Category Archives: Washington

Concerning the control of oil

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The United States has tabled a U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion to lift most of the sanc­tions against Iraq. The draft also would — sur­prise! —  grant the United States “broad con­trol over the country’s oil indus­try and rev­enue until a per­ma­nent, rep­re­sen­ta­tive Iraqi gov­ern­ment is in place.” (Wash­ing­ton Post)
“The res­o­lu­tion, which is to be pre­sented to the 15-nation body Fri­day, would shift con­trol of Iraq’s oil from the United Nations to the United States and its mil­i­tary allies, with an inter­na­tional advi­sory board hav­ing over­sight respon­si­bil­i­ties but lit­tle effec­tive power. A tran­si­tional Iraqi gov­ern­ment, which U.S. author­i­ties have said they hope to estab­lish within weeks, would be granted a con­sul­ta­tive role.“
In an ear­lier arti­cle on B2I, I wrote about Feisal al-Istrabadi, a found­ing mem­ber of the Iraqi Forum for Democ­racy and an activist on var­i­ous human­i­tar­ian issues relat­ing to Iraq. Istra­badi is also a mem­ber of the plan­ning com­mit­tee for the State Department?s Future of Iraq Project, serv­ing on its Tran­si­tional Jus­tice and Demo­c­ra­tic Prin­ci­ples work­ing groups.
Dur­ing his talk, he out­lined the ideas for a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment.

It would last two to three years at most, must pro­vide imme­di­ate ben­e­fits to the peo­ple of Iraq, would hold munic­i­pal elec­tions within six months and regional elec­tions within another six months after that and begin imme­di­ate crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tions. The other duties must be to ful­fill oblig­a­tions to the U.N. regard­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion, he said, and human rights agree­ments must be adhered to. “It’s crit­i­cal to me that the tran­si­tional period not be seen as a final sta­tus,” he said. “I don?t think the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment should be the gov­ern­ment that signs a peace treaty with Israel. That should be the per­ma­nent gov­ern­ment.“
And most impor­tant, he said, the United Nations should not _lift_ the sanc­tions. Instead they should be _suspended_ so that the tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment doesn?t gain con­trol of the country?s trea­sury and the per­ma­nent lift­ing of sanc­tions is an incen­tive to democ­ra­tize.
“If you want to ensure the tran­si­tional fig­ures do not become tran­si­tional in the Iraqi sense of the word — by that I mean last­ing 40 years — you can­not hand over the purse strings of Iraq,” he said. “Sad­dam did not imme­di­ately rule by fear. He co-opted the elite dur­ing the 1960s and ‘70s by drown­ing them in cash.”

Tak­ing con­trol of the oil indus­try, while look­ing really, _really_ bad to the rest of the world, is prob­a­bly the best that can be made of a bad sit­u­a­tion. Istrabadi’s right; if a tran­si­tional gov­ern­ment took con­trol of Iraq’s oil rev­enue, there likely result would be whole­sale rob­bing that would make the loot­ers in the clos­ing days of the war look like pik­ers.
Granted, this will not help the United States’ image in Iraq or in the Arab world. They’re already con­vinced the U.S. was mak­ing an oil grab. The only way to com­bat this impres­sion is to man­age the oil indus­try in an enlight­ened and benev­o­lent man­ner with no favor­tism given to cor­rupted Iraqis or Amer­i­can com­pa­nies.
Hand­ing out crony con­tracts to Hal­libur­ton sub­sidiaries and other, well-connected Amer­i­can cor­po­ra­tions ain’t the way do this. There really don’t seem to be many good solu­tions to this mess.

Epilogue: A Question of Truth

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New York at dawn © 2002 Christopher AllbrittonNEW YORK — After a week back, I’ve man­aged to get some sleep in, say “hey” to a few friends, put up some pic­ture pages (part one and part two) and try to take stock of the after­math of this war. This is dif­fi­cult, how­ever, as the urban envi­ron­ment of New York City is so alien to the expe­ri­ences of the past month that it might as well be a dif­fer­ent planet. It doesn’t help that I’m still step­ping gin­gerly around the East Vil­lage (resid­ual fear of land­mines), look­ing for sniper posi­tions on the sky­scrap­ers and mar­veling that peo­ple aren’t all car­ry­ing AK-47s.
But that’s noth­ing com­pared to what the Iraqi peo­ple have had to go through, and what they’re fac­ing. To a cer­tain degree, the same goes for the peo­ple of Amer­ica who, it may be, were lied to about the rea­sons for this war.
Accord­ing to the Inde­pen­dent in the U.K., the Bush White House based its case for invad­ing Iraq on a “selec­tive use of intel­li­gence, exag­ger­a­tion, use of sources known to be dis­cred­ited and out­right fab­ri­ca­tion.” The weapons of mass destruc­tion that were said to have posed an immi­nent threat to the United States and the free world have yet to be found, although Bush promises they will be. Again, the Times reported April 27:

In north­ern Iraq, a mil­i­tary chemical-analysis team said today that a cache of bar­rels and two mobile lab­o­ra­to­ries found near the vil­lage of Bayji were most likely not used for chem­i­cal war­fare pur­poses, coun­ter­ing ear­lier reports from an Army offi­cer at the site.

