CenterFeud

AP catches up to Michael Yon on success in Iraq

Michael Yon, July 14, 2008: Success in Iraq.

Associated Press, July 26, 2008: Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost.

Hmmm...Only two weeks or so behind the curve. "Independent journalist beats MSM to the story" is seeming more and more like "dog bites man". Would be nice if occasionally, the mainstream press acknowledged this.

UPDATE: Maybe only 2 days behind the curve? On July 16, the AP was quietly saying the war was winding down, it just wasn't the headline. But Gateway Pundit commemorated the occasion with a flying pig.

The left's betrayal of liberal ideals

A must-read excerpt from UK journalist Nick Cohen's new book, What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal left, but not China, Sudan, Zimbabwe, the Congo or North Korea? Why, even in the case of Palestine, can't those who say they support the Palestinian cause tell you what type of Palestine they would like to see? After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington why were you as likely to read that a sinister conspiracy of Jews controlled American or British foreign policy in a superior literary journal as in a neo-Nazi hate sheet? And why after the 7/7 attacks on London did leftish rather than right-wing newspapers run pieces excusing suicide bombers who were inspired by a psychopathic theology from the ultra-right?

In short, why is the world upside down? In the past conservatives made excuses for fascism because they mistakenly saw it as a continuation of their democratic rightwing ideas. Now, overwhelmingly and every where, liberals and leftists are far more likely than conservatives to excuse fascistic governments and movements, with the exception of their native far-right parties. As long as local racists are white, they have no difficulty in opposing them in a manner that would have been recognisable to the traditional left. But give them a foreign far-right movement that is anti-Western and they treat it as at best a distraction and at worst an ally.

Cohen grew up on the political and cultural left, which he always saw as inherently virtuous. Now, he bemoans the left's betrayal of everything it formerly stood for. Case in point, Iraq:

Journalists wondered whether the Americans were puffing up Zarqawi's role in the violence - as a foreigner he was a convenient enemy - but they couldn't deny the ferocity of the terror. Like Stalin, Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic, they went for the professors and technicians who could make a democratic Iraq work. They murdered Sergio Vieira de Mello, one of the United Nations's bravest officials, and his colleagues; Red Cross workers, politicians, journalists and thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who happened to be in the wrong church or Shia mosque.

How hard was it for opponents of the war to be against that? Unbelievably hard, it turned out. The anti-war movement disgraced itself not because it was against the war in Iraq, but because it could not oppose the counter-revolution once the war was over. A principled left that still had life in it and a liberalism that meant what it said might have remained ferociously critical of the American and British governments while offering support to Iraqis who wanted the freedoms they enjoyed...

The policy of not leaving Iraqis stranded was so clearly the only moral option, it never occurred to me that there could be another choice. I did have an eminent liberal specialist on foreign policy tell me that 'we're just going to have to forget about Saddam's victims', but I thought he was shooting his mouth off in the heat of the moment. From the point of view of the liberals, the only grounds they would have had to concede if they had stuck by their principles in Iraq would have been an acknowledgement that the war had a degree of legitimacy. They would still have been able to say it was catastrophically mismanaged, a provocation to al-Qaeda and all the rest of it. They would still have been able to condemn atrocities by American troops, Guantanamo Bay, and Bush's pushing of the boundaries on torture. They might usefully have linked up with like-minded Iraqis, who wanted international support to fight against the American insistence on privatisation of industries, for instance. All they would have had to accept was that the attempt to build a better Iraq was worthwhile and one to which they could and should make a positive commitment.

A small price to pay; a price all their liberal principles insisted they had a duty to pay. Or so it seemed.

Like Christopher Hitchens, Cohen has become something of an outcast for his consistency in opposing fascism and supporting human rights and self-determination, even if that ostensibly lands him in the same camp as George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He refuses to treat politics as an us-against-them team sport, instead holding the left and the anti-war movement accountable for its betrayal of what he thought were obvious principles.

"George Bush, true Democrat"

Victor Davis Hanson points up the irony of how the US public, and particularly Democrats, have come to view Iraq: "If we fail..."

Prior to Iraq, there was some American guilt over past realism, whether stopping before Baghdad in 1991, playing Iran off Iraq, cozying up to dictatorships, or predicating American Middle East foreign policy solely on either oil or anti-Communism. Read the liberal literature of the 1990s and it was essentially a call for what George Bush is now doing — and being damned for. Then the liberal bogeyman was not Paul Wolfowitz, but Jim Baker (“jobs, jobs, jobs”/”F—- the Jews”). Now the latter is the model of Republican sobriety.

