Your idiotic statement is not worth my time to refute.
Well, this is a good observation, however at the same time recasting this in terms of what concerns the private sector investor, it is the wild west.
The main centers of population and economic activity are unsafe, private businessmen with assets have little to no security that is not secured through private guards, etc.
For the reconstruction worker, of course, things look different, but to the capitalist, it’s the wild west.
The problem is, if you speak to Iraqis, they largel want a National Gov right away. I speak the language, I don’t see much leeway on that, except by fudging the way into a national government with supervision. Delaying will only feed into the anti-American agitprop.
Catch 22, don’t do it and the occupation grows less acceptable day by day. Do it and the initial Admin will be compromised. Elections I agree are short term unworkable.
Bremmer has perhaps pulled the right compromise by throwing in the Exiles into the current Council. They’re dirty linen anyways, expendable fucks, so let them take some heat and allow generation 1.5 to emmerge.
Regardless, initial elections, held whenever are going to pull in more Islamists of various stripes than any of the dewy eyed fantasies pimped by Perle et al anticipated. Reality of the region.
Wrong. The politics is not going to hold on the macro level. Lose the macro level you lose the game.
These are good things, but don’t address the politics of the occupation, a very bad word in Arabic. Ihtelal has Israel written all over it.
I agree entirely, but from my perspective as a private investor with a network of contacts, I do not see proper resources or movement, nor the US ponying up the initial funds necessary for this to get out of its current rut. The current rut is a losing game on the macro economic and political levels.
This isn’t some little howdy doody shithole to sorta-kinda get up and running again and let stagger on, this is a major political power play for a major regional actor. Howdy doody half assed efforts are not going to cut it. Bush et al need to kick in and fast. On this scale, in a country where there has been an invasion and where anti-American / anti-Western sentiment is something well enracinated, there is not much room for the CPA to maneuver, above all when the Bush Admin insists on taking all the risk on itself by hoarding responsibility. The geo-political risks here are huge – pre-made opposition and guerrilla-terror networks ready to plug into disaffection (I speak to Islamic radicals, not Sadaam’s boys), a country and region filled with an immense historical distrust and cynicism for Western efforts… As I said earlier, one already has Iraqis making unfavorable comparisons between Sadaam’s efficiency and admin capacity and the CPA’s. That goes on too long and you have a hole you don’t get out of.
Further to this issue, and I believe worthy of note for all that it is an OP Ed, is Douglas Hurd’s [sub](Lord Hurd was foreign secretary 1989-95 and is senior adviser to Hawkpoint)[/sub] piece in The Financial Times
“The west cannot afford to fail in Iraq” 13 July 2003.
Hurd observers:
I believe we have no arguments here, except perhaps quibbling over who misled who.
Hurd further notes:
I clearly agree. Above all on the last part.
Hurd also raises the question of how to characterize the opposition, “an intefada” like Palestine or dying gasps of a regime (or not so dying gasps), or both.
His example I think is instructive:
Take note of the last line.
Further to this:
I believe it is appropriate that esp. in re Algeria, I have constantly made this point, to little effect until recently. Of course now the usual suspects begin to convert. Before the war they poopooed the idea of guerrilla war and famously in my review of Black Hawk Down, rejected the analogies I drew there, which in effect are the observation above.
Hurd also notes
After some discussion of the importance, as I have noted above, he argues the solutions are
May I be so uncharitable as to point out this has been precisely my argumentation as well, and in regards to the emphasis added, I note and agree – as well as uncharitably note as usual I was right on this point back when the jingos were crowing childishingly about punishment.
He further discusses a NATO role, although again this will require climb downs on responsibility.
Further to this, on the IRaqi government:
Again, my argument to the T.
Hurd also notes
The overall point is pragmatism and not doctrinaire purism should reign, and pragmatic climb downs rather than wanting a pure ideological game to “make an example” as Rumsfeld wants to run the game, is an error.
Well now december, I must say I felt rather silly after reading that. By such logic, it could be extended to justifying the USA attacking Iceland for example, for no other reason that one day, they might choose to embark upon a WMD program which one day might fall into the hands of nefarious no-gooders. Nah… sorry… you can’t move the goal posts like that and not expect someone like myself to notice.