For New York Times colum­nist Tom Fried­man, this is no big­gie. “We do not need to find any weapons of mass destruc­tion to jus­tify this war,” he wrote this week­end. “That skull, and the thou­sands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me.” He was refer­ring to a graphic and affect­ing photo the Times ran on its front page on Fri­day. This is the same man who wrote on Feb. 19:

I am also very trou­bled by the way Bush offi­cials have tried to jus­tify this war on the grounds that Sad­dam is allied with Osama bin Laden or will be soon. There is sim­ply no proof of that, and every time I hear them repeat it I think of the Gulf of Tonkin res­o­lu­tion. You don’t take the coun­try to war on the wings of a lie. (Empha­sis added.)

Fried­man wasn’t talk­ing so much about WMD in that ear­lier col­umn, but the point remains the same. In mat­ters of start­ing wars, you bet­ter have the moral high ground, and you don’t get there by climb­ing a lad­der of false­hoods.
For peo­ple wholly sup­port­ive of the war, how­ever, the tonic of tri­umphal­ism is sweet indeed. Many are now say­ing “I told you so” to those of us who opposed it. A reader — I can’t find the email now — asked some months ago if I would change my mind on the war if it was proven that Iraq was devel­op­ing weapons of mass destruc­tion. I answered that no, I wouldn’t, since I didn’t — and don’t — believe that the war was about WMD or an evil tyrant but about realpoli­tik plans for pro­ject­ing Amer­i­can power into the Mid­dle East. My response to this reader is to flip the ques­tion: “Do you still think this war was nec­es­sary since it may very well turn out that there are no WMD to be found?“
(Mind you, I’m sure the U.S. will find some cache of chem­i­cals or a few war­heads, but Pres­i­dent Bush repeat­edly invoked a clear and present dan­ger to the sur­vival of the United States as a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for war. A few dozen litres of mus­tard gas or even VX does not strike me as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for shred­ding the U.N. Char­ter, demol­ish­ing NATO, harm­ing fur­ther the United States’ image abroad and increas­ing the risk of ter­ror­ism at home.)
Still, some very real good occurred from the top­pling of Sad­dam. There is no doubt the future of Iraq will be much, much brighter with­out him. The war was pros­e­cuted fairly well with rel­a­tively low civil­ian casu­al­ties, there was no urban war­fare and at least some Iraqis in the Arab parts of the coun­try cheered the U.S’s entry into Bagh­dad. (The Kurds were, nat­u­rally, ecsta­tic, but the warm wel­come I received should not be taken as indica­tive of the mood of the coun­try as a whole. Many, many Arabs are angry over what hap­pened to their coun­try and the Kurds are ready to bolt from Iraq if they get the chance.) But the after­math of the war could be more dam­ag­ing to Amer­i­can inter­ests and the Iraqi peo­ple. U.S. sol­diers today fired into a crowd of civil­ian pro­test­ers at Fal­luhaj, about 30 miles west of Bagh­dad. The direc­tor of the local hos­pi­tal said 13 peo­ple were killed and 75 injured. This is the third such inci­dent such as this, with the other two occur­ring in Mosul.
Trigger-happy troops, Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rumsfeld’s cav­a­lier atti­tude toward the rape of a nation’s cul­tural his­tory — with jour­nal­ists and sol­diers tak­ing part — as well as dis­turb­ing but totally uncon­firmed sto­ries I was told by troops about atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by U.S. forces against pris­on­ers all point to one thing: the need for a skep­ti­cal and close exam­i­na­tion of America’s role in a post-war Iraq.
This exam­i­na­tion is not going to come from the net­works, obvi­ously. CNN’s news head Eason Jor­dan, already fac­ing crit­i­cism for the arguably morally bank­rupt pol­icy of not report­ing Saddam’s thug­gery in exchange for 12 years of access, revealed to Howard Kurtz on “Reli­able Sources” last week that the retired mil­i­tary per­son­nel used on air were all approved by the Pen­ta­gon! (L.A. Times, reg­is­tra­tion req.) “I went to the Pen­ta­gon myself sev­eral times before the war started and met with impor­tant peo­ple there and said, for instance, at CNN, ‘Here are the gen­er­als we’re think­ing of retain­ing to advise us on the air and off about the war,’” he said. “And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was impor­tant.” Cozy arrange­ment, there.
By and large, the tele­vi­sion reports were uni­formly awful, in my opin­ion, with a rah-rah patri­o­tism that tele­vi­sion excels at. Print reporters were bet­ter, how­ever, with crit­i­cal reports and unfil­tered quotes from troops, includ­ing New York Times reporter Dex­ter Filkins quot­ing a sergeant as say­ing he shot an Iraqi woman because “the chick got in the way.“
This crit­i­cism is not to take away from the courage of the reporters in the field. I was a chicken and mainly stayed away from the rough stuff so I don’t include myself in that pre­vi­ous sen­tence. Twelve jour­nal­ists died in this war, out of about 1,500 cov­er­ing it. None of those 12 peo­ple had to be there; they chose to be there. Their moti­va­tions, I’m sure, ranged from the noble ded­i­ca­tion to the story and the peo­ple of Iraq to the base lust for glory and a col­lec­tion of war sto­ries. Most likely it was a com­bi­na­tion of both. I am includ­ing myself here and speak­ing from per­sonal expe­ri­ence.
So what comes next? For Iraq, no one knows. Pres­i­dent Bush says the U.S. will install democ­racy but that doesn’t include a Shi’a-led Islamic state — a wise choice, even if it does leave the United States open to hypocrisy. We’ll see to what degree democ­racy really does come to the new Iraq. But I know this: The Amer­i­can peo­ple, in whose name this war was waged, need to hold this administration’s feet to the fire. It’s obvi­ously too late to stop this war, but we as a demo­c­ra­tic nation still have a respon­si­bil­ity to make the after­math as ben­e­fi­cial to the Iraqi peo­ple as pos­si­ble now that it’s over. That means that cor­po­rate crony­ism that seems to be the pre­ferred method for award­ing lucra­tive rebuild­ing con­tracts needs to be protested — loudly. Any back­slid­ing on demo­c­ra­tic actions or a dis­con­nect between admin­is­tra­tion actions and rhetoric have to be com­bat­ted as vig­or­ously pos­si­ble.
The anti-war crowd would be crim­i­nally irre­spon­si­ble if it just washes its hands of the mat­ter and con­sid­ers the bat­tle to halt mil­i­tary action in Iraq a failed cause and moves onto the next cause cele­bre. And if the pro-war peo­ple think they now have a right to say, “We told you this war would go well,” they damn well also have a respon­si­bil­ity to hold the peo­ple they sup­ported to their word. It’s time for them, the “win­ners” in the “Should we go to war or shouldn’t we?” debate, to put up or shut up.
I per­son­ally don’t plan on sit­ting back and let­ting things just hap­pen, on let­ting Iraq slip from the con­scious­ness of an eas­ily dis­tracted peo­ple. I’m work­ing on a book pro­posal exam­in­ing the three acts of this drama — build up, the war itself and its after­math. I’ll be return­ing to Iraq as soon as pos­si­ble to research the rebuild­ing and to explore those dis­turb­ing sto­ries I heard. Most impor­tant, I’ll be keep­ing the voices of the Iraqi peo­ple front and cen­ter, some­thing the main­stream media tend not to do.
Do keep in touch. Things are get­ting com­pli­cated — and inter­est­ing.

