At the F'DOH

Today and tomorrow, most of the Atlantic's staff is at the Newseum in Washington, for the "First Draft of History" conference. Live streaming webcast here, along with pictures, real-time updates, after-action analyses, and so on. Atlantic staff members are rotating in the role of Official Recording Secretary (aka blogger) for each session. My duty today was the Brian Williams-David Petraeus discussion. First dispatch here; longer followup, with four clips of Petraeus in action, here.
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I spell F'DOH with an apostrophe in homage both to Homer Simpson and to Portuguese Fado music. Although I realize that for Homer alone, it should be FD'OH.

Festival of updates #5: Wolfowitz and Iraq

For the rest of his life, Paul Wolfowitz will face questions about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. You can hear that realization sinking in on him during the course of his ten-minute interview with Guy Raz of NPR, broadcast this evening on on All Things Considered. Wolfowitz had come on the show to discusss his essay on foreign policy "realism" in Foreign Policy magazine -- about which more in a moment. Through the ten minutes, you can hear Wolfowitz sounding startled, then testy, then something like resigned when Raz keeps coming back to the questions he obviously had to ask, about how Wolfowitz's current theories match the record in office for which he will always be best known.

The idea that we'll "always" be known for a moment in the unchangeable past, no matter how the rest of our lives turn out, is a proposition so fatalistic that that we all naturally resist it. (Except maybe Michael Phelps, Sandy Koufax, perhaps Tom Brady and Neil Armstrong, etc.) The earnest post-Vietnam career of Robert McNamara is a testament to how much he struggled with that reality. Remarkably and rarely, Al Gore will "always" be the man at the losing end of Bush v. Gore, but he made a new identity after that.

In the ten minutes of his interview, whenever Wolfowitz says "Look!" what he's really signaling is: I don't want to talk about this Iraq stuff any more, so why do you keep coming back to it? The reason for coming back, of course, is that Wolfowitz does and always will occupy a unique role in the intellectual history of the decision. Dick Cheney will apparently never reveal a doubt or second thought; George W. Bush has (with some dignity) backed off the public stage for now; Colin Powell has made sure to signal that he was never that enthusiastic; and who knows what Donald Rumsfeld will come up with. But Wolfowitz was the one who from the start had the sweeping vision of the historic rationale for removing Saddam Hussein.

The public case for invading Iraq was purely negative. ("Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Dick Cheney, speech to national VFW Convention, August 26, 2002.) But the "enlightened" case that Wolfowitz in particular had made for years in articles, interviews, and speeches involved the broader, Wilsonian prospect of bringing democracy to the Arab world, as it had largely come to much of Asia and Latin America. I did a profile of him in early 2002 that emphasized this theme. I also had a sense of its origins, having lived in Southeast Asia in the 1980s, when Wolfowitz helped swing U.S. policy against Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and then was a very popular U.S. ambassador to Indonesia. By all accounts, Wolfowitz was a prominent voice telling a rattled President Bush, during the first, nervous strategy session at Camp David days after the 9/11 attacks, that for positive and negative reasons alike he had to get to the root of the terrorist problem by moving against Iraq. (For more on Wolfowitz's role in war planning, see here and here.)

In its way it was an honorable vision, as were most of Robert McNamara's beliefs through the early days in Vietnam. But it did not -- OK, has not so far -- turned out anything like what Wolfowitz advertised publicly and within the government. To his credit, Guy Raz of NPR played back to Wolfowitz the tape of his notorious Congressional testimony just before the invasion, in which he said "We can't be sure that the Iraqi people will welcome us as liberators ... [but] I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." And "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine."

It's worth listening to -- along with the full 37-minute unedited interview, here. Among other reasons, I suspect it will be a while before we hear Paul Wolfowitz in such a setting again. The first 15 minutes or so of the "long" version involve what he did want to talk about -- his new Foreign Policy article warning against excessive "realism" in America's approach to the world. Judge for yourself, but it strikes me as a concerted argument against a non-existent or straw-man foe. When an American president has given a major speech in an Arab capital saying that the U.S. needs to engage in the modernization of the Islamic world, it's hard to argue that the U.S. is showing a steely indifference to social and political conditions outside its borders.

It took more than twenty years after Robert McNamara's departure from the Pentagon for him to begin talking seriously about Vietnam. I look forward to what Paul Wolfowitz eventually says about his war.
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In an on-air colloquy with Guy Raz after this interview, I made my own mistake. I said that a recent ruling by a panel of judges from the 9th Circuit held that John Ashcroft, former Attorney General, "was" personally liable for illegal detention of a U.S. citizen. Actually, the ruling said that he "could be" personally liable. My apologies.
 

Col. Timothy Reese on Iraq

Since, atypically, this appears not yet to have been mentioned by any of my on-the-news Atlantic.com colleagues, let me refer anyone who has not seen it to the full text of Col. Timothy Reese's memo urging a rapid exit from Iraq, "It's Time for the U.S. to Declare Victory and Go Home." I first saw it this morning at the Washington Independent site, here, and recommend the full thing to anyone who has read only news summaries.

Opinion has always varied widely within the professional military about the prospects and best options for America's presence in Iraq. So this obviously does not represent a new military "consensus." But it makes a big difference to have this case argued by a senior U.S. military officer on the scene. Well worth reading.