Arab intellectuals and much of the Western Left once decried Bakerism and called for a new muscular idealism that put us on the side of the powerless reformers and not with the entrenched authoritarians. But if we fail in Iraq, then again, fairly or not, the verdict will be far more sweeping than simply the incompetence of the Bremer proconsulship or the impotence of the Maliki government.

Rather, the conventional wisdom will arise that an infantile Middle East ipso facto — whether due to Islamism, tribalism, gender apartheid, sectarianism, engrained dictatorship, or corruption — is simply incapable at this time of consensual government. Anyone who seeks such reform, whether in the Gulf, Palestine, Lebanon, or Egypt, is to be written off not only as naïve, but as reckless as well. A Libyan dissident, a feminist writer in Egypt, or an Iraqi intellectual who decries Western indifference to their plight or American tolerance of regional dictatorships will be told to quit whining and get a life, by a been-there/done-that American public.

Both carping hothouse Arab intellectuals and Western liberals should be put on notice of this change to come. However imperfect, however flawed, however improperly explained our efforts in Iraq were, they nevertheless represented a costly American about-face to offer something in the Middle East other than theocracy or dictatorship — something we are not likely to see again in our lifetime.

Democrats and liberals should likewise realize that for all their hatred of George Bush and the partisan points to be gained by coddling up to the libertarian and paleo-conservative Right, George Bush’s embrace of freedom was far closer to their own past rhetoric than almost any Republican administration in history.

There is definitely a sense of having slipped into some alternate reality from the one I knew pre-9/11. I remember in early 2001 a sense of foreboding that, with the Republicans having won the White House, there would be a shift back to the realpolitik of Bush I and James Baker. The warnings of the Clinton administration about the strategic threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the urgent need to push for regime change in Iraq would be ignored, and we would continue to treat the Middle East as, in the words of Thomas Friedman, "a big dumb gas station". I fully expected the Republicans to stick to their traditional script, and ignore democratic reformers in the Middle East in favor of the usual dictators, tyrants and strongmen.

I didn't figure on George W. Bush, the most unlikely figure in the world to make democratic reform a centerpiece of Middle East policy. In a post-9/11 world, he concluded that there was no safety in the old "stability", only societies forced to choose between rule by thugs or theocrats, who would continue to demonize the West in order to redirect the anger and resentment of their people against an external "other", i.e. "decadent" democracies. Something had to be done to change that dynamic, otherwise it was only a matter of time before we were confronted with an alliance of terrorist networks equipped by their state sponsors with terrifying weapons that could kill hundreds of thousands and wreak social and economic turmoil. He concluded that confronting dictatorial regimes that were actively pursuing such weapons would be far less costly than fighting them when they had achieved their aims and had become emboldened.

It has now become fashionable to deride the so-called "neocons" as Machiavellians ruthlessly plotting global American hegemony, but an objective reading of their writings reveals an idealism rooted in the belief that America should stand with the forces of democratic reform and liberalism in places like the Middle East. Given a choice between coddling dictators and championing rule of law, the equality of women, and a free press, we should be unapologetically in favor of the latter. That support would not necessarily have to be military in nature, but diplomacy must to be backed with a credible threat of force or else it is ineffectual, especially in dealing with despotic regimes.

Now, with the neocons discredited and the general consensus that post-Saddam Iraq is ungovernable, we are back to a weird nostalgia for the dictators. James Baker is suddenly considered the voice of reasonableness by his erstwhile Democratic critics, even as he urges cutting deals with the likes of Iran's Ahmadinejad and Syria's Assad, who he assures us with a straight face have a long-term interest in a stable Iraq. Meanwhile, Iraqi democrats who risked their lives to elect a representative (if flawed and ineffectual) government are to be ignored. And bizarrely, Israel, the only true democracy in the region, is treated as a bargaining chip as we pursue the delusion that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the magic key that will resolve Sunni-Shia bloodletting in Iraq and cause Iran to abandon its nuclear program and ambitions to dominate the region. And these are the "realists"!