Some sta­tis­tics on B2I
Num­ber of donors: 316
Total amount raised: $13,834.16
Largest dona­tion: $2,500 (anony­mous)
Small­est dona­tion: $1
Aver­age dona­tion: $43.78
Median dona­tion: $20
Total num­ber of unique vis­i­tors since Jan. 16, 2003: 462,036
Peak day: March 27, 2003 with 23,328 unique vis­i­tors
Num­ber of coun­tries rep­re­sented: 140, includ­ing almost every coun­try in the Mid­dle East.
Who’s read­ing?
B2I has been accessed by every branch of the U.S. mil­i­tary as well as Cen­tral Com­mand, Pacific Com­mand, South­ern Com­mand and Euro­pean Com­mand. It was also accessed from the CIA, the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, NASA and the United States Supreme Court. It has been men­tioned in the Boston Globe, Jim Lehrer’s New­sHour, Time Out New York, Reuters, NPR, CNN and many other media outlets.

… or maybe not

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Well, Strat­for is now report­ing that the B-52s are still in RAF Fair­ford as of 2133 GMT (4:33 p.m.) Highly ironic con­sid­er­ing they crowed about stay­ing out of the “Tariq Aziz is Dead” rumor fray. As the com­pany reported:

As Strat­for tried to ver­ify or dis­credit the rumors through its own sources, some of our read­ers took the oppor­tu­nity to crit­i­cize us for falling behind var­i­ous Inter­net rumor mills. We’ve received sim­i­lar crit­i­cisms for miss­ing the mul­ti­ple reports of the arrest, death or immac­u­late trans­fig­u­ra­tion of Osama bin Laden. Though we con­tem­plated respond­ing with vary­ing degrees of crass­ness or seri­ous­ness, depend­ing on the tone of the com­ments, events have demon­strated the valid­ity of our approach to ana­lyz­ing this and other con­flicts.
Strat­for takes noth­ing at face value. We are now swim­ming in a sea of rumors, pro­pa­ganda and the fog of war. Strat­for has always set as its goal sift­ing the ele­ments of truth from this mess. We hope to con­tinue serv­ing as your steady and unbi­ased source of analy­sis on the con­flict in Iraq.