The CIA vs. Sen. Bob Graham: how to keep score at home

It's easy! If the CIA says one thing and former Sen. Graham says another, then the CIA is lying. Or, "in error," if you prefer.

(Background here and here, in which Graham says that some of the briefings in which he was allegedly filled in about waterboarding and related techniques never occurred. This matters, because the CIA's claims are part of the same argument that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress had known about and acquiesced to waterboarding all the way along.)

Part of the payoff of reaching age 72 and having spent 38 years in public office, as Graham has, is that people have had a chance to judge your reputation. Graham has a general reputation for honesty. In my eyes he has a specific reputation for very good judgment: he was one of a handful of Senators actually to read the full classified intelligence report about the "threats" posed by Saddam Hussein. On the basis of reading it, despite a career as a conservative/centrist Democrat, he voted against the war and fervently urged his colleagues to do the same. "Blood is going to be on your hands," he warned those who voted yes.

More relevant in this case, Graham also has a specific reputation for keeping detailed daily records of people he met and things they said. He's sometimes been mocked for this compulsive practice, but he's never been doubted about the completeness or accuracy of what he compiles. (In the fine print of those records would be an indication that I had interviewed him about Iraq war policy while he was in the Senate and recently spent time with him when he was on this side of the world.)

So if he says he never got the briefing, he didn't. And if the CIA or anyone acting on its behalf challenges him, they are stupid and incompetent as well as being untrustworthy. This doesn't prove that the accounts of briefing Pelosi are also inaccurate. But it shifts the burden of proof.

Seatmates on a plane: Iraq report

From a long-time friend of mine, a report of his latest domestic airline flight:

Flew from XXX to XXX seated next to a career Army sgt headed to Iraq after R&R on 3rd tour.  Fascinating conversation - and I realized that being seated next to Iraq-bound or -returning soldiers is commonplace on domestic air travel these days...

Gratifying to me was his saying that the troops really do feel appreciated and supported by the public, and can distinguish criticism of the war from criticism of the men and women in uniform (unlike in Vietnam days).  None of the rest was gratifying at all:

•    Surge has "worked" because Iraqis who just want to start killing one another again are biding their time.  Après nous, le deluge.
•    No one could comprehend the waste of money in US expenditures in Iraq.  
•    IEDs have become infinitely more sophisticated, very high tech now, and can penetrate all but one type of US vehicle.  Suicide bombers can penetrate anything they want.
•    When an IED blows up a vehicle in a convoy, and you are two vehicles away in the same convoy, the force of the explosion is so violent you are thrown against the interior of your vehicle, you are temporarily deafened, etc.
•    Troop morale is high because they sense they are going home, most of them.  But there is no way US can be out in five years or even ten without leaving too much equipment behind.
•    Although troop morale is high, they universally hate George W. Bush now.
•    Afghanistan is much more difficult than Iraq just on the basis of terrain alone.  What we have in the way of tools and weapons is far better suited to Iraq than to Afghanistan.

It was poignant his describing the "huge" increases in pay resulting from Stop-Loss, plus Congress's efforts to help:  $500 a month.  To him, this is a really big sum, "on top of the extra $1000 per month we already get for being in combat."

Somehow additionally poignant on income tax day.

Karmic justice: Gen. Eric Shinseki

One of the truly nauseating moments in the run-up to the Iraq war was the humiliating public rebuke that Paul Wolfowitz, then Donald Rumsfeld's #2 at the Pentagon, delivered to Eric Shinseki, then a four-star general serving as Army chief of staff.

Shinseki, a wounded combat veteran of Vietnam, was by career and reputation a cautious, methodical person. Those who criticized his performance as Army chief mainly complained that he was too traditional and non-innovative in his approach. Thus, he was constantly at odds with Rumsfeld's crew, who viewed him as a passive-aggressive, fuddy-duddy obstacle to doing things in their new lean-and-mean way.

The showdown came just before the war began. Shinseki, who had direct experience with land warfare (in Vietnam) and post-combat occupation (in the Balkans), was urging that the U.S. go in with a force large enough to ensure that it could maintain order and genuinely control Iraq's sizable territory and potentially fractious society after it ousted Saddam. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz hated this whole idea.

After the jump, a passage from my Atlantic article and subsequent book, both called Blind into Baghdad, describing what happened next. I think this also explains why it is so satisfying and right that Barack Obama will (reportedly) name Shinseki to his Cabinet as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.



(Shinseki after his retirement, at a museum in his honor in Hawaii. Photo from a profile of him at this official Army web site.)

Here's one other point that is not as widely known as Rumfeld's and Wolfowitz's bullying of Shinseki: Despite being unfairly treated, despite being 100% vindicated by subsequent events, Shinseki kept his grievances entirely to himself. Although my book contains accounts of Shinseki's inside arguents with Rumsfeld et al, and his discussions with his own staff, zero of that information came from Shinseki.

I made a complete nuisance of myself requesting an interview, or a phone conversation, or an email exchange, or even some "you're getting warmer" guidance from him. Nothing doing, in any way. (I did track him down at an ROTC commissioning ceremony where he was speaking; he greeted me politely, but that was it.) I am confident in the accounts I presented, which came from a variety of first-hand participants; but Shinseki, who could have had a lucrative career on the talk show/lecture circuit giving "I told you so" presentations, has not indulged that taste at all.