And in the midst of all of it, there's George W. Bush, his popularity in the toilet, his credibility losing altitude by the minute, his every statement second-guessed, his war-fighting strategy undermined -- and yet he keeps at it, sending in yet more troops to take on the militias and terrorist gangs that are determined to impose their will on post-Saddam Iraq and make it a base for jihad against the West. Many of us have checked out, having concluded this war is already lost and not worth a single additional American life. Others want it to be lost if only to repudiate George W. Bush, whom they despise more than Saddam Hussein, the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, or Moqtada Al-Sadr. Ironically, Bush remains a "true democrat" while his critics on the left and right seem to have retreated to the comforts and illusions of the old realpolitik.

But whether the so-called "surge" turns the tide or represents yet another failed attempt to stabilize Iraq, we should all be desperately hoping it succeeds. Because to hope it fails, or to express ambivalence -- as apparently one third of Americans do according to a recent poll -- is to objectively side with religious zealots, Ba'athist thugs, and ethnic cleansers against the majority of Iraqis who want to live decent lives, just because you don't like Bush and want him to go down. If, like me, you retain the liberal idealism you grew up with, that realization should make you shudder.

UPDATE: In a must-read essay on America's checkered history with Iraq and the choices the US has made over the years, Neo-neocon makes a similar observation:

The funny thing about the whole thing (and I mean funny-strange, not funny ha-ha) is that it is the neocon philosophy that represents one of the only strategies offering a possible way out of the realpolitik dilemma. And yet those who criticize our realpolitik decisions to back dictators also criticize our neonconnish decisions to overthrow them and try to institute a better and more democratic form of government. Odd, isn't it?

"The highest form of a citizen"

Christopher Hitchens in the Wall St. Journal: "Memorial Day: Reflections on those who made the ultimate sacrifice":

Always think of it: never speak of it." That was the stoic French injunction during the time when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had been lost. This resolution might serve us well at the present time, when we are in midconflict with a hideous foe, and when it is too soon to be thinking of memorials to a war not yet won. This Memorial Day, one might think particularly of those of our fallen who also guarded polling-places, opened schools and clinics, and excavated mass graves. They represent the highest form of the citizen, and every man and woman among them was a volunteer. This plain statement requires no further rhetoric.

First, second and third thoughts on Iraq

As we approach the three-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, Reason gives us a sampling of opinions about the Iraq war from a range of commentators, based on three questions:

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

2. Have you changed your position?

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

My own answers:

1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?

Yes. I believed Saddam Hussein to be a threat when president Clinton made regime change our explicit policy in 1998, and after 9/11 assumed it was only a matter of time before he would furnish WMDs to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. I never bought into the rationale that he was a "secular dictator" who would never make common cause with islamist radicals.

2. Have you changed your position?

No. I still think it was the right thing to do. I never thought it would be a "cakewalk", given the complex dynamics of the Middle East. Nonetheless, I am saddened but not surprised by the level of violence and terrorism visited on everyday Iraqis who should be focusing on rebuilding their country after 35 years of dictatorship.

3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?

What it's doing at present: strengthen the Iraqi security forces so they can take over and maintain the strategy of "clear, hold and build". Continue to take the fight to Zarqawi and others whose aim is to foment civil war and make Iraq the new Jihad Central, a base for future attacks against the West. Work behind the scenes with the elected parties to form a consensus government that includes Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds. Work towards a reduced US military presence as Iraqi armed fores continue to demonstrate the ability to handle their own security. We may not think Iraq is central to the global war on terror, but Al Qaeda, the Iranian mullas, and other radical islamists understand the stakes only too well. The success of a democratically elected Iraqi government would be a disaster for them.

OK, I've had my say. Now go read what a bunch of smart, opinionated people have to say. Then take your turn in the comments below.

UPDATE: More from military/Security analyst Richard Fernandez ("Wretchard") of The Belmont Club:

The US is not "finally becoming adept" at fighting in Iraq so much as reaping the result of a two pronged strategy. First, building up indigenous and de-Baathized forces (with a large Shi'ite and Kurdish component) and second, destroying the infrastructure of the insurgency...

Just how impressive the bumbling, unsophisticated effort in Iraq is will be evident when compared to the decades-long failure to create a working Palestinian Authority, which till now has no effective and reliable security forces and only a desultory form of "government" despite the efforts of far the more legitimate, understanding and capable United Nations and the sophisticated European Union.