None of this absolves me, of course. Fogs of war and rumor mills are con­fus­ing. At thet moment, it’s very hard to know what’s going on. But as an old Asso­ci­ated Press reporter, I can say this: Some­times this is how news works. Strat­for and the Evening Mail were report­ing the B-52s were en route. Now it seems they’re not… Per­haps we’ll get a bet­ter glimpse of what’s hap­pen­ing around 8 p.m. or so.

Bush attempts to make case for war, puts exile on the table

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Pres­i­dent Bush’s news con­fer­ence tonight empha­sized a few key points. They are as follows:

  • Bush hasn’t made up his mind and “hopes” that this whole thing can get worked out peacefully;

  • Exile for Iraqi pres­i­dent Sad­dam Hus­sein is explic­itly an option (!), the first time the pres­i­dent has said this so firmly and publicly;
  • Iraq and Sept. 11 are linked;
  • This war is a choice of Sad­dam, not the United States;
  • Dis­ar­ma­ment must hap­pen, and the only way to get it is via regime change;
  • The con­quest of Iraq will be the start of “trickle-down democ­racy” in the region.

Let’s look at these in more detail, shall we?
bush.strip.pool.jpgBush is still unde­cided on war and hopes that this all we’ll all look back on this and have a good laugh about it
I don’t know what Bush hopes. No doubt he’s hop­ing this turns out well, and I don’t think he hopes for war, but it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t expect this to work out peace­fully. Numer­ous times in the speech, he said that Sad­dam was flout­ing the will of the United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil. “Great Britain, Spain and the United States have intro­duced a new res­o­lu­tion say­ing that Iraq has failed to meet the require­ments of 1441,” Bush said. “Sad­dam Hus­sein is not dis­arm­ing. That is a fact and it can­not be denied.“
In response to a ques­tion as to why, if allies of the United States have access to the same intel­li­gence the U.S. does, are coun­tries such as France and Ger­many so reluc­tant to back Amer­ica, Bush again said he has no expec­ta­tions of Sad­dam coop­er­at­ing. “This is the last phase of diplo­macy,” he said. “A lit­tle bit more time? Sad­dam Hus­sein has had 12 years to dis­arm. He is deceiv­ing peo­ple. This is impor­tant for our fel­low cit­i­zens to real­ize that if he really intended to dis­arm like the world has asked him to do, the world would know about it. He’s try­ing to buy time.“
So while Bush talks about hop­ing to find a peace­ful solu­tion, he fully expects and knows that there will be none forth­com­ing.
Exile for Sad­dam is def­i­nitely on the table
This might be the most sig­nif­i­cant com­ment of the evening, because while other admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials have off-handedly mused that it might be nice if Sad­dam said, “To hell with this, I’m going to Morocco,” tonight was the first time the Pres­i­dent of the United States offered it as an accept­able option. “That’d be fine with me, just so long as Iraq dis­arms after he’s exiled.“
That’s huge, because Arab coun­tries have been look­ing for an exile solu­tion but with­out any explicit sup­port from the United States, they’ve been unwill­ing to go too far out on a limb to make seri­ous offers to Sad­dam. I don’t think exile is a very viable option for Sad­dam, how­ever, since he would be a tar­get for score-settlers and he would lose his place in his­tory — at least in his mind. Still, it’s sig­nif­i­cant that Bush put that card on the table. And with his innu­mer­able ref­er­ences to his hopes to find a peace­ful solu­tion, he’s prac­ti­cally dar­ing the Iraqi leader to turn it down. I think Sad­dam will.
Iraq and Sept. 11 are linked
This was one of the sneakier aspects of the news con­fer­ence. Bush attempted many times in the open­ing state­ments and the responses to reporters’ ques­tions to tie Iraq to Sept. 11, not through log­i­cal or evi­den­tial ties, but by using the rhetor­i­cal trick to men­tion the two in the same sen­tence, strongly imply­ing that Iraq was behind 9/11 but not actu­ally com­ing out and say­ing it. For instance:

Sad­dam Hus­sein is a threat to our nation. Sept. 11 changed the strate­gic think­ing, at least as far as I was con­cerned, for how to pro­tect our coun­try. My job is to pro­tect the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Used to be, we thought you could con­tain a per­son like Sad­dam Hus­sein, that oceans would pro­tect us from his kind of ter­ror. Sept. 11 should say to the Amer­i­can peo­ple that we’re now a bat­tle­field, that weapons of mass destruc­tion in the hands of a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion could be deployed here at home. So there­fore, i think the threat is real, and so do a lot of other peo­ple in my government.

