similarly classified as enemy combatants. There appears to be something of a grey area in this regard as far as Article 4 of the Geneva Convention are concerned with respect to Mr. Padilla. He is not a soldier in an enemy military unit, nor is he a common criminal. Certainly I can understand the administration's reluctance to treat terrorists like common crooks given the ability of any number of notable al-Qaeda figures (Ali Mohammed, Mullah Krekar, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, Sheikh Omar Bakri, Ahmed Said Khadr, and Ibn Mir come to mind right off-hand) to exploit the freedoms provided by the Western legal system for the purposes of plotting against us.

This is not to say that I support the detention of Mr. Padilla in the manner in which the administration has chosen to pursue it, however. Based on the evidence that was released by the administration concerning the case against Mr. Padilla, there appears to be a very strong case under which the man might be prosecuted for treason under Article 3, Section 3 of the US constitution. Mr. Padilla has undertaken a conspiracy to levy war against the United States, and as part of his al-Qaeda graduation ceremony he would have undoubtably made bayat (sworn unconditional allegiance) to Osama bin Laden, which is about as close as one can get to adhering to an enemy of the United States in this day and age. Likewise he would seem to have given aid and comfort to our enemies as a result of his actions, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as here in the United States. Were I in the same position as the administration, I would have probably have undertaken legal action with which to put Mr. Padilla on trial for treason and then have his US citizenship revoked.

However, I am not the administration, do not have access to the information that they do, and this discussion is supposed to be about Iraq, not Jose Padilla. Were I to attempt to defend, justify, or otherwise explain every ill action in which the administration is accused of taking part, rightly or wrongly, I'd probably be here doing this for years on end.

So moving back to the actual subject Iraq ...

The Iraq War is the first implementation of the Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive War, and Iraq is to the doctrine of casus belli as Padilla is to the Bill of Rights. There have been several blog arguments on whether the Administration claimed that Saddam constituted an "imminent threat". The pro-war position, oddly enough, is in the negative. Now, it's beyond question that the Administration portrayed Saddam as all manner of terrifying threat: "grave and gathering", "immediate", "mushroom cloud". (Donald Rumsfeld on "Meet the Press" denied ever using "immediate threat" and was then left looking silly when Thomas Friedman read his own words back to him.) Given that we were going to war—war!—with Saddam, what exactly was the problem with calling him an imminent threat? The answer, I believe, is that "imminent threat" is a term-of-art in international law, and acting against such a threat is as justified as self-defense after an attack is already underway. (See in particular, 1967 Israeli attack on the Egypt.) So if we called Saddam an "imminent threat" then there would be nothing novel, no bounds broken, in the Bush Doctrine.

Spinsanity, which can hardly be classified as shilling for Bush, says that the whole imminent threat argument is bogus, for whatever that's worth. A lot of the debate here seems to center largely around the issue of semantics as to whether or not Saddam Hussein possessing the large WMD stockpiles that he was believed to possess by US intelligence in 2002 was in a position to use them against the United States.

For whatever it's worth, it would seem equally poignant to note that none of the nightmare scenarios being argued by opponents to the war in an effort to sell their argument occurred either. There was no mass influx of refugees that created a humanitarian disaster, there was no Stalingrad-style battle for Baghdad, Iraqi WMDs were not used against American forces, the UN and other international institutions seem to be pretty much carrying on with business as normal, and the recent rise in gas prices are due far more to good old-fashioned profiteering from the robber barons OPEC member states than any complete destruction of Iraqi oil production.

As far as the doctrine of preemption is concerned, I myself would point out (even though I do not consider Iraq a preemptive war per se because of the Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda that I outlined in my previous response) this is hardly a novel thing for the United States to do. Certainly US military interventions first in Haiti and then in the Balkans during the 1990s under no self-defense rationales whatsoever were hardly controversial moves in the US at the time, if for no other reason than that American troops were not being killed in either intervention on the scale of which they were in Iraq. It is also worth noting that for all the Holocaust-esque imagery and claims that were brought up by the US government in 1999 against Serbia that the Hague has yet to convict Slobodan Milosevic for any of the charges that were leveled against him. What that says about the efficacy of the Hague I leave readers to judge, but I note this only to highlight the fact that preemption by the United States is hardly the radical, never before seen campaign that some opponents of the war are making it out to be.