In retrospect three of the decisive weapons of victory in Iraq will have been the 190 military transition teams which raised the new Iraqi Army, the Transitional Administrative Law which made a new coalition government possible, and the US Armed Forces itself, which held up the shield behind which the training and political components could take shape. It now seems fairly clear that many of the 'far better' strategies which were suggested in 2004 and 2005 in place of CENTCOM's may not have been as good as they were made out to be. There were many calls for more American troops on the ground, up to 400,000 men. There were even calls for a return to the draft to rescue a "broken army". It had been suggested that it was a "mistake" to fire the old Saddamite Army, which alone could maintain control, or so it was said. In the end, CENTCOM's strategy did not prove so amateurish after all.

Do you view this analysis as Pollyannish? Wretchard doesn't deny that chaos and violence are a fact of everyday life in Iraq, only that the strategy of standing up a reliable Iraqi army (the police force has been far more problematic) and a legitimately elected government is slowly and inexorably depriving the insurgency of oxygen.

Ukraine on the Tigris

Publius Pundit reports on the coalition of parties uniting in Iraq to claim election fraud:

The Sunni lists, along with ex-PM Iyad Allawi’s multi-confessional secular list and others, have joined together to contest the results of the December 15 election in order, at the least, to have the results reviewed and their complaints addressed. At the most, some members of this new coalition have called for new elections altogether.

The bad news is that widespread election fraud on the part of the majority Shi'a party (with the complicity of the government) is looking more and more likely. The good news is that the other parties are uniting into a coalition to do something about it. Even beter: they're working through the political process and organizing peaceful protests. Don't know if it will continue this way, but Iraq is looking more and more like Ukraine did this time last year.

Steyn advises Clooney on reclaiming "liberal" as a positive label

Mark Steyn again:

George Clooney, the matinee idol, made an interesting point the other day. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. So I hope he won't mind if I make a suggestion. The best way to reclaim "liberal" for the angels is to get on the right side of history -- the side the Iraqi people are on. The word "liberal" has no meaning if those who wear the label refuse to celebrate the birth of a new democracy after 40 years of tyranny. Yet, if you wandered the Internet on Thursday, you came across far too many "liberals" who watched the election, shrugged and went straight back to Valerie Plame, WMD, Bush lied.

Good advice. It just seems like no one is the mood to hear it. It's like reminding conservatives they're supposed to be in favor of small government and against running large deficits.

Old media dog learns new tricks: MSM blog on the Iraqi elections is good. Really.

Hats off to Eric Black, national and world news writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, who is running a feature this week called "The Big Question - Iraq's Election: Is this a turning point?" In addition to well researched articles and interviews with experts on the Iraqi elections, Black provides a blog with a discussion thread for readers to comment at length and get into dialogue with one another.

And you know what? It really works. The discussion is civil in tone, well-informed, and generally less shrill and partisan than what you see in a typical letters to the editor column, or for that matter on a typical editorial page. Thoughtful people weigh in with a variety of perspectives, and there is give and take, with Black occasionally stepping in to clarify or even to take questions back to the panel of experts. One commenter expresses his appreciation as follows:

Eric, you put the major newspapers of this country to shame.

You have brought together not just two sides for the phony balance that is treated as journalism nowadays, but the many sides that every real issue involves.

You have offered to collect questions from your readers to ask the people you interviewed.

It’s all written at a high level, not for sixth graders.

This is the sort of open-mindedness, intellectual integrity, and respect for readers that is so patently missing from our news.

You can bet that I will recommend that everyone I know read this.

Thanks for showing us how journalism is done!

I would definitely second that. This is light years ahead of anything I have ever read in the dead trees edition of the Star Tribune and gives me hope that some of the journalists there are actually interested in journalism and grasp how blogs add a new dimension to the reporting. There are several topic threads going, including "What if the Sunnis lose?", "Are the Iraqis like our Founding Fathers?" and "Does the United States really want democracy in Iraq?" They, and the discussions that follow, are well worth your time.

UPDATE: Eric Black notes in the comments below that he is not an editor at the Star Tribune, "just a reporter/writer" (now corrected above). My bad. Nonetheless, I hope the real editors At the Star Tribune are paying attention to this demonstration on how to involve the readership in a dialogue rather than pushing a simplistic (and distorted) view of events on them. There are many points of view on this story, and the articles, interviews and discussion threads illuminate more of them than I have seen in years of the paper's normal coverage. And I read it daily.

