The Dish

Josh Marshall has a detailed rebuttal to my recent criticisms of his criticisms of the Iraqi campaign so far. Josh is easily the most credible liberal blogger, so let me take his counter-arguments one by one. (I don’t agree with Josh, by the way, that this kind of back-and-forth is insidery. We’re not discussing ourselves; we’re debating the issues. Isn’t that what opinion journalism should be all about?) I argued that the plan made sense in as much as we shot for the moon in trying to decapitate the regime quickly, but still have the resources to fight a less triumphant campaign. Josh counters:

If it were true that we were just shooting for the moon knowing that it might fail and that we’d then hit them with a more conventional infantry and armor attack, we’d already have our infantry and armor in place. We don’t. So I don’t find that argument particularly credible.

But from what I can tell, we do have our infantry in place. Moreover, our air superiority is helping destroy the Republican Guards before we encounter them on the ground. I see no evidence that we are holding back from Baghdad because we don’t have sufficient troops. I see evidence that we’re trying to avoid street-fighting, by luring the Saddam shock troops out into the open, while we pulverize them from the air, and get reinforcements from Kuwait. (According to the Washington Post this morning, the first real battle between the army and the Republican Guard is pitting 20,000 U.S. soldiers with 21st century armaments against 6,000 Saddamite troops, half of whom have no formal military training, and whose artillery has been pounded from the air for days.) Even Barry McCaffrey concedes that

“the 100,000 troops en route to the battle will give the operational commanders the ability to control the pace and tempo of the fight if we sense trouble.”

Like Josh, I’m not expert enough to tell whether we have enough troops for the job at hand. But Franks says we do; Pace says we do; the latest reports suggest we do; and even arch-skeptic McCaffrey says we soon will have. What difference does it make if we take Baghdad in four weeks rather than two?

LIBERATION: Josh’s second point is the following:

The administration premised virtually all of its strategy and most of its tactics on the assumption that the civilian population would treat us as liberators. Unfortunately, that basic assumption has been shown itself to be fundamentally flawed. Our military strategy was based on the idea that the Iraqis would be so happy we’d shown up that they wouldn’t harrass our supply lines on the way to Baghdad. That hasn’t panned out.

But ordinary Iraqis are not harrassing our supply lines. Paramilitary Saddam loyalists are. We did indeed under-estimate the legacy of 1991, and the power of a police state to intimidate people – and I’ve been more than candid about that. But, as Josh agrees, it’s still unclear what the general Iraqi population feels about our intervention. Which brings me to a different point. What if we’d done what Josh seems now to support: a massive 1991-style 500,000 troop, lumbering onslaught through the deserts? Wouldn’t that have looked much more like an invasion than the current action? And would that have been more useful in getting rid of fedayeen in street-fighting? I can see the Arab press now writing up the huge invasion force as a new imperialism; and a whole bunch of military commentators pointing out how the army was fighting the last war. I can also see the dangers in that approach of not being able to move quickly and deeply enough to secure the Western airbases (to protect Israel) and the oil-fields (critical for reconstruction). It seems to me that the flexible Franks-Rumsfeld plan was therefore a pretty good one. Perhaps the Turkish refusal to allow border-crossing from our troops hindered things a lot. All I can say is that this quibbling and second-guessing is based on an incredibly high standard for military success after less than two weeks of combat. No harm in that, I suppose. As long as we don’t let perfection become a means of under-appreciating something that’s perfectly good.

THE MOVING GOAL-POSTS: Then Josh shifts the goal posts for success even further. Here is the only scenario in which he will feel chagrined for his political pessimism about this war:

Presumably, I’ll be haunted one or two months from now when we’re off on an easy occupation of Baghdad, governing a peaceful nation of thankful Iraqis, and resting easier since we’ve cowed Syria, Iran and the Palestinians into quiescence.

Come on, Josh. I don’t think anyone has promised that. If, in two months, we have liberated Iraq from Saddam, brought its oil back on line, set up a new provisional government, and begun the process of de-Ba’athification, then I think most Americans will think of this war as huge success. And they should. The attempt to stem the rise of Islamist terrorist totalitarianism in the Middle East will take a generation at least. But it’s worth trying. The alternative is to sit back, watch it fester and wait for it to come at us with weapons of mass destruction. Some of what we’ll do won’t exactly endear us to the Arab world. But in the long run, we’re not looking for love; and the experience of fledgling semi-democracies in Jordan, Turkey and Iraq could well change many minds. That’s my hope. And it’s not a hopelessly quixotic one.

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.”