The faulty intelligence isn't the reason Bush avoided this one specific word, because the Iraq we actually invaded was neither imminent, nor grave, nor capable of mushroom clouds, nor very threatening to American security at all.

If I understand this correctly, Andrew is arguing that Bush knew that Iraq was not threatening to American security (which I assume to be a reference to apparently non-existent Iraqi WMDs) but invaded the nation in any event ... just cause. I would submit to you, citing Bob Woodward's claims in Plan of Attack as well as just common sense, that this was not the case. There was a huge effort before the war to equip US troops with protection to Iraqi WMDs, an effort that cost a great deal of time, effort, and money to do. I would submit that even if one believes that the administration knew or at the very least suspected that US intelligence concerning Iraqi WMDs was erroneous that the sheer number of people who would have to have been duped in order to participate in so wide-spanning a conspiracy in order for it to have occurred - this would literally make what UFOologists believe happened at Roswell look like peanuts by comparison. If one wants to believe this, that's fine, just as Andrew has apparently decided that any and all US intelligence failures with regard to Iraq were deliberately foisted upon us by the person of Ahmed Chalabi, a point I will deal with in full further down the line. As for myself, I do not find his claim in this instance particularly convincing and I doubt that I'm alone in this regard.

Of Allies and Multilateralism

Bush, in campaign mode, ridicules the idea of multilateralism as holding America's security hostage to France. But the interesting thing is, when Al Qaeda attacked us, even though we hardly needed permission from the world to take out the Taliban, not only permission but all sorts of aid were given to us freely. Doesn't the refusal of so many of our allies to do likewise for Iraq tell us something? (The idea that it tells us they are cowards founders, since they, too, were at little risk from Iraq.)

I would say that it means that the chief nation-state proponents of the anti-war coalition (France, Germany, or Russia) believed that other options were better exercised in Iraq with respect to dealing with Saddam Hussein's unaccounted arsenal. There are a number of factors that need to be understood as far as why each nation took the position that it did, but the basic gist of it as I understand it has to do with their belief in the following:

• The Iraqi regime, owing its continued survival to diplomatic support from all three nations, would not be so exceedingly stupid as to bite the hands of those upon which it depended for survival.

• Any new episodes of Iraqi belligerence with respect to WMD could all deterred through MAD. This is particularly true in the case of France and Russia, both of which are nuclear powers.

• German domestic politics in the 2002 elections forced the Schroeder government to adopt a much harder line against US intervention in Iraq than it might have otherwise done so.

• And yes, finally, it must be noted that high-ranking members of all three governments appear to have actively profited from all of the corruption and kickbacks that occurred inside the UN oil for food program.

However, there is another factor, one not commonly noted in these types of analyses, regarding the fact that in the case of Western Europe, French and German authorities refused to accept the idea that Abu Musab Zarqawi was an al-Qaeda leader, a point I covered extensively in Distorted Intelligence. To understand how they came to this conclusion, one need look no further than one man, Shadi Abdallah, on whose word this entire bit of quackery rests. Abdallah's claims, which originally appeared in full in English in a Newsweek web exclusive and have since been most recently published in the Christian Science Monitor (you can read my reply to this foolishness here) and are frequently alluded to in any number of news stories seeking to undercut the rationale for war in Iraq (though never in full, perhaps because the purveyors of such information recognize just ludicrous such claims are), claim that Zarqawi in fact hates bin Laden and only seeks to overthrow the Jordanian government and kill Jews. Abdallah's claims in addition to popular anti-war sentiment, served as the reason as to why the Franco-German governments did not accept the US position with regard to Iraq and al-Qaeda. It took French investigators the better part of a year before they would even acknowledge a connection between Zarqawi, the Chechen jihadis, and the European al-Qaeda network with regard to the planned chemical attacks that Zarqawi was organizing according to the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism from 2002:

The presence of several hundred al-Qaida operatives fighting with the small Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam in the northeastern corner of Iraqi Kurdistan—where the IIS operates—is well documented. Iraq has an agent in the most senior levels of Ansar al-Islam as well. In addition, small numbers of highly placed al-Qaida militants were present in Baghdad and areas of Iraq that Saddam controls. It is inconceivable these groups were in Iraq without the knowledge and acquiescence of Saddam’s regime. In the past year, al-Qaida operatives in northern Iraq concocted suspect chemicals under the direction of senior al-Qaida associate Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi and tried to smuggle them into Russia, Western Europe, and the United States for terrorist operations.

