Where do we go from here?

Joseph Cirincione: We need to admit that we failed
This is a revolutionary situation in Iraq. You don't see this very often. It's a strategic shift, similar to what happened in Iran during the overthrow of the shah or at the Tet Offensive in 1968. Everything is changing, and our political institutions are
lagging behind the change. You see this in the statements coming out of the White House
and the Pentagon. They still think they're fighting the battles of a few weeks ago. They don't understand how radically different this is, and therefore there are radical new approaches necessary. We have to recognize that we, in fact, are not in control of the country, that this is no longer a situation where we're battling a small band of insurgents or terrorists.

We are now in urban combat, laying siege to about a half a dozen Iraqi cities. We're now at war with the people whom we said we were liberating. And we are about to enter one of the holiest months in the Shiah calendar, where a million Shiah pilgrims are about to come into these cities. What that means is that what began as a small revolt by a
relatively small group will spread to become a broad-based revolt of the majority of the Shiah population.

There are some striking parallels to the Tet Offensive, which occurred during another
presidential-election year, caught the administration completely by surprise, and
fundamentally transformed the strategic situation in Vietnam ?- and also cost the sitting
president the election. The forces of change, which we thought to be weak, have revealed
themselves to be in fact quite powerful, and established institutions that were thought
to be strong ?- for example, the US-created Iraqi militia and the Iraqi governing council
?- have been swept into irrelevance. This uprising changes everything.

For months, it's been clear that the transfer of power was in trouble. It is now dead.
There is no one to transfer power to; there is no Iraqi institution that can accept or defend that power. Anything we could possibly create within the next 80-90 days wouldn't last more than 90 minutes. So at this point, we have to be talking about withdrawal. Not immediately, but what is the best and safest way to get US troops out and to give the Iraqis the best chance of creating a stable government structure.

There is no good solution here. But the one that has the best chance is to recognize that the US plan has failed, and to consider calling a national summit of the people who really do have the power in the Shiah, Sunni, and Kurdish communities. I believe that there are leaders in those communities that can quell the violence, if it is matched with
a commitment for the US troops to withdraw from key areas. I think the military will recognize this perhaps more quickly than the political leadership, and will ask not for more troops but for an exit strategy.

Joseph Cirincione is the director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and author of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction

(Carnegie Endowment, 2002).

Juliette N. Kayyem: Consider the unintended consequences

A lot of Democrats and human-rights activists supported the war in Iraq, and the question they always ask is, "Aren't we better off without Saddam Hussein?" That question is way too easy. The harder question, the important question, is whether it was worth the price.

Getting someone out of power has a price. And these efforts have tremendous costs. My thing is counterterrorism. I always ask, "How has this war affected our counterterrorism strategy?" Well, in Iraq the cost is the war on terrorism.

The truth is, if we had had a better idea of what we wanted the peace to be like, we would not have fought the war the way we did. Our goal was, we go in there fast, Baghdad falls, and that's okay, that's that. We were all watching our trucks barreling down the highway, now they're two hours from Baghdad, now they're an hour from Baghdad. That was our military strategy. There was no thought to how you bring stability to those areas
you're driving past. In hindsight, as you were driving to Baghdad, you didn't stabilize
Shiah areas, and you bypassed huge amounts of guns and military caches that are currently being used against us. How we waged the war was clearly the wrong way for winning the peace.

The justification for going into Iraq was that we didn't want governments that wouldn't or couldn't control terrorists inside its borders. Well, if the US leaves now, we will have created another Afghanistan. So, what should we do from here? Dump the June 30 deadline. Nobody thinks it means anything. It's a cosmetic deadline. It's a date that has just come to plague us. That date exists purely for political reasons, for United States
politics. It has no meaning within Iraq. We should increase troops, internationalize the troops, and commit for the long haul. Withdrawal is the wrong thing to do. The idea that we have no interest there boggles my mind. Not just for moral reasons, which would be enough, because we created the problems the Iraqis are facing. But there is a real
consequence to what happens now. If we leave, the best-case scenario is a Shiah-majority
government. The worst-case scenario is civil war. In a Shiah government, you would have Kurds facing persecution by the majority, so Turkey would want to go in to protect them.

If you walk away, why wouldn't Iran and Turkey get involved? What would be their incentive not to get involved?

Juliette N. Kayyem is a senior fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and national-security analyst for NBC News.

