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Thus, the report highlights the essential dilemma Iraq poses for the war on terror: staying fuels the al-Qaeda-inspired movement, creating a net increase in the terrorist threat; while leaving Iraq in chaos would also worsen the threat.
The Democrats tend to focus on the first part of the dilemma; the administration focuses on the second part. They are both right (and wrong) -- and the debate would be greatly served by focusing on the dilemma itself."
The solution to this dilemma is actually quite simple. We must abandon this Quixotic attempt at establishing democracy in Iraq and set up a dictator to run the country. Preferably, he should be a pro-US dictator, of the Shah of Iran or Pervez Musharraf type, but in any event he should be a dictator.
After all, the thing that is keeping American troops in Iraq is not the war on terrorism, it is the futile quest to transform Iraq into a western-style democracy. If the US valued the establishment of order over the establishment of democratic institutions, the troops could withdraw in a couple of weeks. All that is needed is the re-establishment of a dictatorship.
Funeral Surge
by the Editors
Post date 02.01.07 | Issue date 02.12.07
When George W. Bush set out to sell his surge, he never imagined that he would need to convince the plan's intellectual authors of its wisdom. But, a week after Bush delivered his State of the Union address, the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Kagan began furiously distancing himself from the escalation. "This is not our plan," he told Salon. His writing partner, former Army Vice Chief of Staff Jack Keane, informed the Senate Armed Services Committee, "t makes no sense to me."
It's not just the president's wonk base that has fled. Republican senators have begun looking more like the defeated Republican Guard, melting into the Democratic opposition. Bush's prime-time defense of his escalation policy was followed by five new Republican draft resolutions opposing it.
So who in Washington actually believes this surge will work? Apparently, the one man who still believes in Mission Accomplished. We speak, of course, of Dick Cheney. A day after the State of the Union, he sat down with CNN's Wolf Blitzer for a remarkably feisty interview. When Blitzer mentioned the broad consensus that the administration had bungled its Iraq policy, the vice president dismissed such talk as "hogwash." In fact, he said, "Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes." He denied that Iraq was a "terrible situation." [..]
This isn't spin applied to make the best of a bad situation. Cheney has repeated his optimistic take on Iraq so often that you can't doubt his belief in it. And, therefore, he properly qualifies as a delusional individual. Now, Cheney may or may not be the most influential man in the White House these days. But his assumptions about Iraq continue to hold sway. Despite their plans for an escalation, administration officials fail to grasp the scale of our problem in Iraq--or its urgency. There's a reason why the plan has virtually no defenders outside the president's chain of command.
For the last week, Cheney and Bush have defended the plan by placing the onus on its critics. "Those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success," Bush has argued. This is, to borrow Cheney's phrase, hogwash.
But, OK, here's an alternative: Stop making things worse. It's now clear that the Maliki government is not going to unify the country; it's interested in U.S. participation only to the extent that it can turn our Armed Forces into an instrument of sectarian warfare. Our military must get out of the business of helping Shia death squads--a business in which the surge will only implicate us more deeply.
Does this mean we have no further military role in Iraq? No, it does not. We have a strong interest in staying to fight Al Qaeda, and we have a powerful responsibility to mitigate ethnic slaughter and protect Iraqi refugees as the civil war deepens.
There is, for that reason, something unsettling about Democratic rhetoric at this juncture. While the vast bulk of the Democrats' proposals are reasonable--benchmarks for the Iraqi government, a renewed focus on battling Al Qaeda--some of their speechifying is less than appealing. Hillary Clinton says she "resents" that Bush's successor will inherit his mess; Barack Obama talks about letting Iraqis tackle their own problems; every other presidential candidate decries the continued Iraqi dependency on the United States.
They may be right to disdain Bush and his war. But they are also evading America's moral responsibility for the fate of the country we invaded. We set events in motion, and now there are ethnic groups that depend on our protection from catastrophes that will follow our withdrawal. Some of these catastrophes may be inevitable. But that doesn't justify throwing up our hands--or rhetoric that raises public expectations of an easy and guilt-free withdrawal.
The current swirl of binding and nonbinding congressional resolutions is hardly satisfying. But this glut of legislation was born of desperation. The Bush administration continues to push ahead on its course in spite of public opinion, congressional consensus, and bloody reality. These resolutions may be the only vehicles for sending a message to the obstreperous bunch in the White House. And, even when the surge happens, these resolutions could help lay important political groundwork for foisting a new strategy on the White House in the future. Sooner or later, even for Dick Cheney, reality must intrude.
the Editors
The New Republic published an evaluation of the "Surge", signed by "The Editors" (plural, which is something, considering they hardly agree about anything).
Gates Considers Alternatives for Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 7, 2007
Filed at 11:29 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a House panel Wednesday that the U.S. should know in a few months if the Iraqi government is making progress toward peace and whether the United States ''is going to have to look at other alternatives and consequences.''
Feb. 8, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.
"Every day when I go to work or pick up my sons from their schools, a child comes near my car asking for money. It is hard to ignore them as so many children are now in the streets begging for food and material help," said Ali Mussawi, president of the local NGO Keeping Children Alive (KCA).
"They speak and swear like adults, putting the name of Allah [God] in the middle of all their sentences. Sometimes, when their hunger is severe, you can see a child is seemingly not afraid to steal in order to eat," Mussawi added.
According to the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq is the main reason for the increase in the number of street children since the occupation of the country began in 2003. The next major contributor is the increase in the number of widows countrywide.