Changing with the Times

American Future traces the New York Times' shifting perspective on Iraq from the early '90s to the present. Instructive.

UPDATE: Part 2 is now available. Props to AF's proprietor Marc Schulman for a truly herculean effort.

(Hat tip: The Glittering Eye)

Incompetence in waging the Iraq war, but also in opposing it

Norm Geras isn't buying the argument, advanced by Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, that liberal hawks who backed Bush and Blair on the overthrow of Saddam are now taking the "incompetence dodge", i.e., they supported the Iraq war initially but regret the way it has been conducted:

It's not that I don't think mistakes have been made in the occupation of Iraq. Some plainly have been, and the worst of them wasn't only a mistake. It was a national disgrace and a crime, and the responsibility for it reaches to the highest level. But I haven't for my part dwelt on competence and incompetence as a theme because, as I have argued here, I don't believe that an undertaking like the liberation and democratization of Iraq, undertaken by anybody (whether internal movement or external intervention force), could have been free of mistakes and misjudgements; because, on some of the issues in play in Iraq, I haven't felt especially competent to judge what the best course of action would have been; and because I have not seen in the discourse about US administrative incompetence from the anti-war side much in the way of an effort to discriminate between culpable error or negligence and the sort of unavoidable mistakes that are part and parcel of any enterprise of this magnitude.

For, of course, if the incompetence argument has been mobilized by some who supported the war, it has also had a central role for many in the anti-war camp, the main targets of whose animus and criticism have been the Bush administration, the way in which it has run the war, Tony Blair (on this side of the Atlantic) and even the pro-war segment of liberal left. So much so, in fact, that if you weren't careful you might have come to forget at times the nature of the enemy which has been opposing the occupation and transformation of Iraq and the attempt to set the country on a democratic path after decades of rule by a brutal dictatorship; you might just have formed an impression that for much of the anti-war liberal left the main political enemy was at home. Note that I am not, in this, referring to the Pilgers and other such spokespeople who have come out openly in support of the Iraqi 'resistance', its daily crimes notwithstanding. I'm referring, rather, to a wider anti-war left, those who would bridle (and reasonably so) at any suggestion that they might actually support the combination of jihadists and Baathists opposing the US and its allies in Iraq, but whose time, whose criticism and, above all, whose passion so far as that country is concerned are all but consumed by their hostility to Bush, Blair and the supporters of the war, and who evidently find it rather more difficult to get excited about the reactionary aims and the murderous methods of those the US-led coalition are fighting against.

That I was not in their camp is a badge I am happy to wear, and I shall continue to wear it without shame, indeed with pride. Differential assessments of the likely outcomes of the war being projected were always acceptable, and unavoidable, in the run-up to that war. Uncertainties and doubts on both sides were likewise part and parcel of political debate then. But to have opposed the war in a way that left one at all ambivalent as between those trying to help the people of Iraq towards a new democratic life and the forces doing everything they could to kill that historical effort, this is ground on which I would never have even contemplated standing, not for one minute. There are people who opposed the war, conscientiously and honourably, and who have not stood on that ground. But too many others did.

Even as the press continues to hammer home the concept of the Iraq war as a failed enterprise, buffered by polls that show declining support, gains are being made in Iraq on a daily basis: a constitution was approved in October following a messy political battle, coalition and Iraqi forces are regaining control of "Route Irish" the road from Baghdad to the airport that has been plagued by attacks throughout the occupation, new US-Iraqi efforts are under way to cut off the flow of foreign fighters inflitrating across the Syrian border, and the country is preparing to elect a permanent constitutional government in December, with participation by many of the Sunni groups who boycotted elections last January. Based on the enthusiastic participation of Iraqis in the last two elections, there is every reason to expect that the coming elections in December will be equally successful.

So where does that leave Iraq? With a lawfully elected government and a miliatry and internal security force that is slowly but surely rising to the challenge of securing the country from terrorist attacks, enabling US and coalition forces to assume a lower profile role. As "insurgents" lose support from among a population that has placed its confidence in their elected government, and as the supply of jihadists arriving via Syria dries up, we will see a more stable and more confident Iraq.

Won't happen, you say? By all means, cite articles and polls refuting the above scenario. But there are life and death stakes here, so ask yourself whether you would truly rather see Iraqi democracy succeed, even if you don't agree with the way it was achieved.