Month: April 2003

Hmmm. Who was the bolshy “senior military commander” with a “deep grounding in Arab history and culture” who was criticizing the legacy of the betrayed Shi’a uprising in 1991 in the New York Times this morning? Could it be the only senior military commander with a deep grounding in Arab history and culture, John Abizaid? Funny how the online version of the story now omits the phrase “”deep grounding in Arab history and culture.” Another case of the NYT accidentally revealing its sources? The Columbia Political Review has the goods.

This broadcast is perhaps the strongest evidence yet that Saddam is wounded or dead. Why, when the allies are encroaching on his citadel, does Saddam not appear in person to rally his SS units, secret police and terrorist thugs? It makes no sense for him to be completely absent. Maybe we got him after all.

I’ve been floating a few counter-factuals about this war in my head. In particular, I’m thinking about what the Josh Marshalls and Joe Conasons (although Josh is in a different league of seriousness than Conason, of course) would have had the administration say just before the war. What if Cheney had gone on television and said: “Look, this is going to take months. Saddam’s hardcore is highly trained, ruthless and will fight to the death.” Wouldn’t that have largely removed the chance – even if it were an outside one – of psyching out the Ba’ath leadership and possibly cracking the Saddamite machine at the outset? Part of what the administration was trying to achieve, it seems to me, was a psychological coup against the Baghdad leadership. If they could out-psyche the Ba’athists, convince them they were doomed, we’d have had much higher chances of winning this quickly and well. The problem, of course, was that the message designed for Saddam was also one heard by the domestic audience, and so was a set-up for disappointment. The further problem was that if the leadership survived, they might also feel more confidence for making it through the first couple of weeks. But, again, that’s only a problem if the British and American publics aren’t grown-ups and can’t deal with the uncertainties of war, and if we don’t have the firepower to win anyway. But the publics are grown up – certainly more so than many of my colleagues in the media – and we do have the firepower to carry on. The other obvious advantage of the rolling approach to the war is what Jim Hoagland points out this morning:

They were determined to avoid giving Hussein time to launch missiles with chemical warheads against Israel and its Arab neighbors, torch Iraq’s oil fields or launch new massacres that would send waves of Iraqi refugees fleeing into Turkey and elsewhere. They have been largely successful in these objectives so far.

Those are big successes, but because they are negative ones, they don’t please the critics. From the broadest perspective, I’d say that the negative verdict on the war plan is still unproven.

AND HOW: Here’s general Peter Pace on the flexibility of the Rumsfeld-Franks plan, making a similar point to Hoagland’s. He persuades me:

I think it’s a very, very good plan, and I have given my opinions many, many times to the civilian leadership. I support this plan. It’s a brilliant plan in both its simplicity and its flexibility. And Gen. Franks had a plan that would allow us, if there was early capitulation on the part of the Iraqis, would have allowed us to not have to destroy a large portion of that country. It is flexible enough to handle everything up to the most devastating attacks that we may have to conduct.
But the scope of the operations is all within the original plan, and the flexibility has been demonstrated right from the beginning. When Gen. Franks saw that the oil fields down South might be destroyed as the oil fields were in Kuwait, he quickly sent the ground forces in there and was able to secure over 1,000 oil wells, maybe 80 percent of the Iraqi people’s wealth that’s in the ground he was able to secure for them for their future. And there’s many, many other examples of the plan being set in motion and then circumstances on the ground providing opportunities, like the night that we got the great intelligence on where we thought Saddam was and the very, very specific precise attack.

Of course, Pace has a vested interest in saying this. But he also makes sense. And the critics have a vested interest as well. Why else would jilted former Bush adviser, Brent Scowcroft, the man who helped get us into this mess in the first place, be carping on background to the Washington Post?

This piece by Christopher’s high Tory brother, Peter Hitchens, is illuminating for several reasons, not least of which is that it’s quite persuasive. There is an important conservative argument against this war – an argument that it is destroying the status quo, that dictators should be dealt with, not challenged, that the developing world should be written off for democracy, and so on. That’s why so many Tories opposed what they saw at the time as “Churchill’s war” in the 1930s. It’s why Patrick Buchanan is against this war. And the hard left against this war is also, strictly speaking, reactionary – they loathe the disturbing, transformative power of free trade, free markets and American military power. For my part, I think that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists make this a war that should be fought for national interests alone. That’s the conservative argument. But it is also a progressive endeavor, fueled by the American hope for progress in the Middle East and for democracy, of all things. Hitchens digs up the Tory roots of the anti-war impulse nicely. No chance it will embarrass the anti-war left, though. They seem, for the most part, unembarrassable.

“I noticed that you picked up on the BBC’s story about the controversy over whether two British soldiers were “executed” by the Iraqis, as Blair alleged in a press conference. You draw hostile attention to the BBC’s “profound scepticism” about the truth of Blair’s claim, and their reprinting of the Iraqi denial ‘without comment’. You may not have been following this closely in the British press, where it is an issue about the accuracy of Coalition information. There appear to be two completely inconsistent stories here. Blair claimed that the two soldiers had been executed. The family of one of the soldiers claims that they had been told by both the sergeant and the colonel responsible for this soldier that he had been killed in action, with an implication that there were eye-witnesses, and have accused Blair of lying…” – more reader skepticism and comment, on the Letters Page.

THE BEEB FAILS: British opinion is now more optimistic than American opinion about when this war will end. More interestingly, both Americans and Britons still expect a long campaign – months and months. In that sense, maybe the BBC has had an effect in portraying the costs and difficulties – but it will only redound to Bush’s and Blair’s advantage if the war picks up pace. I have a feeling the expectations game has gone far too dramatically in the direction of pessimism.

Why does he keep digging? Jake Tapper has a little scoop.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “The United States has also become a pathocracy, that is, a regime that is neurotic in essence, the leaders of which are, quite simply, psychopaths.- I offer the hypothesis that the American president is personally suffering from a paranoid psychosis and that the quartet he has formed with Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld constitutes a government that is both theocratic and pathocratic …” – Francois de Bernard, Liberation, translated by Salon.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, or where a doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and who comes up short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause. The man who at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with those cold timid souls who never knew victory or defeat.” – Teddy Roosevelt on the back-seat drivers in this war, “The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses.”