And lest there be any further doubt about the nature of Zarqawi and his relationship with al-Qaeda, I would refer any skeptical readers to the letter that he wrote to the al-Qaeda leadership that was captured by US forces:

You, gracious brothers, are the leaders, guides, and symbolic figures of jihad and battle. We do not see ourselves as fit to challenge you, and we have never striven to achieve glory for ourselves. All that we hope is that we will be the spearhead, the enabling vanguard, and the bridge on which the [Islamic] nation crosses over to the victory that is promised and the tomorrow to which we aspire. This is our vision, and we have explained it. This is our path, and we have made it clear. If you agree with us on it, if you adopt it as a program and road, and if you are convinced of the idea of fighting the sects of apostasy, we will be your readied soldiers, working under your banner, complying with your orders, and indeed swearing fealty to you publicly and in the news media, vexing the infidels and gladdening those who preach the oneness of God. On that day, the believers will rejoice in God’s victory. If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship. [This is} a cause [in which] we are cooperating for the good and supporting jihad. Awaiting your response, may God preserve you as keys to good and reserves for Islam and its people.

This is hardly the language of a rival or a bitter enemy.

Had the French come the conclusions that they now apparently hold with regard to Zarqawi and his relationship to the al-Qaeda network back in December 2002, it is entirely probable that they would have either sided with the US with regard to Iraq or at the very least done nothing to block our diplomatic efforts at the UN Security Council.

Ultimately, I think that the administration made a conscious decision to preserve the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain even at the cost of Franco-Russian support (Germany's actions, as I already noted, was due in no small part to its own domestic politics). There are already some tentative signs that both France and Russia were more than willing to haggle with the US over support or at least apathy with respect to Iraq which, if true, makes it rather difficult to argue that either government opposed the war purely on the basis of principle. However, the US government was unwilling to agree to allow a quid pro quo would more or less result in the Russian reconquest of Georgia (a move that would almost certainly have had a negative impact on the US relations with the rest of Europe, particularly in former Soviet Bloc states) and it would seem that the French attempt at a deal was scuttled by the administration's desire to support Tony Blair in his failed bid to attain a second UN resolution. While it is very tempting to envision alternate history scenarios in which one or both of these arrangements tried and succeeded, I would point out that in both cases France and Russia were simply opting not to oppose a US-led war against Iraq rather than actually desiring to contribute troops to such a campaign (although here again this possibility should not be ruled out altogether). In the end, it seems as though the administration made a judgement call that it was better to have full British support going into Iraq and to preserve the special relationship between the United States and the UK than it was to receive less diplomatic resistance from France and Russia. One can criticize this judgement (and I have), but that should not keep one from resorting to the extremely simplistic and misleading argument that those nations that opposed the war in Iraq did so only out of sheer principle and they and they alone were able to penetrate the intricate layers of deception that surrounding the Bush administration.

The truth is, this Administration, especially VP Cheney, disdain multilateralism—at least they did until we started to need help extricating ourselves from Iraq. I opposed the Iraq War in part, then, because bad as multilateral institutions are, they are still better than the alternative.

I don't see the necessity of reducing the war in Iraq to a zero-sum game in this regard where we either are forced to follow in lockstep the dictates of the UN (if this is the case, then France does more or less have a veto on US foreign policy, as do the three other members of the Security Council) or an anarchic international system. And for all the stereotypes about the unilateralism of the current administration, the truth of the matter is that they have shown more than the necessary skills and resolve in assembling multinational coalitions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, have improved and expanded Russo-American relations to a degree that would have been unheard of prior to 9/11, and have most recenty engaged in constructing African coalitions both to stabilize the situation in Liberia as well as to launch the Pan-Sahel Initiative aimed at preventing al-Qaeda's North African arm from gaining a foothold on the continent. All of these are commendable achievements of diplomacy, but are all too often patently ignored both conservatives who are loathe to give any credit to Colin Powell and the State Department as well as by liberals who, like Andrew, seek to force the administration into a unilateral caricature.

I also opposed it because I think that the greatest success of the American Revolution was to give us a government of laws and not of men, which I take to mean that our democratic system succeeded because it is designed to survive times when incompetent (Harding) or even malevolent (Nixon) men are in charge, unlike the rival monarchies which alternated between enlightened princes and despots. I think we should be doing everything possible to replicate this arrangement in the international sphere, and organizations like the UN and the EU must be part of this process. And certainly the Padilla case shows that Bush understands nothing of this dynamic at all.