So congratulations to Eric Shinseki, who has stoically served his country for decades and was wounded in that cause, in several senses, on this new honor -- and on the responsibility to help others who have served. Congratulations, too, that a Japanese-American patriot from Hawaii should receive this news on December 7. And not just congratulations but wonderment at the Obama team's deftness in the symbolism and substance of this choice.

Details of Shinseki-Wolfowitz showdown after the jump.
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Nagl, Russert, and crises of institutional culture

Two very important articles:

1) Tom Ricks's story in the Washington Post revealing that Lt.Col John Nagl is leaving the Army to join a new DC think tank.

I am partial to Nagl, whom I know somewhat and like very much, and whom I interviewed, along with Lewis Sorley and Conrad Crane, two years ago on the Charlie Rose show. Indeed many reporters know and like him, and he has been a kind of media darling: subject of a (very good) cover-story profile by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine four years ago; author of a well-received book about the timeliest of military topics, counter-insurgency strategy; and one of the driving forces behind the new Army/Marine Corps "Counterinsurgency Field Manual," the same document whose existence is so often cited as one of general David Petraeus's great accomplishments. (Petraeus and Marine Corps general James Mattis sponsored the overall effort.) Nagl had been a Rhodes scholar and, like Petraeus (Princeton PhD) before him, has been a very prominent example of the media-savvy scholar-warrior.

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Two important documents about Iraq

1) From the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, the paper "Dereliction of Duty Redux?" by Frank Hoffman, a retired Marine officer and long-time military scholar, whom I know.

The paper's title refers, of course, to Col. H.R. McMaster's book from the 1990s Dereliction of Duty, which argued that the uniformed military leadership in the Vietnam era finally betrayed the military and the country by not more forcefully opposing policies in Vietnam it knew to be doomed. The book was extremely influential within today's officer corps -- and since McMaster himself, a youngish West Point grad when he wrote it, has been centrally involved in combat operations in Iraq (and now is part of Gen. David Petraeus's team), it has become a cliched joke that soon there will be "McMaster's McMaster" -- that is, some young officer who describes how even the person who saw what happened to the military in Vietnam was caught by a repetition of many of the same patterns.

Frank Hoffmann's essay goes into the similarities and differences in the military leadership's performance in Vietnam and Iraq -- and in particular the warring "narratives" inside the military about who will take the blame for what has gone wrong this time:

The nation’s leadership, civilian and military, need to come to grips with the emerging “stab in the back” thesis in the armed services and better define the social compact and code of conduct that governs the overall relationship between the masters of policy and the dedicated servants we ask to carry it out. Our collective failure to address the torn fabric and weave a stronger and more enduring relationship will only allow a sore to fester and ultimately undermine the nation’s security.

The essay is not not long and very much worth reading in its entirety.

2) A paper last week from the Pew Research Center* giving data to back up the general impression that Americans are thinking and talking less about the Iraq war than they did even a few months ago, and that the American media are paying less attention to the war. There's evidence in the paper for both sides of the chicken-and-egg question: less coverage because people don't care, or people don't care because of less coverage. Either way, here is the result:

Again the whole report is worth looking at.

* My wife works for the Pew Internet Project, which is part of Pew Research.

Veterans' Day (and, my interview with Donald Rumsfeld...)

...back in 1993.

By my local China time it is now the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This is November 11, which means variously, Remembrance Day, Armistice Day, or Poppy Day among countries on the Allied side of World War I, and of course Veterans' Day in the United States.

Originally this was a moment for looking backwards, to honor those who had served in the Great War and mourn those who had died. Its retrospective purpose remains. But for Americans right now it should also be a moment to honor the men and women who continue to serve and sacrifice and be injured and die -- and to reflect on the fact that, for the first time in our modern history, they do so with absolutely no shared sacrifice or service from the public at large. Everyone knows this and avoids thinking much about it. Today it's worth at least remembering.

Also it is worth looking at several articles the Atlantic has brought up from the archives and made available free, for now. They're about Vietnam, not Iraq or Afghanistan (or Iran), but several are significant in their own right in addition to shedding indirect light on our current and continuing wars. Let me emphasize two:

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The Iraq speeches, Take Two

Five pm Friday China time, 5 am on the US East Coast: I'm ready to sweat away my woes with a trip to the gym. Find CNN to watch on a monitor in the workout room -- and discover that I have my choice of agonies! I can directly face the rigors of an hour on the ergometer,* or I can be distracted from them while rowing by watching President Bush's latest Iraq speech all over again!

Impression the second time around (first take here):

Senator Reed a little better than I had remembered.

President Bush a little worse.

Senators Obama and McCain about the same.

Mayor Giuliani, outrageously worse. Is this how he's been all along? To start with, he doesn't know anything. To be more precise: not a single sentence that he utters suggests any familiarity with what people have been saying and arguing -- about terrorism, Iraq, the situation of the military, security trade-offs, etc -- for the last few years. He's out of date in two ways: He displays the "fashionable in 2003 and 2004" assumption that if you say "nine-eleven, nine-eleven, nine-eleven!!" enough times, you end all debate about military policy. He displays the "fashionable about three weeks ago" assumption that if you say "General Petraeus, General Petraeus, General Petraeus" enough times, you've offered an Iraq policy. And through it all he seems totally self-confident. Hmm, have we seen anything like this combo before?