Notice how he moves from “Sad­dam is a threat” to “Sept. 11 …” And also, “We thought you could con­tain a per­son like Sad­dam Hus­sein, that oceans would pro­tect us from his kind of ter­ror.” Then he fol­lows it up with, “Sept. 11 should say to the Amer­i­can peo­ple that we’re now a bat­tle­field.“
Notice that Bush just said that the attacks on Sept. 11 were “his kind of ter­ror,” which is demon­stra­bly not true. It is true that Amer­ica is a now a bat­tle­field, but regard­ing al Qa’ida, not Iraq. Bush’s false tying is a sneaky trick to try to pull, and I hope peo­ple see through it.
It’s Saddam’s fault!
Bush also said, “If war is upon us because Sad­dam Hus­sein has made that choice…” So Sad­dam is call­ing the shots now? Bush is try­ing to say that all Sad­dam has to do is dis­arm, but he is not adding, “and we’ll go home.” Bush has not given any sig­nal that Saddam’s dis­ar­ma­ment is enough to avert war, and in fact, Ari Fleis­cher said that dis­ar­ma­ment and regime change were the only way to avoid war.

Q Ari, two ques­tions on Iraq. In response to an ear­lier ques­tion, you said the Pres­i­dent still hopes to avoid war, and that Sad­dam Hus­sein could avoid it by com­pletely and totally dis­arm­ing, and by going into exile. I’m won­der­ing, are you — is that now the stan­dard? Pre­vi­ously, you’ve obvi­ously said dis­ar­ma­ment. But is it now the com­bi­na­tion of dis­ar­ma­ment and exile?
MR. FLEISCHER: I think the Pres­i­dent made it per­fectly plain yes­ter­day in the Oval Office and he has said this repeat­edly, it’s dis­ar­ma­ment and regime change.
Q So even though the United Nations would sign on to the first part of that, and not to the sec­ond, when the Pres­i­dent thinks about launch­ing mil­i­tary action, he’s going to think about the com­bi­na­tion?
MR. FLEISCHER: The Pres­i­dent has made that plain.

This is actu­ally shame­ful. It’s one thing to say we were attacked and so we had war thrust upon us, which I believe hap­pened regard­ing al Qa’ida. But it’s quite another to say, “Hm, there’s a bit of unfin­ished busi­ness in the desert over there. You! do what we say or else we’ll invade. No? Ah, now you’ve made us do some­thing we don’t want to do…“
Make no mis­take, this is a war of choice, and it’s not one that Sad­dam Hus­sein chose. This is a choice by the United States gov­ern­ment; the very words used so often by the White House — “preventive” — show that. If he believes so strongly that this mis­sion is just, say so. Don’t try to shift the respon­si­bil­ity from the shoul­ders of the United States by imply­ing that Iraq pro­voked America.

Iraq must be dis­armed; there­fore, inva­sion and regime change are the only options
Are they? From 1991 – 1998, inspec­tors, with only nom­i­nal coop­er­a­tion from Bagh­dad, man­aged to destroy more WMD and their pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties than the mil­i­tary cam­paign of Desert Storm did. This, obvi­ously, is the crux of the dis­pute between the U.K., the U.S., and, well, basi­cally every­one else — but espe­cially France, Ger­many, Rus­sia and China. Inspec­tions worked in the past. They did. Why won’t they work now? Hawks have never given a sat­is­fac­tory answer to this, instead say­ing inspec­tors aren’t detec­tives — they’re more like audi­tors. They require full coop­er­a­tion, oth­er­wise they are Saddam’s “use­ful idiots.” Well, who says? Why can’t inspec­tors be detec­tives? Who’s to say a strength­ened inspec­tion regime backed up by U.N. troops and tar­geted air strikes on sus­pected sites if the Iraqis don’t play ball wouldn’t accom­plish dis­ar­ma­ment with­out a mas­sive inva­sion and huge loss of life? George over at War­blog­ging a while back made a good case for a treat­ing Iraq like a hos­tile wit­ness and using a strong inspec­tion regime that can be sum­ma­rized as fol­lows (I’d link to the arti­cle, but I can’t find the exact one I want. Sorry, George!):

  1. UN inspec­tors select site for inspection.

  2. Inspec­tors dis­patch Preda­tor UAVs to watch site for any move­ment, par­tic­u­larly the ingress or egress of peo­ple or material.
  3. Inspec­tors call Iraqi liai­son to inspec­tions team and notify them that any move­ment in or out of the selected site will con­sti­tute non­com­pli­ance. Non­com­pli­ance will result in puni­tive mil­i­tary action (i.e. destruc­tion of three pres­i­den­tial palaces) and a report of non­com­pli­ance to the United Nations Secu­rity Council.
  4. Inspec­tors lift off in heli­copters from an air base within an hour?s flight time of the site to be inspected.
  5. Inspec­tors inspect every inch of the site they’re inter­ested in. Any non-cooperative Iraqi per­son­nel are imme­di­ately arrested and shipped out of the coun­try for inter­ro­ga­tion, and puni­tive mil­i­tary action is taken in response. If nec­es­sary mil­i­tary forces descend on site and open any “locked” doors and such.