On a broader level, I certainly agree with Andrew on the need to establish some kind of an international executive to deal with the current security environment, I remain warily skeptical of the effectiveness of the current status quo, not simply because it is bad but also because it is ineffective. The current international non-proliferation regime, for example, already appears to have failed quite dramatically with regard to Libya and North Korea, to say nothing of the nuclear black market activities of Abdul Qadeer Khan. All of this occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s and a truly effective international non-proliferation regime would have almost certainly been able to uncover them. One need only witness the recent backbiting now going on at the IAEA with regard to Iran's nuclear program, which has far more to do with the desire on behalf of the EU to retain economic ties with Tehran than any actual dispute surrounding the facts as far as what the end-goal of Iran's "civilian power program" would be.

Now understand, I am not one of the more radical conservatives who regards the UN as some kind of a blight upon the face of Western civilization to be eliminated, but all the same I do think that the institution should be recognized for the flawed construct that it is, particularly under the current management that allowed the oil for food corruption to occur under its watch. So when all of this talk is made regarding the need for international support and UN intervention, both of which can be positive goods, it needs to be remembered as far as just what kind of institution we are dealing with here.

The case of the EU is somewhat more complex, do to the fact that large segments of the Western European populace appear to have an almost pathological dislike and hatred for the current administration to the point where everything from Bush's religious beliefs to his regional origins are force into such innane caricatures that they would be regarded as hopelessly bigoted were they ever applied to any Arab strongman within polite diplomatic company. I read European media coverage on a fairly regular basis and judging from what I can determine there are few if any pro-American news outlets, especially in non-English speaking countries on the Continent. A lot of talk has been made since 9/11 about making sure that a pro-American voice reaches the Arab masses and I agree that the creation of al-Hurra is a positive step in this direction. However, judging from the current levels of anti-Americanism in Western Europe, some of which are separated from their Middle Eastern counterparts only by degree rather than kind (and by this I do simply mean disagreement with American foreign policy but rather a bitter, vehement, and ultimately bigoted reaction to anything remotely tainted by the US), I'm not so certain whether or not taking similar measures in Europe aren't also warranted in order to ensure that when US policy is articulated on the Continent, it is understood by its reality rather than its caricature.

Putative Threats and Ahmed Chalabi

Let's be blunt: even though I find the humanitarian argument for the Iraq War insufficient, it's much, much better than the argument by the Administration at the time. That argument was based almost entirely on the putative threat, and on spurious connections between Saddam and the 9/11 attack (largely by VP Cheney), and there can't be any force to an argument whose premises are not true.

Hehehe. I myself actually find the humanitarian argument for the war in Iraq far worse than the other two that were made prior to the invasion, which is one of the reasons why I have avoided many conservatives' willingness to embrace it after the fact in the absence of Iraqi WMDs.

However, I would hold that US intelligence had fairly good reason for concluding what it did with regard to the composition of the Iraqi arsenal far beyond the fables concocted by Ahmed Chalabi's merry band of defectors. Various news outlets, including Newsweek, noted intelligence intercepts of Saddam Hussein instructing his commanders to use chemical weapons the moment the ground assault began. David Kay, who appears to be well-regarded in anti-war circles these days because of his conclusion that Saddam Hussein's WMDs did not exist, has even found evidence that the Iraqi dictator ordered a chemical attack during the war and even according to the testimony of captured Iraqi military generals:

American and British interrogators have asked dozens of generals who served in high-ranking command roles in Iraqi army divisions during this year -- some imprisoned, some living freely -- why Hussein did not use chemical weapons to defend Baghdad. A number of these generals have said that they, too, believed chemical weapons would be deployed by Hussein for the capital's defense. Yet none of the officers admitted receiving such weapons himself.

"The only consistent pattern we've gotten -- 100 percent consistent -- is that each commander says, 'My unit didn't have WMD, but the one to my right or left did,' " said the senior U.S. official involved. This has led some American interrogators to theorize that Hussein may have bluffed not only neighboring governments and the United States, but his own restive generals.

This would tend to explain a great deal regarding US intelligence failures concerning WMDs. At best, all that can said is that what our intelligence agencies knew concerning Iraqi WMD deployments is more or less the same as that which was known to the generals charged with the defense of Baghdad at the time in question.