Senator Edwards: Again I saw, Wow. What a powerful, no-nonsense appearance. In his heyday Bill Clinton could deflate a Newt Gingrich argument by saying: Look, here's what's really going on. Edwards was Clintonesque in that good sense tonight.

Same for Michael Ware of CNN: I can't do his whole statement justice, but essentially he said: We hear from these politicians that there would be chaos in Iraq if we leave? What do they think is happening now! We hear that the Iraqi government will be an ally! What world are they living in? And so on.

That may be all the American TV I can take for a while.

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* Disclosure! This is a link to a company that one of my sons runs.

Man from Mars perspective on tonight's speeches

Suppose you were interested in American politics and America's policy toward Iraq, but for quite some time you had not seen the major U.S. figures explaining themselves and reacting in real time.

(Why hadn't you seen them? Details below.*)

Suppose that, like most people in China, you had seen none of the countless Rep-Dem U.S. candidate debates of recent months (not on TV here); nor any of the live Petraeus-Crocker hearings (same problem); nor many on-the-stump clips of the major candidates' current presentations. Yes, you've read accounts of what everyone has said, and followed all the post-game analysis. But it's different to see the people.

Just now CNN International did run Bush's latest speech; plus the Larry King followup with candidates Obama, Giuliani, Edwards, and McCain; plus an Anderson Cooper followup from Iraq. So what do you notice if you haven't seen these people in action in a long time?

- Bush: no surprises. At this point you buy the argument or you don't. Simply as performance, this struck me as being in the higher end of Bush's range. No stumblings over words, none of the familiar, maddening habit of emphasizing "hard" words as if proud he had forced them out. Fewer of the insultingly oversimplified versions of his claims -- "we must fight them there so we don't fight them here." Instead, his arguments were phrased as if the Administration had some idea of what the main counter-argument would be. Bush was sobered but looked less rattled than he has in many of his previous "we are at a crucial moment" speeches about Iraq.

- Democrats: How long has John Edwards been sounding like this? Wow!

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When did CNN join the Administration's (linguistic) team?

Easing back into the world of TV coverage, from remotest Xinjiang. Re-entry via CNN (after a stint watching TV Monde: just too depressing to see that French, which I have not studied for 35+ years, is still 50x more comprehensible than the Chinese I'm wrestling with now. Same impression with Deutsche TV and RAI Italia, which I've studied only a little. Sigh.)

Ongoing special from Iraq, tied no doubt to the Petraeus-Crocker appearances. And every reference to the adversary in Iraq is to "al Qaeda."

* Michael Gordon, of the NYT, is interviewed and talks about the anti-US troop strategy of "al Qaeda."

* Michael Ware, usually a very, very tough critic of U.S. policy, narrates a perilous drive through Baghdad and refers maybe 50 times to "al Qaeda" threatening to attack him or Iraqi civilians.

* Anderson Cooper himself refers continually to "al Qaeda" as the author of all mayhem in Iraq.

Jeez louise! Even Petraeus's own briefing slides, which I have just seen, refer to "AQI" -- al Qaeda/Iraq, as distinguished from the actual al Qaeda that attacked the American mainland six years ago. Wasn't there a fair amount of fuss a few months ago about the Bush Administration's bait-and-switch trick in pushing the term "al Qaeda in Iraq" as a (bogus) way of stressing a link between Osama bin Laden and whoever is the enemy in Iraq? Why should CNN go along with this -- and improve on it, by dropping the "in Iraq" part? Is it that anxious about shaking its "liberal" image? Just curious.

On Petraeus and Crocker from afar

Central Asia is a difficult place from which to follow the Petraeus / Crocker presentations. As a real-time thinking-out-loud exercise, here are the expectations I bring and assumptions I apply before having seen or read the testimony and questioning or followed the after-action wrapups. More “informed” reaction, or at least more reaction, once I have returned to the land of TV, newspapers, and connections fast enough to support video streaming.

1) This is a bad role for the House of Representatives to play. By “this” I mean conducting an extravaganza-style, live-TV hearing with star political witnesses.

A kind of “culture of poverty” disorder blights the performance of House committees when they are on TV. All politicians feel hungry for live TV coverage; Representatives feel starved. The President is on TV 24/7, and most Senators can get on every week or two if they really try. Most House members go months, years, or their entire careers with no shot at live national TV. Therefore they simply cannot help themselves when they have an opportunity to “question” witnesses before a national audience. They (almost) never ask real questions; they (almost) always burn their time giving little speeches. Every one of them knows that as a result their hearings are ruined as TV presentations, and – more important -- their witnesses are let off the hook. But it’s a tragedy of the commons, which no individual can prevent. I hope the first day’s session with Petraeus has proven me wrong here.

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Since I don't know how to contact Tom Hayden directly...

... let me send him a message this way.