History will show that the USA Administration consciously embarked upon a making a case for military invasion of Iraq based on the known presence of an existing pool of WMD’s, and an existing pool of WMD programs, and an existing policy WITHIN Iraq of moving said programs to avoid detection by the outside world.
History will also show that said case was ultimately proven to be false.
Was it still wrong to invade Iraq nonetheless? In my opinion, no… but it should have been cast however as a move similar to invading Cambodia at the height of the Pol Pot regime. To have gone about it the way that the USA has gone about it has invited such overwhelming global damnation that incredible amounts of latent goodwill towards the USA has been eroded. This can’t be a good thing. It was a silly strategy with hindsight.
Call it spin, call it whatever. What can’t be argued is that the people who count, (and that’s neither you nor I december) but to the people who really count - namely your average Iraqi who is currently TOTALLY PISSED OFF ABOUT THE SITUATION - well, they’re not happy about how things have panned out. And indeed, to merely equate the entire imbroglio to being nothing more than a sideshow as to how things are going to pan out in future US Presidential elections smacks to this particular Australian of dreadful insensitivity to be honest.
What’s the problem here? Are you suggesting that no-one ever said Saddam had WMD, just that he was “seeking WMD” ? Or is it that the WMD he supposedly did have weren’t made an issue of?
Directly out of GWB’s mouth:
Not the words: “grave danger”, “direct threat”, “possess” (not “seeking” to posses) and also “long-term safety”.
You can squirm around the words all you want, but these speeches make clear that Bush wished Saddam to be seen as an immediate threat, not just a “long-term problem” of “seeking” WMD.
Can you not also appreciate that as long as the claims about existing WMD vanish from sight, the additional claims of possible, future nuclear weapon WMD can only be regarded as fantasies with an equal lack of substance?
You have a point. Bush may have exaggerated the imminence of Iraqi nukes. OTOH virtually everyone agreed that Saddam almost surely had chemical and biological weapons, including Hans Blix.
My understanding, which I stated on these boards, was that the biggest risk was that Saddam might develop nuclear weapons. It now appears that he was farther from doing so than we feared.
In my view, the US was not have the ability to attack Iraq whenever we felt like it. It took a combination of political, economic, military, and diplomatic steps that would have been hard to duplicate in the future. Bush felt that the time was ripe for attack, and he made the best possible case
Well, no. First of all, Saddam had been seeking nukes for decades. He would have had them a long time ago, if the work hadn’t been stopped by Israel’s courageous action in bombing his reactor and then by the First Gulf War. We know from the recent discovery of buried nuke-related equipment and papers that there was an effort to maintain the nuclear progress in hidden locations.
It is conceivable that for one reason or another Saddam had totally changed his stripes. Maybe he no longer wanted WMDs. It’s possible that there was no potetntial threat to the US and our allies. Maybe we merely overthrew a fascistic regime that had killed and tortured millions of people and which supported terrorism. IMHO that would be a high class failure.
Boo Boo Foo, preemptive war not a question of logic. It requires a judgment about the pros and cons. You are free to opine that the reasons weren’t good enough at the time or in retrospect.
May have? May have?
Insofar as the only out of international control nuclear materials found to date have been a piece of equipment that spent ten years buried in a back yard, I think anyone who thinks about this carefully can admit we can forgo the “may.”
By the way, World Eater provided these quotes which help remind us of the actual run up:
Yes, but the critics thought they were just remainders, the remenants of programs, a vestige. Indeed Ritter, who you so aggresively slandered as unreliable, etc etc, proved spot on in his estimations of what would be found, per data to date.
Appears… farther… Well that rather understates the degree to which you were wrong, no doesn’t it?
This… this is almost beautiful in its nonsensicalness.
I suppose it would be hard to duplicate the sheer incompetence that marked the diplomatic efforts running up to the war. Economic? Well, I suppose we might try to generate a weaker economy to work off of, but this makes little sense. Military, well I am hard pressed to see anything particularly special in that, wind up, wind down, wind up when ready again.
No, the real conext is the political-diplomatic, and to claim there was some special constellation strikes me as transparently ludicrous.
Unless one means that there is some fear that some degree of rational thought might accidentally have pervaded the Administration and they might have decided, well this crock of shit doesn’t actually add up, now does it?
He fabricated the moment and the case.