John Dean: How secrets lead to lies

Lyndon Johnson hoodwinked the public into going into Vietnam. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney hoodwinked the public into going into Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution [passed in 1964 in response to North Vietnamese firing on a US warship, it authorized the president to take "all necessary steps" to protect American and allied armed forces] was nothing short of a fraud on the Congress. Getting us into Iraq has proven to be nothing but a fraud ?- and I don't say that lightly, because the consequences of it are quite serious. Clearly, Vietnam was a quagmire. We have all the potentials of having stepped into a quagmire in Iraq.
Another similarity I see is, in Vietnam ?- notwithstanding the fact that we had some very
able and now-legendary reporters there ?- there was still great control of the news that was coming out of Vietnam. And this was one of the problems that, really, the government tried to clamp down on. One of the lessons of Vietnam was, you can't have too much free press in a war zone. They have taken that lesson and really stacked the news control, and we don't know what is really happening.

So the parallels of dealing with what really is happening there are there as well. What is most evident to me is a parallel in not explaining what we're doing, not really being forthcoming in how we got there. One of the problems of secrecy ?- of the kind of obsessive secrecy, particularly, we saw with Johnson in Vietnam, and was exacerbated by
Nixon, and now has surpassed any prior presidency in the Bush administration ?- is the
type of decision-making we get. One of the consequences of secret decision-making is a
classic problem that was once described as "groupthink" ?- an internal thinking process
where no outside thinking comes in, no public debate, no outside nations participate in that decision-making, and we have this belief that we have wisdom in all our own decisions, and we suffer from it. I see classic groupthink in our occupation of Iraq. We don't have a clear strategy, we don't have an exit strategy. We're managing to do just about everything wrong. We're driving opponents together to become fiercer enemies
against ourselves. This is classic groupthink. And it is to me a product of secrecy.

One thing you can count on is that the American people will not get the truth. They will not know the facts. This administration does not square with the American people. We may pick it up from the foreign press, we may pick it up from the Iraqis themselves speaking out, but we really won't know what's going on because that's the practice and standard operating procedure of this administration.

John Dean is the author of Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush

(Little Brown & Company, 2004) and a former White House counsel to President Richard Nixon.

This sums it all up.

Howard Zinn: Vietnam parallels are striking

There are obvious differences between this situation and Vietnam, but the similarities are striking. The United States is sending its troops halfway around the world, invading another country, claiming that it is doing it for liberty and democracy, and subjecting the people of that country to a ferocious military attack. We haven't yet reached the level of mayhem that we reached in Vietnam, where several million people died, but we have only been at war with Iraq for a year.

As we became more involved in Vietnam, and as it became clear that we were not simply winning quickly and getting out, Lyndon Johnson had to escalate the war very rapidly ?- 100,000 troops the first year, 200,000 the next year, 200,000 the next year. As it became obvious that the increase in troops was not resulting in victory in Vietnam, people said, "Well, we can't cut and run" and "We must show our resolve" ?- which is exactly what they are saying now. There is something absurd about the most powerful military nation in the
world thinking it will somehow increase its respect in the world by killing more people in another country.

Another similarity has to do with the press. I think the press has been shamefully negligent in not asking fundamental questions. We're in a very critical situation in Iraq, and the press has not made fundamental criticisms of this war. The criticisms are generally superficial. They will ask, "Did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?" They will not ask, "Well, what if Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, would we then be
justified in going in and invading another country because they, among many, many other
countries in the world, have weapons of mass destruction?" Or you'll find the press saying, "Well, it was wrong because we had to do it alone." You mean if we had allies in a war that was fundamentally immoral and illegal then that would legitimize it? So I'm finding a similarity in the lack of basic analysis and lack of fundamental questioning that is going on in the media.

Ahmed Chalabi is also illustrative of the larger problem. We take a guy who is a fugitive from justice in Jordan for embezzling $200 million, and then we bring him from London, where he is in exile, and say, "Now we have a leader." Talk about similarities ?- we plucked Ngo Dinh Diem out of New Jersey and flew him to Saigon and said, "Now we have an ally."

But the biggest mistake is that we are reacting to Iraqi hostility with more and more military power. The more we react with military power, the more we will create hostility.

It's the Ariel Sharon approach. You have suicide bombers, so you raze a bunch of houses in the West Bank ?- which only leads to more suicide bombers. The mistake we've made since we're been there is to act like a military power instead of a humanitarian power. We could be there, we could be dispensing food and medicine, we could be doing useful things, but we have 100,000 troops, we have planes, we have tanks, and we are killing
Iraqis by the day. That is not going to help the situation.