He recently wrote a (very polite and respectful) reference to comments I'd made about the need to stick it out in Iraq. He then used this to illustrate the larger problem of people who had opposed the war but were unwilling to face the need to withdraw. The words of mine he quoted were:

I have come to this sobering conclusion. The United States can best train Iraqis, and therefore best help itself leave Iraq, only by making a long-term commitment to stay.

I did write those words. I wrote them two years ago, in an Atlantic article published late in 2005 called "Why Iraq Has No Army."

That's not what I think any more. Here is what I wrote one year after that, nearly a year ago, in explaining why I had come to an even grimmer conclusion about Iraq:

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Bush on disbanding the Iraqi military

There are so many things to scream about in this NY Times report of George W. Bush's view of his "legacy" that it is hard to know where to start. But I'll start with this, describing Bush's extended recent interviews with the author Robert Draper:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Think about this. The dissolution of the Iraq military is one of the six most-criticized and most-often-discussed aspects of the Administration's entire approach to Iraq. (Others: the decision to invade at all; the assessment of WMD; the size of the initial invasion-and-occupation force; the decision not to stop the looting of Baghdad; and the operation of Abu Ghraib.) And the President who has staked the fortunes of his Administration, his party, his place in history, and (come to think of it ) his nation on the success of his Iraq policy cannot remember and even now cannot be bothered to find out how the decision was made.

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In defense of Petraeus-as-author

I am sorry to disagree with someone from my home town and someone from my own magazine at the same time, but I think it's silly to complain that David Petraeus's 20-year-old PhD dissertation from Princeton has lots of vapid passages. I'll make this challenge (though I probably won't take the time actually to carry it out): give me any 20-year-old PhD dissertation in the social sciences, and I will show you lots of vapid passages.

The significant points are these: first, the relevant document for which Petraeus can claim credit, if not as author then as supervising editor/publisher/protector, is the new Army/Marine Corps Field Manual 3-24, on counterinsurgency. This is not a vapid or silly piece of work -- certainly not if taken in context with previous Field Manuals.In fact, it's arguably the most scathing indictment of the Administration's entire approach to Iraq, with its discussions about the need to solve political problems politically rather than with brute force, its emphasis on the importance of low-tech human interactions as opposed to reliance on high tech, its calculations of the force presence needed for a successful occupation, etc.

And, second: the "New Jesus" use to which Petraeus, his reputation, and his counterinsurgency doctrine are being put is shameful. With the release of the vaunted Petraeus Report over the next month, we'll see whether his destined role is as victim of the Administration's policy ("we brought in this guy Petraeus, but he screwed up the surge and didn't solve the political problems") or as enabler of it ("Dave -- that's General David Petraeus -- has been on the scene and confirms that our strategy against Al Qaeda/Iraq is working, and that we must fight them there so we don't have to fight them here. Above all we must not cut and run...")

What Petraeus is doing now, and will do in coming months, is all that matters. Not whatever "the future lies ahead" passages he may have cranked out to get his dissertation done.

The cost of Iraq (cont.)

My colleague Matthew Yglesias quotes the latest (very good) Newsweek article detailing how the war in Iraq undercut the original "war on terror."

By the beginning of 2002 -- when Osama bin Laden was still on the run after his narrow escape at Tora Bora, when the United States still enjoyed vast, strong international support in its effort to evict the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan, when no member of the Bush Administration had publicly discussed the prospect of invading Iraq -- preparations to invade Iraq were already underway. They gutted the effort in Afghanistan.

It is easy to prove now, and was easy to figure out at the time, that the more the United States concentrated on Saddam Hussein, the less it could concentrate on Osama bin Laden. This was one of many reasons to oppose the war before it began: not just the direct costs it would bring inside Iraq but what we could bloodlessly call its opportunity costs elsewhere.

The story of this tradeoff is an old one. It has been told many places, including in a cover story I did for the Atlantic three years ago. (Subscribers only; subscribe!) Even then, when Iraq was less obviously a disaster, people let me put them on the record saying things like this:

"Had we seen Afghanistan as anything other than a sideshow," says Larry Goodson, a scholar at the Army War College who spent much of 2002 in Afghanistan, "we could have stepped up both the economic and security presence much more quickly than we did. Had Iraq not been what we were ginning up for in 2002, when the security situation in Afghanistan was collapsing, we might have come much more quickly to the peacekeeping and 'nation-building' strategy we're beginning to employ now."...

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Cheney on why not to invade Iraq, ca 1994

In case you haven't seen it elsewhere, and since I'm not sure this has yet been posted by my colleagues on the Atlantic's site, two links to Dick Cheney's jaw-dropping and incredible (because so lucid and prescient) comments about the folly of trying to occupy Iraq:

YouTube version (with branding from "Grand Theft Country") here.

MoveOn.org version (with pitch for funds) here.

Arguably the most important 82 seconds of political footage you'll see -- well, in quite a while.It's one thing to read quotes from G.H.W. Bush's book to the same effect. To see Cheney himself making the case and juxtapose that with the man we've come to know..... Too bad Charles Ferguson didn't have this for his movie.

Update: As I should have guessed, Andrew Sullivan actually mentioned this same video a couple of days ago. That's what he gets for cryptic references that don't come up in a search for "Cheney and video" or "Cheney and Iraq"!

