The Dish

Sane words:

Those who don’t have an answer for Iraq aren’t necessarily morally unserious, and those who do aren’t necessarily dogmatic.

[Apologies for garbling this in the first posting.]

A key premise of the president’s speech is that the alternative is so horrifying we have no choice but to press on. But this assumption, like the fixed WMD assumption before the war, risks freezing our thought and immobilizing strategy. The assumption deserves close examination. I’ve argued that withdrawal to Kurdistan, allowing the Sunni and Shia forces in Iraq to reach their own settlement through a real civil war with a real outcome, is something we need to think through. It may be less damaging to our interests than the surge. Its most important aspect is the way it changes the narrative of the war from Osama’s "Islam vs the West" to "Islam vs itself". I think that’s a strategic game-changer that may redound to our long-term advantage. It requires a United States prepared to let go of trying to control the region and stabilize it. I fear the president is unable to even think in such terms. But that doesn’t mean we cannot. I air this scenario in this post over a month ago and this one yesterday. A reader throws in his two cents:

We are not going to be able to win the argument on the war until we enter into a real, cold-eyed discussion of what the alternative to direct military engagement would likely look like.  Up to now our collective thinking has revolved around a choice between more of the same versus giving in to inevitable chaos.  It’s the "inevitable chaos" alternative that needs to be challenged and analyzed.

Would Sunni insurgents and al Qaeda in Mesopotamia based in Anbar hold a lovefeast to celebrate our departure, or would the Sunnis immediately commence a hunt-down of the alien, troublesome jihadis?  (Maybe the Taliban can push around the disparate Afghans, but I don’t think that the Iraqi Sunnis would put up with that shit.)  Would Iraqi Shia, having finally gained control of their own destiny, be inclined to throw open the door to the Persians next door?  Would the Shia majority be interested in occupying the oil-less sands of the Sunni Triangle and would the Sunni minority be interested in a never-ending war against the overwhelming Shia majority if a real deal on oil revenue could be put in place?  Would the Kurds be paranoid about an Arab invasion, and would the Turks be paranoid about a Kurd invasion if there was an American rapid response force in place in Kurdistan?

I’m just an ignorant slob sitting way back in the bleachers, but I think I know enough to be aware that these and other topics that can define the probabilities of an alternative to Bush’s war are not being rationally and thoughtful discussed. It’s past due.

Agreed. Over to you, realist Republicans and sane Democrats.

Where’s Rove? He’s been awfully quiet lately, hasn’t he? But one reader suspects his finger-marks are all over this speech. Here’s an interesting take:

If one views the speech as a campaign speech, it becomes intelligible. The words are focus group tested and, and while it cannot contain lies readily detectable by the audience, the truth is viewed as irrelevant. Therefore there is the reference to 9/ll because it is still is a hot-button phrase, although by 43’s own admission that has nothing to do with Iraq. He refers to another hot-button issue, controlling the threat of terror, even though his own National Intelligence Estimate concludes the Iraqi war is exacerbating that threat. He harps on Iran because memories linger of the kidnapping of the US employees at the American Embassy there. 

He accepts responsibility for mistakes because they learned from a similar admission with Katrina that this plays well. Of course, as with Katrina, it means nothing because he is by definition responsible and because the acceptance of responsibility has no policy ramifications. Jordan has an attractive and westernized king and queen and therefore he avoids references to that country even though most aid to the Sunni insurgents flows across its borders.

One could go on and on. But, fundamentally, the speech can only comprehended if it’s analyzed as a campaign tool intended to achieve an objective but with no intention of conveying concrete information.

But whose campaign? This president is outta here soon. I think the reader may be more accurate if he described this as a political speech designed to provide minimal cover until the president leaves office. But, still, I’m not convinced. I have a feeling that this is less a Rove speech than a Cheney speech. I don’t believe Cheney thinks this anemic gesture is a game-changer. Even he hasn’t become that unhinged. So what else can it mean? My gut tells me that this speech was, in fact, a serious military warning to Syria and Iran. This president may have in mind a future escalation far greater and more explosive than anything we’re doing in Baghdad. The real reason we’re not withdrawing is that we are keeping our options open for a wider war. And the president, as always, is not being honest about his real intentions.