Some other key points of strong inspec­tions include:

  • At all times at least one Amer­i­can Marine Expe­di­tionary Force and car­rier bat­tle group are sta­tioned around Iraq in order to take proper puni­tive mil­i­tary action against Iraq in the case of non-compliance

  • The Secu­rity Coun­cil meets biweekly to assess Iraqi com­pli­ance and decide whether com­pli­ance mer­its the lift­ing of some sanc­tions pro­vi­sions or puni­tive mil­i­tary action. The Coun­cil can, at any time, decide to autho­rize the inva­sion and occu­pa­tion of Iraq — and the United States will carry out such a sentence.

Many war sup­port­ers like to frame the only options avail­able are “doing noth­ing” and going to war. “The risk of doing noth­ing, the risk of hop­ing that Sad­dam Hus­sein changes his mind and becomes a gen­tle soul, the risk that some­how inac­tion will make the world safer, is a risk I’m not will­ing to take for the Amer­i­can peo­ple,” said Bush.
George’s ideas, as well as pro­pos­als floated by France, Ger­many and most recently Canada, shows that “noth­ing” and war is a false choice.
Trickle-down Democ­racy
Bush has started to speak in pos­i­tively Wilson­ian terms lately, of spread­ing peace and democ­racy to the Mid­dle East. That would be lovely, if only it were true.

I believe Sad­dam Hus­sein is a threat — is a threat to the Amer­i­can peo­ple. He’s a threat to peo­ple in his neigh­bor­hood. He’s also a threat to the Iraqi peo­ple.
One of the things we love in Amer­ica is free­dom. If I may, I’d like to remind you what I said at the State of the Union: Lib­erty is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to each and every per­son. And that’s what I believe.
I believe that when we see total­i­tar­i­an­ism, that we must deal with it. We don’t have to do it always mil­i­tar­ily.
But this is a unique cir­cum­stance because of 12 years of denial and defi­ance, because of ter­ror­ist con­nec­tions, because of past his­tory.
I’m con­vinced that a lib­er­ated Iraq will be impor­tant for that trou­bled part of the world. The Iraqi peo­ple are plenty capa­ble of gov­ern­ing them­selves. Iraq’s a sophis­ti­cated soci­ety. Iraq’s got money. Iraq will pro­vide a place where peo­ple can see that the Shia and the Sunni and the Kurds can get along in a fed­er­a­tion. Iraq will serve as a cat­a­lyst for change — pos­i­tive change.
So there’s a lot more at stake than just Amer­i­can secu­rity and the secu­rity of peo­ple close by Sad­dam Hus­sein. Free­dom is at stake, as well. And I take that very seriously.

If only he did take it seri­ously. America’s track record ain’t good. Afghanistan, with the excep­tion of Kabul, is still made up of fief­doms ruled by gang­sters, Tal­iban hold­outs and war­lords. It’s arguably in worse shape than it was a year ago, what with opium again being one of its biggest crops and a spring offen­sive by al Qa’ida and the Tal­iban in the works. U.S. troops are engaged in the heav­i­est fight­ing since Oper­a­tion Ana­conda. That war isn’t fin­ished and Bush is ready to start another one.
In a quick run-down, South Korea was a mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship for decades after the Korean War. We kicked out a demo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected leader in Chile in 1973 ush­er­ing in Pinochet. The Shah of Iran ran a wicked police state from the time the CIA installed him in 1954 until his over­throw by the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion of 1979. Nor­iega was our strong­man in Panama until we grew tired of his drug run­ning. The list could be a lot longer.
How­ever, there have been suc­cess­ful democ­rac­tic inter­ven­tions. Bosnia and Kosovo come to mind, frag­ile democ­ra­cies though they are. But there is a strong multi­na­tional coali­tion run­ning the show in both cases, some­thing that it doesn’t look like the United States is going to get in Iraq. And any­way, democ­racy, pow­dered wigs and all, doesn’t jibe with the United States’ inter­ests in Iraq.
Con­clu­sion
All in all, I will give Bush this: He was mea­sured, somber and didn’t flub up much. The only time the frat-boy glib­ness showed up was when dis­cussed the mas­sive protests of Feb. 15. “I’ve seen all kinds of protests since i’ve been the pres­i­dent,” he said and then shrugged. “I rec­og­nize there are peo­ple who don’t like war. I don’t like war.” He might as well have added, “What­ever.” Hon­estly, this was one of his bet­ter per­for­mance. I sus­pect tonight will go a long way toward con­vinc­ing some fence-sitters in Amer­ica that this is the route to take, and I’ll go out on a limb and pre­dict a 5 – 7 point shift in favor of war in the next few days. Mil­lions of Amer­i­cans can’t be wrong can they?
Unfor­tu­nately, yes, they can.