Out of the rival threat assessments available to the Administration before the war, they chose to be deceived utterly by a convicted grifter, Ahmad Chalabi, whom we are still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. This was no innocent error. Chalabi told the marks what they wanted to hear: not only about WMD, but about his internal resistance movement ready to create a pro-American and pro-Israel (!) Iraq. Better intelligence was available from the United Nations team under Hans Blix, whom we literally chased out of Iraq at the beginning of the invasion.

To begin with, it appears that intelligence information concerning the issue of Iraqi WMDs came from far more sources than just Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress but also from satellite photos and electronic intercepts of Iraqi orders - orders that by all accounts appear to have been believed by the individuals within the Iraqi military who received them at the time.

None of this excuses the behavior of Ahmed Chalabi, however, and on this much Andrew and I are agreed entirely. While I don't accept the premise that all of the information that he provided to the US government over the years have been completely false, the vast majority of it appears to be, particularly the whoppers concerning such things as the claims made by the various defectors he provided, mobile labs, underground WMD factories, and a vast underground resistance movement. He more or less conned us after we accepted his claims in good faith and my view regarding the man is that if he called the tune then he had best be prepared to pay the piper. If nothing else, the United States cannot allow someone who has more or less swindled us to just get away with it. Chalabi's own petty actions have immeasureably complicated the war on terrorism and have tainted the reputation of US intelligence to such a degree that it will take us at least a decade to recover. And in case anybody's been keeping track of Iran and North Korea lately, but, as John Kerry himself has noted, we may well not have that kind of time. A definitive reckoning with Chalabi would help to rid the larger US intelligence community of the man's taint as well as serving as a stern object lesson for the next exile group that gets any bright ideas about scamming the US. The sooner this occurs, the easier it will be. I hear the prisons in Amman are lovely this time of year ...

We insulted our allies (but, again, this was seen as a side benefit) with Secy Powell's Power Point show, not one slide of which has been verified. When the inspectors reported that our Chalabi-based WMD tips, detailed to the level of GPS coordinates, didn't work out, we didn't re-evaluate our intelligence. Instead, Cheney announced we would "discredit" the inspectors. It's safe to assume he hasn't apologized.

Regarding Powell's presentation at the UN, the vast majority of it dealt with WMDs so it is not altogether surprising that it has been found lacking given that we cannot ourselves account for the WMDs we, like the Iraqi generals, were certain existed beforehand. As far as not re-evaluating our intelligence, as I noted earlier there were evidently intercepted communications from the Iraqi leadership concerning the existence of WMDs. So even when our INC-based intelligence on the actual location of WMDs failed to pan out we still had, in my opinion, good reason to conclude that they existed because of these intercepts. None of this, of course, excuses the smear campaign that was run against Hans Blix and UNMOVIC during the months immediately leading up to the war, some of which continues to this day.

Those of you who don't think that knowingly false propaganda contributed to public acquiescence in the war: something like half of the country believes that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi, when of course the correct number is zero. On 9/12, what reason would anyone have for this erroneous belief? None. I suspect at that time those Americans who could answer the question at all would remember that nearly all of the terrorists were Saudi.

Here is where we part ways. I have no doubt that a large percentage of the American public believes that Iraq was tied in some fashion to 9/11 (if memory serves, about the same percentage holds that there was a broader conspiracy involved in the Kennedy assassination), but I would also be very interested to see just how far back in time this belief can be drawn for reasons I intend to highlight in a moment.

The error came from frequent and deliberate juxtaposition of Saddam and 9/11 in repeated speeches that (with the exception of an egregious statement by Cheney that Bush was forced to repudiate) were not literally untrue, but which were designed to leave a false impression.

I think that Andrew, like so many other critics of the administration, are giving Bush and Cheney too much credit. Neither man stated that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks and I think that it shows a staggering contempt for the American electorate to assert that the mere juxtaposition of the two in speeches that most of the country never actually saw (the combined viewership of the cable news services that carried such speeches on a regular basis is something like 5,000,000, tops) is enough to persuade sizeable elements of the American public to adopt a certain point of view. Even the Cheney statement on "Meet the Press" that Andrew is referring to was more or less along the lines of, "We don't know," and was quickly repudiated by the administration.