Another Chinese perspective on Karl Rove

While riffling through the desktop pile of pirate videos this evening, I saw one I hadn't expected to find: a pre-release version of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, the very powerful documentary about the origins of catastrophe in Iraq. (No, this wasn't just another DVD I'd picked up for 87 cents at the local video store -- and I'll explain my Chinese video-store ethics some other time. It was an early copy Ferguson had sent me, because I'd discussed the project with him at its start. I thought I'd sent it back, but...)

My wife and I watched it again this evening, while eating dinner. Pretty soon it was hard to eat. Nothing in the film is "new" in a technical sense -- we all have heard that there was too little preparation for occupying Iraq, we all know that it was idiotic for Americans not to have stopped the scorched-earth looting of Baghdad, etc. But to see it all take place again, accompanied by the feckless comments of our national leaders.... It would be in Donald Rumsfeld's interest to use some of his wealth to buy up all available tickets to the movie, to minimize the number of people who see it and become newly and furiously contemptuous of him. Walter Slocombe, Paul "Medal of Freedom" Bremer, and Dick Cheney would also be wise to chip in.

I actually recommend mass viewings of this film as a way to mark Rove's departure and reflect upon the way he has changed America. He is the unacknowledged offstage actor through much of this drama, and not simply in winning reelection for the team that created the disaster. He is also there, in spirit, as the occupation staff in the Green Zone is re-populated by 23-year olds whose main qualification was service in College Republicans. In honor of Karl, check this movie out.

'No End in Sight': Definitely, see this movie

Next week Charles Ferguson's documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by "select other cities." It is worth making time to see this film.

The trailer can be viewed on YouTube here. (At least for me, in China, this loads much faster than the same trailer at the movie's official site).

It gives a taste of the film's energy and overwhelming accumulation of fact. Also, many people will be tempted, as I was, to pause the trailer 16 seconds in, to stare in shock at how George W. Bush looked before this war began. That clip, from his 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war, shows a man who could be the carefree young nephew of our current haggard president.

Biases to disclose: I know, like, and admire the film's creator, Charles Ferguson. I talked with him when he was planning the film, and I have a tiny cameo role as one of his interviewees.

My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I'm not denigrating print, to which I've devoted my professional life -- and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)

I don't know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn't shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you're looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.

David Petraeus and the "New Jesus" problem

One memoir of life at the New Yorker under its founding editor, Harold Ross -- maybe it was James Thurber's The Years with Ross, maybe Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker -- described the concept of the "New Jesus." Everyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the idea. The New Jesus is the guy the boss has just brought in to solve the problems that the slackers and idiots already on the staff cannot handle. Of course sooner or later the New Jesus himself turns into a slacker or idiot, and the search for the next Jesus begins.

As has been widely noted, Gen. David Petraeus is getting the full New Jesus treatment. It's underway to an extent I can barely remember happening before. OK, maybe one exception: When Coach Joe Gibbs was brought back to "save" the Washington Redskins three years ago, under their lamentable owner, Dan Snyder. The subsequent travails of Coach Gibbs illustrate the standard New Jesus cycle.

Petraeus is a serious man, but the expectations being heaped on him are simply laughable, and it's worth noting the proportions this phenomenon has taken on.

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What is Rudy Giuliani talking about???

This is what I am denied, or spared, by being trapped in Chinese factories or hospitals and getting only intermittent glimpses of real-time Campaign 2008 rhetoric:

Rudy Giuliani’s answer to the first substantive question of the debate. Knowing everything we know now, good idea or bad idea to have invaded Iraq?

Absolutely the right thing to do. It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror. And the problem is that we see Iraq in a vacuum. Iraq should not be seen in a vacuum. Iraq is part of the overall terrorist war against the United States.

Huh????

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Honoring James Webb, father and son

Via Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, word that his son Jimmy, a Marine lance corporal, has safely returned with his unit from Iraq. This comes one week after the tragic news that Andrew Bacevich, an Army first lieutenant and son of retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich, had died there. The senior Webb and Bacevich have of course been realistic, serious-minded opponents of the unrealistic, reckless insistence on invading Iraq.

Reaction to the Webb family news: relief, best wishes, and congratulations, on service and safety.

Reaction to the paired Webb and Bacevich events: wonderment at how rarely we hear of prominent supporters of the war with children or relatives in harm’s way.

Honoring Andrew Bacevich, father and son

To the family of Army 1st Lt. Andrew Bacevich, killed at age 27 this week in Iraq, deepest sympathies. There is nothing others can say to ease this blow, except: we are sorry for the loss of your son, and brother, and nephew — and send you support and sympathies in this time of loss.

From a coldly logical point of view, news of this death is no worse than the steady flow of news of other deaths, American and otherwise, coming out of Iraq. But for many people it is worse, based on the widespread knowledge that Lt. Bacevich’s family includes his father, retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich.

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At least George Tenet is not telling a flat-out lie

Which is a difference between him and White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

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About that Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet

Two and a half years ago, after interviewing many, many people involved in shaping Iraq-war policy, I wrote the following in the Atlantic (and then in Blind into Baghdad):

There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq. No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.