Has Saddam Blinked?

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7

Strat­for and the Asso­ci­ated Press are report­ing that for­mer Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter Yevgeny Pri­makov, sup­pos­edly a per­sonal friend of Sad­dam Hus­sein, vis­ited Bagh­dad on Feb. 23. The pur­pose and results of the meet­ing remain secret, but a state­ment from Moscow reveals that the Iraqi pres­i­dent was asked — and agreed — to coop­er­ate fully with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Sad­dam has appar­ently agreed to destroy Iraq’s al-Samoud 2 mis­siles, the ones caus­ing such a stink in Wash­ing­ton for exceed­ing the 93-mile limit by less than 20 miles. Strat­for goes fur­ther, say­ing that Sad­dam has also agreed to a ver­sion of the Franco-German plan to intro­duce a flood of U.N. troops to back up weapons inspec­tors within in the next 10 days to show the Secu­rity Coun­cil that Iraq has been uncon­di­tion­ally disarmed.

Sad­dam Hus­sein will “do any­thing that he rea­son­ably can that is hon­or­able and pro­tec­tive of the sov­er­eignty of his peo­ple to pre­vent war,” said for­mer U.S. attor­ney gen­eral Ram­sey Clark after meet­ing with Hus­sein on Mon­day. Clark is active in the anti-war movement.

(In an inter­view prior to Primakov’s visit, Sad­dam told CBS’ Dan Rather that Iraq would not destroy the al-Samoud 2 mis­siles and instead chal­lenged the U.S. pres­i­dent to a tele­vised debate. Per­haps Pri­makov real­ity checked Saddam?)

Still… Strat­for also men­tioned a request from Sad­dam to Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin to deliver a secret com­mu­niqué to U.S. and British energy com­pa­nies, invit­ing them back to Iraq after 30 years of being kept out. If Wash­ing­ton calls off the dogs of war, the com­pa­nies will be allowed to imme­di­ately return. A Russ­ian envoy is expected to deliver the terms of this deal to Bush in the com­ing days.

French pres­i­dent Jacques Chirac was report­edly enthu­si­as­tic for the deal, and British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair was said to have reacted favor­ably. Wash­ing­ton has had no reac­tion yet, of course, and there’s no way to ascer­tain how gen­uine this offer from Sad­dam is. Has Sad­dam blinked, as he some­times has in the past? And given that it’s likely this pro­posal will embolden France, Rus­sia and China, all “P-5″ mem­bers of the UNSCR to throw up more diplo­matic road­blocks, will U.S. pres­i­dent George W. Bush accept this pro­posal as a face-saving plan to avoid an unpop­u­lar and costly war?

Ini­tial state­ments from White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher indi­cate that the White House will reject this idea. (This is prob­a­bly another exchange between Helen Thomas of Hearst News­pa­pers and Fleis­cher, but it’s unclear from the Feb. 24 briefing.)

The U.N. weapons inspec­tors have deter­mined that Iraq has this mis­sile which exceeds lim­its that it agreed to, or were imposed on it by the U.N. Hans Blix has said it should be destroyed. If Iraq destroys those mis­siles, why isn’t that con­crete progress toward disarmament?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, num­ber one, we expect that Sad­dam Hus­sein will destroy those mis­siles. The United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil has called on it to do so, and unless he engages in fur­ther defi­ance, we expect that he will. But, num­ber two, as the Pres­i­dent said over the week­end, that would just be the tip of the ice­berg. And the rea­son for that is when a crim­i­nal holds a gun to your head and takes one bul­let out of the cham­ber, you still have to worry about all the rest of the bul­lets in the cham­ber, because they can kill you, too.

And the fact is, with Sad­dam Hus­sein, he still has not shown the world that he has dis­armed from the VX, the nerve agents, the bot­u­lin, the anthrax, all of which the United Nations found that he had in his pos­ses­sion in the late 1990s, which he has yet to account for. That’s the fear about what’s in the rest of the gun, in the other cham­ber — in the cham­ber in the gun.

So there’s no way that Iraq can do any­thing, really, to avoid war? Because if they begin to dis­man­tle their weapons, the Pres­i­dent still believes that they’ve got other bul­lets in the cham­ber and is –

MR. FLEISCHER: Under Secu­rity Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 1441, which was passed in Novem­ber last year, Iraq had an oblig­a­tion to imme­di­ately and fully dis­arm from all the weapons that were pro­hib­ited — and I just cited sev­eral of them. So if Iraq were to take one mis­sile out of the cham­ber that they left in the cham­ber — VX, sarin, bot­u­lin, anthrax — the world still has a lot to worry about.