(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP.)

A reader writes of this post:

But for one line, your analysis of the speech was on the money. I especially enjoyed your first paragraph, which examines the premises of the speech compared to the reality on the ground. But alas, we know only one thing about Iraq.  It has failed.  But its failure does not mean that anyone who supported different tactics was right.  We know only that the tactics used in this particular invasion did not work.

You still steadfastly refuse to examine the views of those who opposed the war from the outset.  If you did, you would find that for the most part, they understood that the premises of the war did not match the facts on the ground.  In particular, they understood the culture, the people, the economics and the religion(s) of Iraq.  They also understood the American people, who will not, perhaps sadly, ultimately support a war that does not end quickly unless national security is a genuine and clear issue.  The world today is not the world that Niall Ferguson understands. Until the day comes that you really analyze the views of Juan Cole and others like him, views that were expressed in real time, and respond to their content, your views about who was right and who was wrong are not credible. 

I am glad you understand now the significance of the way forward expressed last night, but I hope in the future you will at least have the decency to characterize your views properly.  Perhaps additional troops used at an earlier time could have worked, we will never know, but certainly now the escalation proposed by Mr. Bush and the premises underlying that escalation do not fit the facts on the ground.  Anything more on your part, a supporter of the war, is overreaching.

I’ll ignore the condescension, but the reader is right about one thing. We will never know for sure if a strategy with far more troops back in 2003 and 2004 would have worked. In retrospect, I think we had a window of six months after Saddam’s fall to avoid the centrifugal disintegration of Iraq. But I remain unconvinced that this effort, while always extremely difficult, was doomed to fail as badly as it has. I’m sorry if it irritates some that my evolution is not a clean break. But history is rarely a clean break. It is a series of real human choices in real time – and our real time attempt, fallible attempt to understand them.

DId anyone notice a little wrinkle in Bush’s speech at the very end? One reader did:

This is the final paragraph of the President’s speech:

"We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night."

What’s missing?

He left out the ubiquitous "May God continue to bless the United States of America." We only "trust" that the "Author of Liberty" will "guide us." Do we no longer need God’s blessing, just a little guidance?

Interestingly, the absence of the word "God" is downright Jeffersonian. The founders often used euphemism’s for "God." For example "Creator" in the Declaration of Independence.

Have the president’s speech writers finally understood that the founders knew best? That the invocation of God should be sparing, austere and reflective of a distant deity – particularly in a president’s utterances in a diverse religious society?

I missed this recent stream-of-consciousness by John Derbyshire. He sat down with a pot of coffee and a jar of cookies and watched Hamlet, empowered by the web’s resources. After endless, amusing online digressions, Derb gets to the nub:

At last there is the play itself, ever fresh, ever fascinating, one of the greatest of all productions of the human imagination. It is of course about death‚Äîmore exactly, about the soap-bubble-thin yet opaque membrane that separates this place from the other.  And Hamlet is of course us, all of us, each of us‚Äîa mirror.  Peter Saccio, in one of his Teaching Company lectures, pauses to remark that he, Saccio, a literary critic who spends his working days among students, has been describing Hamlet as a literary critic and a college student.

Caught up with Hamlet and his hesitations, I found myself thinking of the thing not done.  Does everybody have a thing not done?  Perhaps not.  I have one, and think of it daily‚Äîhourly, at dark times.  For most of us, the thing not done is far better left undone, carried in silence to the other place; but Hamlet‚Äôs is too imperative.  After trying to keep his doubt alive by feeding it all the learning of the ages, and the new understandings of his own time, he goes and does the thing not done, taking us with him to the edge of the world.

(Painting of Hamlet and his father’s ghost by Henry Fuseli).