Howard Zinn is author of A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present
(Perennial, 2003) and co-author of Terrorism and War (Seven Story Press, 2002).

Hey, Wilso! What time is it where you are?

Christopher Hitchens: This is nothing like Vietnam

The only people that you can decide to ignore in this debate are people who start by talking about Vietnam. There's absolutely no meeting point between the two at all, of any kind. The Vietnamese, even at their most Stalinist, had never been condemned by the United Nations or the international community for invading neighboring countries, for using weapons of genocide at home and abroad, or for sponsoring and encouraging terror. I think it's an insult to compare the Vietnamese revolutionaries to these jihadist and Baathist riffraff. Most importantly, Vietnamese nationalism, even in its communist form, could never be described by anyone as a threat to international order or to civilization. The forces of jihad have to be described that way. It is as important to prevent them taking over Iraq, which they would have had a strong chance of doing if Saddam Hussein had been allowed to run out his term, as it would be to prevent them taking over any other country, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Uzbekistan.

This is a bit more like Bosnia or Kosovo. That was an attempt to rescue Muslims from massacre in the heart of a largely Christian setting. This is an attempt to create something like a democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, so the context is different. But it belongs with the post-Cold War nation-building operations that we're going to have to get much better at.

When I was in Iraq last summer, a lot of my Iraqi friends were saying to me to look out for this guy Moqtada Sadr, he's a small guy at the moment but he's very unpleasant and he could become a real nuisance. They were wishing something could be done about him. If what I read is true, that they had a warrant for his arrest on the charge of murder of a senior Shiite imam, I certainly think it was a mistake to close his newspaper rather than arrest him. I do remember feeling a qualm, a pang, when I read about the closing of the paper. Not that it's a newspaper exactly, it doesn't deserve the name of newspaper, but still, his propaganda sheet. I'd like to have it out where I could see it if I were in charge of Iraq. I'd like to know what they were saying. So that doesn't seem to have been handled very brilliantly.

Also, Dr. Ahmed Chalabi argued that there should have been a transfer of sovereignty much sooner, and I think that he has been proved right. The basic training you have if you're Iraqi is keeping your head down and watching out to see which side will be the winning side. It's evident from looking at the newspapers that that's what people are doing to a large extent. So this is potentially a very great tragedy. It's not as bad as it would have been without an intervention, though. My God, then it would have been like Somalia, squared.

Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, and the author or editor of more than 35 books.

Jessica Stern: The war in Iraq has made us less safe

We're stuck in a bind, which is similar to what Israel is dealing with in responding to the Intifadah. Most things we would want to do to increase security of our forces in the short term, could potentially make things a lot worse in the long term. Like bombing that mosque in Fallujah, for example. We don't yet know the details, but even if we accept the argument that 100 percent of the people in that mosque were militants, in the short term it was probably the right thing to do, but in the long term that's an incredible provocation. And if there were any innocent civilians in there it, of course, makes it worse.

We set ourselves up for this by going into Iraq without being prepared to create a functioning state. My colleague Steve Walt put this really well: we made a grave error, and when you make a major mistake, you are left with bad choices. And you have to take the least bad of those bad choices. The bad choices we have are: stick it out, put our troops at risk, and also, I believe, put at risk the broader war on terrorism to some extent. It's sort of like whatever we do, it will be bad because we don't have very good choices. I think if we leave, that's probably the worst thing we could do because we really have created precisely what the Bush administration has identified as a major threat to national security: an extremely weak state that's a mecca for terrorists.

The really frightening thing about what is happening in Iraq is that Sunni and Shiah extremist groups, and foreign and international terrorist groups, are all learning from one another ?- and from Saddam's military personnel. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan, when we financially supported the training of what eventually became Al Qaeda and a number of jihadi groups around the world. The international jihadi army learned things from its exposure to military personnel, who obviously have a different level of training. In Iraq now, the amateurs are intermingling with the professionals. It's not just that we have unified various jihadi groups by giving them a common enemy, but we have also inadvertently exposed them to people with professional training. We really did create a mess, most of which was pretty predictable.