I under­stand. And you won’t wait to see whether the French pro­posal or any other pro­posal could get them to take those bul­lets out of the cham­ber — you aren’t will­ing to take “yes” for an answer here on the mis­siles and any­thing else?

MR. FLEISCHER: Given the fact that the res­o­lu­tion passed in Novem­ber and called for full and imme­di­ate com­pli­ance, “yes” has not been a word that any­body has heard out of Iraq.

The White House will likely reject this idea for a num­ber of reasons:

  1. It doesn’t achieve the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle plan for the Mid­dle East as a col­lec­tion of satrapys friendly to United States energy and secu­rity needs;
  2. The world would breathe a sigh of relief not only because war was averted but also because Amer­i­can hege­mony was thwarted. Even though Wash­ing­ton could back down grace­fully by say­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary build-up pres­sured Iraq into com­ply­ing and accept­ing peace­keep­ing troops, other nations ruled mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal mad­men — yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, North Korea — with nukes would likely see this as a sign of weakness;
  3. The Amer­i­can domes­tic polit­i­cal back­lash could be fierce.

The last item deserves spe­cial men­tion. And I will get to it.

But first, some will say Sad­dam is not seri­ous, because if he allows blue-helmets all over the coun­try and fully dis­arms, he will appear weak to his own peo­ple, to other Arab lead­ers and would not be long for this world. His dream of estab­lish­ing him­self as a modern-day Sal­adin would be over — and so, too, would his presidency.

But Sad­dam is a canny old fox, still, and here I veer into spec­u­la­tion, although of the informed sort. The Iraqi peo­ple are dread­ing war and the destruc­tion it would bring. While they would not be happy to see Sad­dam stay in power, they likely would be happy not to be blown up by Amer­i­can JDAM bombs. The Iraqis I met while trav­el­ing were fairly fatal­is­tic. They’ve suf­fered this long, they feel, the next life will be better.

(The INC and other mem­bers of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion will scream bloody mur­der, of course, but no one takes them that seri­ously any­way. The Kurds also would not be happy with this and might — I repeat, might — declare inde­pen­dence.)

The lead­ers of the rest of the Arab world already hate Sad­dam and know that he’s effec­tively defanged by U.N. sanc­tions. And while they no doubt feel sym­pa­thy for the suf­fer­ing Iraqi peo­ple, Arab lead­ers would con­sider the plight of suf­fer­ing Iraqis like they do the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tini­ans — very use­ful for dis­tract­ing their publics from top­pling their own author­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ments, assum­ing the U.N. sanc­tions regime is continued.

And lastly, if Sad­dam remains in power after a U.S. mil­i­tary build-up, even if it results in U.N. troops all over Bagh­dad, it will still be seen as a vic­tory for him and a humil­i­at­ing loss for George W. Bush. Bush can’t allow that to hap­pen. Partly out of con­vic­tion and partly out of polit­i­cal neces­sity, Bush has posi­tioned him­self on the side of angels in this loom­ing war with his evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric of good and evil. The Chris­t­ian Right, neo­cons and other hawks who have taken a hard-line on Iraq believe they are doing God’s work, more or less, and if you’ve got God on your side, you don’t dicker with the devil. Bush, him­self, may be will­ing to cut a deal and get this whole mess over with, but I don’t think his right flank will allow him to do that. He’s very con­scious of the sus­pi­cion with which the Chris­t­ian right viewed his father. And he’s like­wise aware of how Bush I’s “no new taxes” pledge came back and bit him in the ass. If Bush II leaves Sad­dam in power, he will be fac­ing a dou­ble whammy with his base for leav­ing an evil tyrant in power and for break­ing a com­mit­ment to “regime change.”

This won’t cause evan­gel­i­cals and oth­ers on the hard right to vote for a Demo­c­rat of course, but if the econ­omy con­tin­ues to shuf­fle along, and North Korea con­tin­ues to thumb its nose at the United States, Bush’s num­bers likely will con­tinue their grav­i­ta­tion­ally assisted move­ment. A pri­mary chal­lenger could emerge from Bush’s right, siphon­ing off his base. And if the cur­rent weak­ness of the Demo­c­ra­tic field stays steady (Kucinich? Kerry? Give me a break), red-meat con­ser­v­a­tives might not be so afraid to take a chance with another GOP candidate.

And that could be Saddam’s game, in effect becom­ing the Fidel Cas­tro of the Mid­dle East. If he can’t lib­er­ate Jerusalem, Sad­dam might be sat­is­fied with humil­i­at­ing both Bush I and II, espe­cially if his con­tin­ued sur­vival was a decid­ing fac­tor in end­ing both pres­i­den­cies. Yeah, I think he’d be quite happy with that.

Which is why the White House can’t allow him to stick around.