Ah yes, the Mulberry Tree Device (cyclotron as I recall, yes?), dangerously hidden burried under a tree for a decade, now that’s some fucking threat, eh?
Extraordinary.
december may I reiterate that deposing Saddam Hussein was no small thing of which to be to be proud of. The guy was/is a cunt. No other way to call it. However, even before the first missile was fired, I stated in Sam Stone’s predictions thread that President Bush had done a dreadful job of explaining the merits behind the policy.
My concern, in the context of the posts which you yourself tend to write, is that the whole shebang was/is merely a sideshow to the future of US politics - and there are many of us around the world who feel that such a position lacks a sense of caring towards those poor Iraqi souls who were in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own - other than being officers and enlisted men in an army which was destined to be decimated by the infinitely superior US Army.
To argue that Gulf War Three (remember that Gulf War One was actually the Iran/Iraq war of 1980-88) was caused by the WMD issue, and ONLY the WMD issue is profoundly a distortion of the truth. The truth, as it seems to me, had nothing to do with oil - nor WMD’s or WMD programs. The truth (as it seems to me) is that Gulf War III was (and remains) a desire by the US Administration to force Iraq into a new era - an era which enshrines Western values of good behaviour at the nation state level. This is something which I personally condone - I simply don’t condone the political exploitation which goes along with it.
And many of your posts and threads december are guilty of equating Gulf War III as being little more than a re-election strategy on the part of President Bush. I accept that my perception here is a profoundly personal (and doubtless flawed) perception - but it’s worth noting that not just a few of us non Americans are somewhat offended by the efforts of some Americans to paint Gulf War III as little more than another blip on the radar in the far more (seemingly) important game of US politics.
That’s right - it was also because of Iraq’s involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. :rolleyes:
I think if George W. Bush were to confess on national teevee that he lied all about Iraq’s WMD stockpiles just to start a war, december would have a thread in Great Debates explaining why George didn’t say what he just said within ten minutes of the event.
Are you serious? It seems he could not have picked a worse time. Politically he had huge opposition from a large segment of the American people, diplomatically it was a disaster, . . . I mean, come on!
Hearts and minds:
Not promising.
You are both operating under the assumption that the administration cared about whether it was a bad time or a good time to go to war. They could not have cared less. They had the invasion timed well over a year in advance. Remember the satellite photos of the Qatar air-field? See this archived link which shows that by August '02 the US had completed 6 months of work to make the Qatar air field war ready. That work started in February '02. Add on the time for plans, contracts, materials acquisition, etc., and it is clear that the Iraq invasion was planned concurrently with the Afghanistan war plan. They picked the date a year and a half in advance, and the rest was just posturing. (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. had been dreaming about this day for years.) After the date was picked, they set Colin Powell loose – if he could get the UN to go along, great, but the fact was that they didn’t really care. WMDs, Saddam Hussein’s brutality, UN resolutions, and all the rest was just . . . bluster. So, december is wrong in one respect – the US could have invaded Iraq at any time. There was no need to get the approval of the UN (as sailor points out, by the time the date arrived, the diplomatic efforts had become a disaster). Even Britan’s cooperation was unnecessary (as Rumsfeld so elegantly mentioned on the eve of the war). There was, however, a “combination of political, economic, military, and diplomatic” occurrences that made the invasion possible. Those were (i) the election of George W. Bush, (ii) the appointment of Rumsfeld as SecDef, and (iii) Sept. 11, which gave Rumsfeld a plausible story to convince Bush that the invasion was necessary.
(All of which makes it all the more maddening to hear quotes from Pentagon planners that “there wasn’t time to do everything” in regard to the shoddy planning re: the post war occupation. They had all the time in the world. The reason the planning was shoddy was because the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld et al., believed their own bullshit. Anyone that objected was a fool or a traitor.)
I further note the report of the missile fired at a CPA military craft incoming to Baghdad. I believe this is now the fourth such event, first time in the press, however.
Further to the above mention:
Iraq’s Highway of Constant Hazard
Attackers Leave Trail of Casualties on Baghdad Airport Road
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2880-2003Jul16.html?nav=hptop_ts
Also note other attacks I reported from international security monitoring elsewhere.
Now, as to getting things going:
And it’s not safe.
Not very pretty circumstances. Enough resources? I don’t think so, I have a hard time getting through to CPA-I, and I should be doing so.