I am not very political ?- in fact, I'm quite allergic to politics ?- but I feel that the Bush administration is quite dangerous on national-security grounds. I think they have made Americans less safe. I think they are dangerous. This administration has so many times, for no real reason, offended its allies. We gratuitously offend our allies on a regular basis, and now we need them and, big surprise, they don't really want to help us out. If there's any hope that we're going to get the international community willing and able to do something for us in Iraq, a Kerry administration would be far more likely to pull that off.

Jessica Stern is lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (HarperCollins, 2003).

Lawrence Korb: Postpone the June 30 transfer of power

What went wrong? You had an administration with an ideological agenda. They tried to fit the facts to their vision, so anybody who disagreed with the prevailing view about the reasons for going to war was put aside. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was trying to prove his transformation worked, that you don't need a lot of ground forces. And they listened to the Iraqi exiles. Ahmed Chalabi hadn't been in Baghdad since the Dodgers were in Brooklyn! And Bush ?- I don't know if it was because of his faith or what ?- assumed that our values are shared by all people throughout the world because they're God's gift to humanity, as he said, not the American people's gift. We were just bringing God's gift to the Iraqis, and assumed that they'd be thrilled to get it.

We have overwhelming conventional military power. Basically, if we want to, we can restore order any place that we want. The question is, then what? They can wear you down. Even though you've taken over, quote unquote, you're still going to be suffering these casualties, and at some point people ask whether it's worth the cost. For Israel, if you think people are out to get rid of your state, then you'll pay any cost. But the Americans don't see this as an existential threat, so they're going to say, "How many more people are going to die? How much more money are we going to spend?" Remember the reaction to that $87 billion Iraq spending bill? People said, "What the hell's going on? You're closing firehouses here and you're opening them in Baghdad?"

We didn't have enough troops. If you look at the percentage in Bosnia or other occupations ?- Germany, Japan ?- you just don't have enough troops. This is connected to Rumsfeld's project and, I think, a desire to mask from the American people the difficulty of what was going on. When General Eric Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff, said we might need several hundred thousand soldiers for the postwar occupation, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark." People would have said, wait a second ?- it's one thing to send 130,000; it's another thing to send a quarter of a million people in.

We need to postpone the June 30 deadline. I think it'll happen. Bush is incredible ?- he's opposed to the 9/11 commission, he was opposed to creating the Department of Homeland Security ?- but whatever else you think about the guy, the guy's a good politician. At some point he can say, "Well, it's going to be contingent upon security and getting the situation under control." People don't mind you changing your mind if you change it to do the right thing.

Lawrence Korb is a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Phillip Carter: An underwhelming troop presence doomed the mission from the start
I think the biggest mistake in Iraq was the first one made, and that was to not put enough resources into the mission. Initially this meant not putting enough planning resources into the mission for how to stabilize Iraq after the war, and that drove the decision to not deploy enough troops to Iraq to provide adequate security and stability immediately after the Hussein regime fell. The cascade effect of that decision has been with us ever since last spring. The US still has to establish security. It has to establish the environment that will allow law to develop, elections to flourish, a market economy of some sort to take root, and civil society to generally operate. We've learned in Bosnia and Kosovo and Haiti and Somalia and Afghanistan that the civilian population will not come out of their homes and interact with each other as a civil society until they feel safe.

We've created security in the past with an overwhelming troop presence at the outset, which essentially telegraphed the message to insurgents, "We're the baddest guy on the block. If you do anything, we are going to respond with overwhelming force." But in Iraq, the model didn't work that way. We came in with an underwhelming show of force, insurgents and looters took root quite quickly, and we've been struggling to eliminate them ever since. At this point, we still may need to make that overwhelming show of force, and only then, I think, can we back off from that posture to a more peaceful and friendly posture.

I think we should be wary of the desire to get out of Iraq very quickly and cut our losses because of the effects that may have down the road. We will essentially tell our enemies that if you behave like the Iraqi insurgents, then you too can be victorious against the United States. If you inflict enough casualties, you will destroy America's political will to do anything in the world. I also think all of the unstated reasons for going to war, that is, stabilizing the Middle East, building some sort of nation regime in Iraq that upholds human rights and does the right thing in international affairs ?- all of those reasons will not be served by pulling out now. If we pull out now, the regime that takes root in Iraq is probably going to be as vicious and as destructive as the regime we sought to replace. If that happens, all of our work and all of our expenditures in blood and treasure will be for naught, and that would be a real tragedy.