Might I suggest a more charitable explanation as far as why so many Americans believed what the did concerning Iraq and 9/11:

• At least two INC defectors purportedly from Salman Pak arrived on the scene in late September 2001 and had interviews with everyone from PBS to the New York Times and more less claimed that the hijackers had been trained at Salman Pak (there is no evidence for this, incidentally) and that 9/11 was the work of Saddam Hussein.

• There has been widespread coverage of the still-raging debate over whether or not Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague prior to the attacks.

• A number of conservative talk radio hosts, not the least of which being Rush Limbaugh, were quite adapt at keeping the Salman Pak story as well as a number of variants of Mylroie's theories in the minds of their audiences during the immediate run-up to the war. These are the same outlets that have been more or less arguing that bin Laden was killed at Tora Bora and that the US government is covering it up in order to answer Democratic criticism as to why the US has yet to capture the al-Qaeda.

I expect that there was some interplay between these three factors, but my point is that the reasons for a widespread public belief of Iraqi complicity in 9/11 are far from being the sole province of the Bush administration.

Here I must admit that my pre-existing animus against George W. Bush probably contributed to my belief that most of his WMD allegations weren't true. Even in my dreams, though, I didn't guess that they had simply decided on WMD as an expedience because the Administration was divided on other rationales. And those other rationales would never have gotten enough support in the Congress and in the American public to support a war. I don't think that sending the President (State of the Union), the Vice President, and much of the Cabinet out to snow the American people is healthy for our democratic political system, nor is insulting the intelligence (pun intended) of our allies good for our position in the world, and I think that the war should have been resisted on these grounds alone.

Respectfully, Andrew, I think that you yourself have stated at numerous points that in the event were you consider to be credible evidence emerges of Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda that you would support the war, the second justification cited by Wolfowitz in the article. As I noted before, it was that charge, rather than claims as to the Iraqi WMD arsenal, that convinced me to support the war. And I don't imagine myself to be all that unique in this regard.

Quagmire?

Here I have to admit, I was one of the war's opponents who overestimated the difficulty of taking Baghdad. I knew it would happen, but I expected it to take many more months. (I suppose it's an open question whether the Ba'ath militants conceded the conventional battle more quickly in order to preserve themselves and their ammunition for guerrilla tactics.)

My understanding is that various documents have surfaced in the old Iraqi archives to the effect that effect. However, that does not in of itself rid us of the issue that opponents of the war asserted that the feared Republican Guard™ would prove a potent adversary for the US military. One does not fight guerrilla war because of their overwhelming prowess on the conventional battlefield.

Hence, when I criticize the Administration for its dreadful planning for the aftermath, it must be discounted by the fact that they were right and I was not about the conventional battle. However, it appears as if the serious misjudgment of what Iraq would be like the Day After was systemic, originating to a great degree in over-reliance on Chalabi [another link].

I tend to concur with Andrew's evaluation of the immediate aftermath of the war but I think that part of the reason why this occurred is because the general expectation at the time, even among anti-war circles, was that most of the Iraqi military would still be destroyed during the battle for Baghdad and that there would still be a viable government in place to surrender to us. As a result, when the Baathist infrastructure more or less collapsed and party members began fleeing en masse to the Sunni Triangle, the US found itself caught in an unexpected bind that, to be quite frank, no one on either side of the debate had predicted.

Now even proponents of the war are left wondering how we are going to get out of Iraq without a civil war following our departure, and without remaining as sitting ducks. Too late.

And it is precisely this kind of (gleeful?) defeatist attitude that doesn't do particularly all that much to actually solve the dilemmas at hand. By my count, we've had at least seven quagmires to date, each of which have been regarded by opponents of the war as apocalyptic harbringers of the beginning of the end of the US presence in Iraq.