"The economic situation of the Iraqis is decreasing month after month. Lots of families are using their children to get additional income, which they can get through begging. There are also families who send their children to work," Cedric Turlan, information officer for the NCCI, said.
"In addition, with the increasing number of widows and orphans, and the terrible [security] situation, the families' needs have increased as has the number of street children.
"Of course, when children are not going to school anymore, there is nothing you can do to keep them off the streets. When children are in school, they are not in the street and teachers and educators can also have an impact on families," Turlan added.
There are several centres working with street children in Baghdad and the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, in conjunction with NGOs, is working to provide financial or social support to families so as to prevent them sending their children to work or beg.
"Unfortunately, with the current situation - I mean the difficulty of access and the security matter, and sometimes the lack of funds - these projects are very much reduced and have become very difficult to implement," Turlan said.
"Iraq has signed the conventions related to the rights of the children, but their implementation is also much reduced now, certainly because of insecurity. So the main concern is the future of Iraqi children in general: what will be their future?"
Conservatives Assail North Korea Accord
Deal Could Get Nation off Terrorism List
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 15, 2007; A01
The White House yesterday found itself fending off a conservative revolt over the North Korea nuclear deal, even scrambling to mollify one of its own top officials who expressed sharp disagreement with a provision that could spring Pyongyang from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser, fired off e-mails expressing bewilderment over the agreement and demanding to know why North Korea would not have to first prove it had stopped sponsoring terrorism before being rewarded with removal from the list, according to officials who reviewed the messages.
John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, called the agreement -- in which North Korea would freeze its main nuclear facility in exchange for an initial supply of fuel oil -- "a bad deal" that violated principles that were closely held in the beginning of the Bush administration.
And the National Review, a conservative bastion, yesterday slammed the agreement as essentially the same one negotiated by President Bill Clinton in 1994 -- a charge the Bush administration rejects. "When exactly did Kim Jong Il become trustworthy?" the magazine's editors asked. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, normally a Bush supporter, also condemned the accord yesterday as "faith-based nonproliferation."
Bolton's comments, the barbs from conservative publications and the Abrams e-mails reflected deep concerns among conservatives that the agreement could turn out to be an important and troubling turning point. Current and former Bush officials said they fear that after six years they are losing control of foreign policy to more pragmatic forces. The shift, they said, has become especially apparent with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld, who as defense secretary was often seen as a counterweight to State.
More specifically, conservatives said, they worry that the administration's willingness to bend on North Korea does not bode well for hard-line policies toward Iran, the Palestinians or other issues. Indeed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday called on the United States to demonstrate "the same flexibility, a sensible flexibility" toward Iran's nuclear program.
At a news conference yesterday, Bush appeared irritated by criticism from Bolton, once a leader of the administration's conservatives. When a reporter mentioned that Bolton, whom Bush championed, had called it a bad deal, Bush smiled ruefully. "I strongly disagree, strongly disagree with his assessment," Bush said.
Abrams, a legendary bureaucratic infighter and outspoken neoconservative, is responsible for policies aimed at promoting democracy overseas. Officials who reviewed his e-mails on the nuclear deal would not quote from them but described the messages because they agreed with the concerns and wanted to make public the depth of disagreement within the administration. They said Abrams appeared frustrated because so many key decisions had been made at the highest levels without much vetting by officials scattered across the government.
Abrams, they said, was especially concerned about a section of the agreement that stated: "The U.S. will begin the process of removing the designation of the DPRK as a state-sponsor of terrorism, and advance the process of terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with respect to the DPRK." DPRK is the abbreviation of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Countries that are on the U.S. terrorism list are subject to trade and other sanctions.
In an e-mail that Abrams sent to officials involved in Asia policy and nonproliferation policy, he reminded the recipients that, in a deal with Libya on abandoning weapons of mass destruction, the United States said it would start a "delisting" process only if Libya ended its support for terrorism -- and that the terrorism track was separate from the weapons deal.
When one of the Asia experts replied that the process was young, Abrams shot back that he thought that section of the deal was bad.
Gordon Johndroe, a National Security Council spokesman, did not dispute this account but said: "Initial press reports on the six-party-talks agreement sparked a discussion among staff that were seeking clarification of some of the deal's aspects. All has been clarified, and we look forward to implementation."
The provision that irritated Abrams has also sparked concern in Japan, which fears that the United States will remove North Korea from the terrorism list before North Korea has come clean on its kidnappings of Japanese citizens decades ago. Bush tried to mollify those concerns in a phone call yesterday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The State Department says North Korea has not committed a terrorist act since the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air Lines flight.
Bush defended the nuclear agreement as a "unique deal," in part because of his decision to bring in other nations, such as China.
"I changed the dynamic on the North Korean issue by convincing other people to be at the table with us on the theory that the best diplomacy is diplomacy in which there is more than one voice," Bush said.
Bolton later stood by his criticism. "I'm very sad about the president's change in policy," he said in an interview. "The policy as originally articulated and implemented in the first term was exactly right. There's no need to change it. The pressure was what brought North Korea to the table originally. Why get rid of the pressure?"
Asked if he felt disloyal to Bush, who stood by him through a long and ultimately unsuccessful Senate confirmation fight, Bolton said: "I didn't say anything for a good long time, and I wouldn't have said anything if they hadn't changed the policy. I'm loyal to the original policy."
Staff writer Peter Baker contributed to this report.