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Wolfowitz = Swaggart, chap. 1

I was wrong to suggest that Paul Wolfowitz was like Robert McNamara. That is disrespectful to McNamara. The better comparison is to Jimmy Swaggart. Let me explain, through the roundabout medium of Norman Podhoretz.

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Wolfowitz = McNamara, chapter 402

From John Cassidy's (very good) profile of Paul Wolfowitz as head of the World Bank, in the New Yorker:

Wolfowitz refused to talk about Iraq specifically, but he told me that he still believes in the vision of a moderate, democratic Middle East.

Jeez louise. How much inner peace does it suggest about a person -- the most famed intellectual in the Bush administration -- if he refuses to talk about the event for which he will always be principally known? ("John Hinckley refused to talk about shooting President Reagan specifically, but he told me that he still believes in his vision of a happy future with Jodie Foster.")

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Colbert interview links

Here is the main index page for recent Colbert interviews, and here is a direct link to the one I did with him (or he did on me, or whatever) last night. Another direct link: here.

Thank you, Martha Raddatz

At yesterday's news conference, Martha Raddatz of ABC finally got to ask President Bush directly the question that has been obvious since he first announced his "surge" policy one month ago. Ignore the first sentence of her question and look at what comes after that:

Q Mr. President, do you agree with the National Intelligence Estimate that we are now in a civil war in Iraq? And, also, you talk about victory, that you have to have victory in Iraq; it would be catastrophic if we didn't. You said again today that the enemy would come here, and yet you say it's not an open-ended commitment. How do you square those things?

Of course Bush didn't answer.

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It is tedious to say this again, but there is a HUGE logical problem with the Iraq policy

At President Bush's meeting with the Democratic leadership over the weekend, the following line drew applause, according to the transcript released by the White House:

And I have made it clear to the Iraqi government, just like I made it clear to the American people, our commitment is not open ended.

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Where Congress can draw the line: no war with Iran

Deciding what to do next about Iraq is hard -- on the merits, and in the politics. It's hard on the merits because whatever comes next, from "surge" to "get out now" and everything in between, will involve suffering, misery, and dishonor. It's just a question of by whom and for how long. On a balance-of-misery basis, my own view changed last year from "we can't afford to leave" to "we can't afford to stay." And the whole issue is hard in its politics because even Democrats too young to remember Vietnam know that future Karl Roves will dog them for decades with accusations of "cut-and-run" and "betraying" troops unless they can get Republicans to stand with them on limiting funding and forcing the policy to change.

By comparison, Iran is easy: on the merits, in the politics. War with Iran would be a catastrophe that would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq. While the Congress flounders about what, exactly, it can do about Iraq, it can do something useful, while it still matters, in making clear that it will authorize no money and provide no endorsement for military action against Iran.

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And by the way, if anyone is watching Jim Webb...

I am biased, but I thought this was the most formidable response to the President's speech the Democrats could possibly have offered. The controlled ferocity of the last two minutes of that talk, which covered what is often called "up and down" loyalty -- the loyalty and respect troops owe their commanders, but the competence and judgment their commanders owe them -- had the good-for-TV quality of being hard to turn away from, and the unfakeable sense of coming directly from Webb's mind and heart. More on this speech, too, tomorrow. (And, yes, it ended "God Bless America.")

A four-minute rebuttal to the "surge" plan

This link comes courtesy of my friend Richard Samuels, an expert in all things Japanese at MIT. If it is already widely known, sorry; it was news to me.

It is a "debate" on Al Jazeera between a prominent Sunni and a prominent Shiite Iraqi over the execution of Saddam Hussein.

Watch this to the end -- just over four minutes, but well spent -- and think again of the benchmarks President Bush has set for America's continued commitment to Iraq. A crackdown on sectarian militias, a fair sharing of oil revenues, a general sense of national concord.

Watch, and wonder. The link is here.

The painfully obvious problem at the core of the "surge" strategy

I don't know why the Democrats have not made the following a central part of their criticism of the "New Way Forward" in Iraq:

On the one hand, President Bush says that the stakes are too high even to consider the possibility of "failure" in Iraq. From his speech last week:

Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq.

But on the other hand, it turns there are, in fact, circumstances in which the United States can accept the failure of this effort.

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On the content of the "surge" speech

This was an intelligent speech, carefully written and delivered with appropriate gravitas. In striking contrast to the President's rhetoric of a year or two ago, it addressed some actual objections to the Administration's policy. Most of the time, it avoided overblown claims. Etc.

But I will bet anyone any amount of money that three or four months from now, we will look back on this as yet another "false dawn" announcement -- like the hugely publicized National Strategy for Victory in Iraq of November, 2005. At the time, this strategy was going to correct all previous errors; now, it's a previous error itself.

Here's one passage from tonight's speech that illustrates why.

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A trivial-seeming but important detail in the "surge" speech

These were the last words of President Bush's speech just now defending the commitment of more troops to Iraq:

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

A spiritual allusion? Sure. One of the skillful and continuing traits of George W. Bush's rhetoric has been the deft use of religious references that will be noticed by the part of the audience most likely to welcome them and that will skid right past the parts of the audience they might annoy. In many of his early speeches, written on the Michael Gerson watch, the President used "Providence" to similar effect. Like Author of Liberty in this speech, Providence was capitalized in the released versions of the speeches, to make the spiritual resonance clear.