Just off-hand:

• The looting and anarchy quagmire

• The rise of Iraqi Khomeinism quagmire

• The dreaded Iraqi summer quagmire

• The Ramadan offensive quagmire

• The sectarian civil war quagmire

• The Fallujah quagmire

• The Sadr Revolt quagmire

• The Abu Gharib

In the case of the most recent quagmires (and how many quagmires do we have to go through before we get a "victory?"), the US has established a peace agreement with the al-Dulaimi tribesmen of the Fallujah area and even halted the de-Baathification strategy (which was widely blasted as a Chalabi-backed political purge that alienated the Sunni technocrat class by opponents of the war up until the point its reversal actually started accomplishing something for the administration, I believe the term here is a bait-and-switch) to a certain degree in order to accomodate them. As for Sadr, his little Iranian-backed revolt was far from the mass popular movement that it was made out to be and every attempt by his followers to expand their control beyond the immediate area of An Najaf (of which Kufa is adjacent to) have failed miserably, with Shi'ite sensibilities rather than any actual strength on Sadr's part having saved him for the time being. The fact that Iraqi tribesmen fought the Mahdi Army at al-Kut after the Ukrainians fled as well as that Sadr's own presence in An Najaf is being opposed by the pro-American Thulifqar Army should tell anybody, including the numerous commenters who have suggested that we basically hand over Iraq to Sadr at the beginning of the insurgency, a thing about his level of "popular support."

Suggestions For the Future

I respect Andrew's own suggestions and here are a few of my own:

• And end to US partisanship on foreign policy. The fact that rhetoric used here in US political discourse is now being employed by Osama bin Laden and Sadr to make their points should tell one a thing or two about just how bad things have gotten here where many individuals entirely unable to distinguish foreign policy from domestic policy. Joe Lieberman has recently called for a bipartisan war council to establish a consensus US foreign policy and I think that it's good idea, but that it simply doesn't go far enough. Recognizing that a national unity government is completely untenable at this stage in the game, I myself would take the proposal a step further and pool the major Washington think tanks of AEI, Brookings, Carnegie, and Heritage into a unified policy team with which to articulate the policies that will be used to fight the war on terrorism. The neocons will have a seat at the table, but they will not control it. This should work to stem partisan divisions like those that currently exist over Iraq in the short-term as well as to work to establish policies that will be acceptable for fighting the war on terrorism outside the Chomskyite fringe in the long-term.

• As I noted above, some kind of reckoning must occur between the United States and Ahmed Chalabi. This man betrayed us and that must never be allowed to happen again.

• Work to publicize and articulate US foreign policy, particularly within Western Europe, in order to undercut the rising tide of anti-American sentiment on the Continent. Wherever possible, the US should strive to reach and publicize a more conciliatory policy with Europe without compromising our own key objectives.

• Establish economic benefits for those nations willing to serve as our allies. There have been a number of reports suggesting that Poland, Chile, and a number of other nations have been more or less screwed with regard to trade and contract deals despite their own diplomatic support for the US. That needs to change, and promptly. Similarly, no attempts should be made to undercut France, Germany, or Russia economically for their opposition to the war in Iraq - we simply aren't in the position to engage in that kind of spite right now.

• In my own opinion, Kofi Annan needs to be sacked and a new UN Secretary-General appointed for allowing the kind of corruption that took place in the oil for food program to go on. More, not less, should be demanded for such an international body if it wants to view itself as a Parliament of Man.

• Whether alternative fuel sources or alternate oil suppliers, the US must do everything possible to extricate our own economy and that of our allies from Saudi Arabia. The same should also be true of Europe with regard to Iran.

• Stability in Pakistan is the clearest way to ensure that al-Qaeda doesn't end up with nukes. The US should seriously consider funding a Western-style Pakistani education establishment as a means to counter religious extremism in the country.

• Andrew's suggestion about a Marshal Plan-style initiative with regard to Jordan is a good one and should be acted upon. The same can be said for his suggestions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Concluding Remarks

We can't follow Spain out of Iraq. For them, it was a contribution to America, more than a token gesture, but hardly mission-critical. Also, Spain leaving is their way to repudiate Bush's policy. Defeating George Bush is itself such a repudiation, so it isn't necessary for us to withdraw and make matters worse. (Of the Democratic candidates, only Kucinich and perhaps Sharpton called for immediate withdrawal.)

I am somewhat confused by Andrew's argument here. He appears to regard (at least from the tone of his posts) civil war in Iraq as simply the inevitable outcome of a US invasion as well as nothing more than a meat grinder for our troops, hence his labeling it a quagmire and Vietnam. I think that this more or less begs the question of why he believes that the US should bother staying in Iraq if such a bleak outcome is simply the inevitable result of our own invasion. Would not it be prudent to simply pull out as soon as possible and save American lives? This is the inevitable dilemma of those who wish to label the current US presence in Iraq a quagmire: one does not triumph in a quagmire, one pulls out of it, and the sooner, the better. And the current difficulties for the US with regard to Iraq (or European anti-Americanism, for that matter) are not at all likely to vanish into thin air in the event that John Kerry wins the election in November.