Further color commentary:
Well, good thing the SAM didn’t take out our top Arabic speaking general.
That would really be nice, wouldn’t it?
Now I wonder if december would like to restart his drumbeat about the “liberals” exagerating conditions in Iraq.
Further color commentary:
Well, good thing the SAM didn’t take out our top Arabic speaking general.
That would really be nice, wouldn’t it?
Now I wonder if december would like to restart his drumbeat about the “liberals” exagerating conditions in Iraq.
Also further to the issue of progress:
“Just a Dribble of Oil Exports as Iraq Struggles”
It rather appears as if the Admin. assumptions re Iraqi oil paying for efforts is, as appears now to be habitual, badly off.
Rather clearly this is not going to be self financing as the Administration seems to be betting on. As I have warned and predicted since April, betting on the oil to jump start things is a bad, bad bet, although this situation is far worse than anyone thought might be, ex blowing the wells.
As for Bremer, I have sympathy for him as his efforts are being starved for resources. Fact of life… only because some people back in Washington do not wish to face up to the real costs as Election year rolls up.
Yes indeed. As I’ve stated elsewhere… and probably in this thread too - but the historical consensus I’m told is that an occupying military needs to ideally have a 1 to 15 ratio of infantrymen to civilians to thoroughly route out latent guerilla activities.
The problem, it seems to me, is that the Coalition forces basically don’t seem to have any real friends within Iraq, and further, their current numbers are only 170,000 soldiers to a population base of 22 million people - which is only a miniscule ratio of 1 to 129 - which obviously, is much, much less than what history would show is ideal.
Hence, the lack of quality infantrymen on the ground looms as a real problem for the USA. They are far too few to expedite all of the political ideals which were originally outlined for Iraq, and as you’ve noted Coll - people such as yourself and other foreign investment folks are simply incapable of attempting to do business due to the dreadful security problems.
Obviously, I’m sailing close to repeating myself like some sort of broken record here, but you know Coll, it’s eerie how true your assertions of 3 months ago are ringing now. The USA either has to cut a deal with the major Clerics in the region and attempt to get an Islamic Democracy in place as soon as possible, OR, Plan (B) is to go back to the UN with cap in hand and somehow get other countries to commit a further 800,000 infantrymen with a view of raising the ratio of soldiers to civilians up to at least 1 in 22.
Personally, I rather think the USA has found herself in a wholly unenviable position - her goals are probably (on balance) quite noble actually - but what’s the point if the ability of saboteurs to ruin any chance of success is so high?
I’d love to know what sort of deal the US could cut with the Clerics of Iraq. I have a hunch that if the Clerics were assured of forming an Islamic Democracy, then certain nationwide orders would go out to start “informing” on the saboteurs.
The problem remains however that the Coalition forces are inarguably perceived as occupiers, not as liberators. Moreover, they’re also inarguably perceived as the enemy, and the total lack of friends WITHIN Iraq allows the saboteurs (guerilla fighters, call them whatever) to currently move through Iraqi society with impugnity.
Well, the Kurds are more or less ‘real friends’ so long as they think they’re not getting screwed.
The Shiites are fair weather friends in a sense,not perhaps unhappy Americans are getting whacked, but not desiring to join in. Indeed they may like it just as it is, gives them leverage.
That leaves the Sunni Arabs and the Turkmens, ah and the Arab Xians of various flavors as looking like real enemies unless bribed.
I am paid a lot of fucking money to do this, you all get it for free. Assuming that the market for regional analysts and investment specialists is reasonably efficient, you can draw your conclusions.
I rather prefer plan B, do a climb down and get the UN involved. Otherwise no one significant is going to pony up forces or aid.
I noted in one of the articles that Hundary promised a truck regiment. Transport. Turns out in the end they decided they would just offer the drivers. No trucks. No equipment, no nothing, just the drivers.
I warned back in the pit after the war that the risk had not been properly priced - I recall Scylla thought I was wrong. Well, as usual, I was right on the money.
We bit off a huge amount of risk thinking it was only moderate. Now reality is in, and worse now instead of having been magnimonious back in April and May when we looked like the shit, and having gotten others in on the deal, we have to come back with hat in hand with a clearly impaired asset.
So much for ‘revenge’ and the French ‘paying the price’- like I said at the time childish and short sighted.