But the most startling aspect of the conclusion was the phrase it did not include.

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Why the surge is a bad idea

Here is the clearer summary of the preceding post: Like many reporters, I admire David Petraeus and respect him for taking this new job in Iraq.

But the very probability of failure that makes it mensch-like for Petraeus to be in this job makes it insane for the nation to double-down its bets in Iraq with a "surge." Democrats should refuse even to use that term, and instead call it what it is: "escalation." And they should not let it occur.

You can say this for David Petraeus... (with big-time update)

... who will soon take over military command in Iraq:

Those who like or admire him, among them many members of the press (including me), think he is smart, imaginative, adaptable. Those who resent him, among them many of his officer-corps contemporaries, think he is too flashy, ostentatiously intellectual, publicity-minded, and above all ambitious, and that he would do anything for promotion and the next star.

But he has now agreed to accept a job in which he is very, very likely to fail -- or to be seen as failing, two or three years from now.

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Nothing to celebrate in Saddam's hanging

A week ago I was with my family in Hanoi, seeing (among other sites) the structure that the French called Maison Centrale, the Vietnamese called Hoa Lo Prison, and the American POW's like John McCain called the "Hanoi Hilton." Like most prisons it is a grim, intimidating building. Much of it has been demolished to make way for a modern high-rise-and-condo complex, but one wing has been preserved as a museum.

Within the musuem are countless reminders of, mainly, the French colonialists' cruelty to their subject race, the Vietnamese. One wall has plaques with the names of hundreds of Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured there. Several other walls have photos of Vietnamese captives who died. There is a dark "interrogation room," frightening even to look into, plus specimens of the wires, canes, and electric generators used on captives within that room. There is also a chilling collection of artifacts from the American POWs, including the flight suit McCain was wearing when he was shot down. (But, to put it mildly, the hardships of the Americans are not the museum's dominant theme. The most extensive description of their situation is a ridiculous Soviet Life-style agitprop montage of the way they passed the time by teaching each other new crafts and singing soulfully about their home towns.)

And, impossible to take your eyes off, is the prison's guillotine, flanked by photos of Vietnamese insurgents' heads in baskets.

Any sentient American finds much to reflect upon in the Maison Centrale, including how torturers generally look in retrospect, no matter how "justified" their cause. In the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution, I find myself reflecting on that guillotine.

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Three quick points about the Iraq Study Group

Everything detailed and authoritative that needs to be said about this report has already been said, including by my friend and Atlantic colleague Robert Kaplan immediately after its release. In the set-up to his comments, Kaplan concisely outlines the way that people who held differing views before the war (as he and I did -- he and Michael Kelly, the two staff members with the deepest and most direct experience in the region, were the ones most passionately in favor of forced "regime change," while most others at the magazine were against it) can deal with the undisputed disaster that American presence in Iraq has become:

The mistakes made in Iraq since 2003 were so many and so serious that it is reasonable to argue that toppling Saddam Hussein was a wise decision, incompetently handled in its occupation phase. It is also possible to argue that the frequency and magnitude of the mistakes indicate a hubristic flaw in the concept of regime change itself, which I supported. Thus it is with humility and open-mindedness that I read the report of the Iraq Study Group.

Kaplan would, I assume, still make the first, "wise decision" argument; I was and am in the "hubristic flaw" camp. Because we can't re-run the invasion and occupation, we'll never know which of these views is correct. But obviously the outcome of this argument -- whether Iraq was a good idea badly handled, or a bad idea that incompetence made even worse -- will have a bearing on future American policy.

That's for later. For now, three points:

1) There is essentially no chance that the Baker-Hamilton/Iraq Study Group report will be remembered for what it spends most time discussing: the next steps to take in Iraq.

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Getting out of Iraq: What's the right idea when all ideas are bad?

For much of the last five years I have been writing about the buildup to the Iraq war, the management of the war, and the war's likely consequences. Apart from this article in the Atlantic a year and a half ago, I have avoided writing or saying much about what the United States should do next in Iraq. About the general management of the "war on terror" -- sure, no problem, as shown in one article from early in 2005 and another from a few months ago. But as for the "best" way to deal with the worst strategic error in modern American history, I've had nothing useful to say.

There was a natural but not so high-minded reason I felt this way. Having been against this venture from the start, I had no stomach for coming up with "solutions" to problems that I thought ahead of time were likely to prove insoluble.

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Transcript of interview for PBS documentary on Iraq

Now posted online here (and text appended after the break).

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What's wrong with academia, chapter 972

A friend sent me a recent blog post. The (lengthy) relevant portion begins this way:

In the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the magazine's national correspondent James Fallows suggests that it is time for the United States to declare victory since the U.S "is succeeding in its struggle against terrorism." When he wrote his article, Fallows was obviously not aware of a National Intelligence Estimate that in April 2006 pinpointed the war in Iraq as "a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat..." He may have written a different piece. While President Bush and others in his administration underline the successes in the "war on terrorism," the intelligence community paints a far less rosy picture. As the Washington Post reported today, "the battlefronts intelligence analysts depict are far more impenetrable and difficult, if not impossible, to combat with the standard tools of warfare."

OK, let's clear this up. ...

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