Perhaps if we cede control of the reconstruction to the UN, even though our own personnel would be most at risk, we can get Spain and other countries to return or commit new troops. Recall, experts in occupation in the former Yugoslavia say that we have no more than half the necessary number of troops. Do you still think Rummy knows better?

Where exactly are all these troops going to come from? With the exception of Russia (whose military has a rather checkered record, re: Chechnya), I don't foresee substantial Franco-German deployments in Iraq at any point in the near future, even assuming that they could sustain such an enterprise. Turkey was willing to commit a sizeable number of troops, but that idea got put down by the IGC. I am the first one to agree that we need more troops, not just in Iraq but in our entire military as well. As Tom Holsinger can no doubt vouch, I agree that with his conclusion need to expand the size of the US military by at least another 670,000 troops if we want to accomplish our goal winning the war on terrorism in Iraq and beyond and have been quite critical of Rumsfeld for his belief concerning the troops needed to secure Iraq.

I realize if we are unable to negotiate such an arrangement, none of my suggestions outlines any other way we are going to get out of Iraq with our pride and the Iraqi nation intact and not in civil war.

I fail to understand exactly what Andrew's solution would accomplish, beyond putting the current coalition under UN auspices with perhaps a few additional members. That might be quite nice among the Guardian readership and even in the court of international public opinion, but I fail to see what this does to change the problems involved in the situation on the ground. Wasn't it Andrew who argued when the US returned to the UN for international support that no nation would willfully throw its troops into a meet grinder?

If there were some program, any program, to guarantee this, frankly, I think at this point George Bush would implement it, too. As Max Cleland put it, "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."

This argument, put forth by Cleland and others, basically holds that the current war in Iraq is all but unwinnable (or maybe just unwinnable among opponents of the war so long as Republican is in office?) and is a de facto concession that al-Qaeda's combat doctrine that Fourth Generation warfare is capable of defeating the US just as it did the Russians in Afghanistan. Vietnam was a US military defeat and to compare Iraq is to more or less rhetorically cede the field of battle to the enemy. As I noted before, the organization would likely do what they are doing now in Iraq in Afghanistan but for the lack of a larger US deployment there.

Yousef al-Ayyeri, al-Qaeda's late chief ideologue, regarded Iraq as a clash of wills between al-Qaeda and the United States. I believe that he is correct on this point, though I doubt al-Ayyeri would agree with my own conclusions from it. If we win, then the organization's combat doctrine will have been shown demonstrably to have been found lacking, entirely apart from the large number of al-Qaeda and allied jihadis who are likely to be killed in the process. This isn't the flypaper theory redux, it's simply a reflection of where our enemy views the battlefield now. On the other hand, if they win then all that will have been accomplished is to prolongue the al-Qaeda threat through the course of our lifetimes and perhaps even beyond. When they killed our troops in Somalia, their involvement was a shadowy thing, hidden behind an elaborate web of alliances between Somali warlords and their militias. Here it's right out in the open, with regular statements being issued from al-Qaeda leaders and followers in Iraq and carried on jihadi as well as mainstream Arabic news outlets, which means all the more prestige and glory for them should they succeed at this.

One final point to be made is that Vietnam was essentially a war of convenience or choice for the United States. The eventual conquest of South Vietnam by its northern counterpart as the mass murder that occurred in Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was certainly horrific and tragic, but the conflict there was one of literally dozens of wars and proxy wars that made up the Cold War. That is not the case in Iraq, which al-Qaeda evidently considers far more important than even overthrowing the Algerian junta, driving the Russians from Chechnya, or evicting India from Jammu and Kashmir. And to even think for a moment that a US defeat in Iraq doesn't have far broader implications for the entire world only shows how completely subordinate to domestic political ideology one's worldview is.

Nothing more than demagoguery and rhetoric, one might argue. Perhaps. But that doesn't change the fact as far as what the current conflict in Iraq represents for the United States, regardless of who wins the US election in November. Those who fail to recognize that in favor of (fond?) comparisons to Vietnam only do so at their own peril but then, as Glenn Reynolds noted, at least some people don't seem too terribly concerned about the implications for the entire world if the US loses in Iraq if that loss means that George Bush gets voted out of office in November.