I said this last night on CNN, but there is an obvious glaring logical hole at the center of the president’s strategy. John Derbsyhire sums it up brilliantly here:

The central and most glaring contradiction is the implied threat to walk away… Yoked to the ringing declaration that, of course, we can’t walk away.  We seem to be saying to the Maliki govt.:  "Hey, you guys better step up to your responsibilites, or else we’re outa here."  This, a few sentences after saying that we can’t leave the place without a victory.  So-o-o-o:

‚Äî-We can’t leave Iraq without a victory.

‚Äî-Unless Maliki & Co. get their act together, we can’t achieve victory.

‚Äî-If Maliki & Co. don’t get their act together, we’ll leave.

It’s been a while since I studied classical logic, but it seems to me that this syllogism leaks like a sieve.

I think the logical inference is that this is hooey. But Cheney, if not Bush, does not do hooey. What was the real message of this speech? I’m trying to figure that out. But I’m beginning to feel more dread in my stomach about what this president is prepared to do.

Sedona, Arizona, 9 am.

The brightly-lit guy in the lower half of the window is Anderson Cooper, whose show I was on last night. They broadcast it from a balcony in the Cannon Building in the Congress. This is taken from the other side of the rotunda, with Anderson in mid-show. It’s almost 2 am now. Blogging may be a little delayed in the morning, but my take on the speech can be read below.

The premise of the speech, and of the strategy, is that there is a national democratic government in Baghdad, defending itself against Jihadist attacks. The task, in the president’s mind, is therefore to send more troops to defend such a government. But the reality facing us each day is a starkly different one from the scenario assumed by the president. The government of which Bush speaks, to put it bluntly, does not exist. The reality illumined by the lynching of Saddam is that the Maliki government is a front for Shiite factions and dependent for its future on Shiite death squads. U.S. support for the government is not, therefore, a defense of democracy in a unified country, whatever our intentions. It is putting the lives of American soldiers in defense of the Shiite side in an increasingly brutal civil war.

What we will discover in the next few months, therefore, is simply whether the entire premise of this strategy is actually true. The president is asking us to find this out one more time. He seems to disbelieve the overwhelming evidence on the ground – that the dynamic has changed beyond recognition. His intellectual rubric – democracy versus terror – has not changed to deal with fast-changing events, or to take account of the sectarian dynamic that his appallingly managed occupation has spawned. And so his strategy is no surprise. It would have made sense in 2004, when so many of us were begging for more troops, only to be dismissed as fair-weather warriors, terror-supporters, or lily-livered wimps. We were right. This president was disastrously wrong – and clung to his disproved strategy in the face of overwhelming evidence, supported by the Republican right regardless, until it simply became impossible to sustain the lie any longer.

If the president tonight had outlined a serious attempt to grapple with this new situation – a minimum of 50,000 new troops as a game-changer – then I’d eagerly be supporting him. But he hasn’t. 21,500 U.S. troops is once again, I fear, just enough troops to lose. The only leverage this president really has left is the looming regional war that withdrawal would bring. Yes, if we leave, the civil war will take off. And if we stay, with this level of troops, the civil war will also take off. One way, we get enmeshed in the brutal civil war in the region. One way, we get to face them another day, and perhaps benefit by setting them against each other, and destabilizing Iran. That’s the awful choice this president has brought us to. Under these circumstances, I favor withdrawal, while of course, hoping that a miracle could take place. But make no mistake: a miracle is what this president needs. And a miracle is what we will now have to pray for.

He will do what he wants, of course. Even if the bulk of his own party balks, along with the Democrats. Even if the casualties mount, and the civil war intensifies. Even if failure becomes more and more entrenched. The logic of his speech is that we can never let go of this disaster, that it is our fate for the rest of our lives, and that his job is merely to pass it on – deadlier than ever – to whichever unlucky sap gets to inherit his office.

To back this anemic reponse to the escalating civil war requires us to abandon our empirical sense and the lessons of the past four years. To back it requires us to trust this president as a competent, deft and determined leader. Do you? Can you? At this point? After all we have seen?