Phillip Carter is a former Army officer who attends UCLA Law School and writes on military and legal affairs. He also created the blog "Intel Dump" (www.philcarter.blogspot.com), which provides analysis of the military strategies deployed in Iraq.

Craig Unger: The biggest mistake was not listening to Richard Clarke

The Bush administration put forward this vision of a democratic Iraq, with a modern market economy and modern democracy. To build those institutions is a three-, five-, 10-year proposition at the very best, which would require enormous numbers of American troops there. It's an extraordinary investment. When the American people signed on for this war, I suspect they thought they were getting a replay of the Gulf War of '91 ?- that it would be three weeks in and then out. President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" display, which is nearly a year old, shows that that's not going to be the case.

We're in this war because the administration tried to conflate Saddam and Osama, and nothing could be more different. Saddam was far more secular ?- he was an enemy of Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden wanted to attack Saddam and Iraq, in fact, in 1990 and 1991 and to take the place of the Americans during the Gulf War. It is simply wrong to conflate the two, yet the administration has tried to do that again and again and again. We've seen now that there really is no evidence that Iraq was a clear threat to the United States whatsoever.

It's important to remember that by the mid '90s, the Clinton administration had understood the transnational nature of terrorism, a new kind of terrorism devised by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and Richard Clarke began to create a fairly forceful and aggressive policy to fight it. They struck back quite forcefully in 1998, after Al Qaeda bombed the two American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya ?- and they were completely ridiculed at the time by the Republicans and the press with the "wag the dog" scenario because it was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. As a result of that, the Clinton administration did not have the political capital to execute Clarke's policies. But in October of 2000, Al Qaeda bombed the USS Cole. It was not definitively pinned on Al Qaeda until the presidential transition was taking place. During that time, the decision was made that it was not possible to attack Afghanistan and essentially start a war during the presidential transition. But by the time Bush took office, Clarke had an aggressive plan that was there in the White House, and former national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clarke had thoroughly briefed Condi Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, and they had this plan and it sat on their desk for eight months without them taking action. There was no response to the bombing of the USS Cole. In Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission, she said that to have responded tit for tat would have emboldened Al Qaeda. Well, I'm not sure ?- not responding is an aggressive move? I don't understand her logic.

Craig Unger is author of House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner, 2004).

4:32pm right now.

You can put that down to the influence of one person. Rupert Murdoch. He has an incredible proportion of the world's media under his control, and these outlets have become rabid right wing propaganda machines. Anything he controls in Australia, have been vocally supportive of this war. Even public polls have had their questions structured in such a way that opponents of the war did not have a question available to answer. Letters to the editor are only printed which support the conservative governments of our countries.

?
"Dump the June 30 deadline. Nobody thinks it means anything. It's a cosmetic deadline."

A few people are advocating this but it will be surprising if it is postponed because the pig sheeit for brains Pres. we have keeps saying that this date cannot be changed.

Exit plan? There was never one because this NeoFascist Govt. of the US is not planning on leaving. the largest Embasy in the world is in the planning stages or Iraq and 14 Military bases are in the works. All the US Multi-Corps are waiting for the natives to be subdued so that they can start up their businesses there.

All the sage advice on the planet can be offered to the NeoFascists but they won't take it because they have their PNAC Plans to fullfill.

There is only one solution to Iraq. Vote the NeoFascists out. If they take power anyway, a Coup must be advanced to throw them out and trials of their criminal actions must be held.

Let us hope that Americans will do that. Otherwise, we may as well resign ourselves for nothing but the same as been happening the past three years and who knows how it will all end up other than it will not be good.

..."other than it will not be good."? How's that for an understatement. Are you from the the British Isles?

They do have a reputation for understatement!

One little tidbit I just picked up while reading other stuff: one reason why Bush might have given Woodward such unfettered access to him and his team is the fact that Woodward's last book on Bush (about immediately post-9/11) was relatively complementary about him.

Interesting thread, Suzy.

I'll be back to comment when I have more time.

KP

summac

no just kentucky, usually my statements are anything but understatements, but I just can't imagine how all this is going to end up other than I know it will be bad. I keep picturing our way of life being as dramatically different than it is now, it is just a general feeling of doom. I don't know if Kerry is the answer to everything but surely he has got to be a little less damaging. A presidents first rule of thumb aught to be like a doctors, "first do no harm."

Maybe we shouldn't have presidents at all but elective bodies who have to decide everything by majority vote. But that is probably unrealistic.